Tag: perpetual war

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Western Media Normalize Ethnic Cleansing of Lebanon by Viewing It Through Israel’s Eyes

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”

Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”

And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.

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After Killing Three Indian Mariners, US Bombs Another Tanker in the Gulf of Oman

US Central Command announced on Thursday that it bombed an oil tanker for the third time this week in the Gulf of Oman as part of its enforcement of the blockade of Iranian ports, which comes after India confirmed the previous US attack on a tanker killed three Indian crew members.

CENTCOM said its latest attack targeted the Guinea-Bissau-flagged tanker Jalveer. “A US aircraft fired two Hellfire missiles into the ship’s engine room after the crew repeatedly failed to comply with directions from US forces,” the command said.

Indian media on Thursday identified the three Indian mariners who were killed by the previous US attack on the Palau-flagged oil product tanker Settebello as Shivanand Chaurasiya, Patnala Suresh, and Aditya Sharma, a 23-year-old deck cadet who was on the ship for training to become an officer.

Aditya’s father, Rajesh Sharma, called the US attack a war crime and said his government should take a strong stance. “My last conversation with him was on Sunday. I request the government to take a strong stance against the US. I will say it is a war crime to attack a commercial ship with a missile,” Rajesh told NDTV.

“There are a lot of ways to control those cargo ships, you can send a military, you can arrest the crew members, you have no right to attack them with deadly missiles,” he added.

According to CENTCOM’s numbers, its forces have “disabled” nine civilian commercial ships while enforcing the blockade. “The blockade is being enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” the command said.

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Trump Says US Will Be ‘Taking’ Iran’s Kharg Island

President Trump on Thursday threatened Iran with a third straight night of bombing and said that the US would eventually be “taking” Iran’s Kharg Island, an island deep in the Persian Gulf that serves as a major oil export hub.

“The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America,” Trump added.

During the full-scale US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran from February 28 to April 8, the US positioned Marines and US Army paratroopers in the region for potential ground operations to target Iranian islands and the country’s coast. A report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein recently revealed that some members of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne were deployed to Israel.

Klippenstein cited a military source who told him that the deployment to Israel was part of a US-Israeli joint contingency plan completed since February to seize Kharg Island and carve out coastal territory inside Iran.

Later on Thursday, Trump told Fox News that his “preference” would be to take Kharg Island but that he doesn’t know if “America would have the stomach for it.” Any US ground operation to take the island would almost certainly result in major US casualties since the invading troops would face significant drone and missile attacks.

Trump again compared the potential operation to take over Iranian oil infrastructure to his attack on Venezuela to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Since then, the US has taken control of Venezuela’s oil exports, though the US war with Iran is much different since the US has faced much stiffer resistance, and the entire country is mobilized for war.

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Ukraine Is Back to Its Car-Bombing Terror Campaign – And the MSM Is Cheering Them on

Fake News Globalists love their terrorists.

After Volodymyr Zelensky wasted everyone’s time with an offensive public letter ostensibly meant to demand for direct peace talks – but in truth calculated to make a splash in the press during Russia’s SPIEF forum – Ukraine is back to their ‘Asymmetric warfare’, a.k.a. terrorism.

On Monday (8), a Russian military official in charge of ammunition supplies was assassinated with a car bomb near Moscow.

Dozens of MSM news outlets reported the attack, but NOT ONE of them condemned the attack – or even attributed it to the Kiev regime.

We see them using their dirty, old, and trusted linguistic tricks to say that ‘a car bomb’ killed the Colonel.

The Telegraph reported:

“Surveillance footage caught the moment a car exploded in the middle of the street early on Tuesday in Balashikha, an industrial satellite town around six miles east of Moscow known for housing senior military personnel.

The victim was Col Damir Davydov, who headed the Russian defense ministry’s missile and artillery wing, according to The Insider, a Russian investigative outlet.”

Watch: car bomb explosion in Balashikha targeting the head of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Damir Davydov.

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DOJ announces seizure of 13 internet domains being operated by suspected Chinese intelligence agents

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that it seized 13 internet domains allegedly being used by Chinese operatives to recruit former and current American officials with security clearances.

Several unnamed individuals are accused of using these websites as a front for fake “consulting companies to recruit individuals in the United States to obtain sensitive and possibly classified information in exchange for monetary payments.”

“A lot of this information came from doing interviews, interviews with people who came forward that something didn’t seem right. They provided information and said, ‘Hey, this is kind of weird, we’re kind of getting paid by a cryptocurrency or an online payment system that’s not typical,” said Dan Wierzbicki, the special agent in charge of the counterintelligence and cyber division of the FBI’s Washington field office in an interview.

The FBI believes that the individuals behind the scheme acted on behalf of the Chinese government “wittingly or unwittingly.”

This operation follows a pattern of heightened economic and political espionage. A report from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) last year accused foreign actors of attempting to hire federal employees and capitalizing on the Trump administration’s plans for layoffs across various companies.

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance — comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — recently issued a joint warning detailing how Chinese military intelligence targets Western personnel.

Operating under the guise of think tanks or private businesses, these operatives post fraudulent job listings for foreign policy and defense analysts on legitimate recruiting sites. Once a candidate applies, handlers pressure them for sensitive information, offering cryptocurrency and online payments for “reports” to effectively conceal their true identities.

“For too long, the Chinese government has tried to exploit U.S. government employees behind the cover of fake companies and phony job postings. Today, we shut them down. These seizures will prevent these fraudulent sites from being used to target Americans with access to sensitive information. The FBI will continue to use every tool available to protect Americans and our national security from this threat,” said Special Agent in Charge Daniel Wierzbicki of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Counterintelligence and Cyber Division.

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