Tag: wmd

WMDs for a MIC in Need

In the closing days of 2025, the White House turned an opioid crisis into a national security drama. Standing in the Oval Office during a Mexican Border Defense Medal ceremony on December 15, President Donald Trump declared that he would sign an executive order to classify fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” calling the announcement “historic.” Treating a synthetic painkiller like a nuclear bomb says more about Washington’s mindset than about the drug. Though drug overdose deaths declined in 2024, 80,391 people still died and 54,743 of those deaths were from opioids. Those numbers mark a public‑health emergency. Rather than tackle fentanyl abuse as a medical or social problem, the administration reframed it as an existential threat requiring military tools. Labeling a narcotic a WMD creates a pretext for war and sidesteps due process. This move grows out of a political culture that uses fear of invisible enemies—terrorists, microbes, drugs—to justify extraordinary power.

Past and present administrations have blurred the line between law enforcement and warfare. Since September 2025 the United States has launched more than twenty strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific suspected of carrying narcotics, killing over eighty people. Experts note that little proof has been made public that the vessels contained drugs or that blowing them out of the water was necessary. Yet the assaults continued, and on December 10 the U.S. Navy seized a sanctioned Venezuelan oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, sending oil prices higher. Trump boasted it was the largest tanker ever seized and said, when asked about the cargo, “We keep it, I guess.” Caracas denounced the action as “blatant theft.” The administration justified the operation as part of its anti‑drug campaign, but the target was not an unmarked speedboat; it was a carrier of crude oil, the sanctioned state’s main revenue source. Calling fentanyl a WMD makes such seizures look like acts of defense and blurs war and policing.

For students of recent history, this conflation of domestic threats with existential danger is hauntingly familiar. After September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and his advisers claimed Iraq was developing anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. Vice President Dick Cheney insisted there was “no doubt” Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and was amassing them for use against America and its allies. Those arguments resonated with a populace still traumatized by the attacks. Fear allowed hawks to portray preemptive war as the only way to prevent a “mushroom cloud,” and in March 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. Investigations later found no factual basis for the claims that Iraq possessed WMD or collaborated with al‑Qaida. The smoking gun was a phantom, but by the time the truth emerged, Baghdad had been captured and the region destabilized for a generation.

One of the most tragic figures in that saga was Secretary of State Colin Powell. On February 5, 2003, he sat before the United Nations Security Council holding a glass vial he said could contain anthrax. He described Iraq’s alleged weapons labs and insisted the case was based on “solid intelligence.” The performance helped clinch support for war. Years later it became clear the intelligence was false and cherry‑picked, and no WMD were found. Powell later admitted the presentation was wrong and had blotted his record. Using a decorated officer’s credibility to sell a war built on falsehoods shows how propaganda can override reason.

The consequences of the Iraq War were catastrophic. The Defense Department records 4,418 U.S. service members dead in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including 3,481 killed in hostile action. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that the post‑9/11 wars have cost the United States around $8 trillion and killed more than 900,000 people. About $2.1 trillion of that went to the Iraq/Syria theater. These figures exclude indirect deaths and future costs for veterans’ care. Millions of Iraqis were killed, injured or displaced, fueling sectarian violence and extremism. The war enriched defense contractors and expanded the military‑industrial complex while leaving ordinary people to pay the bill.

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Tulsi Gabbard Reveals Deep State Operative James Clapper’s Russia Hoax Wasn’t His First Intel Scam — He “Manufactured” the WMD Lie That Led to the Iraq War

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused former Obama DNI James Clapper of being a serial political manipulator, exposing that the Russia Collusion Hoax wasn’t his first rodeo in deception.

Gabbard unloaded on disgraced former DNI James Clapper during her appearance on the Pod Force One podcast with Miranda Devine of the New York Post.

Gabbard is accusing the longtime Deep State operator of not one, but TWO of the most catastrophic intelligence failures in modern American history, the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) narrative that dragged the U.S. into a forever war in Iraq, AND the sham “Russia Collusion” hoax used to undermine President Donald Trump.

The “Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) narrative” refers to the false claims made by the U.S. government primarily under President George W. Bush and his administration that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq possessed active WMD programs, including chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear weapons.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were central in pushing the WMD case.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell famously presented the WMD case before the United Nations in February 2003, using satellite photos and intercepts that later turned out to be deeply flawed or outright false.

At the time, Clapper was the Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), responsible for analyzing satellite imagery and other geospatial intelligence. The NGA’s assessments of potential Iraqi WMD sites contributed to the overall intelligence community’s conclusion that Iraq had such weapons.

Clapper later conceded that the intelligence community’s assessment was wrong, describing it as building “a house of cards” based on faulty assumptions that ultimately led to the conclusion that WMD were present when they weren’t. 

“My fingerprints are on the infamous national intelligence assessment of October 2002,” he said during a 2018 event promoting his book Facts and Fears at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium.

“[The intelligence community] built a case in our own minds, a house of cards it turned out that led us to the conclusion with pretty high confidence that they were there, and it turns out they weren’t,” he added.

“It represented closure for the country and closure for the intelligence community and certainly personal closure. It was certainly a profound event, and I will never forget it,” he said.

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The FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Has a New Target: Animal Rights Activists

On a chilly, early morning in January 2019, a group of animal rights activists descended upon a poultry farm in central Texas. Donning plastic gloves, medical masks, hazmat suits, and T-shirts emblazoned with “Meat the Victims,” they slipped through the unlocked door of a massive, windowless barn. 

Inside, they found 27,000 chicks densely packed across the floor, like “just a sea of yellow,” recalled Sarah Weldon, one of the activists. “There were a lot of chicks that were already deceased, in various stages of decomposition,” she said. “Some were so deformed you couldn’t even tell they used to be baby chicks, just fluffs of feathers.”

Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. This is how, Weldon suspects, the police identified her and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor, and quickly turned herself into jail.

The local police weren’t the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction. 

The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records recently obtained by the nonprofit Animal Partisan through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison — including for the “attempted use” of WMD — while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program.

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Trump Would-Be Assassin Ryan Wesley Routh Has Over 100 Criminal Charges, Was Arrested for Possessing a Weapon of Mass Destruction in 2002 — Yet Only Received Probation

Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspected gunman behind the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, was previously charged in 2002 for possessing a weapon of mass destruction.

Roth is a construction worker and a registered Democrat.

This is according to North Carolina Department of Adult Correction records, which show that despite the severity of his crime, Routh received a mere slap on the wrist — probation.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, “A weapon of mass destruction is a nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological, or other device that is intended to harm a large number of people.”

Former FBI agent and justice contributor for NewsNation Jennifer Coffindaffer weighed in on the implications of such a charge.

“Essentially, it’s a weapon that can be used to cause a lot of damage to any sort of infrastructure or a large population,” she said.  “That can be radiological, that could be chemical, that could be nuclear, that could be explosive. We don’t know the exact details, but this is a very serious charge.”

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US Pentagon is developing a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’: Thousands of drones will work together to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans will lose control of the ‘swarms’

The US Pentagon is planning a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’ that involves thousands of drones that strike by air, land and water to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans could lose control of the ‘swarms.’

The top-secret project, dubbed AMASS (Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms), would represent automated warfare on an unprecedented scale.

AMASS is still in the planning stages, but DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) has been collecting bids from suppliers for the $78 million contract.

Small drones would be equipped with weapons and tools for navigation and communication, along with abilities ranging from radar jamming to launching lethal attacks.

While the technology would change how the US goes to war, experts in the industry raise concerns.

Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University in Virginia, said: ‘As the swarm grows in size, it’ll become virtually impossible for humans to manage the decisions.’

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Texas doctor’s new research links onset of Gulf War illness in some veterans to sarin gas exposure

New research from a Texas doctor has linked the onset of Gulf War illness in some veterans to exposure to the deadly nerve gas sarin.

“Our findings prove that Gulf War illness was caused by sarin, which was released when we bombed Iraqi chemical weapons storage and production facilities,” said Dr. Robert Haley, professor of internal medicine and director of the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “There are still more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans who are not getting help for this illness and our hope is that these findings will accelerate the search for better treatment.”

Haley, a medical epidemiologist who studies disease outbreaks in groups of people, has been investigating Gulf War illness for 28 years and used a genetic study that found some people have a stronger natural ability to fight the deadly chemical.

Troops who have genes that help metabolize the gas were less likely to develop the myriad of symptoms associated with the mysterious illness than those without it, according to the new research, which was released Wednesday. The findings were published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed medical journal.

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AI invents 40,000 chemical weapons in only six hours

A drug-developing Artificial Intelligence needed just six hours to come up with 40,000 potentially deadly chemical weapons, a fresh study has revealed.

The authors of the paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence earlier this month, said they’d carried out the ‘thought experiment’ to figure out if artificial intelligence (AI) could be misused by evil actors. And the results their work produced have proven that the danger is real.

As part of the study, the usual data was given to the AI, but it was programmed to process it in a different way, looking for toxic combinations.

“In less than six hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold,” the paper said.

It came up not just with the VX compound, which is one of the most dangerous nerve agents ever created, but also with some unknown molecules, “predicted to be more toxic.”

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