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War Media Articles

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on war from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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Who Could Have Predicted The U.S. War In Somalia Would Fail? The Pentagon.
2024-03-07, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/07/pentagon-somalia-africa-terrorism-failure/

The Pentagon has known of fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa for nearly 20 years but has nonetheless forged ahead, failing to address glaring problems, according to a 2007 study. The 50-page analysis, conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a private think tank that works solely for the U.S. government, is based on anonymized interviews with key U.S. government officials from across various departments and agencies. It found America’s nascent war in the Horn of Africa was plagued by a failure to define the parameters of the conflict or its aims; an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy; and barriers to coordination between the military and other government agencies. In 2007, the year the ... U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, began operations, the U.S. conducted its first declared airstrike in Somalia. Since then, it has carried out more than 280 air attacks and commando raids, aimed primarily at the terrorist group al-Shabab, while the CIA and elite troops created local proxy forces to conduct low-profile operations on behalf of the United States. At the same time, the U.S. has provided Somalia with billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance. The IDA study lamented the “presence of al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa and the “failed state of Somalia.” Both remain realities despite two decades of forever war.

Note: Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


US uses loophole to keep 100 arms sales to Israel under the radar amid Gaza war – report
2024-03-06, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/06/israel-weapons-sales-loophole

The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval. The Biden administration ... has kept up a quiet but substantial flow of munitions to help replace the tens of thousands of bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny coastal strip, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history. Administration officials informed Congress of the 100 foreign military sales to Israel in a classified briefing. The sales ... are reported to have included precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid. The under-the-radar deliveries made by the Biden administration to Israel were additional to the three major military sales that were made public since the start of the war: $320m in precision bomb kits in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106m and $147.5m of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December. “Whether it is arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE under the Trump administration, or sales to Israel under the Biden administration, Congress – and the American public – deserve full transparency about who is buying US weapons and how many weapons we are selling them,” said Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro.

Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


CIA in Ukraine — An Ex-CIA Agent’s View
2024-03-03, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/03/cia-in-ukraine/

The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” ... relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US, and “several European countries.” There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there. Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them.” One of the reasons that I believe the Times article was “authorized” by the intelligence community is because of what isn’t in it. There’s no mention, for example, that the United Nations has deemed Ukraine to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where money just seems to disappear into foreign accounts and the pockets of Ukrainian government officials. There’s no mention that Ukraine has become a “supermarket” for black market weapons and that western weapons meant for the war effort have popped up all over the world. And there is no mention at all that it was the CIA and the State Department that were responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the first place, an action that resulted in Russia’s decision to invade eight years later.

Note: John Kiriakou is a whistleblower, former CIA counter-terrorism officer, and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In our War Failures and Lies section in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center, we discuss how the CIA has supported Neo-Nazis in Ukraine since at least 2014, the year of the far-right coup that incorporated the Nazi group Azov Battalion into the country’s National Guard. Since then, declassified government documents show that Ukraine was systematically developed as a proxy for US war against Russia. In 2016, Congress removed a ban on funding Ukrainian neo-fascist groups, effectively paving the way for American arms and weapons to fall in the hands of Ukraine’s Nazi organizations.


Sexual violence is an ancient and often unseen war crime. Is it inevitable?
2024-02-08, NPR
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/02/08/1229815241/sexual-violen...

Despite its long history as part of conflicts, sexual violence is often not reported because of the trauma and shame it brings to survivors, their families and their wider communities. There has also been reticence among various authorities to speak out. Only in modern times, in the 1990s when wars broke out in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, did the United Nations begin to recognize sexual violence as ... a category of war crime. The specific term "conflict-related sexual violence," or CRSV, was first introduced in 2000 when the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution that launched the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. The U.N. defined the term as "rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, enforced sterilization, forced marriage and any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity perpetrated against women, men, girls or boys that is directly or indirectly linked to a conflict." [CRSV] is widespread and is used as a tactic of war to assert dominance and power. "It can be just as traumatizing to see your daughter, your sister or your parents being raped in front of you," says [Dr. Ranit] Mishori. "Or you're forced to strip naked in front of soldiers or in the city square. People often carry this trauma without knowing it's an international crime and minimize what happened to them." For conflict resolution and peace building to be successful, survivors need to be included in the process. For some countries this method has already started to work. [In Colombia], they have built women into the peace process. It's not perfect — no peace is perfect — but it is progressive and it is intentional, and that is important. Intentional peace building must be inclusive of survivors of this form of violence.

Note: The public receives censored and sanitized versions of war from the government and the media. Yet in reality, unethical violations of domestic and international human rights law are common and often kept hidden during wartime. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.


Pentagon Suggests There’re No U.S. Troops In Yemen — But Last Month The White House Said There Are
2024-01-26, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/26/us-troops-yemen-pentagon-white-house/

Amid a raft of U.S. strikes targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Pentagon has boots on the ground in the country — a fact the Defense Department has recently refused to acknowledge. “A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS,” the White House told Congress ... on December 7. This month, the U.S. began its military campaign against the Houthis for attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea. As the U.S. began to attack, defense officials suddenly became more reticent about the American military presence in Yemen. In a press briefing on January 17, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder was asked if he could give assurances that the U.S. had no troops on the ground in Yemen. “It’s possible that U.S. forces are spread so widely around the globe that not even the professional tasked with knowing that can keep track of it all,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, who worked on Yemen as a Capitol Hill staffer. “But it’s also possible that, given the dramatic expansion in US presence in the region in recent months, he is trying to skirt the question to avoid greater scrutiny.” The U.S. has conducted eight rounds of strikes on Houthi targets in the past month alone. On December 18, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a U.S.-led coalition to defend ships against Houthi attacks.

Note: Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


‘Different rules’: special policies keep US supplying weapons to Israel despite alleged abuses
2024-01-18, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/us-supply-weapons-israel-allege...

Top US officials quietly reviewed more than a dozen incidents of alleged gross violations of human rights by Israeli security forces since 2020, but have gone to great lengths to preserve continued access to US weapons for the units responsible for the alleged violations, contributing ... to the sense of impunity with which Israel has approached its war in Gaza. An estimated 24,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed by Israeli forces since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel. Special mechanisms have been used over the last few years to shield Israel from US human rights laws, even as other allies’ military units who receive US support – including, sources say, Ukraine – have privately been sanctioned and faced consequences for committing human rights violations. Under the Leahy law ... a foreign military unit is granted US military assistance or training after it is vetted by the state department for any reported human rights violations. The law prohibits the Department of State and the Department of Defense from providing funds, assistance or training to foreign security force units where there is “credible information” that the forces have committed a gross violation of human rights. In the case of at least three countries – Israel, Ukraine and Egypt – the scale of foreign assistance is so great that US military assistance can be difficult to track, and the US often has no knowledge of where specific weapons end up or how they are used.

Note: Learn more about the dysfunctional nature of the US war machine in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


The Military-Industrial Complex Is the Winner (Not You)
2024-01-17, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/17/the-military-industrial-complex-is-the-winn...

2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’s horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country’s indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there’s a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex. In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in “national defense” spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time. Annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin’s contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government’s entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before investing ever more tax dollars ... the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban On Using ChatGPT For “Military And Warfare”
2024-01-12, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/

OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes. Up until January 10, OpenAI’s “usage policies” page included a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including,” specifically, “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” That plainly worded prohibition against military applications would seemingly rule out any official, and extremely lucrative, use by the Department of Defense or any other state military. The new policy retains an injunction not to “use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished. OpenAI spokesperson Niko ... Felix [said] that OpenAI wanted to pursue certain “national security use cases that align with our mission,” citing a plan to create “cybersecurity tools” with DARPA, and that “the goal with our policy update is to provide clarity and the ability to have these discussions.” The real-world consequences of the policy are unclear. Last year, The Intercept reported that OpenAI was unwilling to say whether it would enforce its own clear “military and warfare” ban in the face of increasing interest from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community. “Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it’s a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words ‘military and warfare’ from OpenAI’s permissible use policy,” said [former AI policy analyst] Sarah Myers West.

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.


US did not properly track more than $1 billion worth of weapons sent to Ukraine, watchdog report finds
2024-01-11, CNN News
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/11/politics/pentagon-tracking-weapons-ukraine-rep...

The Pentagon did not properly track $1 billion worth of military equipment sent to Ukraine, according to a watchdog report. The report from the Pentagon Inspector General says that while the Defense Department has improved its ability to track military aid sent to Ukraine, it “did not fully comply” with requirements and much of the equipment sent is “delinquent,” meaning it’s not possible to complete an inventory of everything sent. Among the items that are designated for enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM) are weapons like Javelin and Stinger missiles, night-vision devices, AIM-9X missiles, and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles. According to the IG report, roughly $1.005 billion of the total $1.699 billion of equipment subject to end-use monitoring was not inventoried as of June 2023. The new report comes at a critical moment for Ukraine aid, as Congress debates whether to authorize a supplemental package of more than $60 billion in aid. While delinquency could suggest weapons had been stolen or diverted away from Ukrainian forces, the inspector general said it was outside the scope of its probe to determine what had happened to the weapons that were not properly tracked. “The DoD OIG now has personnel stationed in Ukraine,” the report says, “and the DoD OIG’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service continues to investigate allegations of criminal conduct with regard to U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.”

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


The Military Industrial Complex Scam
2023-12-30, LA Progressive
https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/military-industrial-complex-scam

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. Despite these remarkable and costly debacles ... the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades. American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA. Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays.

Note: War profiteering is an old game. General Smedley Butler wrote War is a Racket in 1935. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and government corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.


Ukraine Needs a Ceasefire, Not Biden’s $50 Billion Escalation of Failing War
2023-12-30, LA Progressive
https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/ukraine-needs-a-ceasefire

The latest White House spending package includes $50 billion in additional military funding, which is more than Ukraine has received from the United States since the war began in early 2022. There’s a better way. The United States can take an active role in organizing a ceasefire, to be followed by negotiations toward a permanent settlement. Unfortunately, so far Biden has made little effort to end the slaughter. In fact, there is serious evidence that Great Britain and the US played a decisive role in blocking a 2022 peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. The State Department reports that the United States has given Ukraine $44.2 billion in military aid since Russia invaded at the end of February, 2022. At the current pace of spending, the additional military aid requested by the White House would keep the Ukraine war going until sometime in mid-2026 – that is, unless there is a plan to intensify the attacks, which would increase the risk of a nuclear conflict. The US has reportedly spent a total of $111 billion on Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. If the supplemental spending package is approved ... military-only spending for Ukraine will be greater than the annual budget of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration – combined. The US has already spent ten times as much on Ukraine as we spend on the Centers for Disease Control. That does not mean Ukraine doesn’t deserve to be defended, but it does raise serious questions about the direction of the war and our government’s priorities.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and government corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.


Meet the Companies Profiting From Israel’s War on Gaza
2023-12-21, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/21/meet-the-companies-profiting-from-israels-w...

As of Wednesday, a U.S.-based Quaker group’s online database listed over two dozen companies profiting from the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have spent the last 10 weeks waging what experts call a “genocidal” war that sent defense stocks soaring. Backed by $3.8 billion in annual military aid from the United States, Israel declared war on October 7 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack that killed over 1,100 people. Since then, Israeli forces have killed over 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza. “The scale of destruction and war crimes in Gaza would not be possible without massive weapon transfers from the U.S.,” said Noam Perry of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Boeing, the world’s fifth-largest weapon manufacturer, makes F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used by the Israeli forces, as well as “multiple types of unguided small diameter bombs (SDBs) and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits” that have been used “extensively” during the war. Caterpillar’s armored D9 bulldozers ... have been crucial in the Israeli military’s ground invasion. Other companies on the list include weapons giants such as General Dynamics, General Electric, L3Harris Technologies, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX—formerly Raytheon—as well as vehicle companies AM General, Ford, Oshkosh, Toyota, and drone manufacturers AeroVironment, Skydio, and XTEND.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.


Advocates Demand Compensation For U.S. Drone Strike Victims In Somalia
2023-12-18, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/18/somalia-drone-strike-civilians-letter/

Two Dozen human rights organizations called on the Pentagon Monday to make amends to a Somali family following an investigation by The Intercept of a 2018 U.S. drone strike that killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter. The 14 Somali groups and 10 international organizations devoted to the protection of civilians urged Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to take immediate action. The family is seeking an explanation, an apology, and compensation. Congress appropriates millions of dollars annually for the Defense Department to compensate families of civilians killed or injured in U.S. attacks, but the Pentagon has shown an aversion to confronting its mistakes and rarely makes compensation payments, even in cases as clear cut as this one. A drone pilot and analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul [Dahir Mohamed] and [her daughter] Mariam were killed and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the attack was no anomaly. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention. It was like, ‘We can do whatever we want,’” he told The Intercept. When he counted the civilians he knew the U.S. had killed and compared that tally with publicly announced figures, he said, “the numbers just didn’t add up.” Luul’s family was traumatized by the airstrike and has suffered for more than half a decade. Her brothers say their elderly father — who died earlier this month — never recovered from his daughter’s sudden death.

Note: Since 2008, the US has supported at least nine coups in African countries, with a vast network of military bases scattered across the continent. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.


As U.S.-funded Wars Rage In Israel And Ukraine, Pentagon Watchdog Warns Of Military Failures
2023-12-06, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/06/pentagon-military-failures-waste/

The Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General issued a report that details widespread failures in the Pentagon’s operations. In a semiannual report to Congress, the watchdog found a breakdown in the process to provide care for sexual assault survivors, damaged artillery earmarked for Ukraine, and continued failures to monitor the Defense Department’s single most expensive program, the scandal-ridden F-35 fighter jet. Taken together, the inspector general’s findings paint a picture of a sprawling military-industrial complex that, while providing billions in aid to foreign militaries, has failed to solve long-standing issues that result in extreme levels of taxpayer waste. In October, President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve $75 billion in combined security assistance for Israel and Ukraine. The request would add to the $44 billion in security assistance already pledged to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, and the tens of billions of dollars in security assistance delivered to Israel over the past five years. Just last month, the Department of Defense failed its sixth straight audit, underscoring the lack of oversight of the funds that Congress forks over to the armed forces every year. The inspector general also reported that the Defense Department’s protocols for protecting its employees are not routinely followed. The Pentagon’s medical treatment facilities failed to consistently triage and record care administered to survivors of sexual assault. 

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Rand Paul Wants To End Undeclared War In Syria
2023-12-05, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/05/rand-paul-syria-war-troops/

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul plans to force a vote this week on a joint resolution to remove all U.S. troops from Syria within 30 days, according to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with his plans. “The American people have had enough of endless wars in the Middle East,” Paul told The Intercept by email. “Yet, 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria with no vital U.S. interest at stake, no definition of victory, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization to be there.” The U.S. conflict in Syria is just one of several forever wars — including conflicts in Niger and Somalia — that continue to smolder more than two decades after 9/11 and more than two years after President Joe Biden declared that, for the first time in 20 years, the United States was “not at war.” For almost 10 years, the U.S. has battled a rotating cast of enemies in Syria, including the Syrian Armed Forces and pro-Syrian government forces; terrorist organizations such as ISIS; Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Iranian-backed militias; the Russian-backed Wagner Group; and the armed forces of Turkey, according to Paul’s bill, which notes that Congress has not declared war against Syria or any group in that country. “The United States cannot fix Syria. Yet we still have 900 troops in eastern Syria for eight years, going on nine,” said Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria. “I’m puzzled that we haven’t had a national debate on what U.S. troops are doing in Syria.”

Note: Read how the Pentagon-trained Kurdish militia group once brutally fought with CIA-trained militia group Fursan al Haq (who fights alongside Al-Qaeda) in war-torn Syria. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza
2023-12-01, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-t...

Israel’s military has made no secret of the intensity of its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. There has, however, been relatively little attention paid to the methods used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to select targets in Gaza, and to the role artificial intelligence has played in their bombing campaign. After the 11-day war in Gaza in May 2021, officials said Israel had fought its “first AI war” using machine learning and advanced computing. The latest Israel-Hamas war has provided an unprecedented opportunity for the IDF to use such tools in a much wider theatre of operations and, in particular, to deploy an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel”, which has significantly accelerated a lethal production line of targets. In early November, the IDF said “more than 12,000” targets in Gaza had been identified by its target administration division. Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until January, has said the target division is “powered by AI capabilities” and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers. According to Kochavi, “once this machine was activated” in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100 targets a day. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.” A separate source [said] the Gospel had allowed the IDF to run a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”.

Note: Read about Israel's use of AI warfare since at least 2021. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


New York Times report says Israel knew about Hamas attack over a year in advance
2023-12-01, ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/new-york-times-report-israel-k...

Israel's military was aware of Hamas ' plan to launch an attack on Israeli soil over a year before the devastating Oct. 7 operation that killed hundreds of people, The New York Times reported Friday. It was the latest in a series of signs that top Israeli commanders either ignored or played down warnings that Hamas was plotting the attack, which triggered a war against the Islamic militant group that has devastated the Gaza Strip. The Times said Israeli officials were in possession of a 40-page battle plan, code-named “Jericho Wall,” that detailed a hypothetical Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities. The document was seen by many Israeli military and intelligence officials, the report said, though it was unclear if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top leaders had seen it. The document predicted that Hamas would bombard Israel with rockets, use drones to disable Israel's security and surveillance abilities at the border wall, and take over southern communities and military bases. Another 2016 Israeli defense memo obtained by the Times said Hamas intended to take hostages back to Gaza. The Oct. 7 attack — in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 people were abducted and taken to Gaza — would uncannily mirror the one outlined in the battle plan. But Israeli officials had brushed off the plan, the report said, dismissing it as “aspirational” rather than something that could practically take place, the report said.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


Unearthing the Hidden Impact of Wars: Tunnels and Tragedies
2023-11-26, Truthout
https://truthout.org/articles/unearthing-the-hidden-impact-of-wars-tunnels-an...

When we think of how to rescue suffering children from the unbridled carnage of numerous wars that have forced people to go underground, the vast network of tunnels built by the Vietnamese comes to mind. Following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, weapons makers in the United States focused on developing ordnance that could destroy underground tunnels and bases. In Afghanistan, on April 13, 2017, the United States used a Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb nicknamed MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, to destroy a network of tunnels in the Hindu Kush mountains. The United States had helped the Mujahideen construct these tunnels during their war against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. Locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination. Living as we do in a world where countries like the United States maintain a permanent warfare state, we must reckon with the horrific cost of war — and the obscene profits. The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal notes that weapons makers’ stocks on Wall Street have risen 7 percent since the Israel-Hamas war started. As much as we might long to grasp the hand of the child trying to free herself from underneath a collapsed building’s rubble, we need to imagine and long for the chance to grasp the hand of someone outside our own community, someone we’ve been taught to regard as an enemy or an invisible “other.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


Joe Biden Moves To Lift Nearly Every Restriction On Israel’s Access To U.S. Weapons Stockpile
2023-11-25, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/25/biden-israel-weapons-stockpile-arms-gaza/

The White House has requested the removal of restrictions on all categories of weapons and ammunition Israel is allowed to access from U.S. weapons stockpiles stored in Israel itself. The move to lift restrictions was included in the White House’s supplemental budget request, sent to the Senate on October 20. “This request would,” the proposed budget says, “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles.” The request pertains to little-known weapons stockpiles in Israel that the Pentagon established for use in regional conflicts, but which Israel has been permitted to access in limited circumstances — the very limits President Joe Biden is seeking to remove. Created in the 1980s ... the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I, is the largest node in a network of what are effectively foreign U.S. weapons caches. Highly regulated for security, the stockpiles are governed by a set of strict requirements. Under circumstances laid out in these requirements, Israel has been able to draw on the stockpile, purchasing the weapons at little cost. With the WRSA-I, Biden is looking to lift virtually all the meaningful restrictions on the stockpile and the transfer of its arms to Israel, with plans to remove limitations to obsolete or surplus weapons, waive an annual spending cap on replenishing the stockpile, remove weapon-specific restrictions, and curtail congressional oversight. All of the changes ... would be permanent, except for lifting the spending cap, which is limited to the 2024 fiscal year.

Note: Israel has received at least $158 billion in military aid from the US since 1948. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace
2023-11-25, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html

Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria. But ... experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century. People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups. Civilian casualties are notoriously hard to calculate, and officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip do not separate the deaths of civilians and combatants. Researchers point instead to the roughly 10,000 women and children reported killed in Gaza as an approximate — though conservative — measure of civilian deaths in the territory. More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the number of women and children reported killed in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began last month has already started to approach the roughly 12,400 civilians documented to have been killed by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan during nearly 20 years of war.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


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