Ten days before October 7, MBZ had informed Netanyahu of a major Hamas offensive.
Voltaire Network|September 11, 2026, https://www.voltairenet.org/article224921.html
According to חטופים – 843 ימים של הפקרה (Abducted: 843 Days of Abandonment), a
new book by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval (Kinneret Zmora Publishing), the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few days before the October 7 attack.
He informed him that Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas military chief, was preparing a major offensive against Israel. The call lasted 45 minutes. The Prime Minister replied that Israel was already prepared and that the attack would come from the West Bank, not Gaza.
According to the authors, MBZ’s call came after Netanyahu broke off negotiations between Israel and Hamas. The call reflected a direct threat from Yahya Sinwar, who was furious about the breakdown of talks. Sinwar spoke of ” Zinzal ” (earthquake), a word Arabs use to refer to wars and revolutions. Deeply concerned by Netanyahu’s dismissive attitude, MBZ reported the situation to William J. Burns, the CIA director . Burns then sent a confirming report to the Prime Minister.
Furthermore, the same book claims that Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Prime Minister of Qatar, telephoned David Barnea, Director of Mossad, on October 7, the day of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. He told Barnea that he had forced Hamas to release all its hostages in exchange for Israel’s commitment not to launch any further incursions into Gaza. However, Barnea replied: “If they want to release the civilians, let them release them. We are not ready to talk with Hamas.”
Furthermore, Yahya Sinwar had his right-hand man, in his presence, phone an associate of Mohammed Dahlan on October 8th. Dahlan pledged to release all civilian hostages, whether minors or over 50 years old, without any conditions. The offer was relayed to the Shin Bet, which responded: “Netanyahu doesn’t want to talk about anything anymore. He only wants war and the elimination of Hamas.”
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett commented on X: “This morning’s [Haaretz] article stating that Netanyahu was warned ten days before the October 7 massacre about Sinwar’s intentions is true.”
Netanyahu bears direct and personal responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis under his watch.
His disregard for the warnings constitutes criminal negligence, and therefore he is doing everything he can to prevent the creation of a state commission of inquiry that will reveal the truth […]
If we do not replace this government, we will never know the truth, which will only be revealed by a state commission of inquiry, because it is preventing its establishment for fear that we will discover the terrible truth.
• General Yair Golan, former deputy chief of staff and chairman of the Democrats, had provided aid to victims on the day of the attack. He commented on X: “The ‘They didn’t wake me up’ excuse is over; he knew it. He was warned […]
The investigation reveals that Netanyahu received an explicit warning from the Emir of the [United Arab] Emirates and deliberately concealed it from the army chiefs and the Shin Bet. This shatters all the lies he told us.
Now it’s clear: Netanyahu is unfit and illegitimate. He belongs in prison for his crimes against the State of Israel.
We need to replace it now!
CIA ‘Proxy’: Unravelling Saudi Arabia’s True 9/11 Role
Kit Klarenberg Substack September 12, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/09/12/cia-proxy-unravelling-saudi-arabias-true-9-11-role/
In the leadup to 9/11’s silver anniversary, it was widely reported a forthcoming New York District Court civil case brought against notorious Saudi government operative Omar Bayoumi would deliver “smoking gun” proof tying Riyadh directly to the attacks. Compelling evidence Saudi Arabian intelligence not only managed several hijackers as agents, but did so as a “proxy” for the CIA, has lain unexamined in plain sight for years. Yet, the Agency’s sinister shadowplay remains eerily absent from media consideration, despite mounting recognition of Riyadh’s role.
Bayoumi has long-been accused by major news outlets and US officials of maintaining an intimate and suspicious relationship with hijackers Nawaf Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar, immediately upon their arrival to the US in January 2000. A subsequent FBI investigation, dubbed Operation Encore, ruled there was a “50/50 chance” Bayoumi – and the House of Saud by extension – had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. This explosive finding was not publicly divulged until March 2022.
However, the media remained steadfastly silent a year later when a bombshell filing from the Office of Military Commissions – the legal body overseeing prosecutions of 9/11 defendants – was released. The document summarises classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews conducted with anonymous high-ranking US intelligence officials. Its contents shed unprecedented light on how the CIA recruited at least Hazmi and Mihdhar if not others who participated in the 9/11 attacks, “via a liaison relationship” with Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID).
The same document elucidates how the 9/11 Commission was deliberately sabotaged by its chief Philip Zelikow, who personally endeavoured “to blunt” inquiries “into Saudi involvement with the hijackers.” Concurrently, senior FBI officials tasked with investigating the attacks were prohibited from interviewing Saudi nationals, despite “many” leads pointing directly to Riyadh’s Washington DC embassy. No wonder – probing those connections would’ve amply revealed how the GID was acting as a “cutout” for the CIA, in all its clandestine dealings with the 9/11 hijackers.
High-ranking FBI officials quoted in the filing discuss how the GID was a longstanding CIA “proxy”, exploited by the Agency whenever it was “unwise or not practical…to undertake an operation directly.” This need was particularly pronounced in the context of cloak-and-dagger CIA connivances conducted “on US soil.” After 25 years, it appears Riyadh could finally take the fall for a dastardly CIA operation that one way or another resulted in 9/11. As planned, there is little chance of the Agency itself landing in the dock.
‘CIA Team’
Among the court filing’smost dynamite excerpts is the insider testimony of an FBI special agent, who was posted to Alec Station – the CIA’s Al Qaeda tracking unit, ultimately responsible for recruiting Hazmi and Mihdhar as assets. When in January 2000 the special agent learned the pair – known Al Qaeda operatives under intensive CIA and NSA surveillance – had multi-entry visas to the US, they produced a report warning Bureau headquarters. Its dispatch was blocked by an unnamed CIA analyst.
The same analyst not only directed the GID to make contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar upon their arrival, but falsely claimed to subsequent US government inquiries into 9/11 they had personally informed the FBI about the pair’s presence in the US. The FBI special agent personally witnessed CIA director George Tenet and Agency operations director James Pavitt bragging about how they “conspired to obstruct the 9/11 Commission,” by concealing the analyst’s activities and identity from investigators.
In the process, an extraordinary, hitherto unreported component of Riyadh’s relationship with the hijackers remained determinedly unexplored. The FBI special agent alleged Hazmi and Mihdhar were explicitly provided US visas by the American consulate in Jeddah, “to facilitate the operation run by the Saudis’ GID and the CIA team.” This disclosure is all the more tantalising given 14 of the 19 hijackers all received their visas from the same consulate. In many cases, the paperwork shouldn’t have been granted at all.
Adding to the mystery, 12 of the 14 visas were approved by a single consular official, named Shayna Steinger. Almost immediately after being appointed to the Jeddah consulate in July 2000 with zero diplomatic background, she began rubberstamping applications of future 9/11 hijackers. At the time, the consulate’s approach to issuing visas was strict, specifically due to local “terrorism” concerns. Internal guidelines stated applicants – particularly young male Saudis – should always be interviewed in person, and have clear grounds for travel.
However, Steinger personally took it upon herself to reverse this policy. Moreover, she issued visas to future 9/11 hijackers despite their applications frequently being incomplete or error-strewn, based on forged documents, and their contents giving ample grounds for suspicion. Steinger nonetheless interviewed Hani Hanjour, who purportedly piloted Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. Afterwards, she rejected his application for a three-year US visa, due to apparent doubts over his stated purposes in the country. Nonetheless, Steinger approved Hanjour’s renewed application two weeks later.
In ensuing official investigations, she offered wildly contradictory accounts of why the hijackers’ visas were granted. In Hanjour’s case, Steinger initially claimed he provided requested supporting documentation. She subsequently admitted he actually hadn’t, but Hanjour’s “middle class” background purportedly led her to conclude he was trustworthy. Thanks to the court filing, we know in reality future 9/11 hijackers were granted entry to the US so they could be recruited by the CIA upon arrival, suggesting Steinger was acting on Agency orders.
‘Local Dissidents’
Once Hazmi and Mihdhar touched down in Los Angeles in January 2000, almost immediately they crossed paths with Omar Bayoumi at an airport restaurant. FBI reports cited in the court filing indicate a witness who observed their meeting saw Bayoumi “dropping a piece of paper” near the pair’s table, “then striking up a conversation with them” in a manner that appeared “unnatural.” The witness relayed this account to the Bureau in 2002, but it was never publicised.
In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi maintained his meeting with Hazmi and Mihdhar was pure happenstance. The extraordinary assistance he gave them immediately thereafter – including finding them an apartment, cosigning their lease, setting them up bank accounts, and gifting them substantial sums towards their rent – was simply charity for fellow Muslims who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with Western culture, Bayoumi asserted. But the filing offers numerous striking insights into the dark reality of his contact with the future hijackers.
For example, it appears Bayoumi was secretly instructed to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, by extremist cleric and Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs official Fahad Thumairy. The filing cites evidence indicating Bayoumi was himself in California “to spy on local dissidents” of Saudi extraction. He was seen with the two 9/11 hijackers “on numerous occasions,” at one stage organising “a social gathering for the hijackers.” We can only guess who may also have been in attendance.
Another stunning exposure in the filing concerns Hazmi and Mihdhar lodging with longtime FBI informant and asset Abdussattar Shaikh from September 2000 onwards. That Shaikh failed to provide their surnames to his handler despite being asked has been known for many years. The joint congressional and senate intelligence committee probe into 9/11 ruled the pair’s stay with Shaikh was “the [US] intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.” Insulating Hazmi and Midhar from Bureau scrutiny may have been his explicit objective.
The filing indicates he himself “was receiving funds” from Riyadh, while simultaneously serving as an FBI informant. “Prominent” Saudis “would stay at Shaikh’s boarding house while visiting California,” it states. His mission was “to monitor the activities of [Saudi] citizens while they were abroad.” Hani Hanjour also stayed with Shaikh alongside Hazmi, after Mihdhar returned to Saudi Arabia in late 2000. It appears at every stage Stateside, the hijackers were in intimate proximity with figures connected to Saudi intelligence.
Given the GID was acting directly on the CIA’s behalf, this contact raises the obvious prospect the Agency – via its Riyadh “proxy” – was directly monitoring the movements of Hazmi, Midhar, and Hanjour if not other Saudi-born hijackers from the moment they entered the US at the Agency’s direction, until 9/11 itself. The extent to which the CIA could’ve influenced their actions, behaviour and movements throughout is unknown, but the scope was self-evidently massive.
Saudi Involvement’
All along, Alec Station deliberately concealed the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar in the US from the FBI, until it was too late. The filing records how in June 2001 Station representatives showed senior Bureau officials photographs of three Al Qaeda operatives, including Hazmi and Mihdhar. However, the CIA refused to answer questions about the individuals in the photos, or provide identifying information. Had they done so, the FBI could’ve readily found Hazmi and Mihdhar’s names and addresses listed in San Diego’s local phone directory.
This was a flagrant dangle, obviously intended to gauge the Bureau’s cognisance of the identities of the individuals pictured, and their presence in the US. The filing also indicates the FBI conducted a dedicated counterintelligence investigation into Omar Bayoumi prior to 9/11, due to suspicions “he was operating as an intelligence officer.” Yet, when the Bureau contacted the CIA for information on Bayoumi, they were told the Agency “held no files” on him at all – a “falsehood”.
In reality, the CIA maintained plentiful “operational” records on Bayoumi, which were “never passed to the FBI.” Such brazen stonewalling persisted long after 9/11. Upon learning tens of thousands of dollars had been sent from Haifa bin Faisal, wife of Saudi ambassador to the US Bandar bin Sultan, to Bayoumi’s wife, the Bureau attempted to subpoena their financial records from Washington DC’s Riggs Bank. Per the filing, “officials at Riggs thwarted the FBI’s efforts to obtain the records for a year.”
Riggs Bank – which counted US Presidents and CIA-installed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as clients – collapsed amid major money laundering scandals, in 2005. Post-9/11 investigations identified financial improprieties in accounts held by several wealthy Saudis – including a lack of required background checks, and consistent failure to alert regulators over large transactions violating federal banking laws. Riggs’ downfall precisely mirrors the unceremonious end of many confirmed CIA front banks past, such as Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which assisted criminal cloak-and-dagger connivances including Iran/Contra.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the filing records how “diplomatic pressure” was exerted on the FBI not to investigate Riyad’s myriad connections to 9/11. Bureau agents testifying to the joint inquiry into the attacks were moreover “instructed not to reveal the full extent of Saudi involvement with Al-Qaeda.” Senior officials at FBI headquarters knew “of both Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and…the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar,” but “suppressed investigations” into these burning matters.
The filing concludes by noting Bayoumi was subsequently arrested in Britain on immigration charges immediately after 9/11, with authorities finding “extremist literature in his apartment.” The significance of this disclosure has gone entirely unnoticed, since 2022. Only now, as a result of the New York court case, has the media acknowledged how within days of the attacks, “game-changing” evidence directly implicating Bayoumi in 9/11 was seized from his British home by counter-terror police, then shared with the FBI, which actively buried the information.
Quite unbelievably, the incriminating haul supposedly included a phonebook listing over two dozen Saudi government officials in the US and Saudi Arabia; flight simulator software; tickets and travel documents; and a notepad featuring a sketch of an aircraft. An accompanying note from a British counter-terror officer stated of the latter: “contains handwritten notes mathematical calculations re height of planes.” A member of the 9/11 families’ legal team behind the court action boldly informed the BBC, “it’s the mathematical calculation of the [Pentagon] crash.”
By September 22nd 2001, this seemingly incontrovertible windfall was in the Bureau’s possession. So too highly illuminating home video tapes of Bayoumi roaming around Washington DC in 1999, highlighting security measures in place at the Capitol building, openly discussing nearby Reagan National Airport, and referencing an unspecified “plan” on camera. Other tapes feature Bayoumi in close quarters with senior Al Qaeda figures such as Anwar Awlaki, assassinated in a September 2011 US drone strike.
While British detectives apparently believed they possessed “more than sufficient evidence” to extradite Bayoumi to stand trial, Washington ordered him freed, and he returned to Saudi Arabia. US authorities’ resistance is understandable, given the overwhelming abundance of evidence pointing ineluctably to the CIA at the very least actively facilitating the 9/11 attacks, if not carrying them out, using the Saudis as scapegoats. Media determination to avoid mentioning how Bayoumi et al provably acted as “proxies” for the CIA shows the coverup continues today.
The case for declassifying 9/11 records
Government secrecy on intelligence related to the attacks impedes the justice process for some and allows conspiracy theories to fester.
MS Now By Lauren Harper, Sept. 10, 2026,
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently ordered the release of more than 170,000 pages of city records about the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. This release, the first in a series of planned disclosures, shows how opening decades-old records, including those that expose government wrongdoing, is in the public interest. Political will to expand such efforts elsewhere is crucial
Thousands of 9/11 survivors and victims’ families in Lower Manhattan have fought for more than two decades to hold foreign entities liable for the terrorist attacks — only to find that one of the biggest obstacles is their own government. While successive U.S. administrations have promised closure for victims, critical records remain classified 25 years after 9/11, delaying justice and accountability.
The executive order governing classification, EO 13526, mandates that most historical records must be automatically declassified at 25 years, unless they meet certain strict criteria.
In theory, this means the records of the defining national tragedy of this century should start becoming public on Dec. 31. In practice, the declassification system is so ineffective that millions of pages are all but certain to remain hidden in agency archives from Quantico to Langley for years, possibly even decades, whether or not they require continued protection.
This impedes justice on multiple fronts.
In the Southern District of New York, for example, thousands of people have been fighting since 2002 to hold a variety of defendants — from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to members of Al Qaeda — responsible for the attack. They have been impeded in part by the Justice Department, which has aggressively invoked the state-secrets privilege to block the release of records discussing, among other things, whether Saudi officials aided the hijackers when they arrived in the United States in 2000. While a Biden-era executive order forced the partial declassification of some records relevant to this case, many interagency communications and witness interviews remain heavily redacted or fully classified.
At Guantánamo Bay, enduring secrecy has complicated the prosecution of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several co-conspirators. The military commission has dragged on for nearly 25 years, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, in part because the government’s evidence was obtained from the CIA’s torture program. Although classification rules explicitly prohibit keeping records classified to conceal violations of law, including torture, the federal government has withheld records from the agency’s black-site prisons for years, ultimately prolonging proceedings. In doing so, the government prioritizes its need for secrecy over ensuring the commission’s tribunals proceed at a reasonable speed toward justice………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Although the summary and the closed-door interviews have not reached the 25-year mark, having been compiled by the 9/11 Commission in 2003 and 2004, releasing them would help promote public understanding of the attacks and government intelligence. It could also help dismantle agency pretexts for withholding the older, underlying intelligence………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.ms.now/opinion/9-11-victims-declassifying-records-intelligence-threats
9/11 and the War on Terror’s Darkest Paradox
“Never Forget” has become a national ritual. But remembering the tragedy without confronting the deeper story is its own kind of forgetting.
Amber Yang, Sep 12, 2026, https://wtkconsciousmedia.substack.com/p/911-and-the-war-on-terrors-darkest?utm_source=aweber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9-11-and-the-war-on-terror-s-darkest-paradox
Twenty-five years ago on 9/11, a vast machine of perpetual war, intrusive surveillance, high-tech human rights abuses, and unaccountable power was born in the ashes of our civil liberties.
The 9/11 Commission was given a $15 million budget to investigate the attacks. This might sound like a lot, but by comparison, the sprawling investigation of Bill Clinton’s scandals (which included the Monica Lewinsky affair) consumed at least $30 million. What does that say about the priority placed on finding out the deeper forces behind one of the greatest tragedies in American history?
WantToKnow.info has been investigating the unanswered questions surrounding 9/11 since our founding in 2003. Our comprehensive 9/11 Information Center includes detailed timelines tracing relevant events back to the 1980s, concise investigative summaries, documentaries and major-media reporting, along with collections of media statements from senior military, intelligence and government officials who have publicly questioned important aspects of the official account. The late theologian and prolific 9/11 researcher Dr. David Ray Griffin once wrote:
WantToKnow.info is a great source of information. I myself first learned about the problems in the official account of 9/11 from this website early in 2003. It has continued since that time to provide exactly what it says: ‘reliable, verifiable information on major cover-ups.’ WantToKnow.info is eminently worthy of support.
Below is a brief overview of some of the key facts, unanswered questions, evidence of concealment and obstruction surrounding the 9/11 investigation, and the far-reaching consequences of the War on Terror that followed. The post 9/11 realities we also explore presents a disturbing paradox; our response did not make us safer. Below, we bring together rarely connected evidence showing how the machinery built to fight terrorism has repeatedly fueled the very violence, terrorism, and extremism we’re told to fear—from FBI operations manufacturing terrorist plots at home, American military prisons serving as incubators for terrorist networks, brutal drone warfare creating new generations of extremists, to a War on Drugs that failed to stop the drug trade while enriching warlords and drug traffickers. In fact, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich recently pointed to the ultimate irony: forces descending from al-Qaeda went from being America’s defining enemy after 9/11 to emerging victorious in Syria after years of US-backed regime change efforts.
When it comes to the evidence of a 9/11 cover-up, here is what has held up after 25 years:
- One year before 9/11, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential Washington think tank, wrote that global US military dominance would likely be slow without a “catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” Several figures associated with PNAC went on to serve in the Bush administration. Around September 20th, four-star General Wesley Clark was informed by a senior Pentagon general that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made, and when Clark returned a few weeks later, the same general told him about a classified memo describing plans to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with Iraq and including Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
Could 9/11 have been prevented? The CIA and FBI almost certainly received and discarded warnings about the attack. The US military’s advanced technology systems were capable of stopping the planes before they struck the buildings but chose not to do so. No adequate explanation for these failures has ever been presented to the public. Even stranger, stock market bets were made against the airlines that were involved by a firm formerly headed by CIA director “Buzzy” Krongard; the profits were never claimed. And more than two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were allowed to leave the United States on specially arranged charter flights shortly after 9/11.
Three skyscrapers collapsed on 9/11, but only two were hit by airplanes. The 47-story World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7) was never struck by an airplane, yet later that afternoon roughly 26,000 tons of structural steel came down in a sudden, remarkably vertical collapse within seconds. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first known building taller than 15 stories to collapse primarily because of fire. Yet if fires really caused such an unprecedented collapse, why hasn’t WTC 7 become one of the most important case studies in high-rise firefighting history? Retired Seattle Fire Captain Raul Angulo is an internationally recognized firefighting instructor and author of a major firefighting textbook published in conjunction with the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). In a 2024 article in the International Fire & Safety Journal, Angulo points out that fire-resistant high-rises are specifically designed to withstand severe fires without completely collapsing. He contrasts WTC 7 with other major high-rise fires that burned for many hours without producing total collapse. A later three-year University of Alaska Fairbanks structural study went further, concluding that fire could not have caused WTC 7’s observed collapse.
Were the buildings brought down through controlled demolition, the deliberate use of explosives and/or incendiaries to destroy a building from within? Countless testimonies including more than 150 firefighters and other first responders described explosions or explosion-like events at the World Trade Center. Particularly notable are accounts from two New York City officials Barry Jennings and Michael Hess who reported a major explosion while evacuating WTC 7 before either of the Twin Towers had collapsed.- Yet how do you seriously investigate controlled demolition when critical physical evidence was either already gone or never tested for it? Much of the WTC steel was rapidly removed and recycled from crash sites. In Angulo’s 2025 article in the International Fire & Safety Journal, he writes that the NIST even admitted that less than 1% of the steel from the Twin Towers was preserved, and next to none from WTC7. NIST never tested recovered Twin Towers steel for explosive or thermite residues despite physical evidence and witness testimony suggesting that explosives and/or incendiaries were involved in the collapse of the towers. And its computer modeling stopped short of explaining the Towers’ complete destruction, later acknowledging it was “unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.”
- John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, later described a government “culture of concealment” and wrote that the story presented to the public was “almost entirely, and fundamentally, untrue.” Critical records were withheld, difficult to obtain, or destroyed. FAA recordings were deliberately destroyed. CIA interrogation tapes sought by the Commission were withheld and later destroyed, and key government accounts of the military response on 9/11 turned out to be false. In fact, the collective voices of over 100 respected professors along with over 50 senior government officials, over 250 pilots and aviation professionals, and over 3,000 architects and engineers give credibility to the claim that the 9/11 Commission Report was tragically flawed.
The War on Terror we launched after 9/11 did not make us safer. In reality, the machinery built to fight terrorism fueled the very violence, terrorism, and extremism we were told to be afraid of.
Serious questions remain about how the post-9/11 terrorism threat has been measured and presented to the public. The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of violence. FBI operatives were found to have proposed terrorist plots, supplied money or weapons, coached vulnerable targets and then arrested them for participating. Human Rights Watch found that the majority of defendants in post-9/11 terrorist cases had no actual ties to terrorism or to terrorist organizations. The organization concluded that, “the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals.” National security expert Sahar Aziz put it best: “If there was a serious terrorist threat in America, the FBI would not be spending its time entrapping a mentally ill minor.”
The biggest Al Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no Al Qaeda. Instead, the vague, implausible threat by a group of construction workers in Florida to blow up U.S. buildings, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, was mostly the making of the FBI, whose undercover operatives sought out the men, promised them money, and coached them over months to implicate themselves in a conspiracy to commit violent acts they never actually intended or had the means to carry out. The “Liberty City Seven” case — known by its connection to the poor, violence-ridden Miami neighborhood where the men involved lived — was the most high-profile FBI investigation of a supposed terrorist cell after the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. The ordeal of the seven Black men, most of them Haitian American, who were manipulated by two paid FBI informants into pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda is recounted in a new Frontline documentary, “In the Shadow of 9/11.” The case set the stage for hundreds of FBI sting operations in the following years, as the bureau continued to frame individuals who were often poor, credulous, and had dubious ability to independently plan any attacks. Rather than abandoning stings as pointless and harmful … the FBI doubled down on them, in some cases even providing weapons to the individuals they set up.
— “The Most High-Profile Al Qaeda Plot Foiled After 9/11 Was an FBI Scam,” The Intercept
Many people imprisoned in the War on Terror were never terrorists, and senior Bush administration officials knew it. At the Abu Ghraib prison, the Red Cross estimated that 70–90% of Iraqi detainees had been arrested by mistake. CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, slammed into walls, confined in coffin-like boxes and subjected to “rectal rehydration.” The government initially portrayed him as a senior al-Qaeda figure, until CIA contractors realized they had the wrong man. The Senate Intelligence Committee ultimately concluded that the CIA’s torture program was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining detainee cooperation. Read more about the CIA’s torture program.- Camp Bucca in Iraq, a US military detention center, came to be known widely as a “terrorist university“ that “absolutely radicalized young Iraqis” (quote from retired US Army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] Michael Flynn). In fact, 80% of prisoners released from Camp Bucca rejoined terrorists. One senior leader of ISIS told The Guardian, “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no [ISIS] now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”
- At least 20,000 innocent civilians have died as a result of US drone warfare and targeted killings since 9/11. Yet the CIA itself warned that these tactics could fuel the very extremism and terrorism they were intended to defeat. A secret 2009 CIA assessment warned that killing high-value targets could radicalize populations and even create openings for more radical groups, particularly when civilians are killed.
- Drone warfare has also inflicted severe psychological trauma and PTSD on US military personnel ordered to kill people thousands of miles away through high-resolution cameras. Air Force Captain Kevin Larson, who died by suicide in 2020, described a mission in which he was told to follow a target’s body to his funeral and kill those who attended. Former drone operator Brandon Bryant recounted an emotional experience of killing a child in Afghanistan that his superiors told him was a dog. Intelligence analyst Bennett Miller told about a time when his team killed a supposed high-level Taliban financier, only to see the same target’s name appear again a week later. “We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts.” Another drone operator Michael Haas once said that operators referred to children as fun-sized terrorists or TITS, terrorists in training.
- In our Substack, “A History of Militarized Policing in the US and the Suppression of Dissent Across the Political Spectrum,” we discuss how the militarization of domestic police was driven by the Pentagon supplying local police with military equipment after 9/11. Since then, the term terrorism has expanded to include any activist group across the spectrum not in favor of the political establishment.
- The War on Terror also deepened the War on Drugs as we document in our Substack, How the Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline. Despite a successful ban on opium cultivation by the Taliban in 2000, which drastically reduced production, Afghanistan again became the world’s largest source of heroin after the US invasion in 2001. By the end of the war, opium production, drug addiction, and the flow of drug money had reached unprecedented levels, despite costly and ineffective anti-drug efforts. In fact, an interview with one official estimated that 40% of US aid to Afghanistan during the War on Terror had been pocketed by officials, gangsters, warlords, drug lords and insurgents.
Based on all of our research, we believe that these facts about 9/11 are just the tip of the iceberg. We deserve better than leaders who lie to us, create the very enemies we’re told to be afraid of, and kill in our name with our taxpayer dollars.
We can’t shift the chaos we’re in until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us—in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. Challenging information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It is the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these challenges to light—fueling open dialogue and constructive action.
With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
The Dancing Israelis: Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks
Signs of the Times, Whitney Webb, Mint Press News, Sun, 19 May 2019
Four of the Israeli nationals arrested for “puzzling behavior” during the September 11 attacks are seen casually posing together in front of the Manhattan skyline while the September 11 attacks were in progress
New information released by the FBI has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7thhas brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men – later revealed to be Israeli nationals – had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story receivedcoverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten.
The men – Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari – were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”
For years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen.
According to a former high-ranking American intelligence official who spoke to the Jewish daily Forward in 2002, the FBI concluded in its investigation that the five Israelis arrested “were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ, served as a front.” At least two of the men arrested were determined to have direct links to the Mossad after their names appeared in a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives. According to one of their lawyers, one of the men, Paul Kurzberg, had previously worked for the Mossad in another country prior to arriving in the United States. Another of those arrested, Oded Ellner, subsequently stated on Israeli TV that the five Israelis had been in New York at the time “to document the event,” meaning the attack on the World Trade Center.
The FOIA release of the photos is notable because responses to prior FOIA requests to the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, had previously claimed that all of the photos taken by the Israeli nationals had been destroyed in January 2014. The photos themselves are heavily redacted, making it impossible to see the Israelis’ facial expressions. However, previously declassified yet heavily redacted FBI reports state that the Israelis are “visibly happy” in nearly every photo, even when the burning towers are in the background. The photos released are also not original copies and instead appear to be photocopies of photocopies of the original pictures. In addition, of the original 76 pictures developed by authorities from the camera in the Israelis’ possession, only 14 were released.
FOIA Release of 9/11 Dancin… by on Scribd
However, three of these photos – despite the heavy redaction and poor quality – are damning. Since 2001, even though the photos were never released until now, it had been known that one of the Israelis arrested – Sivan Kurzberg – was seen in a photo “holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage [of the twin towers] in the background,” according to Steven Noah Gordon, then-lawyer for the five Israelis, as cited in a New York Times report from November 2001…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.sott.net/article/413373-The-Dancing-Israelis-Newly-Released-FBI-Docs-Shed-Light-on-Apparent-Mossad-Foreknowledge-of-9-11-Attacks
Exposed: How The CIA Manipulates Public Opinion
SCHEERPOST, September 8, 2026, Joshua Scheer
Ben Norton examines the little-discussed history of CIA influence over the American left—and the role played by one of the most celebrated feminist icons of the modern era, Gloria Steinem. Steinem’s work with a CIA-funded organization during the Cold War, Norton argues, was part of a broader effort to cultivate a “compatible left”: liberal voices that could promote American power while presenting the United States as a force for democracy, human rights and progress.
But the story doesn’t end with Steinem. Norton connects the Cold War propaganda apparatus to CIA interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Italy and Indonesia, the enormous human toll of U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the cultural institutions and intellectuals allegedly enlisted to fight the ideological battle against communism.
He then brings that history into the present, arguing that the same political language can be heard in today’s Democratic Party—from Hillary Clinton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—particularly in rhetoric about “democracy vs. authoritarianism,” U.S. intervention abroad and the supposed moral distinction between American power and its rivals.
The central question is provocative: Has the machinery of Cold War propaganda really disappeared—or has it simply learned how to speak the language of modern liberalism?
Highlights
- Gloria Steinem and the CIA: Steinem acknowledged working with the CIA-funded Independent Research Service during the Cold War.
- The “compatible left”: Norton argues that the CIA sought to cultivate center-left figures who opposed communism without challenging U.S. imperial power.
- CIA coups and intervention: The analysis examines U.S. involvement in the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, as well as CIA interference in Italy’s 1948 election. – Indonesia: Norton examines U.S. support for the Indonesian military amid the mass killings of 1965–66.
- The cultural Cold War: The analysis explores the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom and its connections to artists, writers and intellectuals.
- From Steinem to today: Norton argues that Cold War narratives about democracy, authoritarianism and U.S. power continue to influence contemporary liberal politics.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This transcript has been cleaned for readability while maintaining the speaker’s original words, meaning, arguments, and overall sequence. Timestamps have been removed, punctuation and paragraphing have been lightly edited, and obvious transcription/spelling errors in names and terms have been corrected.
Today I’m going to be explaining one of the ways in which US intelligence agencies manipulate public opinion in order to support U.S. wars and interventions abroad. And this scandal involves one of the most prominent political activists in modern US history. Her name was Gloria Steinem. She was a major feminist leader and she just passed away this September. And the reason that I’m talking about Gloria Steinem today is that many people have heard of her and they know that she was a feminist icon. But what many people do not know is that she was a CIA agent. She worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency for years. And later in this analysis today, I’ll look at the evidence detailing how Steinem was used by the U.S. in order to manufacture consent for the U.S. Empire’s wars of aggression for its imperial crimes and especially as a vehicle for anti-communist propaganda. Steinem worked for the CIA at the height of the first cold war and she was a proud part of the U.S. Empire’s global propaganda narrative when the US tried to portray itself as a progressive beacon of liberal values that was defending democracy in scare quotes and human rights and fighting against the big bad boogeymen of the Soviet Union fighting against communism. This is why the CIA hired Steinem because she was a very effective propagandist………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://scheerpost.com/2026/09/08/exposed-how-the-cia-manipulates-public-opinion/
Three Major Revelations About The Gaza Holocaust In The Israeli Press
Caitlin Johnstone, Sep 10, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/three-major-revelations-about-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=214991965&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory.
The first two come from a Haaretz article titled “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs”, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza.
Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources:
“A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.”
Haaretz reports that rather than pass these warnings on to Israeli national security officials, Netanyahu chose to sit on information which an unnamed Shin Bet official said could have “changed our entire assessment picture.”
Haaretz also notes that Israel had received similar warnings about a coming Hamas attack from Egyptian intelligence, which had been reported earlier. These are just two items in the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence indicating that powerful people in Israel knowingly allowed Hamas to inflict as much damage as possible on October 7 2023 in order to advance the murderous ethnic cleansing objectives we’ve seen rolled out in the years since.
Nothing will turn you into a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on October 7. But even without knowing those facts it already strains credulity to believe Israel had no advance knowledge of a complex attack which would require extensive open-air training in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land on our planet. Especially when you look at all the pre-existing military agendas Israel was able to push forward in the aftermath.
Later in that same article, Haaretz quotes a Palestinian politician named Samir Mashharawi describing what Hamas leadership told him during his mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas after October 7:
“He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return,” Mashharawi recounts. “I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else.”
Mashharawi said Israel rejected the offer. A senior Israeli defense official corroborated this, telling Haaretz:
“The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of October 7. Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes. But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?”
So all that hasbara about the hostages and the Bibas kids and how Hamas needed to be destroyed because they were refusing to release innocent civilian captives was complete bunk from the very beginning. Hamas offered to release them with no conditions but the opening of communication lines. Israel refused, because what they wanted was to steal more Palestinian land. It was never about the hostages, and anyone who said it was is a liar.
Lastly, a separate report in Hebrew from Haaretz quotes an Israeli air force reserve major describing how IDF policies and culture ensured the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Here are a few quotes, translated by Israeli-American political analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim:
1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah and said, “You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground. For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another.”
“On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: “The Palestinians didn’t know it existed, and the Air Force wasn’t always updated either. From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he’s stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. ‘He came for an arms deal.’ ‘He touched the ground, maybe he’s planting an explosive.’ To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof.”
On how all morals were lost in Gaza: “”The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can’t understand it from the outside. It’s not just fatigue, it’s an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event. Very quickly this whole business of ‘collateral damage’ disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, ‘Yalla, score,’ that’s how they shout at a soldier, ‘Kill him, strike him.’”
Like the other revelations, this report further discredits the lies the public was sold about Israel’s reasons for its atrocities in Gaza. All those lies about how Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza and only kills civilians because Hamas “hides behind human shields” has been thoroughly discredited by copious amounts of evidence that Israel was going out of its way to kill noncombatants throughout the course of the onslaught.
The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just like it was lied to about every other act of mass military slaughter that the US involves itself in. Please carry these lessons into the future.
Inside Assad’s nuclear secrets
Al Majalla chose Bashar al‑Assad’s nuclear programme as this week’s
cover story following reports issued by the International Atomic Energy
Agency in early September, which revealed that the project was much more
extensive than previously believed. This investigation traces the hidden
history of the former Syrian president’s nuclear ambitions, while shedding
light on the roles played by North Korea and Iran, the depth of Israel’s
penetration into the most guarded leadership circles, the destruction of
the al‑Kibar reactor in 2007, and the 2008 assassination of Brigadier
General Mohammed Suleiman—one of the senior officials entrusted with
Syria’s most sensitive strategic weapons programmes.
Al Majalla 10th Sept 2026, https://en.majalla.com/node/332964/politics/inside-assad%E2%80%99s-nuclear-secrets
Boris Johnson Continues to Lie About Subverting Ukraine Peace Talks
The origin of the Johnson sabotage story is not Russian propaganda. It was first reported by Ukrainska Pravda. The Ukrainian paper says that as soon as Ukraine and Russia had “agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning.” He told Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”
Johnson also wooed Zelensky with promises of “influence” and “fame” as a great war hero.
The charge against Johnson is supported not only by Ukrainian testimony, but by British testimony
Columnist Ted Snider takes on the former PM
Ted Snider is a columnist for The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor for The American Conservative. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and other outlets.
In a recent interview, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson repeated his denial that he discouraged Ukraine from negotiating peace in the first days of the war. “This is complete, utter nonsense,” Johnson said. He insisted that the story was just the Kremlin spreading allegations.
Johnson has used that defense before. In January 2024, he told The Times that “This is nothing but total nonsense and Russian propaganda.”
But none of the sources of the charge are Russian. They are all either Ukrainian or British.
Johnson denies that he encouraged Zelensky to fight. He says that Zelensky’s mind was already set on fighting and that “there was not a single European or Western leader who could have stopped the Ukrainians from fighting for their country.”
That was not true at the time. In a February 25, 2022 address to Ukrainians, Zelensky said, “We are not afraid to talk to Russia. We are not afraid to say everything about security guarantees for our state. We are not afraid to talk about neutral status.”
The origin of the Johnson sabotage story is not Russian propaganda. It was first reported by Ukrainska Pravda. The Ukrainian paper says that as soon as Ukraine and Russia had “agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning.” He told Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”
That story, first reported in the Ukrainian press, was confirmed by the head of the Ukrainian negotiating team, Davyd Arakhamia, who says that when the Ukrainian team “returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” He adds that the West “actually advised us not to go into ephemeral security guarantees.”
Far from Russian propaganda, the charge against Johnson has a Ukrainian media source backed by primary source confirmation from the lead Ukrainian negotiator.
Though it carries less weight because she was not there and because she was no longer in office at the time, there is also secondary source confirmation from within Zelensky’s administration. Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019-2021, retells the story of Johnson rushing to Kiev to urge the Ukrainians to keep fighting. She also adds the claim, without support or attribution, that Johnson also wooed Zelensky with promises of “influence” and “fame” as a great war hero.
The charge against Johnson is supported not only by Ukrainian testimony, but by British testimony. A senior government source told The Times at the end of March 2022 that the British government warned Zelensky not to be bullied into concessions and that it was the position of the UK that he shouldn’t be “too eager… to settle” and that “Ukraine needs to be in the strongest possible position militarily before those talks can take place.”
Johnson did say that the UK “would back Ukraine a thousand percent.” But he also said, “I could not see for the life of me what the deal could be, and I thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.” He then told Zelensky that “as far as I am concerned, Putin must fail and Ukraine must be entitled to retain full sovereignty and independence.” Johnson then made the promise of providing the Ukrainian armed forces with military supplies.
In The Russo-Ukrainian War: Follies of Empire, Richard Sakwa reports an earlier phone conversation in which Johnson told Zelensky that the UK “would not stand as a guarantor power and urged Zelensky to refuse the deal.”
It is important to set Johnson’s perjury straight not just to correct the historical record, but to remember that, at a time when the war is becoming increasingly hopeless for Ukraine, before most of the death and destruction, there was the chance of peace, and that Johnson contributed to discouraging it and encouraging this horrible war.
Syria’s Assad-era reactor configured for nuclear weapons: IAEA
UN watchdog says material now is under IAEA safeguards.
By AP and Reuters, 7 Sep 20267 Sep 2026
Syria’s Assad-era nuclear facility was configured to produce material for possible use in nuclear weapons, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported.
The nuclear reactor, which the United Nations nuclear watchdog has been investigating with the cooperation of Syria’s new authorities, would have been able to produce fissile material that could be used for weapons, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told a media conference in Vienna on Monday.
“This is a reactor that is very efficient in the production of fissile material that could be used directly for the fabrication of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Grossi’s comments came a week after the UN watchdog revealed in a confidential report that it had visited several sites in Syria in August and carried out verification work.
Based on observations at the Deir Az Zor site, the agency said it confirms “that the cooling infrastructure which has now been uncovered is consistent with that of a nuclear reactor”.
The agency added that it would continue to monitor the activities at the site “as the excavation work progresses”………………………
Israel is believed to have its own undeclared atomic weapons programme, which makes it the only nuclear armed country in the Middle East. Israel neither confirms nor denies having nuclear weapons.
The IAEA has said that the former Syrian authorities had failed to report nuclear material, facilities and activities……………………..
The Syrian administration – made up of the group that overthrew Assad in 2024 – notified the agency of its existence in July and invited the nuclear inspectors to investigate. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/7/syrias-assad-era-reactor-configured-for-nuclear-weapons-iaea
Ministry of Defence withheld information about nuclear test veterans’ records, ex-minister claims
He said the information was “deliberately withheld” by the MoD and claimed there was an effort to delay its release until surviving veterans had passed away.
2 Sept 26, Tabby Wilson, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3d787k9kpyo
Former veterans minister Tobias Ellwood has accused the Ministry of Defence (MoD) of deliberately withholding the medical records of Cold War veterans who oversaw nuclear tests, calling it “an absolute cover-up”.
Ellwood told BBC Newsnight he now believes some information he gave to Parliament about the UK’s nuclear programme, based on MoD briefings, was “a complete lie”.
Veterans have campaigned for the release of their medical histories, arguing blood and urine test results could help them prove that nuclear exposure damaged their health.
An MoD spokesperson said the government had conducted an “extensive records discovery exercise” to address questions about the programme, with its findings published in full.
As many as 25,000 members of the UK armed services, scientists and civilians took part in the nuclear testing programme between 1952 and 1967 at sites including Australia and several islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Veterans have claimed the tests caused severe lifelong health problems, alleging they have suffered cancers of the liver, bone, bowel, skin and brain, as well as leukaemia, heart disease, stillbirths and generational birth defects as a result of their exposure.
Ellwood, who served as a junior defence minister between June 2017 and July 2019, said he believed ministers over the years had been briefed to say they had no evidence to help nuclear test veterans, despite thousands of documents about the programme being held.
He said the information was “deliberately withheld” by the MoD and claimed there was an effort to delay its release until surviving veterans had passed away.
“The more you unpick this story, the more murky, the more shady, the concerning it becomes,” Ellwood told Newsnight, calling it bigger than the infected blood, Windrush and Post Office scandals “because of the longevity… and the number of people that have been involved”.
“This is a scandal. It’s absolutely tarnished the reputation of the MoD.”
Calling for an independent tribunal into the matter, Ellwood asked: “Why it is that the MoD – rather than help veterans, provide the information – closed ranks and said ‘nothing to see here’, and then told ministers such as me ‘actually we haven’t got that information and we’re not willing to help the veterans’?”
The ministry in 2024 promised to embark on a comprehensive examination of any information the department held on the issue, and has since released five reports.
In those, it said there were a number of factors affecting the way medical records were kept, including the lack of a centralised approach and high levels of Cold War “secrecy”.
Ellwood conceded that some documents were to be handed to the National Archives, but said they would still be heavily redacted: “They have to be declassified. This isn’t enough to help the veterans, who understandably remain deeply angry.”
An MoD spokesperson said the government had examined “tens of thousands of documents to address long-standing questions from veterans about blood and urine testing policies during the nuclear testing programme”.
They said it had been published in its entirety “following regular engagement between Ministers, nuclear test veterans and community groups throughout the process.”
“We owe an enduring debt of gratitude to the more than 22,000 Service personnel, scientists and civilians who contributed to the UK’s nuclear testing programme and helped safeguard our national security,” the spokesperson said.
I inadvertently misled parliament over a British nuclear scandal. Now I’m calling for justice
Tobias Ellwood, 3 Sept 26,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/02/british-nuclear-tests-compensation-for-veterans
Thousands of service personnel took part in dangerous cold war-era nuclear tests. The government owes them the truth – and compensation.
In December 2018, as defence minister, I inadvertently misled parliament. Asked whether blood samples had been taken from service personnel for radiological monitoring during the nuclear bomb tests, I relayed the line provided to me by the Ministry of Defence: it was “unable to locate any information” suggesting blood samples had been taken for radiological monitoring at the tests.
I now know the reality was very different – these samples were taken across the armed services branches. But those veterans seeking compensation for serious illnesses developed after radiation exposure have been unable to access them. This is among the greatest scandals in Britain, and it must be addressed.
More than 20,000 armed forces personnel took part in dozens of nuclear tests and nearly 600 radiation experiments, the majority between 1952 and 1967. This was for the entirety of the cold war. The science was deemed necessary. How effective were our own bombs and, just as importantly, how well could our military function if the Soviet Union used theirs against us? Test after test was conducted in the Australian desert, at Christmas Island in the Pacific, and we also sent service personnel into the atomic clouds of allies and enemies. Yet their medical records for the period are missing.
Other nuclear nations, such as the US, France and the Soviet Union, did the same. Yet they acknowledged that it happened and created dedicated compensation schemes for nuclear test veterans who subsequently developed serious illnesses. Britain stands apart here. In Britain, the burden was placed on veterans to prove their case. But how do you claim what happened decades earlier when potentially vital records are missing or inaccessible?
In 2007, about 1,000 nuclear test veterans and families took the MoD to court seeking compensation. Pilots had been instructed to fly through mushroom clouds. Service personnel sailed and crawled through fallout. Others witnessed nuclear explosions, in some cases just two miles from ground zero. Surely our service personnel deserved better?
This is where the scandal turns ugly. To deal with the veterans’ litigation, the MoD instructed the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) to collate relevant documentation into a searchable database called Merlin. More than 28,000 documents were eventually assembled, covering radiation, precautions, health monitoring and what was known about the possible biological effects of the tests. Yet the veterans’ lawyers had no practical access to this vast archive. Thanks to the extraordinary investigative journalism of Susie Boniface, historical documents began emerging referring to blood and urine testing.
When I saw the evidence, I raised it in November 2022 as chair of the defence committee. The MoD finally acknowledged that the AWE held copies of blood-test results and urine-radioactivity measurements for “a small number of individuals”. That took me straight back to my parliamentary answer four years earlier.
I challenged the then defence secretary, Ben Wallace. If this information existed within the MoD, why had ministers not been given the full picture? He agreed that withholding relevant medical information would be “deeply wrong” and undertook to investigate.
The dam was beginning to burst. Searches of Merlin for “blood” and “urine” subsequently identified 151 documents. Then another extraordinary twist. A software change meant the AWE could no longer provide a historical audit trail showing who had accessed Merlin.
Ukrainian Writer Gets 15 Years in Jail for Article EXPOSING Ukraine Nazis
31 Aug 2026
Katie speaks to German World Socialist Website editor Johannes Stern about the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian activist who was charged with terrorism for writing articles opposing the war and exposing Ukraine’s rehabilitation of Nazis.
Israel’s ‘Facts on the Ground’ – razing Gaza and South Lebanon
by Cathy Peters | Sep 2, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/israels-facts-on-the-ground-razing-gaza-and-south-lebanon/
Israel is destroying the evidence in the world’s largest crime scenes – Gaza and South Lebanon. Journalist Cathy Peters investigates the push to obliterate Palestinian lives and identity.
Israel is currently creating new Orwellian ‘facts on the ground’ in Gaza. Millions of tonnes of rubble are being transported out of areas in Gaza that the IDF has closed off behind the Yellow Line Zone.
Key locations of recent and former burial sites and ruins of major urban and agricultural landscapes have been razed in a blatant move to erase not only evidence of war crimes but also evidence of prior Palestinian existence on these lands.
Meanwhile, Drop Site News reported journalist Muhammad Shehada has asked Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to disclose whether Gaza reconstruction funds were “paying Israeli contractors or the Israeli military to remove rubble that may contain human remains and pave roads over potential mass graves”. The Board of Peace has denied it.
Nakba reprise
The Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic) of 1948 was planned by a group of Jewish Zionist leaders including Israel’s first president, Ben Gurion, seven years prior to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from Palestine. 530 towns and villages were depopulated, destroyed and then flattened in 1948.
They had been identified in the “Village Files” project (1940–47) which extensively mapped and gathered intelligence on hundreds of towns and villages. These files were incorporated into the ethnic cleansing Plan Dalet of 1948.
By August that year Ben Gurion had formally laid out a policy for the complete erasure of Palestinian existence in large areas of historic Palestine. This razing ensured that Palestinians once forcibly expelled, would not have anything to return to as refugees.
In subsequent years, the Israeli state and state supported organisations like the Jewish National Fund, planted forests over the sites of former Palestinian villages, greenwashing the colonisation of Palestinian lands to ‘dehistoricise Palestine’ in an attempt to obliterate Palestinian identity and ownership of the land.
Facts on the Ground
‘Facts on the ground’ is a familiar catch cry for illegal Israeli actions – unilateral military and civilian actions led by successive generations of Israeli governments pursuing their goal of ‘Eretz Israel’ (The Land of Israel) through relentless seizure of Palestinian property regardless of any agreements or international laws.
The creation of ‘facts on the ground’ such as the 1948 razing of evidence of Palestinian existence throughout Palestine ‘48 (now Israel) or the masses of illegal Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have thwarted any legal processes and greatly
“impeded chances for a just peace for Palestinians.“
Israel’s latest ‘facts on the ground’ are the large swathes of flattened land throughout closed off areas in Gaza and South Lebanon. It has obliterated all evidence of habitation and destroyed evidence in the world’s largest crime scenes.
As 2 million Palestinians try to survive in unspeakable conditions herded into just over a third of the land mass of Gaza, IOF (Israel Occupying Forces) and their mercenary contractors are destroying physical evidence of Israel’s war crimes and of prior Palestinian existence throughout some 65% of land now closed off in the Yellow Line Zone controlled by Israeli forces.
Bombed out landscapes with any number of human remains, crumbling structures of homes, municipal buildings, mosques, streets, civil infrastructure and vital agricultural lands are being razed.
Al Jazeera has reported that hundreds of trucks are transporting rubble out of the Gaza Strip into Israel. This is another grave violation of international humanitarian law by Israel and an obstruction of the work the International Court of Justice is doing in relation to the case brought by South Africa against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Destroying, altering, or removing evidence can constitute an offence against the administration of justice under Article 70 of the Rome Statute. The Genocide Convention cites that along with killing and inflicting severe bodily or mental harm,
“destroying the means of existence for a group, is genocide.“
This week South Africa accused Israel of failing to adhere to the orders imposed by the International Court of Justice in 2024 and filed a dossier to the Court citing that Israel had continued to arbitrarily kill and arrest, torture and imprison Palestinians in Gaza and other violations of the Genocide Convention which include destruction of buildings and infrastructure.
Out of sight, out of mind
There are no peace keepers in Gaza, no Palestinian or international war crimes investigators or journalists and no members of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the body established to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza established by Trump’s Board of Peace and the terms of the ceasefire of October 2025.
They have not yet set foot in Gaza despite the urgent call two weeks ago by the Gaza Government Media Office for them to enter the Strip urgently.
Without any oversight, Israel is creating irreversible facts on the ground and bulldozing not only evidence of its crimes and the bodies of those killed and unaccounted for, but any remaining documentation of individuals’ lives and their ownership of property and land.
Now, not a single landmark or street or tree or building remains in key areas inside the Yellow Line Zone occupied by the IOF and its supported civilian militias outposts.
The BBC produced this forensic satellite analysis of the widespread destruction of towns and cities in Gaza back in July 2025 and all reports indicate that this destruction is continuing apace with the removal of rubble into Israel now a key feature.
Gaza. BBC satellite investigation – [on original]
Not only is the genocide and continued military blockade in Gaza denying any rights or recourse to justice for the living but this erasure is denying Palestinians the right to identify and bury their dead, and to recover any of their heritage in these areas in Gaza which goes back thousands of years.
Testimonies from Gaza
Michael West Media has received reports from Palestinians on the ground in Gaza.
Ahmed is a graduate of one of the best universities in Gaza. He lost his family and home east of Gaza City early in the genocide, and now lives alone in a damaged apartment in Gaza City. Previously he took shelter in a primary school near his home, but the IDF occupied it and has now cleared its ruins. He speaks frequently with Australian friends.
“The IDF and the pro-Israel militia have been killing people trying to cross the yellow line to try salvage personal possessions from the ruins of their homes. Now all the Israeli-controlled zone is being flattened, with rubble and bodies removed to Israel. This means no one can see where their streets or homes or shops or farms were. Families cannot properly honour their dead.
“Historic buildings and the Commonwealth war cemetery, near my old home, have been bulldozed. Friends being evacuated via the Israeli Karem Abu Salem checkpoint, have said all of the land in Rafah has been
“levelled, except for the Israeli and allied militia bases.”
“The levelling is not just for unrestricted military operations by Israel, but shows they want to eradicate Palestinian presence from eastern, southern and northern Gaza permanently.
On the Palestinian side of the yellow line, Israel is doing what it can, by controlling what supplies enter and who sells them, and by bombing local police, to encourage internal conflict, for instance between the big families.”
Tarek, the brother of a Palestinian Australian, is unable to get a visa out of Gaza.
“The situation in Gaza is extremely desperate with people struggling to access basic necessities such as food, safe drinking water, shelter, health care, and medicines. Overcrowded tents and poor sanitation have led to a significant spread of rodents, insects, and diseases in shelters and streets.
“At the same time, shortages of medicines and limited access to health services are putting vulnerable patients, particularly those with chronic conditions, at serious risk.”
Tarek’s comments on the bulldozing and removal of rubble from Gaza reinforce reports from EuroMed Monitor and Al Jazeera on what is happening behind the Yellow Line Zone, hidden from sight as Israel creates its facts on the ground now in Gaza.
“I have heard about the extensive bulldozing and destruction of areas behind the so-called yellow line, including the removal of rubble. I am familiar with some of these areas because some of my friends and colleagues used to live there.
“Large parts of these residential areas have been destroyed or heavily damaged, leaving families displaced and unable to return to their homes. The scale of the destruction has resulted in the loss of homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods, making the possibility of returning to normal life increasingly difficult.
“We do not deserve this. The lack of strong action from the international community feels like a profound abandonment and
“a great failure toward the people of Gaza.”
Ahmed lives in Sydney and has lost many family members. He is in regular contact with a family survivor in desperate conditions in the Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Yunis city in southern Gaza where many thousands of displaced Palestinians living in tents have been facing acute water shortages and extreme heat for months.
“The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. There’s a renewed blockade of medical supplies and essential food supplies. Clean water has been incredibly scarce and food supplies are becoming more and more limited.
“Dangerous rodents and harmful insects have infested the displacement camps along the coasts of Khan Younis (Al Mawasi area) and residents suspect that to be intentionally spread by the IOF because they are of types that they have never seen in the Strip before.
“Moreover, the burning heat waves this summer have been dangerously paralysing and detrimental especially for newborns, small children, and the injured who have not been able to be evacuated overseas for medical attention.
“The genocide may have slowed down to avert the global attention away from Gaza, but our beloved Gaza Strip has been shrinking, and has evidently become a laboratory for the IOF necropolitics where they get to test all types of
physical, mental and psychological weapons
they continuously develop to suppress the population, as they intentionally keep the gates to the Gaza death camp securely locked.
Razing South Lebanon
Last week the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called for “an end to [Israeli] attacks directed against, or indiscriminately affecting, civilians and civilian objects in Lebanon” and noted “reports that entire villages in southern Lebanon have been rendered uninhabitable, with homes, schools, healthcare facilities, water and electricity infrastructure, places of worship and agricultural land destroyed by strikes and demolitions.”
Since March this year, Israel indiscriminately attacked Lebanon and enforced mass displacement orders particularly throughout Southern Lebanon resulting in 1 million people forcibly displaced from 189 towns and villages in just one week.
The Lebanese public research institute, the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) has estimated that almost 85,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed in the south.
Additionally Israel sprayed what laboratory tests confirmed was glyphosate at very high levels over prime agricultural land destroying the chance of farmers to continue to work their lands.
Human Rights Watch has documented numerous instances of Israel’s illegal use of white phosphorus in populated areas of South Lebanon since 2023
n April this year, BBC Verify assembled data on the destruction in Lebanon based on satellite maps showing the complete razing of towns and villages in the south in line with Defence Minister Katz’s order of March 22nd to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes” and key infrastructure
based on the “model in Gaza”.
As quoted in the Lighthouse Report and co published with the Financial Times in August, Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at Amnesty International stated that “It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon … “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”
These are Israel’s facts on the ground in Lebanon.
Israel justifies its actions in Gaza and Lebanon as self-defence but the systematic erasure of life and the means to life has never been about self defence. There will never be any justification for the industrial slaughter and collective punishment in Gaza and Lebanon and the razing of their lands where generations of existence has been wiped off the map.
Cathy Peters
Cathy Peters is a former ABC RN producer/executive producer and Greens councillor on the former Marrickville Council. She also worked for a state Greens MP and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights. In 2014, she co-founded PSNA / BDS Australia. She has Jewish heritage, has travelled and volunteered in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
We Investigated The Board Of Peace. The Corruption We Found Will Shock You
7 Aug 2026Jared Kushner has a scheme to profit off world peace — and Gaza is the testing ground. There’s a web of private equity billionaires with ties to Israel and shadowy corporate armies who stand to profit off never-ending conflict. We investigated Trump’s Board of Peace.
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