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.
Cabinet Office declines to share information it holds about PM’s nuke orders options
Tom Pashby, Aug 26, 2026, https://tompashby.substack.com/p/cabinet-office-declines-to-share?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6735486&post_id=212821041&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The Cabinet Office has confirmed to 20 Working Days that it holds information regarding what options the Prime Minister has in terms of the orders they can give to nuclear-armed submarine captains in their ‘Letters of last resort’, but said it is withholding the information.
It is widely understood that one of the first tasks a Prime Minister has on walking through the door to Number 10 Downing Street is writing the letters to the captains of Trident submarines – the UK’s continuous-at-sea-deterrent.
The letters are written so that, if communications are not possible between the submarine and the wider military and political command and control structure, the submarine captains are able to find out what they should do by reading the pre-written letters which are believed to be sealed until they are needed.
The existence of the letters was confirmed by the MOD in an internal review of a FOI request in 2015. The results of the internal review were addressed to a Mr D Black.
In 2016, just before Theresa May took over the role from David Cameron, the Guardian reported: “The options are said to include the orders “Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there”; “Go to Australia”; “Retaliate”; or “Use your own judgment”.”
On 4 July 2026, using the FOI Act, 20 Working Days asked the MOD to share “any documents which show whether the options include the orders ‘Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there’; ‘Go to Australia’; ‘Retaliate’; or ‘Use your own judgment’,” as per the reporting in the Guardian.
In response, on 16 July, the MOD said: “As the letters are administered by the Cabinet Office, you may wish to approach them regarding […] what options the letters might contain.”
On the same day, 20 Working Days put that question to the Cabinet Office.
On 17 August, the Cabinet Office responded and said: “We are writing to advise you that following a search of our paper and electronic records, we have established that the information you requested is held by the Cabinet Office.
“Information you have requested is exempt under section 24(1) of the Freedom of Information Act. Section 24 exempts information from disclosure if its exemption is required for the purpose of safeguarding national security.”
It added that “Section 24 is a qualified exemption and we have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information”, and confirmed “we have determined that the balance of the public interest favours withholding this Information”.
The Cabinet Office was approached for comment.
Ukraine’s Ultranationalist War On History
Kit Klarenberg Substack, August 23, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/23/ukraines-ultranationalist-war-on-history/
Over the past two decades, hardline Ukrainian ultranationalists have waged an ever-escalating war on history at home and abroad, with dramatic, world-changing consequences. In the country itself, a highly repressive legal apparatus is increasingly enforcing dangerously skewed narratives of Kiev’s near and distant past, with excessive criminal penalties even for those who unwittingly fall foul of the law. A brazenly politicised battle, it has become turbocharged since the Ukraine proxy conflict’s eruption. Despite widespread opposition, Kiev’s aggressive ultranationalist offensive on history is only intensifying.
These are the grave findings of an extraordinary paper by Ukrainian academic Georgiy Kasianov, “To discipline and punish”: A punitive turn in the memory politics in Ukraine, 2006–2025. As the author notes, the weaponisation of law in service of memory politics is common in Central and Eastern Europe. At least nine countries in the region boast legislation prohibiting public displays of Communist and Nazi symbols, which underpins local ultranationalist efforts – eagerly endorsed by the EU – to perversely conflate the two ideologies as comparable totalitarianisms.
Moreover, in many cases – especially the Baltics – these laws are components of wider cultural and legal ecosystems glorifying Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators as heroic freedom fighters, while strictly limiting discourse about World War II to conceal local culpability for macabre crimes. As such, Kasianov writes, Ukraine’s “punitive model of memory politics” fits into “a broader post-Communist pattern of state-enforced historical narratives.” Yet, “in its severity, selectivity, ideological and bureaucratic instrumentalization,” Kiev’s war on history “represents a particularly radical and revealing case.”
Today, Ukraine “leads Europe in the number of judicial decisions concerning violations of criminal statutes specifically designed to prohibit certain historical symbols,” with criminal penalties for breaching “memory laws” being the continent’s “most severe.” Kasianov traces this state of affairs to the mid-2000s, when Western-installed President Viktor Yushchenko’s government sought to implement laws “institutionalizing” the Soviet Union’s 1930 – 1933 famine as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians specifically engineered by Joseph Stalin. It is known within Ukraine, and increasingly internationally, as “Holodomor”.
While the famine and resultant mass death was produced and exacerbated by catastrophic human errors combined with adverse natural factors, few historians consider the horror to have been intentional. Markedly, Kazakhs and Russians also perished in vast numbers. As of November 2022, just 23 UN member states have recognised Holodomor as a genocide – most being Kiev’s close allies, post-Maidan. Nonetheless, prominent Western sources state axiomatically the famine was deliberately inflicted, part of a wider ongoing Russian and/or Soviet effort to erase Ukraine.
Meanwhile, ultranationalist claims of how many Ukrainians were supposedly killed by the famine have grown ever-wilder, with some sources placing the figure as high as 10 million. This is several times the multiethnic death toll typically accepted by scholars, conveniently framing the so-called Holodomor as a greater targeted crime against humanity than the Holocaust. Yuschenko’s foray into memory politics contributed significantly to this warped contemporary informational climate. Still, 2006 legislation formally designating Holodomor as genocidal didn’t include punitive measures for denying or questioning that characterisation.
Kasianov documents how over the next 14 years, 13 separate attempts were made to criminalise “Holodomor denial” by ultranationalist Ukrainian elements within and without government and parliament. Each effort sought to impose “a state-sanctioned historical orthodoxy” around Holodomor, while “[constraining] scholarly debate and freedom of expression.” None received approval from parliament’s “legal analytical department”, but ultranationalist memory politics ultimately prevailed on a cultural and political level locally, and beyond. Notably, many of these initiatives were sponsored by the openly Neo-Nazi political party Svoboda.
‘Political Repression’
Svoboda played a substantial role in the Western-orchestrated 2014 Maidan coup, which not coincidentally “created a fertile environment for reframing memory politics as an instrument of state security and ideological consolidation.” The government of Petro Poroshenko justified the “rapid passage of a package of laws aimed at condemning [Communism] and institutionalizing a nationalist historical narrative” as a “necessary defensive measure” and “nation-building project,” countering supposed “external aggression” from Russia. This led to the adoption of hitherto unthinkable legislation in April 2015.
Approximately 90% of the legislation’s text “is dedicated to defining and enumerating Communist symbols, while Nazi symbols are addressed in relatively minimal and largely perfunctory terms.” Nazi-related prohibitions are “limited to the most universally recognized insignia of the Third Reich, such as the swastika.” By contrast, “the law offers an expansive and detailed catalog of banned Soviet insignia, ranging from the hammer and sickle to red stars and Soviet-era street names.” This “obvious asymmetry” extends even further.
These hastily passed laws equated Communism with Nazism, prohibiting the public display of symbols associated with both ideologies. Yet, Kasianov notes the legislation “also granted legal and moral rehabilitation” to mass-murdering, Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian nationalist factions heavily implicated in the Holocaust. This included Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, and its armed Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) wing. Moreover, despite the law’s formal dual condemnation of Communism and Nazism, Kasianov details how “its implementation and symbolic focus reveal a stark imbalance.”
Approximately 90% of the legislation’s text “is dedicated to defining and enumerating Communist symbols, while Nazi symbols are addressed in relatively minimal and largely perfunctory terms.” Nazi-related prohibitions are “limited to the most universally recognized insignia of the Third Reich, such as the swastika.” By contrast, “the law offers an expansive and detailed catalog of banned Soviet insignia, ranging from the hammer and sickle to red stars and Soviet-era street names.” This “obvious asymmetry” extends even further.
Symbols associated with local Neo-Nazi groups, or formal World War II-era collaborationist Ukrainian military units such as SS Division Galicia, are spared from proscription entirely. “Legal and policy experts and Ukrainian and international human rights organizations” have all expressed concerns over the law’s “vague definitions,” and “potential misuse for political repression.” The Ukrainian Rada’s own “expert department” found the legislation conflicted with the country’s established constitution, and several existing domestic laws.
Disproportionately harsh punishments for infringements, with offenders facing prison sentences of up to five years along with property confiscation, also drew widespread criticism. A lawyer and lecturer at Lviv National University strikingly compared the penalties involved to “using a guillotine to treat a headache.” A damning open letter signed by a welter of academics and policymakers dubbed the legislation “an instrument of ideological purification, selectively targeting the symbols and narratives associated with the political left while allowing for the implicit valorization of radical nationalist traditions.”
These devastating indictments were dismissed by the law’s advocates as “Kremlin propaganda”, if not outright treason. Kasianov reveals how “principal architects” of Poroshenko’s “Decommunization” agenda were a coterie of ultranationalist “memory activists”, drawn from the Lviv-based Center for Research on the Liberation Movement, and Youth Nationalist Congress. Both maintain “close ideological and organizational ties” with, operating as “facade organizations” for, the Banderite OUN. The pair have long-served as “conduits for nationalist reinterpretation of 20th century Ukrainian history and strong anti-Communist and anti-Russian policies.”
‘Memory Regime’
Post-Maidan, “several leading figures from this milieu assumed influential positions within state institutions, shaping historical policy.” This included extensive infiltration of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINP), the state body charged with implementing memory laws. Then-Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych of Neo-Nazi Svoboda appointed OUN-linked figures to influential positions within UINP. Not coincidentally, Sych cofounded the fascist, pro-Maidan Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, an OUN-B “political facade”. Once their long-sought anti-Communist legislation was enacted, enforcement came thick and fast.
From November 2015 – spring 2016, almost 52,000 toponymical objects, 32 cities, 955 villages and settlements, and 25 administrative districts were renamed, with 2,389 monuments and memorial plaques to “totalitarian leaders” removed. In all, 1,320 were Lenin statues. Between 2015 and 2021 too, Ukrainian police and the general prosecutor’s office registered 334 criminal cases against citizens related to the display of “totalitarian symbols” – “the vast majority of which concerned Communist imagery.” Details were almost invariably farcical.
n May 2017, a student narrowly avoided jail for posting Lenin quotes on Facebook. Under his plea deal, he publicly expressed “sincere remorse”, while his personal copy of Karl Marx’s Capital was destroyed. In June 2019, an unemployed man received a one year suspended prison sentence for wearing an old T-shirt featuring the Soviet coat of arms while washing windows. In March 2021, a Lviv resident was sentenced to one year’s probation after being “detained by politically vigilant local citizens” for wearing a USSR emblem.
In the meantime, further legislation was passed by Kiev sacralising ultranationalist historical narratives. Lack of political pushback was in no small part assured by Ukraine’s Communist party being banned in December 2015. The same openly fascist and Neo-Nazi elements behind Poroshenko’s “Decommunization” push successfully sponsored laws granting OUN and UPA genocidaires official combatant status and veteran benefits. Now insulated from legal consequences for any atrocities they committed, Ukrainian state sources universally describe them as “heroes” who fought for Ukrainian “independence”.
The volume of cases brought under “Decommunization” laws, and severity of the punishments involved, ratcheted significantly following the Ukraine proxy war’s eruption. Authorities were handed an ideal rationale further assaulting history, while waging war on enemies within, under the guise of “derussification and decolonization.” In keeping with the “near-absence of prosecutions for Nazi-related offenses” pre-conflict, in over 300 criminal cases brought to trial 2022 – 2025, fewer than 10 involved Nazi symbols. The vast majority “concerned the dissemination of prohibited [Communist] symbols on social media platforms.”
Today, even simply liking social media posts featuring Soviet symbols can land Ukrainians in court. Kasianov notes how “case materials” have “indicated the emergence of specialized investigators…focused on monitoring digital communications and online content,” within the ranks of both police and the SBU security service. There has concomitantly been a significant rise in “vigilant citizens” reporting acquaintances, coworkers, and neighbours to authorities for breaching Kiev’s stringent memory laws. “Overwhelmingly”, individuals “from marginalized and impoverished segments of the population” have been targeted.
Ever since Maidan, Ukraine’s “punitive memory regime” and “nationalist identity project” has been wholeheartedly embraced and promoted by Kiev’s Western proxy sponsors. No wonder – the legally-enforced distorted narrative Ukraine is fighting a battle for its very existence, and ultimate liberation from “Russian imperialism”, ensures the war will continue in perpetuity. All along, distorted “memory politics” becomes more entrenched and rabid at the country’s highest levels, leaving the population – and the wider world – at the mercy of a dangerous and deranged ultranationalist clique.
Today In Dystopia: Burning Books For Israel, Burning Books For AI
Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 20, 2026
I’ve been putting out more and more of these “today in dystopia” write-ups because our society is plunging into iron-fisted authoritarianism and AI-induced idiocracy so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up with how it’s unfolding day by day without shoveling multiple stories into a single essay.
Today in dystopia they’re really going after books. A library in Sydney has removed the book “How to Sell a Genocide” by Adam Johnson from its shelves after Zionists complained about its criticisms of Israeli mass atrocities in Gaza.
The Guardian reports:
“A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.
“Waverley library at Bondi Junction is in the same council area as Bondi beach.
“A Waverley council spokesperson said: “The book has been removed from library shelves for review, and council will further consider processes to ensure closer oversight of book selection.”
“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson commented. “But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding. The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters.”
So in Australia they’re now banning books for Israel. I guess it was only a matter of time.
Also today in dystopia, Amazon is buying and destroying rare books in a secret facility to train AI.
404 Media has been doing some great reporting on how companies like Google and Anthropic have been buying up rare and out-of-print books to train their LLM models before destroying them, and now 404 has a new article out describing how its reporters placed a tracking device on a shipment of books and followed it to an Amazon warehouse where the books are being scanned and shredded.
Here’s an excerpt:
“That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.”
That’s right: the logo for Amazon’s book-destroying location is an angry tyrannosaurus preparing to rip apart a book…………………………………
Today in dystopia, the Israeli government is working harder and harder to manipulate the information AI chatbots feed their users about Israel and its myriad military projects in the middle east.
Politico reports:
“Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum.
“French PR firm Havas Media, which runs the lion’s share of Israel’s FARA-registered foreign influence work in the U.S., appears to have stood up an ‘institute’ aimed at feeding LLMs positive information about Israel via one of its subcontractors, boutique ad agency Piro, Inc.”
This builds on previous reporting from Drop Site News about FARA revelations showing that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale secured a lucrative deal with Israel to set up dummy pro-Israel websites designed to be read not by humans, but by the web crawlers that LLMs get their information from. Drop Site found that Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity were the AI companies most vulnerable to Parscale’s manipulations.
Today in dystopia it’s becoming more and more common for online commenters to accuse me of using AI to write my essays, which I have never done and will never do.
I hate that this is a thing now. I’ve been writing essays every day for a decade, and nobody who’s been reading me for a long time believes I use AI. But now that so many people are using these creepy chatbots to do everything for them, people believe it’s impossible for a human brain to produce a few paragraphs of text.
I don’t mind the accusations, I just hate what it says about where we’re heading as a species. These things have only existed for a few years, but some people are already forgetting what it was like to be able to use your own mind to complete simple cognitive tasks. I find it deeply disturbing.https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/today-in-dystopia-burning-books-for?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=211937785&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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