The scandal Zelensky can’t escape: Inside Ukraine’s biggest corruption story
Rt.com 14 Nov, 2025, https://www.rt.com/russia/627803-billion-dollar-friend-zelensky-mindich/
Timur Mindich slipped out of Ukraine hours before the raids. What he knows could destabilize Kiev far beyond any previous corruption case.
Golden toilet bowls. Stacks of dollars fresh from the US Federal Reserve. A courier complaining that hauling $1.6 million in cash “is no easy job.” More than a thousand hours of wiretaps – filled with laughter, swearing, and the careless voices of men discussing how to split state contracts, who to bribe, and who should be placed in key government posts.
These are fragments of a vast corruption saga now unfolding in Ukraine – a scandal whose scale and brazenness have stunned even the country’s Western sponsors.
The latest chapter began with raids on November 10, when officers from Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies searched the Kiev apartment of businessman and media producer Timur Mindich. A few hours earlier, he had quietly left the country – likely warned about the coming operation. That would not be surprising: Mindich is not just any fixer, but a close ally and longtime associate of Vladimir Zelensky.
What exactly lies at the heart of this sprawling corruption scandal? How far will its shockwaves travel – through Ukraine, through its Western backers, and through the war itself? And can a leader who has already outlived his legal mandate once again slip out of the crisis untouched?
The fall of the anti-corruption myth
When Vladimir Zelensky rose to power, he did so in a role that blurred fiction and reality. Ukraine was not simply electing a politician – it was electing the protagonist of a television series. In Servant of the People, Zelensky played Vasily Goloborodko, a humble history teacher who accidentally becomes Ukraine’s president and sets out to wage war on entrenched corruption.
Throughout the series, the creators hammered home one theme: the rot begins when the people closest to the president use personal access to build corrupt networks of their own.
That message became the backbone of Zelensky’s 2019 campaign. He accused then-leader Pyotr Poroshenko of surrounding himself with oligarchs, promised to dismantle corrupt patronage networks, and championed the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies.
Back then, he insisted he would never interfere with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau or Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (NABU and SAP) – the very institutions now driving the case against his closest associate.
Six years later, everything changed. In July 2025, Zelensky moved to strip both NABU and SAP of their independence, pushing to place them under a loyal Prosecutor General. At that same moment – as is now known for certain – NABU was conducting secret surveillance against his longtime friend Timur Mindich.
What once looked like political maneuvering suddenly gained clarity. The man who promised to keep anti-corruption agencies free from interference had tried to bring them under his control precisely when they were listening to his own inner circle.
NABU holds more than a thousand hours of recordings. They suggest that Mindich – a fixture in Zelensky’s entourage – used his proximity to the country’s de facto leader to build a sprawling kickback system in the energy and defense sectors. At least four ministers appear implicated. Whether Zelensky himself was directly involved remains unknown.
Mindich could have shed light on those questions – had investigators managed to question him. But before they could, he received an advance warning of the impending raid, reportedly leaked from inside the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
And somehow, during curfew, Mindich managed to pass through Ukraine’s border checkpoints and leave the country just hours before his arrest.
He is now believed to be hiding abroad – likely in Israel.
The man behind the power
To understand the shockwaves of the Mindich affair, one must first understand the man himself – a figure who rarely appeared in public, yet moved through Kiev’s political and business circles with the ease of someone who never needed a formal title.
Timur Mindich began as a media entrepreneur. He co-founded Kvartal 95, the production studio that transformed Vladimir Zelensky from comedian into a national celebrity. For years, Mindich handled business deals, contracts, casting agencies, and spin-off ventures. He was not merely a colleague – he was part of the tight inner circle that built Zelensky’s career long before he entered politics.
He also had another powerful connection: Igor Kolomoisky. Ukrainian media long described Mindich as the oligarch’s trusted fixer – a man who arranged everything from logistics and personal errands to business negotiations. Ukrainian media noted that Kolomoisky sometimes called him a “would-be son-in-law,” a reference to Mindich’s past engagement to his daughter.
For a time, Mindich acted as an informal go-between for the oligarch and Zelensky – a man who could arrange meetings, solve problems, or pass along requests.
After Zelensky took power, this relationship deepened. According to Strana.ua, Mindich gradually moved out of Kolomoisky’s orbit and into Zelensky’s. He became one of the few people the new leader fully trusted. Their families were close; their business interests intertwined. Ukrainian journalists noted that in 2019 Zelensky even used Mindich’s car. In 2021, at the height of coronavirus restrictions, Zelensky celebrated his birthday in Mindich’s apartment – a gathering that raised questions at the time, and far more now.
The two men also owned apartments in the same elite building on Grushevskogo Street, a residence filled with ministers, MPs, security officials, and politically connected businessmen. They lived, worked, and socialized within the same ecosystem.
Everything pointed to a close personal bond. Yet Mindich held no government post. He was not a minister, a deputy, or an adviser. He wielded influence not through office, but through proximity – a “gray cardinal” of the system Zelensky built around himself.
Opposition figures began calling him “the wallet” – the man who handled the money flows tied to Zelensky’s entourage. Some Ukrainian MPs alleged that informal decisions about appointments, tenders, and budgets were made in Mindich’s apartment, not in government offices. One later-released photograph of the residence – complete with marble floors, chandeliers, and a gold-plated toilet – only fueled that perception.
A kickback machine built on war and energy
It is only now – through leaked recordings, investigative files, and months of reporting by Ukrainian journalists – that the true scale of Mindich’s influence has come into view. What investigators gradually pieced together was a protection racket built into Ukraine’s most sensitive spheres: energy and defense.
The most detailed part of the scheme involves Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear operator. This company provides more than half of the country’s electricity – a lifeline during wartime blackouts. To shield the grid during the war, Ukrainian law introduced a special rule: courts are forbidden from enforcing debts against Energoatom until hostilities end. In practice, this meant that Energoatom paid contractors only after work was completed, but contractors could not sue the company to recover overdue payments, and therefore had no legal leverage if Energoatom simply refused to pay.
Mindich and his circle saw an opening – and turned it into a business.
According to prosecutors, Mindich (listed on recordings as “Karlson” and his associates approached contractors with a simple proposition: Pay us 10–15% of your contract value – or you will not be paid at all.
If a company refused, its payments were blocked indefinitely. Some contractors were told outright that their firms would be destroyed, bankrupted, or stripped of their contracts. In several cases, threats escalated to warnings that company employees might be “mobilized” to the front.
Mindich and his team jokingly called the scheme “the shlagbaum” – the barrier. Pay, and the barrier lifts. Refuse, and your business collapses.
The scope of the scheme was staggering. According to the investigation, a hidden office in central Kiev was responsible for processing black cash, maintaining parallel accounting, and laundering funds through a network of offshore companies.
Through this “laundry,” approximately $100 million passed in recent years – all during a full-scale war, when Ukraine was publicly pleading with Western governments for emergency energy support.
Energy was only one side of the operation. Mindich – again, without any state position – also lobbied suppliers and contracts inside the Ministry of Defense.
The most telling episode involves Ukraine’s minister of defense, Rustem Umerov. After meeting Mindich, Umerov signed a contract for a batch of bulletproof vests with a supplier promoted by Mindich. The armor turned out to be defective, and the contract was quietly terminated. Umerov later admitted the meeting with Mindich took place.
Some Ukrainian journalists have alleged that Mindich may have controlled or influenced companies producing drones for the Armed Forces, selling them to the state at inflated prices. These claims remain unproven, but prosecutors note that Mindich’s name appears repeatedly in connection with defense tenders, lobbying, and private suppliers.
Political fallout: Panic, damage control, and a fractured elite
The first political reaction came from inside the Ukrainian elite itself. According to MP Aleksey Goncharenko, the atmosphere on Bankova Street – the seat of Zelensky’s office – turned “miserable,” with officials aware that only a small part of the tapes had been released and fearing what might come next. Goncharenko also claimed that Zelensky’s team attempted to block Telegram channels reporting on the scandal – a sign, he argued, that the administration had “no plan” for crisis management.
The Ukrainian opposition immediately seized on the moment. Goncharenko publicly accused Zelensky and his entourage of stealing “billions of dollars during the war,” questioning whether Ukrainian soldiers had died “for the bags of Zelensky and his friends.”
Irina Gerashchenko, co-chair of the European Solidarity faction, warned that the scandal could undermine Western support, arguing that donors might “reconsider assistance” if allegations of high-level corruption were confirmed.
Ukrainian media also described a broader realignment within the political class.
According to Strana.ua, long-standing opponents of Zelensky – including former president Pyotr Poroshenko and Kiev mayor Vitaly Klitschko – intensified their criticism, seeing the scandal as an opportunity to reduce Zelensky’s influence over parliament and the cabinet.
Zelensky’s own reaction was markedly cautious. On the first day, he limited himself to general statements about the importance of combating corruption, without addressing the specifics of the Mindich case. As pressure mounted, the government dismissed two ministers – Justice Minister German Galushchenko and Energy Minister Svetlana Grinchuk – a move Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko called “civilized and appropriate.”
By the third day, Zelensky imposed personal sanctions on Timur Mindich, a step widely interpreted by Ukrainian commentators as an attempt to distance himself from a longtime friend and associate. However, given the depth of Zelensky’s ties to Mindich, his response looks strikingly restrained.
International reactions also began to surface. Bloomberg reported that more revelations and “potential shocks” could be expected as the investigation unfolds. In France, Florian Philippot of the “Patriots” party demanded a halt to European support for Kiev until the corruption allegations were fully examined.
These statements reflect growing concern among some Western politicians and commentators, though they do not represent an official shift in Western policy.
And Moscow has weighed in as well.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Western governments were “increasingly realizing” the scale of corruption in Ukraine and that a significant portion of the funds provided to Kiev were being “stolen by the regime.” Peskov expressed hope that the United States and Europe would “pay attention” to the corruption scandal now unfolding, arguing that corruption “remains one of the main sins of Kiev” and “is eating Ukraine from the inside.”
Domestic scandal stops being domestic
If the political shockwaves inside Ukraine were significant, the international repercussions proved even more serious – because the Mindich affair did not stay within Ukraine’s borders.
In fact, it quickly attracted attention from Washington.
According to Ukrainskaya Pravda, US law enforcement had taken an interest in Timur Mindich even before the November raids. On November 6, the outlet reported – citing a source in the United States – that the FBI was examining Mindich’s possible involvement in financial schemes tied to the Odessa Port Plant. One of the key figures in that earlier case, Aleksandr Gorbunenko, was detained in the US but later released under witness protection, allegedly after providing information to American investigators.
Another Ukrainian outlet, Zerkalo Nedeli, reported that on November 11, NABU detectives met with an FBI liaison officer. According to the publication, the Mindich case was part of those discussions.
These reports, taken together, suggest that the scandal may have implications far beyond Kiev’s internal politics.
And several analysts in Moscow believe this is precisely the point.
Russian political scientist Bogdan Bespalko believes that pressure on Mindich may be part of a broader effort by the United States to influence Zelensky and the structure around him, noting that NABU has long been viewed as a “pro-American” institution. According to Bespalko, Washington may be using the corruption scandal as leverage – not to remove Zelensky outright, but to constrain his room for maneuver and force political concessions.
What comes next
As the scandal widens, one question increasingly dominates political discussions in Kiev and abroad: what happens if Timur Mindich is ever forced to speak – and against whom?
Mindich has not been not detained. He left Ukraine shortly before the November raids and, according to open sources, remains outside the country.
But several figures familiar with Ukrainian politics argue that his potential testimony is the biggest threat hanging over the country’s leadership.
Former Verkhovna Rada deputy Vladimir Oleinik believes that if Mindich were ever confronted by investigators – especially those backed by the US – he could provide damaging information about Zelensky’s inner circle. “Mindich and others will be offered to give evidence on bigger fish – on Zelensky – in exchange for leniency,” he said. “They are not heroes. If pressed, they will give up everyone.”
Another former Rada deputy, Oleg Tsarev, expressed an even harsher view. According to him, the danger comes not from Mindich’s legal status, but from the sheer volume of information he allegedly possesses.
“Mindich was Zelensky’s closest confidant. He knows everything,” Tsarev said. “If interrogated seriously, he will talk – and he will talk fast.”
In Tsarev’s assessment, Mindich is aware of how the financial flows around Bankova worked, how influence was distributed, and how members of Zelensky’s entourage allegedly enriched themselves during the war.
Experts who share this view argue that Mindich could, in theory, map out the entire informal system of kickbacks and leverage that shaped Kiev’s wartime governance.
Oleinik adds that many of those implicated in the case initially believed Zelensky would shield them.
For now, however, Mindich remains abroad – and beyond the immediate reach of Ukrainian law enforcement. Whether he eventually cooperates with investigators in Kiev, with NABU, or with US authorities remains an open question.
But one conclusion is becoming hard to ignore: if Mindich ever decides to talk, the political consequences for Kiev could dwarf anything seen so far.
The Censored History of Able Archer 83
Archive Publishes “War Scare” Documents Deleted from State Department History
Newly Declassified Documents Focus on Soviet Military’s Fear of U.S. First Strike During Exercise
Washington, D.C., November 14, 2025 https://nsarchive.salsalabs.org/908?wvpId=753e3bf4-ad6a-4702-8e18-2f0d8d5326e6– The State Department quietly deleted important archival records from an official history detailing how a 1983 NATO war game could have led to a catastrophic nuclear exchange, according to new reporting from The Washington Post. This is the first known instance in which the State Department has removed previously declassified and published documents from one of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, according to the report.
Today, the Archive is publishing copies of the records that were censored by the State Department, along with a selection of the most revealing war scare records. Among them are records revealing that the Soviet military leadership genuinely feared that they were vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear strike from the West during the war scare.
The State Department republished the FRUS volume without the records after the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2024 upheld a CIA decision to deny a 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the National Security Archive seeking the declassification of an important retrospective analysis of Able Archer 83 written by U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, who warned that the exercise could have led to “a potentially disastrous situation.”
Asked why 15 pages on Able Archer had been removed from the history without explanation, the State Department told the Post that “[t]he Department was not required to provide public notice.”
National Security Archive director Tom Blanton said that the unprecedented deletion of declassified historical records from the State Department volume on the war scare echoed similar efforts in the Soviet Union where, as author David Remnick writes, the “censors went through the libraries with razor blades and slashed from the bound copies of Novy Mir.”
“Today, in America,” Blanton said, “the censors just have to press delete.”
| READ THE DOCUMENTS THAT THE STATE DEPARTMENT CENSORED |
| THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. |
AI Warlord”+: Eric Schmidt – Money, Media and Maim
rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.
In an era where technology is advancing at breakneck speed, the implications of AI on warfare are profound and troubling. Byrne’s latest article, “AI Warlord: Eric Schmidt,” part of the ongoing Military AI Watch series from Project Censored, sheds light on the intersection of power, profit, and peril in the realm of military AI. From the shadowy alliances of tech billionaires to the ethical dilemmas posed by autonomous weaponry, we’ll explore how the hype surrounding AI is not just about innovation but also about control, surveillance, and an unsettling future.
October 30, 2025, By Peter Byrne, https://www.projectcensored.org/ai-warlord-eric-schmidt-money-media-maim/
In August, Foreign Affairs published Alphabet-Google billionaire Eric Schmidt’s essay “The Dawn of Automated Warfare”—co-authored with Greg Grant of the Center for New American Security, a nonprofit funded by Schmidt and the military industry.
Best characterized as an advertorial, the AI weapons piece promotes Schmidt’s investments in military AI, including Ukrainian drone manufacturer White Stork, and Relativity Space, a military rocket contractor.
The authors frame Ukraine’s battlefields as laboratories for testing AI weapons in “the new reality of war.” From their profit-seeking perspective, mass death and suffering are collateral effects justified by “racing to create … an automated drone swarm—the holy grail of drone operations.”
The sane response to such callous marketing disguised as objective analysis by a stakeholding multibillionaire is revulsion and disbelief. But, such is the halo of entrepreneurial genius and progressive philanthropy crowning the 70-year-old Democrat Party sugar daddy, that Schmidt’s pronouncements are treated as oracular in corridors of government where he exercises undue influence alongside fellow billionaire AI militarists Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, Thiel, Hoffman, Bloomberg, Andreessen, Altman, Huang, Son, the Trumps, and Kushners.
Since 2016, investigative reports in major media have documented serious conflicts of interest between Schmidt’s governmental positions and his $30 billion in private investments and the multibillion-dollar stock portfolios managed by his nonprofit foundations. But Schmidt and his similarly conflicted tech mogul demographic remain politically immunized against punishment—or paying taxes—by the violence-energized system that created and enriches them.
Schmidt’s conflicts of interest
In 2016, when Schmidt served as CEO of Alphabet-Google, The Intercept and the Tech Transparency Project published The Android Administration, illuminating the incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and 152 Google executives: “Google doesn’t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations.”
Obama’s doors were always open to executives from Schmidt’s investment firm, Tomorrow Ventures, and Civis Analytics, an AI data firm controlled by Schmidt that is a federal contractor.
In 2019, Politico published “How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon,” highlighting Schmidt’s activities as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, a quasi-governmental body composed of militaristic capitalists such as Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman, who is also a board member of the genocide-abetting Microsoft Corporation. The Defense Innovation Board develops military contracting policies that impact companies controlled by Schmidt and other board members.
In 2021, American Prospect exposed that Rebellion Defense, a military and security tech company that Schmidt owns, was vacuuming up military AI contracts while he chaired the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
As Schmidt’s reputation was spoiling, New York Times tech reporters tried to refresh it, “updating” a previously published hagiography. Brushing past Schmidt’s well-documented conflicts, Kate Conger and Cade Metz explained that the philanthropic venture capitalist had simply “reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex.”
In May 2022, the Tech Transparency Project published a blockbuster series detailing the scope of Schmidt’s influence over military AI contracting and his many conflicts of interest.
In December 2022, referencing CNBC reporting on Schmidt’s conflicts, Senator Elizabeth Warren formally requested that the Secretary of Defense investigate Schmidt; there is no available record of a reply.
In May 2023, Le Monde highlighted the synergies between Schmidt’s business interests and his calls to prepare for warring with China. Fox News reported on an investigation by the MAGA-friendly Bull Moose Project, which charted the intersections of Schmidt’s interlocking business and governmental networks. Jack Poulson’s All Source Intelligence published additional evidence of conflicts of interest between Google and Schmidt, including collaborating with US and Australian intelligence agencies.
These are but a few examples of the flood of exposés, amplified by hundreds of news outlets, that could have prompted federal agencies to bar Schmidt from military contracting for influence peddling. But Schmidt’s military businesses thrived during the Trump I and Biden years, and continue to do so under Trump II. In June 2025, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, a military AI venture capitalist associated with the Trump–Kushner family’s Thrive Capital, was tasked with delivering the keynote address at a June 2025 conference called AI+ Expo, sponsored by Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).
The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was dissolved in 2021 after concluding that the US must buy more military AI products to face off against China. Schmidt then transmuted the federal commission into the SCSP, a partially tax-exempt private foundation he funded and governs, which opposes AI regulation.
Most of SCSP’s fifty-member staff have worked for either the Commission, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or Wall Street firms. SCSP leadership includes the Center for a New American Security’s Robert O. Work and Michèle Flournoy. Both are Pentagon careerists turned lobbyists for military AI. To direct his military AI lobby, Schmidt hired the commission’s director, Ylli Bajraktari, the former chief of staff to Trump’s national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, also a prominent military AI promoter.
Tax-avoidant, Schmidt hires former national security officials to operate his interlocking network of businesses and tax-exempt organizations. He also places his employees and grantees in influential governmental positions, paying their salaries via his for-profit organization, Schmidt Futures.
Unholy AI alliances
Schmidt credits the late, and credibly accused war criminal, Henry Kissinger, with having inspired him to create SCSP. Schmidt modeled SCSP after Kissinger’s Special Studies Project (1956–1960), which oil and railroad billionaire John D. Rockefeller bankrolled through his Rockefeller Brothers Fund. History records that the Rockefeller study rationalized minimizing social spending to free up larger portions of the gross national product for the nuclear arms race.
Media amplification of the study influenced public opinion to support the Cold War by demonizing Russia and China as existential threats to American values, by which the Rockefellers meant plutocracy, not democracy.
Kissinger opposed arms control efforts. He advocated fighting “limited” nuclear wars with intercontinental ballistic missiles. He falsely claimed the US was militarily disadvantaged because Russia fielded more nuclear missiles, while the opposite was known to be the case. The Rockefeller study he crafted helped institutionalize what outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower called a danger to democracy when he left office in 1960. The former Army general presciently predicted “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” operating a perpetually war-seeking “military-industrial complex.”
In 2021, Kissinger, Schmidt, and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher published the bestselling book, The Age of AI. They advocated spending vast amounts of public wealth developing AI weapons of mass destruction for use against China.
Their arguments are framed in terms of seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy. They hail the solipsistic Cartesian worldview as the epitome of Reason, acting as if the wisdom of all previous ages culminated in the anti-democratic musings of Immanuel Kant, who avidly supported aristocratic rule. “The AI age needs its own Descartes, its own Kant, to explain what is being created and what it will mean for humanity. … Existing principles [of human reasoning] will not apply.” For Schmidt, Kissinger, and Huttenlocher, artificial intelligence is the New Enlightenment.
The Age of AI echoes the factual dishonesty and omnicidal sociopathy of Herman Kahn’s 1960 treatise On Thermonuclear War. RAND Corporation theorist Kahn had argued that obedience to Reason requires accepting millions of deaths in a nuclear war waged to preserve American values.
According to Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, it is worth taking existential risks in order to achieve the supremacy of artificial intelligence:
Machines will enlighten humans, expanding our reality in ways we did not expect or necessarily intend to provoke. In daily life, AI is our partner, helping us make decisions about what to eat, what to wear, what to believe, where to go, and how to get there. … [AI] weapons are targetable with relative precision, [obeying] moral and legal imperatives.
Counseling going to war with China, Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher claim that failing to militarize artificial general intelligence (AGI) will wreck American society: “The dilemma posed by AI-related weapons technology is that keeping up research and development is essential for national survival.”
But, they caution, advanced AI must serve only certain corporations:
Developing AGI will require immense computing power … created by only a few well-funded organizations. … Its applications will need to be restricted. Limitations could be imposed by only allowing approved organizations to operate it.
Kissinger joined his ancestors in 2023, and in 2025, after Trump retook office, Schmidt teamed up with Alexandr Wang (founder of the military AI company Scale AI, now charged with developing “superintelligence” for Meta) and Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit largely funded by Open Philanthropy.
In March, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang co-published a Strangelovian policy paper on national security, “Superintelligence Strategy.” The authors compare their version of deterring attacks from unfriendly AI-armed nations—which they call “Mutual Assured AI Malfunction” or MAIM—to the classical Cold War deterrence theory of “mutual assured destruction” or MAD.
But, rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.
Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang compare MAIM favorably to Kahn’s “thinking the unthinkable” about the positive aspects of launching a preventative nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union, while preplanning to robustly rebuild American capitalism from the radioactive ashes after the hypothetically enfeebled Soviet retaliation.
Echoing extreme “AI doomer” worldviews, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang encourage the US military to undertake preemptive cyber and “kinetic” sabotage campaigns to ruin the AI infrastructure of US competitors, including bombing data centers to prevent the emergence of non-US-aligned superintelligences.
Afraid of US market competitors launching expensive Manhattan Project-style superintelligence efforts, they advocate for “nonproliferation.” By which they mean using military means to ensure that only the US, its allies, and certain corporate behemoths can create and use advanced AI technologies.
In a major obfuscation, the trio’s pro-AI acceleration paper does not acknowledge ongoing attempts to create international agencies capable of monitoring, regulating, and sanctioning the development and use of military AI, such as the Netherlands’ Responsible AI in the Military Domain, or international resolutions by governments to regulate or ban lethal AI weapons.
Schmidt’s SCSP vehemently opposes significant governmental regulation of AI products and weapons. Schmidt prefers that the AI industry self-regulate, and his policy aligns with the vaguely stated regulatory aims of Hendrycks’s Center for AI Safety.
In late October, leading computer scientists, world celebrities, and thousands of concerned professionals signed the Future of Life Institute’s call for prohibiting the further development of superintelligence until there is “strong public buy-in” and “broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.” Hendrycks signed the call; Wang and Schmidt did not.
An April 2025 analysis by AI Now concludes that, given the propensity of large language models to hallucinate and the impossibility of humans monitoring neural network decision-making processes, it is a national security error to allow commercial interests to dictate the reliability and safety of military AI. The failure to establish strong laws regulating artificial intelligence violates long-established legal and social norms governing the safety of nuclear power, nuclear arsenals, and chemical weapons. Loosely regulated AI systems are obviously more susceptible to hacking, sabotage, and operational disaster than regulated systems, AI Now emphasizes.
In 2025, SCSP released a series of Defense Papers and Memos to the President, urging, “The United States should organize ‘moonshot’ programs, modeled on past successful efforts like the Manhattan Project, to drive AGI [artificial general intelligence] innovation.” Schmidt’s clarion call is for the US to harm China.
Schmidt’s stance on military AI aligns closely with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the policy blueprint followed by the Trump administration. Heritage paints a similarly paranoid view of China, while urging that government research and development of AI weaponry ought to be “transferred swiftly to American interests in the private sector,” which includes, of course, Schmidt’s ventures.
Last year, the Tech Transparency Project uncovered Schmidt’s stakes in Chinese AI firms, “Eric Schmidt Cozies up to China’s AI Industry While Warning U.S. of its Dangers.” It appears that Schmidt lacks a coherent international relations strategy beyond enriching his globalized enterprises.
Media conflicts of interest
In June 2025, SCSP’s AI+ Expo conference in Washington, DC, was sponsored by military firms and “media partners” focused on ramping up military AI spending by the “Department of War.” Talks by Schmidt and panels featuring a Who’s Who in governmental and corporate AI war planning were obsequiously “moderated” by national security beat reporters from the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, Washington Post, and C4ISRNET.
Code Pink energetically disrupted Schmidt’s presentation, which was hosted by former New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, who is now employed by RAND Corporation. The activists unfurled Palestinian flags, demanding that Google cease providing technology enabling genocide in Gaza. They were forcibly removed.
David E. Sanger of the New York Times supervised a panel discussion featuring former Rep. Mac Thornberry, a board member of military AI corporations, including CAE and Booz Allen, where he sits alongside Michèle Flournoy, his colleague at Beltway lobby firm West Exec Advisors and SCSP. Sanger also ran a panel featuring a Google vice president, Royal Hansen, and SCSP’s Anne Neuberger, who had served on Biden’s National Security Council, before joining SCSP and anti-AI regulation leader, Andreessen Horowitz.
SCSP videos record Sanger making statements disguised as questions about the threat of China to US global hegemony, and, therefore, the necessity for the US to quicken AI weapons contracting. Sanger did not ask the panelists about the validity of accepting those core elements of SCSP’s lobbying agenda as factual or desirable.
Hansen, however, made a newsworthy statement:
We have been using AI to defend Gmail long before people were using chatbots, and … it’s only gotten better [with large language models]. … We use little agents, little classifiers, to look at all the content and metadata about a message to look for bad actors.
To reiterate: Hansen stated that Google uses Gemini to parse all the content of Gmail looking for (undefined) “bad actors,” and the “reporter” ignored it. (Google’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The New York Times’s Ethical Handbook cautions reporters that
those assigned to beats, must be sensitive that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance. … [S]ources are eager to win our good will for reasons of their own. … Staff members may not collaborate in ventures involving individuals or organizations that figure or are likely to figure in coverage they provide … While many professional and trade groups are organized as nonprofits, most of them do lobbying or advocacy work on policy issues [so] avoid situations that create an appearance of coziness or favoritism.
Sanger is professionally affiliated with military-industry-focused organizations, including the Center for New American Security, Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Aspen Institute. In an email exchange with Military AI Watch, Sanger said his only recompense for hosting the SCSP panels was “a somewhat soggy sandwich.” He did not respond to our query about his possible conflicts of interest, including writing a Times story last year praising Google’s much-criticized Project Maven, while pumping Schmidt’s White Stork drone business in Ukraine.
Mick Sussman, a New York Times editor charged with investigating staff conflicts of interest, did not respond to Military AI Watch’s email query on Sanger’s conflicts. Reached then on his cellphone, Sussman demanded to know how we got his phone number and abruptly hung up. Doggedly, we called back, and he picked up. Sussman said he had received the email and would get back to us. He didn’t.
Influence peddling and tax dodging
Banking a net worth of $30 billion—more than doubled since 2020—Schmidt uses a network of private nonprofits to reduce taxes and to social engineer his popular image. Advertising himself as “working to restore a balanced relationship between people and the planet,” Schmidt has disbursed billions of his tax-deductible dollars to hundreds of socially and environmentally progressive nonprofits, including media organizations.
To be clear: Schmidt’s foundations earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year investing in environmentally and socially disastrous multinational corporations, venture capital partnerships, and private equity firms, some operating out of secretive tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Schmidt’s nonprofits pay multimillion-dollar fees to Schmidt’s personal investment firm, Hillspire LLC, to manage portfolios of decidedly non-progressive investments.
According to IRS filings in 2023, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation held $1.4 billion in assets and logged (largely untaxed) capital gains of $302 million. It distributed $301 million, mostly to scientific and university projects, including $15 million to SCSP. Its largest tax-free grant, $41 million, went to an AI software accelerator, Convergent Research, which works on barcoding brains.
The Schmidt Family Foundation held $1.8 billion in stocks and real estate, netting $198 million in profits. Its charitable contributions were $137 million, targeting Indigenous and alternative energy organizations—causes antithetical to the sources of the money. The foundation holds $814 million in shares of climate- and information-destroying Alphabet (Google), and extensive holdings of Chinese AI companies.
The family foundation invests heavily in environmentally destructive corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Oracle, Dow, Barrick Gold, and Rio Tinto. It profits from companies that fuel wars and genocides, such as Elbit Systems, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, and Rheinmetall. It owns stock in Las Vegas casinos, greenhouse gas-generating chemical manufacturers, and oil-guzzling automakers. The nonprofit owns a piece of Murdoch’s anti-environmentalist News Corp. And its 2018–2023 tax returns reveal cash donations of $9.75 million to Grist, an “independent” environmental magazine that regularly climate-washes Google and Schmidt. Grist’s media department did not respond to a request for comment.
The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities
Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the west.
Nate Bear, Nov 01, 2025, https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-ai-drones-used-in-gaza-now-surveilling
AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.
The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.
The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.
Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.
And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.
According to my research almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.
In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July.
The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.
The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.
This extensive level of coverage is enabled by Skydio’s docking platform hardware. These launch pads are placed in locations around a city enabling drones to be remote charged, launched and landed many miles away from police HQs. After launch, all the information gathered by these flights is both saved to an internal SD card and automatically uploaded to special software configured for law enforcement. This software is made by Axon, a major financial backer of Skydio and the controversial maker of Tasers and ‘less-lethal weapons’ used by police departments in the US and across the west. The software, Axon Evidence, enables, in the words of an Axon press release, ‘the automatic uploads of photos and video footage from drones into a digital evidence management system.’
Axon’s equipment is also central to Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, with the company providing body cameras and Tasers to Israeli police forces and prison guards who routinely torture Palestinians. Axon, which participated in a $220 million Series E round of funding in Skydio, is just one of the many entities backing Skydio who serve a Zionist agenda.
Skydio’s first investor in 2015 was Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which provided $3 million of seed capital to the three-man team behind the drone maker. They have since invested tens of millions across numerous funding rounds. The founders of a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are both notorious Zionists. The firm was the most active venture capital investor in Israel in 2024 and this summer Andreessen and Horowitz visited Israel to meet with tech companies founded by ex-IDF and Unit 8200 war criminals.
Other Skydio investors include Next 47, which has an office in Israel headed by Moshe Zilberstein who worked in the IDF’s computer spy centre Mamram, and Hercules Capital whose managing director Ella-Tamar Adnahan is an Israeli-American described by Israeli media as “Israel’s go-to tech banker in the US.”
The saturation of US police departments with drone technology so closely connected to Israel, technology used to carry out war crimes is a frightening, if not unsurprising, development. Skydio drones will be central to the rapidly advancing proto-fascism in the US and the crack down on Antifa and other so-called ‘domestic terrorists’ by the Trump administration. In this context, the bigger surprise is that the rapid expansion of Israel-linked surveillance drone technology across America has so far gone largely under the radar.
Skydio should also make it on to the agenda of Zohran Mamdani. Recently criticised for saying “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Skydio is just another example that shows he’s right. If he has the courage of his convictions, he could do worse than use his powers as mayor to shut down the NYPD’s Skydio deal.
Skydio is also a large supplier to the Department of Defence, recently signing a contract to provide the US Army with reconnaissance drones. As a significant supplier to both military and civilian security forces, it raises questions about what information is or will be shared between the US military and domestic security agencies via the Skydio-Axon digital evidence management system.
Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the west. And next year Skydio is rolling out new indoor drones. We can only speculate as to what extent these new drones were informed by the ‘learnings’ accrued via genocide.
The story of Skydio shows that what happens in Gaza doesn’t stay in Gaza.
The logic of capitalist imperialism means these technologies will always find their way home.
It’s Just Wall-To-Wall News Stories About The US And Its Allies Abusing The World.
Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 29, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-just-wall-to-wall-news-stories?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=177462655&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
It’s just news story after news story about the US and its allies terrorizing the world today.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been filming themselves committing horrific massacres in Sudan over the last couple of days, reportedly murdering some two thousand civilians. You can see the bloodstains on the ground in satellite images. As we discussed the other day, the RSF and its atrocities are backed by the UAE, a close partner of the United States.
Meanwhile Israel has committed another wave of massacres of its own throughout the Gaza Strip, reportedly killing 104 people in a single day, including 46 children. This is as many Palestinians as would typically be killed on any given day in Gaza prior to the so-called “ceasefire”.
CBS News’ 60 Minutes has released a cartoonishly blatant war propaganda piece on “Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator” about how poor and unhappy the people of Venezuela are under their current government. The piece featured an interview with Republican Senator Rick Scott, who said that “If I was Maduro I’d head to Russia or China right now; his days are numbered.”
The US can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don’t truly know they’re serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press.
In the same interview, Scott also said that if Maduro is successfully ousted, “it’ll be the end of Cuba.”
“America is gonna take care of the southern hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy,” he added.
The senator’s statements suggest that the US is preparing a push in Latin America similar to what it has been executing with Israel in the middle east, eliminating any powers which refuse to bend the knee. South of the US border the top two disobedient governments are the socialist states of Venezuela and Cuba. In the middle east the US and Israel have spent the last two years bombing Iran and Yemen, securing a regime change in Syria, and doing everything they can to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah in order to rule the region uncontested.
And of course we’ve still got the horrifying US proxy war in Ukraine, where men continue to be dragged off against their will to fight in a nightmarish conflict that most Ukrainians now oppose, but which Zelensky is saying he intends to keep fighting for years against the will of the public. This whole miserable ordeal could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but the western power alliance avoided off-ramp after off-ramp in order to ensure that Russia would get sucked into another costly military quagmire.
All over the world the US and its allies are murdering and abusing people in order to dominate the planet and ensure the survival of the capitalist system with which its power is intertwined. It is a giant murder machine feeding on human blood and the life force of our biosphere while providing nothing but obstacles to a healthy world.
The US-centralized empire is a disease that affects our entire species. We had better find a cure, and fast.
Hi-Tech Holocaust: How Microsoft Aids The Gaza Genocide
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities.
Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”
Alan Macleod, Mintpress News, 28 Oct 25
Israel’s genocide is being powered by Microsoft. From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence.
MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest, leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer to state that “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.” MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created. In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
Sariel argued that big data was the solution to Israel’s problems, envisaging a future where Israel intercepted and stored “a million calls an hour” from Palestine, and used A.I. to search for keywords and identify threats.
There was no way, however, that Israel could do this alone, as it did not possess the expertise or anything like the storage capacity needed for such a project. To this end, Sariel travelled to Seattle in 2021 to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to pitch him on the surveillance partnership whereby Microsoft would build Unit 8200 a customized and segregated area within its Azure platform.
The Israeli military uses Microsoft Azure to transcribe, translate, and otherwise process intelligence garnered via mass surveillance, which is then linked to Israel’s A.I.-based weapons systems.
The largest and most controversial organization within the Israeli military, Unit 8200 has long been the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech spying operation. The unit is dedicated to surveillance, cyberwarfare, and online manipulation operations. Last year, it carried out the Lebanese Pager Attack, an act that wounded thousands of civilians. Unit 8200 agents were also behind many of the most infamous international spyware and hacking cases, including the Pegasus software, that was used to surveil tens of thousands of the world’s most prominent political leaders, journalists, and human rights campaigners.
Sariel’s policy of mass surveillance changed the internal attitude at Unit 8200. “Suddenly the entire public was our enemy,” said one officer. The gargantuan trove of information compiled in Microsoft Azure amounted to a vast repository on the entire Palestinian population – a giant database of kompromat that is used to extort and blackmail the region’s indigenous people. If a person was secretly gay, or cheating on their spouse, for example, that information was readily available to Unit 8200 agents, who would then use it to turn their targets into informants. One former Unit 8200 member revealed that, as part of their training, they were made to memorize different Arabic slang words for “gay”, so that they could identify them in conversations.
The cloud database is also used to provide after-the-fact justification for arrests of innocent peoples. Off-hand, out-of-context comments made years ago can be used to portray anyone as a member of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or another armed resistance force.
“These people get entered into the system, and the data on them just keeps growing,” an Israeli intelligence official who served in the West Bank said.
When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, [the Azure surveillance repository] is where they find the excuse. We’re now in a situation where almost no one in the [Occupied] Territories is ‘clean,’ in terms of what intelligence has on them.
Unit 8200 has also used big data to compile A.I.-generated kill lists featuring tens of thousands of people. One program gave every Gazan, even women and children, a score of between 1 and 100, based on a number of factors. If they live in the same building or are in group chats with known or suspected Hamas members, for instance, their score is increased. Once their score reached a certain threshold, all Gazans were automatically placed on a kill list that was minimally overseen by humans.
According to multiple Unit 8200 agents, Microsoft Azure’s cloud-based storage platform allowed Israel to overcome targeting bottlenecks, using all manner of data to research and identify individuals for assassination, which led to the killing of tens of thousands of people during the first weeks of its post-October 7 onslaught.
Of course, the vast majority of the deaths have been civilians – around 70% were women and children. But Israeli officials can also go back after the fact and scour their digital dragnet to justify any killing, finding connections or any other incriminating evidence. A senior Israeli military officer described the cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word.” Other officials, however, have gone so far as to raise concerns that Israel’s overreliance on Microsoft as a service is a strategic vulnerability that should be corrected.
Microsoft Sees No Evil, Only Profits
Throughout all this, Microsoft has protested its innocence – and ignorance – of Israeli crimes. “At no time during this engagement or since that time has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cell phone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned,” a spokesperson for the company stated, adding, “Any allegations about Microsoft leadership involvement and support of this project … are false.”
But leaked documents suggest Microsoft engineers understood exactly what sort of data was being stored in Azure, and what their clients hoped to achieve. “Technically, they’re not supposed to be told exactly what it is, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” one engineer said. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
Others felt that the idea that Microsoft did not know that one of the world’s most notorious spying organizations might be using big data to spy on people was not credible, especially given how closely the two entities had been working together for years. “Microsoft says that it can’t figure out if their customers are committing crimes against humanity or mass surveillance, while at the same time Microsoft employees are working alongside uniformed IDF. Absurd!” Paul Biggar, the founder of Tech For Palestine, told MintPress.
The corporation’s claim of innocence seems even more tenuous, given the fact that Microsoft employs hundreds of former Unit 8200 agents, and recruits directly from the organization. A 2022 MintPress investigation found at least 166 former Unit 8200 operatives who went on to work for Microsoft, including many who helped design Azure itself.
Microsoft’s role in Gaza goes far beyond locking out the ICC. From cloud warfare to surveillance, it’s helping power Israel’s war machine………………………………………………………………………………
Corporate Zionism: Roots in Israel’s War Economy
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities. Microsoft established its first branch in Israel in 1989, and two years later, opened a research and development center in the city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv. The first of its kind outside the United States, the center has continued to expand, and now directly employs an estimated 2,700 workers…………………………………………………………………
Every CEO in Microsoft’s history has flown to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including Bill Gates, who, in 2016, stated that hi-tech Israeli security was “improving the world.
In short, Microsoft is a cornerstone of Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector, which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP and more than half of its total exports. Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”…………………..
Cracking Down on Internal Resistance
A greater threat than Iran to Microsoft, however, is its own employees, hundreds of whom have organized to oppose its role in the genocide. Under the banner of No Azure for Apartheid, workers demand that: Microsoft terminates all Azure contracts with Israel; disclose all ties to the Israeli national security state; publicly call for a ceasefire, and stop persecuting employees who speak out about the genocide……………………………………………………………………..
Targeting Enemies
Company employees are far from the only target of Microsoft’s wrath, however. In May, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced that Microsoft had locked him out of his official ICC email account, just as he was formalizing charges against Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders. For many, the timing was not a coincidence, but rather a message……………………………………………………………..https://www.mintpressnews.com/microsoft-israel-surveillance-azure-idf-gaza-genocide/290534/
How North Korea outsmarts US intelligence agencies—and what they should do to adapt
Bulletin, By Lauren Cho | October 27, 2025
In the summer of 2017, the United States learned a humbling lesson. For years, American intelligence agencies had assessed that North Korea would need several more years—until 2020 or even 2022—before it could field a missile capable of striking the continental United States. Then, on July 4, Pyongyang launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that reached deep space and re-entered at high velocity.
By that September, North Korea had detonated a hydrogen bomb more than 15 times stronger than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. The Central Intelligence Agency and its sister agencies had anticipated that this day would eventually come. But their inability to predict the rapid pace of advancement remains one of the starkest intelligence failures of recent decades. It was not simply a matter of bad luck or faulty technical analysis. It was the result of two forces that intersect again and again in the history of US assessments of North Korea’s nuclear program: Pyongyang’s deliberate use of strategic deception, and the institutional inertia of the US intelligence community.
From the first suspicions of a clandestine weapons program in the 1980s through the collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework, the inconclusive Six-Party Talks, and the dramatic summits of 2018–2019, a familiar cycle has emerged: Washington enters negotiations determined to halt or roll back North Korea’s program. North Korea agrees on paper but continues developing weapons in secret, denying violations and then unveiling new capabilities with a missile test or nuclear detonation. The agreement collapses, and Washington returns to the negotiating table with hopes of restoring momentum toward denuclearization.
Each turn of this cycle reveals a recurring blind spot. American analysts focus on observable indicators and static assumptions, while North Korea manipulates visual evidence and creates ambiguity to gain time.
Defining intelligence. To the public and political leaders, any unpleasant surprise is an intelligence failure. Scholars define it more precisely. Richard K. Betts, an American political scientist who is one of the leading thinkers on this issue, has argued that failures are not rare anomalies but inevitable outcomes of systemic, cognitive, and organizational barriers. Intelligence agencies must operate under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguous evidence. The greater the ambiguity, the greater the influence of preexisting beliefs.
In the case of North Korea, ambiguity is not simply an accident involving limited information. It is a condition carefully constructed by the regime.
Strategic deception—deliberate manipulation of information to influence an adversary’s perceptions—has become a central component of North Korea’s nuclear armament strategy. American intelligence agencies have repeatedly struggled to adapt to this strategy, because they are weighed down by bureaucratic norms that prize continuity over change and reactivity over anticipation.
Strategic deception is most effective when the target already wants to believe a certain narrative……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Rethinking US intelligence on North Korea. What, then, is to be done? Absolute accuracy in intelligence is unattainable, but incremental improvement is possible. The patterns seen in previous US-North Korean relations suggest several possible reforms. First, intelligence organizations must build for adaptability, not stability. They must prioritize agility, encourage analysts to test assumptions, reward dissenting perspectives, and treat ambiguity as a strategic variable. Rather than forcing ambiguous evidence into existing frameworks, agencies must recognize that adversaries actively manipulate ambiguity.
Also, analysts need more than satellite imagery and signals intercepts. They need linguistic, cultural, and psychological expertise to decode the narratives that adversaries craft. Deception is a cognitive process, not just a technical one. Countering it requires cognitive tools. Intelligence that is accurate but ignored is still a failure.
Finally, agencies must improve communication with policy makers, making uncertainty clear and resisting the urge to present false precision. The goal is not to eliminate ambiguity but to help decision makers understand it and prepare for multiple scenarios……………………………. https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/how-north-korea-outsmarts-us-intelligence-agencies-and-what-they-should-do-to-adapt/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=How%20North%20Korea%20outsmarts%20US%20intelligence&utm_campaign=20251024%20Monday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29
Why there can be no peace for Palestinians.
For those governments looking for means of controlling restive populations, the Gaza war of the last two years is nothing more than a gruesome marketing tool, the continued harassment of people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem becomes another marketing tool, selling the means of control, of surveillance, of remote controlled killing.
22 October 2025 , Bert Hetebry, https://theaimn.net/why-there-can-be-no-peace-for-palestinians/
At the end of 2024, according to UNHCR, there were estimated to be 123.2 million people world wide, forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order. That is 1.5% of the world population. Or if you want to make it real numbers instead of a percentage, for every 1,000 people in the world there are 15 people who are displaced, superfluous to needs, unwanted.
These people form a long line, an almost endless stream of desperation, seeking a safe refuge, seeking work, seeking dignity, yet they are shunned, shoved aside and when they do make it to a ‘promised land’ of sorts, they are remain vulnerable, able to be exploited, yet some make it, find a new home, but many do not.
In 2017, the Chinese artist and humanitarian Ai Weiwei produced a documentary The Human Flow, documenting the march to nowhere, people unwanted, pushed aside, rejected from from the Middle East, from Myanmar, from Africa, from Central America. Millions of people looking for somewhere, anywhere they could make a life. Since that time, the problem has increased, and nation after nation is trying to find ways of controlling this human flotsam.
And that can bring us to Gaza.
No one asks what drove Hamas to mount the attack of 7 October 2023 which killed 1200 Israeli people who were partying at a music festival, and no body asks why Hamas took 250 people as hostages. Hamas are a terrorist organisation, and what ever they do, is an act of terrorism.
That appears to be the conventional wisdom.
What makes a terrorist? Are all Palestinians terrorists?
And despite the best efforts of Donald Trump, what chance is there of peace for the Palestinians in Gaza, in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank?
After eighty years of Israeli occupation, after a hundred years of war against Palestinians, I hold very little hope that the current cease fire will result in peace for Palestinians.
Despite the cost of war, the Israeli economy is in very good shape. This is not in Israel’s interests to stop the war.
The reason is economics.
Israel, with a Jewish population of around 7.7 million represents about 1% of the world’s population, but is a major supplier in the sale of military and surveillance products and services. Over one third of Israeli exports are arms and surveillance equipment and services. Where for most nations military industries are essentially for local markets, Israel’s military and surveillance industries rely on export, constituting as much as 80% of their revenues according to Taylor & Francis online, vol 25, 2025.
It is hard to imagine, from the relative safety of the lives we live, of the freedoms we have, that the freedom to travel around whether it is just locally, near where we live or even to hook up a caravan and do a 20,000km trip ‘around the block’, what it would be like to have a constant awareness that you are being watched. The sort of scenario depicted in the novel, 1984, where Big Brother is watching, where every step you take is noticed, where every word you utter is heard. Where, it seems, even your thoughts are somehow monitored.
I had a sense of that recently. I don’t much like the self checkout at the supermarkets, but used one when buying just three items. It was busy, and as I am scanning my items, placing them carefully on the correct side of the checkout I was using, an attendant came and swiped her card, I asked he what she was doing, apparently she had be warned by the electronic surveillance camera that I might be stealing stuff. Bunnings are using camera surveillance to address theft from their stores, have considered using face recognition, but got into a spot of bother regarding that, but have been a bit quiet on that front lately, so perhaps it’s there, and then there is the profiling of people, certain people look like thieves, right?
The surveillance systems in supermarkets has become so ubiquitous, so sophisticated that any unusual activity is noticed and monitored. In this case, I bought three items, I did not have a trolley but carried them by hand to the check out, and from there followed normal procedure… Except I did not have nor did I purchase a bag to carry them home, I used my hands. So the camera thought perhaps I was trying to steal stuff, or at least looked ‘different’ enough to be possibly suspicious.
The cameras will pick up any behaviour which is considered unusual, any person which fits a specified criteria can be followed through their shopping expedition, monitoring behaviour, and security personnel are advised and will greet the person before they leave the store. And yes, it is easy to justify that sort of surveillance in a supermarket or other retail environment where shop lifting is an issue. And yes, although it would be denied, there is a profiling of shoppers through the surveillance system.
In Israel, the surveillance of Palestinians is not in shops, it is constant, ever-present, it is part of life as a Palestinian… As a ’terrorist’.
To define a group as ‘terrorist’ is dehumanising. It takes away the sense of individuality, the thought that those ‘terrorists’ cannot think for themselves, but are almost mechanically filled with evil intent. It also denies the ability to consider what makes those people subject to such categorisation. And there-in lies the actual juxtaposing of the term, that the so called ‘terrorists’ are being terrorised.
It is difficult to think that with the sophisticated surveillance that Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank are subjected to that the Israelis did not know that Hamas were planning, in fact training for the 7 October attack which was the catalyst for the two years destruction of Gaza. Antony Loewenstein in his 2023 book The Palestine Laboratory writes:
“The most effective example of separatism is the encirclement of Gaza, trapping more than 2 million Palestinians behind high fences, under constant drone surveillance, infrequent missile attack, and largely closed borders enforced by Israel and Egypt. When Israel completed the sixty-five-kilometer high-tech barrier along the entire border with Gaza in late 2021, at a cost of US$1.11 billion, a ceremony in southern Israel took place to mark the occasion.” (The barrier was a rebuilding of a barrier fence which had been destroyed in 2001.)
Facial recognition technology, developed by Israeli firms, AnyVision and Corsight AI among others is used extensively through a growing network of cameras both in Gaza and throughout the West Bank as well as through mobile phones, means that the IDF and other government departments effectively follow interested subjects. Big Brother is constantly watching.
The technologies are sold at various marketing shows, with the mantra that these products are ‘conflict proven’, often with videos of ‘terrorists’ being arrested or otherwise dealt with as evidence of their effectiveness.
The growing use of drones both for surveillance and as means of delivering explosive devices is another export industry, again, proven effectiveness as a marketing tool is demonstrated through videos of the fight against terrorism, in Gaza and the West Bank.
Other means of ‘following’ people is through mobile phone technology. A programme ‘Pegasus’ developed by the Israeli NSO Group was instrumental in monitoring members of the drug cartels resulting in a reduction of murders committed in the drug wars which raged during the early 2000s.
NSO were blamed for being an accessory to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, enabling him to be ‘followed’, tracking his movements before his death.
The sale of exploding communication devices used by Hezbollah across Lebanon last year was another surreptitious use of technology, selling ‘safe’ communications devices, safe, in that they could not be tracked like mobile phones can be tracked, proved to be nothing less than selling murder weapons to be operated remotely; murder by remote control.
But that is part of the technology, the means of remote controlled murder. Israeli industry is at the cutting edge of drones, both for surveillance and for delivering bombs, delivering death and destruction. Not just in controlling Palestinians, but unwanted people, people seeking a better life, somewhere, anywhere but where they are unwanted. Surveillance drones are sent over the Mediterranean Sea, through the sale of surveillance systems to European countries struggling with the influx of stateless and unwanted people, the drones send images to a central, remote site where the images are viewed, and when a boat is in trouble, can message ships, coast guards, officials to help should such a boat be in trouble. Many are inflatable boats and because of overcrowding, deflate, and with the crisis of too many unwanted people, may choose to send the emergency message at a time when the boat has sunk and there is little chance of survivors. Other technologies monitor the movement of mobile phones, tracking the signals as the phones are carried on the journeys to a hoped for freedom.
Client states of these technologies are many, and particularly those states which have ethnic and religious divides, states where civil uprisings are feared, where authoritarian governments need to increase control over populations.
In dealing with the troubles in Gaza during the current conflict, searching for Hamas, drones deliver ordinance to blow up suspected places Hamas may or may nor be hiding, hospitals, schools for example because we know that in that small enclave, where over 2.3 million people are crammed together, Hamas is using human shields, right?
Using technology as an instrument of control, of surveillance, of murder is demonstrated time and again, and that has been a major tool of control Israel has used and continues to use, and the people in Gaza know they are being watched, they cannot escape the surveillance, and so in their preparation for the attack on 7 October 2023, every move had been watched, had been recorded. Could it be that Israel actually wanted the attack to occur, thinking that perhaps a small attack could happen but an excuse for another conflict, another punishment, but when the number of fatalities, the number of injuries, the number of hostages, it became the ultimate excuse for the devastation we have seen over the past two years.
For those governments looking for means of controlling restive populations, the Gaza war of the last two years is nothing more than a gruesome marketing tool, the continued harassment of people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem becomes another marketing tool, selling the means of control, of surveillance, of remote controlled killing.
And the means used, the technology of terrorising is exported, the industry being a huge component of the Israeli economy.
The importance of Gaza and The West Bank is to use it as a marketing tool for other nations needing to control populations, to ensure conformity, to quell dissent. There can be no peace for Palestinians in the marketing of surveillance mechanisms.
There can be no peace for Palestinians while they can be used to sell the means of population control. To sell the Big Brother tools and the armaments and explosives for when needed to ‘mow the grass’, as Prime Minister Netanyahu used to say during his earlier term in power, to keep the anxiety level in Gaza heightened.
How can there ever be peace for Palestinians?
The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State (w/ Whitney Webb) | The Chris Hedges Report
Chris Hedges, October 23, 2025
Whitney Webb traces the Thielverse’s rise and the bipartisan construction of the modern surveillance state that Trump and his benefactors are deploying against dissidents and immigrants today.
The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.
Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.
“I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,” Webb explains.
It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.
If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against each other, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses.
Transcript:
Chris Hedges
There were many, including some liberals, who mistakenly believed the Trump administration would dismantle the deep state. In fact, as the investigative reporter Whitney Webb has documented, Trump is closely allied with the most authoritarian figures in Silicon Valley, such as Peter Thiel, who envision a world where our habits, proclivities, opinions and movements are minutely recorded and tracked.
These Trump allies do not intend to free us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or mass surveillance. They will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. Nor will they slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.
They are rapidly purging the civil service, as well as law enforcement and the military, not to eradicate the deep state, but to ensure that those in charge of state machinery are exclusively loyal to the whims and dictates of the Trump White House. What is being targeted is not the deep state, but the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder absolute dictatorial control.
Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good, rather than the dictates of a tiny cabal of billionaires, will be forced out. The deep state will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult.
Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will become irrelevant. It is a coup d’état by inches, one that will be enforced in crude and brutal fashion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of our cities and empowered by Thiel’s Palantir and the sophisticated forms of monitoring made possible by artificial intelligence and digital surveillance pioneered by Silicon Valley.
Joining me to discuss our emergent Orwellian state is the investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail Whitney Webb. You can find her on her website, Unlimited Hangout.
Whitney, let’s go back to the beginning, [John] Poindexter, Iran-Contra, which I covered actually when I was in Nicaragua, because that’s really the origin of where we are today.
Whitney Webb……………………..right after the Reagan administration, Poindexter was sort of in various roles throughout these tech companies that were sort of a prototype to what Palantir and Total Information Awareness (TIA) would later do…………………………………………………………………………….
Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir and as Palantir was developing as a company they, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the Palantir co-founders, reached out to Poindexter directly through Richard Perle, who’s a well-known neoconservative figure and was also one of the architects of the Iraq War at the Bush-era Pentagon.
Basically they hatched this plan to privatize this program, rightly calculating that if they turned it into an entirely private sector enterprise, the outrage would essentially dissipate, which it remarkably did because originally it was a public-private partnership housed within DARPA……………………………………………………………………………..
the CIA was Palantir’s exclusive client for, I believe, the first six years of its existence as a company and its engineers went to Langley, the CIA headquarters in Virginia, every two weeks for several years as well where the CIA was developing their algorithm with them, in a very direct partnership and Alex Karp has even said that the CIA was always the intended client of Palantir………………………………………………………….
Palantir, you know, also works extensively now in the private sector as well. They’re a major AI engine for Wall Street banks, for example, and they have different programs that are sold to different entities, but ultimately, they are a massive contractor to essentially every US intelligence agency, and that includes DHS and ICE
………………………………………………….. predictive policing is the term that they use but a lot of other companies have attempted to also get in on this.
One of the most notorious being PredPol that was a partnership I believe with UCLA and LAPD or something to that effect and they’re notoriously inaccurate…………………
another Peter Thiel-backed entity called Carbyne also has a predictive policing component……………………………..
But this is a company that wasn’t just funded by Peter Thiel, it was funded by Jeffrey Epstein and was led for a significant amount of time by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, as well and has sort of expanded outwards.
…………………………… The Trump administration was explicitly using Palantir to make databases on every American. But that has been done in a way that has been more covert through something called the Main Core database.
…………………………..William Barr, then Attorney General, created this program at the DOJ called DEEP that basically created the legal infrastructure for pre-crime. And you had Trump come out and say that the way to combat these shootings was to have social media develop algorithms that flag posts to predict shooters before they can act, target some of these anonymous online message boards.
…………………………………………..It is rather unsettling but, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of this profiling of Americans has been going on for a long time under the guise of what was developed by the Iran-Contra crowd covertly. The continuity of government protocols in this effort by parts of the “deep state” or the national security state to basically profile people they deemed unfriendly for whatever reason, people that could be, you know, potentially incarcerated in a time of political upheaval, they said.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………And so since then you have a whole network of people that have either been protege’s of these figures or worked at one point for PayPal. For example the current AI and crypto czar at the White House David Sacks, a former top executive at PayPal with Thiel and all of these other people.
And of course JD Vance, the current vice president, is intimately connected to Peter Thiel……………………………………………………
So Thiel’s influence is incredibly significant. It was also arguably significant during the first Trump administration, but I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government.
…………………………………………………….what I find particularly troubling about this is that a lot of these PayPal Mafia figures Thiel, Musk and Vance, among others, are extremely close to or acolytes really of the philosophy advocated by a fellow named Curtis Yarvin, whose political philosophy is essentially that the way to solve the problems of our current system and current bureaucracy is to basically completely privatize the state and install a CEO in place of the president, who would rule essentially as a dictator, which is completely bonkers and it’s amazing that people have allowed people like Peter Thiel or even Yarvin himself to masquerade as so-called libertarians when they’re very in favor of the authoritarian abilities of the state.
………………………………………………… And you can also see how a lot of these people are also war profiteers, Palantir, of course, not only is this tool of mass surveillance, it’s a tool of mass murder used by the US Army and also by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to decide who lives and who dies in Gaza.
And a lot of these other people that have been Thiel protégés, for example, like Palmer Luckey and Anduril, which Luckey co-founded with Trae Stephens, who’s also affiliated with the aforementioned Epstein-funded Carbyne 911.
Anduril is ushering in this era of autonomous warfare, and bankrolled, of course, by Peter Thiel. And they’re also developing the so-called smart wall on the US-Mexico border. And really, you know, these people are developing very Orwellian disturbing systems with not just domestic implications but also very significant implications to how the US military and other militaries operate abroad……………………………………………………………………….
So under the guise of “we’re making the government more efficient”, what aspects of the government are these people in the PayPal Mafia actually making more efficient? Well, one of them is mass murder.
…………………………………………………………………………………… basically the goal of the smart wall, it’s not a physical wall, it’s meant to be basically an invisible wall that uses a combination of surveillance and drone technology to basically intercept anyone crossing the border in a non-authorized way.
………………. I’m not sure exactly what you’d like to talk about as it relates to SpaceX, but it is worth pointing out that they’re a massive military contractor specifically for Space Force created under the first Trump administration. They really are the main contractor for Space Force.
And also, you know, they are directly affiliated with Starlink, the satellite internet company that also arguably has some kind of covert uses with Elon Musk, for example, saying he is going to help sneak Starlinks into Iran, for example
………………………………………………….. through the Department of Government Deficiency, a government efficiency DOGE, a lot was made to facilitate that by laying off a lot of government workers in their place putting, basically replacing them with, AI algorithms.
And those algorithms are, of course, patented and controlled by Silicon Valley companies. And the vast majority of major Silicon Valley companies double as either intelligence or military contractors or both, or have for a very long time.
One that’s often overlooked a lot is Oracle, Larry Ellison’s Oracle. And Larry Ellison, before creating Oracle, worked on Project Oracle at the CIA, and then created Oracle, the company, which then took on the CIA as one of its earliest main clients, similar in a way to what happened with Palantir, as I noted a moment ago.
And now, Larry Ellison is becoming, basically taking over a large swath of American media now. So you’re seeing a lot of these Silicon billionaires that contract for the military are also becoming major owners of mass media. So you see that with Ellison, for example, and it’s also true with Elon Musk after his purchase of Twitter…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Chris Hedges
I want you to speculate what this world is going to look like, it is the fusion of corporate and governmental power. In some ways, of course, these corporations will have even more power than government institutions. We just had the presidential memo that came out a couple days ago, which essentially criminalizes… It’s quite an amazing memo that criminalizes people who criticize capitalism, support gender equality.
Whitney Webb
Or really anyone who is antifascist in any capacity…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
we lost all of our freedoms, but now al-Qaeda is just let’s shake hands and let them come to the UN while we don’t let anyone from Palestine come. I mean, it’s totally insane. ……………………………………………….
I think Americans have been naive that a lot of the evil that that national security state has done abroad would never be used against them. And I think that we need to be very aware of what is going on here and that the deep state, whatever you want to call it, is expanding and it’s expanding in the hands of private oligarchs that have a very dangerous political vision that is rarely talked about.
……………………………………………………………………..So I think there’s a potentially dark future but there’s still time for awareness about these agendas and for people to develop parallel systems to escape this. And I think it’s very important too that people start really seriously considering how to wean themselves off of these Silicon Valley giants that are building these systems and contracting with these military and intelligence agencies. You know, getting off of Microsoft or Google products………………………………………………………….. https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-thielverse-and-the
Gaza ceasefire is an illusion – starvation and killings still continuing
Martin Jay, Strategic Culture Foundation, Tue, 21 Oct 2025 , https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/10/21/gaza-ceasefire-is-an-illusion-starvation-and-killings-still-continuing/
Just how much of what we see in mainstream media about Gaza is the real story? Actually none of it is true as the bigger, darker game being played is all about preparing for a war with Iran.
How’s the so-called ceasefire holding up in Gaza? You might be forgiven for thinking that it is anything but a ceasefire but more of an illusion created by the U.S. and a deal which can be broken at any moment by Israel if and when it sees capital to be gained there. Indeed, if there is one thing Bibi Netanyahu is renowned for, it is breaking ceasefires and so it should come as little surprise that he recently did that, supposedly to attack Hamas fighters which Israel claimed were posing a threat.
Let’s be clear. The ceasefire is really all about boosting Trump’s credibility as a statesman and giving Netanyahu breathing space to re-equip his army, ahead of an inevitable war with Iran. It is anything but a peace deal with the Palestinians but more of a bluff which was really about giving Netanyahu a shot in the arm amongst voters as he gets the credit for bringing back the hostages. But what is the real story? What is behind all this and reports of ISIS fighters being shipped in to take on Hamas?
How’s the so-called ceasefire holding up in Gaza? You might be forgiven for thinking that it is anything but a ceasefire but more of an illusion created by the U.S. and a deal which can be broken at any moment by Israel if and when it sees capital to be gained there. Indeed, if there is one thing Bibi Netanyahu is renowned for, it is breaking ceasefires and so it should come as little surprise that he recently did that, supposedly to attack Hamas fighters which Israel claimed were posing a threat.
Let’s be clear. The ceasefire is really all about boosting Trump’s credibility as a statesman and giving Netanyahu breathing space to re-equip his army, ahead of an inevitable war with Iran. It is anything but a peace deal with the Palestinians but more of a bluff which was really about giving Netanyahu a shot in the arm amongst voters as he gets the credit for bringing back the hostages. But what is the real story? What is behind all this and reports of ISIS fighters being shipped in to take on Hamas?
The smooth media operator who is comfortable doing ‘pieces to camera’ like broadcast journalists stirred up controversy recently when he made a series of films of him standing in front of UN aid trucks driving past, supposedly heading for Gaza. Sara Wilkinson, a UK-based activist who is often in Gaza, claimed that the trucks were actually only moving in and out of a UN compound and that the whole stunt was dishonest.
My own personal experience with Fletcher is that he smeared my name in Lebanon in 2015 as a pathetic act of petulance following an interview I wrote up about him which, in places, revealed him to be at best a lame diplomat winging it, at worse misinformed and woefully ignorant of regional politics. His response was to defame me in front of a group of visiting MEPs which backfired as the hapless buffoon didn’t realize that I had worked in Brussels previously for a decade and most of the MEPs knew me (or knew of me) and respected my work. One of them even invited me for a working breakfast the next day and was shocked at how immature and vindictive he was.
World
Gaza ceasefire is an illusion – starvation and killings still continuing
October 21, 2025
© Photo: Public domain
Just how much of what we see in mainstream media about Gaza is the real story? Actually none of it is true as the bigger, darker game being played is all about preparing for a war with Iran.
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Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
How’s the so-called ceasefire holding up in Gaza? You might be forgiven for thinking that it is anything but a ceasefire but more of an illusion created by the U.S. and a deal which can be broken at any moment by Israel if and when it sees capital to be gained there. Indeed, if there is one thing Bibi Netanyahu is renowned for, it is breaking ceasefires and so it should come as little surprise that he recently did that, supposedly to attack Hamas fighters which Israel claimed were posing a threat.
Let’s be clear. The ceasefire is really all about boosting Trump’s credibility as a statesman and giving Netanyahu breathing space to re-equip his army, ahead of an inevitable war with Iran. It is anything but a peace deal with the Palestinians but more of a bluff which was really about giving Netanyahu a shot in the arm amongst voters as he gets the credit for bringing back the hostages. But what is the real story? What is behind all this and reports of ISIS fighters being shipped in to take on Hamas?
What we are witnessing is an illusion on a grand scale. Israel has not really stopped its military campaign against the Palestinians there and is still killing Gazans on a daily basis. It is also not feeding them as legacy media likes to assert but in reality the starvation policy is still in place. The West likes to create the narrative that the Gazans are getting fed now with aid shipments whereas in reality these trucks are not getting through. Tom Fletcher, a man comfortable in his role as someone who lies to the press in his previous role of British ambassador to Lebanon is the UN’s relief chief who claims that his operation is feeding one million Gazans a day? But can we believe the softly spoken former diplomat?
The smooth media operator who is comfortable doing ‘pieces to camera’ like broadcast journalists stirred up controversy recently when he made a series of films of him standing in front of UN aid trucks driving past, supposedly heading for Gaza. Sara Wilkinson, a UK-based activist who is often in Gaza, claimed that the trucks were actually only moving in and out of a UN compound and that the whole stunt was dishonest.
My own personal experience with Fletcher is that he smeared my name in Lebanon in 2015 as a pathetic act of petulance following an interview I wrote up about him which, in places, revealed him to be at best a lame diplomat winging it, at worse misinformed and woefully ignorant of regional politics. His response was to defame me in front of a group of visiting MEPs which backfired as the hapless buffoon didn’t realize that I had worked in Brussels previously for a decade and most of the MEPs knew me (or knew of me) and respected my work. One of them even invited me for a working breakfast the next day and was shocked at how immature and vindictive he was.
Fletcher is just all spin. He is hollow and has no substance and only made the news in Lebanon almost on a daily basis for being photographed with super models with bee sting lips and fake boobs while his podgy Irish wife stood behind him with eyes rolling. He is so vain that he gave a photoshoot to a local TimeOut magazine posing as James Bond in front of a British supercar and has a fabulous contempt for free speech. But of course he is a good communicator. He is the man to go to if you have a grand illusion to pull off for Israel as he will happily make that magician’s trick happen by misinforming the press and the greater public about what is the real story.
Gazans are not only still starving but according to a number of top analysts like Lawrence Wilkerson are still being killed at gunpoint (airstrikes) by Israel at feeding centres. So what exactly is the role of this UN body which Fletcher heads up?
The aid trucks are a huge deception conjured up to draw us away from not only a more nefarious, bloody plan which is about to kick off in Gaza but a bigger existential threat to the West and in particular America, which is coming Trump’s way. Like a moth being drawn to a flame, Netanyahu is preparing for war with Iran and this time it will be nuclear.
Some pundits wrongly pour over the subject of the power struggle between Israel and the U.S., with many pointing to the power of AIPAC within the deep state. It is a common idea that Israel completely controls Trump – a notion I sign up to. But we miss the point.
Yes, it’s true that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will make billions in real estate deals in Gaza. The point though is that Trump will no longer have any cards to play if a war starts with Iran. He will be forced to join Israel with its Samsonesque suicide doctrine. The problem with a war with Iran is that it is unwinnable for Israel and more to the point, a disaster for Western hegemony. War with Iran, even if it were only with Iran, doesn’t favour Israel even backed by the U.S. But war with Iran goes beyond the country’s borders as since the Donald was reported to have directed U.S. attacks against Iran’s nuclear bunkers and since it was reported that they had severely damaged them, Saudi Arabia has signed a nuclear pact with Pakistan and both Russia and China are stepping up their military procurement for Iran.
Iran is no longer alone and the first U.S. bunker buster bombs have, if anything, conglomerated these regional powers’ support for Iran. Put bluntly, China simply cannot afford to have its economy threatened by Iran’s cheap oil being halted and Russia needs Iranian drones. To allow Israel, backed by the U.S., to go ahead with a nuclear strike on Iran poses such an existential threat to both Russia and China that is inconceivable that there will be no counter strike on Israel which has never been seen before, which might well mean the end of Israel as we know it. There are no good outcomes to Bibi’s plan to begin a war with Iran and Trump fears more than ever being dragged into it. Yet for the moment, the Gaza ceasefire can be seen for what it is. An illusion, rather like those marching bands and performing artists which come onto a soccer pitch during the half time break which you don’t pay too much attention to and Tom Fletcher is the effeminate wanker leading them spinning his gilt baton and his sparkling teeth.
The Great Narco Pretext: Trump Readies for Regime Change in Venezuela.
20 October 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/the-great-narco-pretext-trump-readies-for-regime-change-in-venezuela/
Since the start of September, the Trump administration has busied itself with striking boats in international waters stemming from Venezuelan and possibly Colombian waters. Their mortal offence: allegedly carrying narcotics cargo destined for consumers in the United States. A few days following the first strike on September 2, President Donald Trump stated in a War Powers Resolution notification to Congress that the action was one of “self-defense” motivated by “the inability or unwillingness of some states in the region to address the continuing threat to United States persons and interests emanating from their territories.”
In early October, a presidential notice was issued deeming those killed in such strikes on suspicion of drug smuggling “unlawful combatants.” The notice to Congress advanced an anaemic excuse to justify murder instead of arrest, an echo of previous, elastic rationales used by administrations to justify an enlargement of executive war powers: “based on the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the president determined that the United States is in a non–international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations.” The US had “reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.”
The document amounted to an arrogation of extraordinary wartime powers to combat drug cartels, treating the trafficking of illicit narcotics to an armed assault on US citizens. Geoffrey S. Corn, a former judge advocate general lawyer, thought it a most adventurous move, given that drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities”. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
In the kingdom of alternative legal realities, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly articulated the position in an email: “the president acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores, and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”
The number of possible international law violations are far from negligible. Michael Schmitt lists a few in Just Security. Most obvious is the physical violation of a State’s sovereignty, which can take place through interfering with its “inherently governmental functions” comprising such matters as law enforcement. To also authorise kinetic operations in another State’s territory can amount to wrongful intervention in its international affairs. Last, though not least, is that using force in this context may be unlawful, violating Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and customary law.
Nothing in this cooked up scheme adds up. If the intention is to curb overdoses on US soil from drug use, flow of fentanyl would be the object of the exercise. But fentanyl hails from Mexico, not South America. The broader agenda is a more traditional one: the assertion of the imperium’s control over countries in the Americas, eliminating regimes deemed unfriendly to Washington’s interests. Narcotics has become the throbbing pretext, with Trump accusing Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro of being the leader of the drug trafficking organisation Cartel of the Suns. He is also accused of using the dark offices of the Tren de Aragua prison gang to conduct “irregular warfare” against the United States, despite countering claims by the intelligence community that the gang is not under Maduro’s control. (The reaffirmation of the initial intelligence assessment by the National Intelligence Council led to the sacking of its acting director, Michael Collins.)
In 2020, the first Trump administration offered a reward of up to US$15 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro. Two more increases to the bounty followed, the latest on August 7 being US$50 million following the sanctioning of the Cartel of the Suns by the Department of Treasury as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. “As leader of Cartel of the Suns,” declares the State Department in its notice of reward, “Maduro is the first target in the history of the Narcotics Rewards Program with a reward offer exceeding $25 million.”
Trump, in one of his moments of sharp frankness, concedes that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been authorised to conduct covert lethal operations on Venezuelan soil and more broadly through the Caribbean in a presidential finding. “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea well under control,” he told reporters hours after the secret authorisation was revealed.
In explaining his shoddy reasons, Trump cited Venezuela’s emptying of its “prisons into the United States of America” and the issue of drugs. “We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that, but we’re going to stop them by land also.”
To the finding can be added a bulking military presence in the region: eight surface warships and a submarine in the Caribbean, 10,000 US troops, largely garrisoned at bases in Puerto Rico, with a contingent of Marines equipped with amphibious assault boats. In the meantime, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado, salivates at the prospect of regime change with muscular intervention from Washington. The pieces are being moved into place, and the self-proclaimed peace maker in the White House is readying for war.
AUKUS: Revolving door, spiralling down
Ahead of the launch of a new database on the Australian military-industrial complex, we document the farce that AUKUS has become
Michelle Fahy, Undue Influence, Oct 20, 2025
It is clear to many that AUKUS, in particular its early fulfilment stages, is becoming a debacle. In February, Defence Minister Richard Marles lauded as a ‘very unique’ arrangement Australia’s gift to the United States of $4.7 billion to bolster America’s struggling submarine output, highlighting that such an arrangement hasn’t been seen in other defence pacts globally.
Of course such an arrangement hasn’t been seen elsewhere! Most other countries wouldn’t agree to hand over this massive sum without ensuring there were provisions for a refund should the promised submarines fail to arrive.
In an inept performance in Senate Estimates in June 2024, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, head of the Australian Submarine Agency, woodenly refused to answer a straightforward question from Greens’ Senator David Shoebridge about whether the agreement Australia has struck with the US contains a clawback provision should the promised submarines fail to be supplied.
Mead’s performance, as recorded in Hansard, is mordantly comical:
It is thus obvious that Australia has no contractual way of recovering its money should the current or a future US President block the transfer of the submarines, as the US President is entitled to do under US legislation.
Australia is certainly ‘very unique’ in its willingness to part with almost $10 billion (the UK is getting a similar amount) in public funds with no strings attached.
Australia made the first payment of $800 million to the US in February and quietly transferred the second payment, a further $800 million, in July. It has committed to paying a total of US$2 billion ($3 billion) by the end of 2025, with the remainder to be paid over the decade to 2035‒36.
Under the AUKUS deal, both major political parties have committed to spending vast public resources with no consultation and minimal transparency and accountability.
Even though the Australian National Audit Office has exposed, in report after report, serious probity breaches in defence procurement, including unethical conduct between global weapons companies and the Australian government, these transgressions are routinely ignored. The weapons deals continue regardless.
The big winners from AUKUS so far have been nuclear submarine manufacturers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Australia has committed to providing almost $10 billion to boost the output of these companies, helping secure jobs for workers in America and the United Kingdom.
As there are no clawback provisions in either of these agreements, should President Trump ditch AUKUS, or if the submarine manufacturing capacity in the US and UK doesn’t sufficiently increase, Australian taxpayers will be picking up another multibillion-dollar defence tab with nothing to show for it. We’ve already shelled out $3.4 billion for no submarines, following former PM Scott Morrison’s shredding of the pre-AUKUS French submarine contract.
This is far from the only example of waste, misdirection and incompetence in Australia’s dealings with the global arms industry. Take the Albanese government’s engagement with global arms giant Thales. In October last year, the government signed up Thales to a further munitions manufacturing contract and a ‘strategic partnership’ in the new domestic missile-making endeavour, the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) enterprise.
The new deal with Thales was struck despite the fact that Thales is currently being investigated by four countries for widespread criminal activity in three separate corruption probes. …………………….https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/nothing-to-see-here-says-australia………………………………………… The Thales example illustrates how a key democratic accountability mechanism, the National Audit Office and its reports, is routinely ignored.
…………………………………………………How is it that such imbroglios occur again and again? Australian governments are highly susceptible to the ‘revolving door’ process in which politicians, the military and public servants move effortlessly between government, lobbying and the industry itself.
In what follows, no suggestion is being made of unlawful activity by any person named, nor that any of the appointments noted was unlawful.
The problem for Australia is not one of legality but of the perfectly legal influence of industry insiders within government, the lack of transparency, and the absence of management of the ‘revolving door’.
The revolving door
The ‘revolving door’ describes the movement of public officials into related private roles, and industry executives into related public roles. It is a widespread problem that undermines democracy, yet in Australia it remains unmonitored and unpoliced.
A large number of Australia’s senior government ministers and their staffers, military officers, and defence department officials move through the revolving door into paid roles with the weapons industry. Such moves are not illegal but they require a robust management framework—with rules that are enforced—to mitigate the inherent conflicts of interest. Australia’s feeble attempts at managing the revolving door have been completely ineffective
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..In the lobby
Numerous former senior politicians are now working as lobbyists for the weapons industry. Examples include: Liberals Christopher Pyne (Pyne and Partners), Joe Hockey (Bondi Partners), Arthur Sinodinos (The Asia Group) and David Johnston (TG Public Affairs); and Labor’s Kim Beazley (TG Public Affairs), Joel Fitzgibbon (CMAX Advisory), Stephen Conroy (TG Public Affairs) and Mark McGowan (Bondi Partners).
There are also plenty of former senior military officers pulling strings on behalf of weapons companies too. Examples are listed below.
The federal register of lobbyists provides some transparency, but does not cover the majority of people who lobby politicians. The register applies only to third-party lobbyists. These people operate as paid professionals, either individually or as an employee of a lobbying firm, on behalf of clients. Third party lobbyists make up just 20% of all lobbyists. The remaining 80% include, amongst others, company CEOs and people employed by corporations as ‘government relations’ advisers. This enables employees of major weapons companies to lobby politicians easily and legally, with zero transparency.
Reverse cycle: private to public
The government’s engagement with UK weapons giant BAE Systems’ local subsidiary best illustrates how this works.
The government gave former senior BAE Systems executives influential behind-the-scenes roles both before and during the tender process for Australia’s largest ever surface warship procurement, the $46 billion Hunter class frigates, a contract BAE went on to win. Few of these roles were publicly acknowledged. https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/sinking-billions-revolving-doors
BAE Systems was awarded the frigates contract by the Turnbull government in mid-2018. The names of the people appointed to an expert advisory panel to oversee the tender evaluation process were not made public. Here’s why: serious conflicts of interest…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Lockheed Martin locks on target
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has put the issue of the extensive influence on the Australian government of Lockheed Martin—the world’s largest arms manufacturer—under the spotlight…………https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/buck-passing-inside-the-murky-arms
Lockheed Martin utilises the revolving door heavily in the US. Until recently, it had openly adopted the same strategy in Australia. From October 2013 until the end of 2021, the board of Lockheed Martin Australia boasted multiple former senior Australian public officials: at least two at any one time, more often three, and even four during one 20-month period.
They included a roll call of defence heavies from past decades,………………………………………………………………………………………
The UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, released a report in July addressing the ‘economy of genocide’ in which she makes special note of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program…………………………….
Australia’s refusal to cease the supply of parts and components into Lockheed Martin’s F-35 global supply chain places the nation at risk of being found complicit in Israel’s genocide.
Complicity in the world’s worst international crime is just one of the democracy-undermining consequences of Australia’s deep enmeshment in the US and broader Western military industrial complex.
This feature article started life as a talk to Australia’s Online Quaker Meeting mid-year. I later expanded it for ARENA Quarterly’s Spring 2025 issue, which was delivered to bookshops last week ($20). It is also online at Arena. https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/aukus-revolving-door-spiralling-down?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=297295&post_id=176534719&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The 9,100 Palestinians left behind in Israeli prisons after the ‘peace’ deal
As world leaders celebrate the release of Israeli captives, over 9,000 Palestinian prisoners still face torture, hunger, and isolation behind bars. Half of them are held by Israel without charge or trial.
Mondoweiss, By Qassam Muaddi October 15, 2025
As the leaders of 20 countries gathered in Egypt’s Sharm al-Sheikh to celebrate the ceasefire, mainstream media celebrated the release of the remaining 20 living Israeli captives in Gaza. After reuniting with their families, the captives described the harsh conditions in which they were held. Meanwhile, 1,968 Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons, 88 of whom were released in the West Bank, 154 were deported to Egypt, and the rest were released in the Gaza Strip. Most of them were abducted by Israeli forces inside Gaza over the past two years. Of the total number of prisoners released, 250 had been serving life sentences for charges related to armed activity.
But over 9,100 Palestinians continue to be held in Israeli prisons. Some 3,544 of them are held under the Israeli system of “administrative detention,” which allows Israel to imprison Palestinians for up to six months without charge or trial. According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, none of the released prisoners in Monday’s swap were administrative detainees.
Administrative detention orders are ratified by an Israeli military court, and the six-month period of imprisonment can be renewed indefinitely based on a “secret file” that neither the detainees nor their lawyers can access. Consecutive renewals have led many Palestinians to serve up to two years under this system, never having been given due process.
Administrative detainees represent the largest category of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, says Ayah Shreiteh, the spokesperson of the Prisoners’ Club.
Shreiteh added that around 1,000 Palestinians have been arrested and held without trial, without even an administrative detention order. Many of them have spent months behind bars.
As for those who have been sentenced based on clear charges, the majority of sentences are for belonging to political organizations and unions, participating in protests, or throwing stones. Since October 2023, however, Shreiteh points out that the most common conviction has been over “incitement,” a charge that covers anything from a social media post to delivering public speeches, and even to raising the flags of Palestinian political factions in public.
“Before October 7, the detention conditions of Palestinian prisoners had already been deteriorating,” Shreiteh noted. Then everything changed. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
After October 7, things got dramatically worse, Ansari says. Both verbal and physical violence increased against Palestinian detainees to the point that violence was used during all phases of detention, starting from the moment of arrest. “But the most noticeable change after October 7 has been the complete isolation of Palestinian prisoners, with the ban of family visitation,” she said. “This is still ongoing.” …………………………………………………………………………………………
Palestinian prisoners have been largely absent from mainstream media since before October 7, appearing only in the context of prisoner swaps last January and last week. However, the day before October 7, human rights groups reported that a total of 5,000 Palestinians were in Israeli jails — at the time, it was considered a record that had not been met in several years, including 1,300 administrative detainees. Over the past two years, that record-breaking prison population doubled.
Mass captivity as a phenomenon is foreign to Israelis, but for Palestinians, it has been normalized over decades. According to human rights reports, at least 1 million Palestinians have experienced Israeli detention since 1967. Yet after October 7, the Israeli captives became the only talking point for Western politicians and the mainstream media, while Palestinian prisoners remained invisible.
On Monday, Donald Trump celebrated his vaunted “forever” peace after the signing of the ceasefire deal in Egypt. Now that the Israeli captives have been released, the 9,100 Palestinians languishing in Israel’s dungeons can continue to be forgotten. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/10/the-9100-palestinians-left-behind-in-israeli-prisons-after-the-peace-deal/
The £1m man: why did Boris Johnson take his donor to Ukraine?
Leaked files offer a glimpse of the ex-prime minister’s relationship with Christopher Harborne.
Tom Burgis. Guardian 10 Oct 25
As he boarded the night train to Ukraine, Boris Johnson had the usual entourage of aides and bodyguards – plus the man who had given him £1m.
Less than a year had passed since Johnson accepted what is thought to be the largest donation ever to an individual MP. It was from Christopher Harborne, one of the UK’s biggest and most private political donors.
Harborne, whose millions helped bankroll Brexit, made the payment to a private company Johnson set up after resigning as prime minister. Now leaked files show that Johnson, a champion of Ukraine in office and since, was accompanied in September 2023 by his benefactor on a two-day visit that included meetings with top officials.
What the files do not explain is why. And neither the former prime minister nor his backer will say.
The organisers of the high-level gathering they attended in Kyiv say Harborne was registered as “adviser, Office of Boris Johnson”.
Harborne has wide expertise: a self-described “digital nomad”, his holdings range from cryptocurrency and a wellness centre to jet fuel and stakes in at least three military contractors. His only apparent connection to Ukraine is as the biggest shareholder in a British weapons manufacturer whose robots and drones are reportedly supplied to its armed forces.
The Boris Files, leaked documents from Johnson’s private office, have exposed how the former PM has sought to enrich himself since leaving office by sitting down with a Venezuelan despot and courting Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince accused of ordering the murder of a journalist.
The Ukrainian cause, by contrast, is “sacred” to Johnson, one political consultant says, an enduring source of moral authority for a politician who was forced out of Downing Street amid scandal.
The leaked files raise questions about whether, even here, he has blurred the lines between public service and money-making.
In an extraordinary statement to the Guardian when asked about his relationship with Harborne, Johnson said: “Your pathetic non-stories … seem mostly to be derived from some illegal Russian hack job. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), the US-based transparency group that obtained the leaked files, said it did not know their provenance.
Johnson added: “Why don’t you just change your name to Pravda? Your stories are rubbish and you are doing Putin’s work.”
‘Boris and Chris only’
In Downing Street, Johnson rallied western powers as Vladimir Putin’s armies poured into Ukraine in February 2022. Since resigning, he has continued to travel there, pledging to maintain allies’ commitment, and remains so popular that he is cheered in the streets.
When he disembarked from the night train in Kyiv on 8 September 2023, Johnson had time for a quick shower at his hotel before heading for the Yalta European Strategy (YES) forum, an itinerary in the leaked files indicates. According to a published list of participants, Ukrainian ministers, spymasters and military chiefs mingled with foreign diplomats, politicians, industrialists and executives.
The itinerary has “Boris and Chris [Harborne] only” down to attend the opening session of the high-level gathering. Images show Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Johnson addressed the gathered luminaries and the itinerary suggests they then retired for a private meeting. Zelenskyy’s office did not respond when asked if Johnson’s benefactor joined them…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The £1m donation
………………….He [Harborne]has given £10m to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party – now Reform UK – and £1m to the Conservatives while Johnson was completing the UK’s departure from the EU. And Johnson seems to have nurtured the beneficial relationship while he was in No 10.
Harborne visited Chequers at least twice during Johnon’s premiership. Once, he arrived at the prime ministerial retreat by helicopter. The second time was for a Tory megadonor barbecue in August 2022.
Within days, Johnson’s tenure was over, but his relationship with Harborne endured, and the £1m personal donation followed. A copy of the financial advice Johnson received soon after leaving Downing Street raises questions about it.
While Johnson was still an MP he set up a private company, The Office of Boris Johnson Ltd. The financial advice reveals that he was expecting a “payment to fund the company’s first few years”. He was advised to consider whether this would represent a political donation or if it “might be simpler for the company to invoice the donor’s company for services”.
The following month, in November 2022, Johnson’s entry in the register of MPs’ interests records a £1m donation to his company from Harborne. The payment does not appear on the Electoral Commission’s donation database of money “given towards the recipient’s political activities” as an MP. This appears to suggest it may have been a contribution towards Johnson’s money-making activities.
The month of the £1m payment, Johnson and Harborne dined together twice in Singapore. A January 2023 entry in Johnson’s schedule set aside half an hour for a call with his backer. It was labelled “Ukraine readout”. That September, by which time Johnson had quit parliament, he and Harborne stepped aboard a Dassault Falcon at Stansted airport, the leaked files indicate. The private jet, apparently operated by Harborne, carried them to eastern Poland to catch the sleeper to Kyiv.
Harborne’s lawyers said: “Mr Harborne’s donation was given to enable Mr Johnson to stay actively engaged in mainstream UK politics. It is and was a donation, and its reporting as such is appropriate.”…………
The letter
Harborne’s lawyers did not give substantive answers to questions about why he went on the trip to Ukraine, beyond saying they “appear to have little to no basis in reality”. But there are possible clues in the leaked files.
The itinerary features a “closed meeting at the military-tech R&D centre”. It does not say whether Harborne attended, but this is an area he knows well. While his position as the largest shareholder in QinetiQ, with 13%, does not give him a role in the day-to-day running of the privatised research unit of the UK armed forces, his financial stake in its operations is significant.
QinetiQ has interests in Ukraine, albeit not its biggest. Ukraine’s forces reportedly use the company’s Banshee drones and bomb-disposal robots. In April 2025, the UK Ministry of Defence announced QinetiQ would help Ukraine’s military make kit with 3D printers……………………. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/10/the-1m-man-why-did-boris-johnson-take-his-donor-to-ukraine
Nobel Peace Prize winner supports Israel’s genocide & Trump’s war on Venezuela
Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado is a far-right Venezuelan coup-plotter funded by the US government. She supports Israel as it commits genocide and is central to Trump’s regime-change war against President Maduro.
By Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy 13 Oct 25– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks9uDtd7Msc
The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to María Corina Machado, a far-right coup leader in Venezuela who has been funded by the US government for decades.
Machado has openly called for the US military to invade Venezuela, in order to overthrow the revolutionary Chavista government of President Nicolás Maduro.
She is at the heart of the war that Donald Trump has waged on Venezuela. Machado has endorsed the US military’s extrajudicial executions of Venezuelans in boats in international waters, echoing the Trump administration’s unsubstantiated, evidence-free claims that it is supposedly killing “drug traffickers”.
Machado also supports the illegal, unilateral US sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
Likewise, Machado has expressed staunch support for Israel as it carried out genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Nobel Peace Prize for war criminals
The fact that a pro-war, far-right coup-plotter like Machado was given a Nobel Peace Prize demonstrates how extremely hypocritical the award is.
This hypocrisy is far from new.
US imperial planner Henry Kissinger was given a so-called Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, despite the fact that he was one of the worst war criminals in modern history, with the blood of millions of victims on his hands, in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, and beyond.
Former US President Barack Obama also won a so-called Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. His administration then went on to wage nonstop war. Obama bombed seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
This is by no means the first time that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has been hypocritical. But giving the prize to María Corina Machado is especially outrageous, because it comes precisely at a moment when, one, she has been supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza; and two, she is working with Donald Trump to wage war and use violence to try to overthrow Venezuela’s government.
María Corina Machado supports Israel’s genocidal regime
Machado has openly praised Israel as it has carried out a genocide against the Palestinian people.
A United Nations commission led by renowned experts on international humanitarian law stated clearly that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
In January 2025, Machado held a call with Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa’ar. She expressed her “gratitude to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel”, adding that she “immensely values the support of the government of Israel”.
The genocidal Israeli regime has refused to recognize the government of Venezuela’s constitutional, internationally recognized President Nicolás Maduro, and has instead recognized US-backed coup leader Edmundo González, who lives in Spain and is a proxy for Machado.
In April 2024, Israel attacked Iran in an act of aggression, and Tehran hit back in self-defense. Machado immediately took to Twitter to condemn Iran. She emphasized her “solidarity with the State of Israel amid the direct aggression by the Iranian regime”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
María Corina Machado is at the center of Donald Trump’s regime-change war on Venezuela
Giving the so-called Nobel Peace Prize for María Corina Machado is even more outrageous considering that she is at the heart of a war that the US government is currently waging against Venezuela.
Donald Trump has launched multiple military attacks, killing dozens of Venezuelans without charge or trial. In flagrant violation of international law, the US military has repeatedly bombed boats surrounding Venezuela in international waters, claiming without any evidence that they were full of people trafficking “drugs”.
Machado has supported Trump’s attacks on her country, including his extrajudicial executions of Venezuelans without charge or trial.
The Financial Times interviewed Machado, and she admitted that she is working with the US government to try to overthrow Venezuela’s President Maduro……………………………………………………….. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/13/maria-corina-machado-israel-genocide-trump-war-venezuela/
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