‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
By Yuval Abraham, April 3, 202, + 972 Magazine,
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
STEP 1: GENERATING TARGETS
‘Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
STEP 2: LINKING TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES
‘Most of the people you killed were women and children’
…………………………… in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place.
…………………………………………………….. these programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”
………………………………. Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures.
………………………………….. “In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens of thousands…………………………. Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said………………………………………………
STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON
‘We usually carried out the attacks with “dumb bombs”’
……………………………. In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates, about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were “dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs.
…………………….. we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
STEP 4: AUTHORIZING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
‘We attacked almost without considering collateral damage’
…………………………………………………………………………….. Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.
……………………………………………………………………………… ‘Entire families were killed’
Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call they took part in even deadlier strikes. In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal.
………………………………………………………………………………………………… Such a high rate of “collateral damage” is exceptional not only compared to what the Israeli army previously deemed acceptable, but also compared to the wars waged by the United States in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. ……………………………………………………………………………
STEP 5: CALCULATING COLLATERAL DAMAGE
‘The model was not connected to reality’
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… “the collateral damage calculation was completely automatic and statistical” — even producing figures that were not whole numbers.
STEP 6: BOMBING A FAMILY HOME
‘You killed a family for no reason’
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call explained that there was sometimes a substantial gap between the moment that tracking systems like Where’s Daddy? alerted an officer that a target had entered their house, and the bombing itself — leading to the killing of whole families even without hitting the army’s target. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn’t even home,” one source said. “The result is that you killed a family for no reason.”……………………………………………………………………. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
U.S. Space Command adopts multipronged approach to prepare for ‘a conflict that has never happened’
April 9, 2024, Sandra Erwin. https://spacenews.com/u-s-space-command-adopts-multipronged-approach-to-prepare-for-a-conflict-that-has-never-happened/
COLORADO SPRINGS – U.S. Space Command seeks to expand international collaboration by inviting Germany, France and New Zealand to join Operation Olympic Defender. Olympic Defender, a U.S.-led initiative to jointly strengthen defenses and deter hostility, already includes England, Australia and Canada.
“We share intelligence, we plan together and work to ensure space is safe for all,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said April 9 at the 39th Space Symposium here. “We’re working to even improve our integration through improved command and control and planning. I’ve been proud to work alongside Germany, France and New Zealand for many years, and I look forward to their consideration of our invitation to join Operation Olympic Defender.”
Preparing for military operations with U.S. allies and partners is one of U.S. Space Command’s top priorities.
Other priorities for the Colorado-based organization are making its constellations more resilient, defending them against a growing array of threats, protecting the joint force from space-enabled attack, and conducting tests and training “that convinces us that these capabilities will work in a conflict which has never happened,” Whiting said.
Strategic Competition
As the combatant command responsible for military operations in outer space, U.S. Space Command is closely tracking military moves by China and Russia.
China is rapidly expanding space-based intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities, and building a “range of counterspace weapons from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital” anti-satellite weapons, Whiting said.
Russia, meanwhile, “continues to invest in counterspace weapons,” Whiting said. “Russia appears more and more to be relying on asymmetric capabilities like space, cyber and nuclear.”
2027 Deadline
U.S. Space Command is focused on maximizing combat readiness by 2027.
“All of us at U.S. Space Command are laser-focused on improving all of our existing forces and capabilities, so that we can stitch them together seamlessly when called upon,” Whiting said.
U.S. Space Command also intends to draw on commercial space technology.
“Our commercial industry will deliver innovative state-of-the-art capabilities,” Whiting said. “We have to modernize our legacy systems, ensure they all work together seamlessly and deliver new capabilities by 2027 to counter the threats that we now see.”
Beyond 2027
At the same time, U.S. Space Command is eager to adopt technology that is likely to pay off in the longer term.
“It’s time to bring dynamic space operations and on-orbit logistics and infrastructure to the space domain,” Whiting said. “Sustained space maneuver will change how we operate, opening up new tactics, techniques, procedures and operating concepts, and allowing operations until the mission is complete, not until the fuel we launched with runs out.”
With an eye toward future conflict, U.S. Space Command also is expanding its reliance on modeling and simulation.
Whiting announced that Space Command’s Capability Assessment and Validation Environment, a modeling and simulation laboratory known as CAVE, has achieved minimum viable capability.
CAVE “enables us to perform analysis on warfighting, on plans, on campaigning,” Whiting said. Space Command will rely on CAVE to help plan “operations for a war that’s never happened and a war we don’t want to happen. We’ll also use it to figure out our combatant command requirements and gain insights into multi-domain joint-warfighting concepts.”
Patrick Lawrence: ‘Automated Murder’: Israel’s ‘AI’ in Gaza
In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification.
A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs.
“intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.
dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future
By Patrick Lawrence and Cara Marianna / Original to ScheerPost, April 9, 2024
ZURICH—“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure collapses.”
That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets. In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972 cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”
Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972 published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.”
Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic, broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering, to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these technologies have on all who depend on them.
Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.
We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result, action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral decision-making or ethical accountability.
In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs.
As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:
We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20 seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns: 20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would be killed.
There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the marketing of “automated murder.”
And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that “intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled sniper drones. https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/09/patrick-lawrence-automated-murder-israels-ai-in-gaza/
Israel Prepares For Potential Strike On Iranian Nuclear Sites
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202404108916
In the wake of last week’s airstrike in Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Israel has reportedly indicated its readiness to target Iranian assets should Iran launch a direct retaliatory attack.
According to a report by the London-based Elaph News, citing an “anonymous Western security official,” Israel has been conducting air force drills, specifically preparing to target Iranian nuclear facilities and other critical infrastructure.
The airstrike killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi, alongside six other senior members of the IRGC.
Although Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the strike, both Damascus and Tehran have blamed Israel.
However, unnamed US intelligence sources, as reported by CNN, suggest that Iran is unlikely to launch a direct attack, fearing retaliation from both the US and Israel.
Instead, Iran will more likely use its regional proxies, which since Iran-backed Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, have launched attacks from Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Both Iran and its proxy groups, including Hezbollah, have pledged revenge for the strike. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s adviser has warned that Israeli embassies are no longer safe, while Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has promised an imminent Iranian response.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recent security cabinet meeting, “Iran has been acting against us for years — directly and via proxies. And, therefore, Israel acts against Iran and its proxies — defensively and offensively”.
As the Israeli military bolsters its manpower and defenses, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel has “completed preparations for a response against any scenario that would develop against Iran.”
Israel’s ‘Where’s Daddy?’ AI system helps target suspected Hamas militants when they’re at home with their families, report says
Business Insider, Rebecca Rommen , Apr 7, 2024,
- An Israeli AI system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracks suspected Hamas militants to their homes.
- Civilians are often “collateral damage” in the following strikes, one unnamed officer told +972 Magazine and Local Call.
- The IDF has said it “makes various efforts to reduce harm to civilians to the extent feasible.”
…………………………………………………. (Subscribers only) https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-daddy-strikes-hamas-family-homes-2024—
Death by Algorithm: Israel’s AI War in Gaza
April 10, 2024 by: Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/death-by-algorithm-israels-ai-war-in-gaza/
Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war has already become a cold-blooded reality, deployed conventionally, and with utmost lethality by human operators.
The teasing illusion here is the idea that autonomous systems will become so algorithmically attuned and trained as to render human agency redundant in a functional sense. Provided the targeting is trained, informed, and surgical, a utopia of precision will dawn in modern warfare. Civilian death tolls will be reduced; the mortality of combatants and undesirables will, conversely, increase with dramatic effect.
The staining case study that has put paid to this idea is the pulverising campaign being waged by Israel in Gaza. A report in the magazine +972 notes that the Israeli Defense Forces has indulgently availed itself of AI to identify targets and dispatch them accordingly. The process, however, has been far from accurate or forensically educated. As Brianna Rosen of Just Security accurately posits, “Rather than limiting harm to civilians, Israel’s use of AI bolsters its ability to identify, locate, and expand target sets which likely are not fully vetted to inflict maximum damage.”
The investigation opens by recalling the bombastically titled The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World, a 2021 publication available in English authored by one “Brigadier General Y.S.”, the current commander of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200.
The author advances the case for a system capable of rapidly generating thousands of potential “targets” in the exigencies of conflict. The sinister and morally arid goal of such a machine would resolve a “human bottleneck for both locating new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” Doing so not only dispenses with the human need to vet, check and verify the viability of the target but dispenses with the need to seek human approval for their termination.
The joint investigation by +972 and Local Call identifies the advanced stage of development of such a system, known to the Israeli forces as Lavender. In terms of its murderous purpose, this AI creation goes further than such lethal predecessors as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which identifies purportedly relevant military buildings and structures used by militants. Even that form of identification did little to keep the death rate moderate, generating what a former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory.”
Six Israeli intelligence officers, all having served during the current war in Gaza, reveal how Lavender “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.” The effect of using the AI machine effectively subsumed the human element while giving the targeting results of the system a fictional human credibility.
Within the first weeks of the war, the IDF placed extensive, even exclusive reliance on Lavender, with as many as 37,000 Palestinians being identified as potential Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants for possible airstrikes. This reliance signalled a shift from the previous “human target” doctrine used by the IDF regarding senior military operatives. In such cases, killing the individual in their private residence would only happen exceptionally, and only to the most senior identified individuals, all to keep in awkward step with principles of proportionality in international law. The commencement of “Operation Swords of Iron” in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 led to the adoption of a policy by which all Hamas operatives in its military wing irrespective of rank would be designated as human targets.
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Officers were given expansive latitude to accept the kill lists without demur or scrutiny, with as little as 20 seconds being given to each target before bombing authorisation was given. Permission was also given despite awareness that errors in targeting arising in “approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.”
The Lavender system was also supplemented by using the emetically named “Where’s Daddy?”, another automated platform which tracked the targeted individuals to their family residences which would then be flattened. The result was mass slaughter, with “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people not involved in the fighting” killed by Israeli airstrikes in the initial stages of the conflict. As one of the interviewed intelligence officers stated with grim candour, killing Hamas operatives when in a military facility or while engaged in military activity was a matter of little interest. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The use of the system entailed resorting to gruesome, and ultimately murderous calculi. Two of the sources interviewed claimed that the IDF “also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” Were the targets Hamas officials of certain seniority, the deaths of up to 100 civilians were also authorised.
In what is becoming its default position in the face of such revelations, the IDF continues to state, as reported in the Times of Israel, that appropriate conventions are being observed in the business of killing Palestinians. It “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist.” The process, the claim goes, is far more discerning, involving the use of a “database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources… on the military operatives of terrorist organizations.”
The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated how “deeply troubled” he was by reports that Israel’s bombing campaign had used “artificial intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.” It might be far better to see these matters as cases of willing, and reckless misidentification, with a conscious acceptance on the part of IDF military personnel that enormous civilian casualties are simply a matter of course. To that end, we are no longer talking about a form of advanced, scientific war waged proportionately and with precision, but a technologically advanced form of mass murder.
Brutal, chaotic war – norms, conventions and laws of conduct are being erased
Alastair Crooke, April 8, 2024, https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/04/08/brutal-chaotic-war-norms-conventions-and-laws-of-conduct-are-being-erased/—
We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula often used by Israel to intimidate adversaries; this is different.
Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?”
“Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.
Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.
Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in Damascus in a different context:
“An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.
Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.
Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals.
The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in Gaza.
Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law. Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.
The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of course.
Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare; to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines and devoid of limits.
As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.
Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.
This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza during the last six months precludes it.
Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the Resistance’s military).
The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:
“[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems, including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all”.
“The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions”.
“”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.
In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.
“… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.
“Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.
So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.
it is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …
Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).
The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as claimed):
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:
“I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.
This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of 24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any other Gazan civilian male?
“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”.
Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.
What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.
By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.
Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:
“The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians”.
Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas; turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the “decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass again:
“Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation”.
The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot do militarily.
The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is making mistakes’).
Increased activity at nuclear test site in northern Russia: expert
Active construction has been seen at a nuclear test site in northern Russia since last year, raising the possibility that Moscow is preparing for a fresh nuclear test, a Japanese expert on the Russian military said Monday.
Citing analysis of satellite images, Yu Koizumi, associate professor at the University of Tokyo, said a large-scale facility presumed to be related to nuclear testing appears to be almost complete at the site on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Sea.
Koizumi called the activities exceptional and said Russia could be preparing a subcritical nuclear test, which does not create an explosion.
He believes the move is “to intimidate European countries and the United States” over their support for Ukraine, which is at war with Russia.
Novaya Zemlya was the site of the Soviet Union’s around 130 nuclear tests, including in the atmosphere, underground and undersea, between 1955 and 1990.
Russia continued with subcritical nuclear tests on the island to enhance nuclear weapons and assess their capabilities, with the latest conducted in 2004.
Satellite images by space tech company Maxar Technologies Inc. and Earth imaging firm Planet Labs PBC, both of the United States, showed that works to construct the large facility got fully underway around last summer at the test site on the southern part of Novaya Zemlya, according to Koizumi.
The building, some 200 meters in length, is around double the size of other facilities in the area and was nearly complete in the Maxar images taken in early February, Koizumi said.
“It is highly likely that the facility was newly built for a (nuclear) test,” he said, adding a pile-up of materials around an airport suggests that the facility could be further enlarged.
At the same time, the images did not show any direct evidence of a nuclear test, Koizumi said, citing snow covering an entrance of a tunnel located around 3 kilometers from the nuclear site in the mountains, which could be used for a subcritical nuclear experiment.
In November last year, Russia revoked its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear explosions, whether for military or peaceful purposes, in a move seen as its de facto exit from the treaty.
“We should seriously worry about Russia playing the card of a nuclear test,” Koizumi said.
Nuclear power plants in war zones: Lessons learned from the war in Ukraine
Joanna Przybylak, SECURITY and DEFENCE Quarterly, April 2024
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to examine the lessons learned till mid-2023 from the war in Ukraine to find out how attacking or seizing nuclear power plants (NPPs) can be utilised to advance military and political objectives during an armed conflict.
The qualitative research approach has been applied to the study, focusing on an analysis of academic research and relevant acts of international law. In order to examine Russia’s approach to the attacks against the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia NPPs, numerous reports, official statements by the authorities, press releases, and Internet sources have been analysed.
For evaluation of nuclear security and safety standards in Ukraine, the “seven pillars” model proposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency has been adopted. The study indicates that strategically located NPPs can be used as “nuclear shields” for the occupying forces deployed at the plant or nearby. They may also become useful tools of “lawfare” waged with the use of flawed interpretations of international humanitarian law.
Finally, nuclear security-related narrations analysed in the paper clearly prove that seized NPPs can be effectively used in information warfare. The research leads to the conclusion that civil NPPs in war zones can be weaponised and exploited by the hostile forces not only for impeding energy supplies (and thus shattering the public morale of the adversary) but also for blackmailing and coercing the decisionmakers of the attacked state and their international allies with a vision of man-made nuclear disaster……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
US, Philippines, Japan, and Australia Conduct First Joint Military Exercise in South China Sea
China launched patrols in the South China Sea in response
by Dave DeCamp April 7, 2024
https://news.antiwar.com/2024/04/07/us-philippines-japan-and-australia-conduct-first-joint-military-exercise-in-south-china-sea/
The US, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia conducted joint military exercises in the South China Sea on Sunday in a provocative show of force aimed at China.
According to Japan’s Kyodo News, the drills marked the first “full-scale exercise” between the four nations. The US has been looking to increase military cooperation between its treaty allies in the region as part of its military build-up to prepare for a future war with China.
The four countries released a joint statement that made clear the drills were meant to push back on China’s claims to the South China Sea. “We stand with all nations in safeguarding the international order based on the rule of law that is the foundation for a peaceful and stable Indo-Pacific region,” the statement said.
According to The South China Morning Post, the drills included two Philippine vessels, one American ship, one Australian ship, and a Japanese ship and focused on anti-submarine warfare training, tactical exercises, and photo exercises.
China launched patrols in the South China Sea on the same day in what appeared to be a response to the drill. “The Southern Theatre Command of the People’s Liberation Army will conduct a joint air and sea combat patrol in the South China Sea on April 7,” the Chinese military’s Southern Theater Command said.
The joint drills come as tensions are soaring between China and the Philippines over disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea. Chinese and Philippine vessels frequently have tense encounters in the waters, which often end in collision. In the most recent incident, a Chinese vessel fired a water cannon at a Philippine supply boat, injuring several crew members.
The incidents in the South China Sea could potentially spark a major war as the US has repeatedly affirmed that the US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty applies to attacks on Philippine vessels in the disputed waters.
President Biden is hosting Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington this Thursday for the first-ever trilateral summit between the three nations. They’re expected to announce the launch of regular joint patrols in the South China Sea.
Meet Centuria, Ukraine’s Western-trained neo-Nazi army
The Grayzone, KIT KLARENBERG·APRIL 7, 2024
A uniquely Ukrainian strain of Neo-Nazism is spreading throughout Europe, which openly advocates violence against minorities while seeking new recruits. With Kiev’s army collapsing and a narrative of Western betrayal gaining currency, the horror inflicted on residents of Donbas for a decade could very soon be coming to a city near you.
Centuria, an ultra-violent Ukrainian Neo-Nazi faction, has cemented itself in six cities across Germany, and is seeking to expand its local presence. According to Junge Welt, a Berlin-based Marxist daily, the Nazi organization’s growth has been “unhindered by local security services.”
Junge Welt traces Centuria’s origins to an August 2020 Neo-Nazi summit “at the edge of a forest near Kiev.” There, an ultranationalist named Igor “Tcherkas” Mikhailenko demanded the “hundreds of mostly masked vigilante fighters present,” who were members Kiev’s fascistic National Militia, “make sacrifices for the idea of ‘Greater Ukraine.’” As the former head of the Neo-Nazi Patriot of Ukraine’s Kharkiv division, and commander of the state sponsored Azov Battalion from 2014 to 2015, Mikhailenko has professed a desire to “destroy everything anti-Ukrainian.”
Junge Welt reports that since 2017, the National Militia “had been practicing brutal vigilante justice” throughout Ukraine, including “tyrannizing the LGBTQ scene.” Centuria was subsequently blamed for a terrifying November 2021 attack on a gay nightclub in Kiev, in which its operatives assaulted revelers with truncheons and pepper spray.
Now the same Neo-Nazi sect “has an offshoot in Germany,” Junge Welt revealed. On August 24 2023, the 32nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, Centuria convened a “nationalist rally” in the central city of Magdeburg, “unmolested by Antifa and critical media reporting.”
Participants proudly posed with the flag of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) founded by World War II-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Centuria boasted at the time on Telegram, “although Ukrainian youth are not in their homeland, they are starting to unite.” Meanwhile, they threatened the “enemies” of their country with “hellish storm,” pledging that “Ukrainian emigrants” would not “forget their national identity for a few hundred euros.”
Junge Welt reports that Centuria “is currently raising funds for its parent organization’s combat unit,” which is commanded by Andriy Biletsky – the Azov Battalion founder who infamously stated in 2014 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen.” At home, Centuria’s members express similar attitudes towards Muslims, Africans, and gays, whom they refer to, respectively, as the “German Caliphate,” “black rapists,” and “pedophiles.”
Now, the group’s members are working hard to pass their ideological vision down to future racists across the continent. “We are creating a new generation of heroes!” Centuria’s Telegram channel boasts. Accordingly, the neo-Nazi group has been arranging hiking trips to Germany’s Harz mountains with a Ukrainian nationalist scout association called Plast. This outfit opened chapters across the Western world beginning in the 1950s, in response to the Soviet Union’s hounding of fascists and nationalists. Besides receiving ideological indoctrination, Plast’s youthful members may have the opportunity to improve their physical fitness and receive military training. As Centuria ominously declares on Telegram, “free people have weapons.”
As Washington gradually backs away from its sponsorship of Ukraine’s war with Russia, it has begun ceding responsibility for the military campaign’s management – and likely failure – to Berlin. If US arms shipments continue to dwindle, Germany will become Kiev’s chief supplier of weapons. And the Germans may find that saying “no” to Ukraine could result in some nasty surprises………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/04/07/centuria-ukraines-western-neo-nazi-army/
NATO 75 Years On… A War Machine Long Past Its Sell-By Date
NATO has been sold to the world as some kind of international security agency. How Orwellian can you get? Peace means war, security means chaos and threats, and rules-based order means domination and exploitation.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/04/05/nato-75-years-war-machine-long-past-its-sell-by-date/
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This week marks the 75th anniversary of NATO’s founding in April 1949. The organization has become a global danger to peace and security and should have been disbanded more than 30 years ago when the Cold War supposedly ended. That the alliance was not disbanded attests that its real purpose was always to serve as a weapon for U.S.-led Western imperialism.
Barely four years after the end of World War Two – the greatest calamity in world history – and amid the ruins of a devastated Europe and Asia, Western imperialism was once again reinventing its nefarious internal forces.
Nearly 30 million citizens of the Soviet Union had died at the hands of Nazi Germany. And yet despite the horror and evil of war, the Western powers were busy reconfiguring their military forces to confront again the Soviet Union. With the defeat of the Nazi war machine largely by the Soviet Red Army, the Western imperialists innovated a new instrument in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The betrayal and treachery were not just to the Soviet people. All of humanity was once again subjected to the warmongering designs and necessities of a global elite under Western imperialism.
NATO’s declared purpose was to defend Europe from Soviet aggression. The same pretense exists today in the claim that the alliance is defending Ukraine from Russian belligerence.
The proof of NATO’s real function is demonstrated by the fact that the organization did not disband in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. Over the ensuing 33 years, the military bloc has doubled its membership to 31 nations. Russia has replaced the Soviet Union as the Western-designated security threat to Europe. But such rationale turns reality on its head. NATO has always existed as a tool of aggression for Western imperialism. Where Nazi Germany failed to do the job of conquering the Soviet Union, NATO tacitly took over the task, and when the Soviet Union disappeared, the new enemy of convenience became the Russian Federation.
Continue readingThe day of nuclear Armageddon: Newly declassified documents reveal in macabre minute-by-minute detail what the end of the world would like. And why those vaporised instantly by an atomic bomb will be the lucky ones…
Eventually it reaches the troposphere, higher than commercial flights. Radioactive particles then spew across everything below as fallout, raining back down on the Earth.
A nuclear bomb produces ‘a witch’s brew of radioactive products, which are also entrained in the cloud’, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned decades ago.
More than a million people are dead or dying and fewer than two minutes have passed since detonation. Now the inferno begins.
ANNIE JACOBSEN, 7 April 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13279197/The-day-nuclear-Armageddon-Newly-declassified-documents-reveal-macabre-minute-minute-end-world-like-vaporised-instantly-atomic-bomb-lucky-ones.html
This story, of what the moments after a nuclear missile launch could look like, is based on facts sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisers, cabinet members, nuclear weapons engineers, scientists, soldiers, airmen, special operators, Secret Service, emergency management experts, intelligence analysts, civil servants and others who have worked on these macabre scenarios over decades.
As the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the US government, the scenario postulated here takes the reader up to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known. Declassified documents, obfuscated for decades, fill in the details with terrifying clarity.
Because the Pentagon is a top target for a strike by America’s nuclear-armed enemies, in the scenario that follows, Washington DC gets hit first with a one megaton thermo-nuclear bomb. ‘A “Bolt out of the Blue” attack against DC is what everyone in DC fears most,’ says Andrew Weber, former assistant secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programmes. ‘Bolt out of the Blue’ is how US Nuclear Command and Control refers to an ‘unwarned large [nuclear] attack’.
This strike on DC initiates the beginning of an Armageddon-like nuclear war that will almost certainly follow. ‘There is no such thing as a small nuclear war,’ is an oft repeated phrase in Washington.
A nuclear strike on the Pentagon is just the beginning of a scenario the finality of which will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
This is the reality of the world in which we live. The nuclear war scenario proposed in this book could happen tomorrow. Or later today. ‘The world could end in the next couple of hours,’ warns General Robert Kehler, the former commander of the United States Strategic Command.
A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend.
One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the centre the Sun.
In the first fraction of a milli-second after the bomb strikes the Pentagon outside Washington DC, there is light. Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour.
Within a few seconds the fireball has increased to a diameter of a little more than a mile, its heat so intense that concrete explodes, metal melts or evaporates, stone shatters and people instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.
The five-storey, five-sided structure of the Pentagon, and everything inside its 6.5 million sq ft of office space, explodes into superheated dust, all the walls shattering with the near-simultaneous arrival of a shockwave. All 27,000 employees perish instantly.
Not a single thing in the fireball remains. Nothing. Ground zero is zeroed.
Travelling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything flammable several miles in every direction.
Curtains, paper, books, wood fences, clothing and dry leaves explode into flames and become kindling for a great firestorm that begins to consume a 100 or more square mile area that, prior to this flash of light, was the beating heart of American governance and home to six million people.
Several hundred feet north-west of the Pentagon, all 639 acres of Arlington national cemetery –including the 400,000 sets of bones and gravestones honouring the war dead, the 3,800 buried African-American freed people, the visitors paying respects on this late winter afternoon, the groundskeepers mowing lawns, the arborists tending trees, the tour guides touring, the white-gloved members of the Old Guard keeping watch over the Tomb of the Unknowns – they are all instantly transformed into charred human figurines. Into soot.
Those incinerated are spared the horror that begins to be inflicted on the one to two million people gravely injured but not yet dead.
Continue readingCIA Front Companies Play Crucial Role in Arms Pipeline to Ukraine and Profit From the Human Misery it Generates
Covert Action Magazine, By CIAgate, April 1, 2024
Noetic Continental Inc. Foists Military Equipment Through Private War Companies
Analyzing the CIA’s records, we’ve noticed that there were many references to the Noetic international Inc., a company with questionable origin and activity.
According to its website, the enterprise specializes in “delivering products and services including assessments, operations and finance to clients in the energy, telecom, space, cybersecurity and intelligence sectors.“
In a previous article on substack we wrote that the CEO of the Noetic International Inc. was Johnna May Holeman, a former U.S. artillery soldier and CIA operative, who took part in the supply of 155mm white phosphorus rounds to Ukraine through a tea-trade company in Bulgaria.
Now we can say that there was another CIA officer behind the creation of the Noetic International Inc. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet John Alan Irvin–the godfather of clandestine operations.
Through his extensive ties, resources and expertise, John Irvin has developed a vast network of contacts, informants and partners to achieve a comprehensive range of goals in accordance with the CIA’s design. Given John’s age, today the bulk of the work is now done by Johnna Holeman. The Noetic International Inc. has offices in Illinois, California, Germany, England and Austria.
The Noetic “specialists” address complex problems in wide range of domains including air- and sea-based drones, renewable energy, cybersecurity and cryptocurrency, technology and robotics, as well as strategic influence campaigns and analysis and decision making.
The network includes hundreds of influencers connected by both personal acquaintance and virtual meetings. The Noetic operatives help local and foreign authorities to achieve goals in order to enlist the support afterwards.
According to our source, the Noetic International Inc. has a shell company in Puerto Rico, that under the guise of cannabis dispensary addresses essential tasks on behalf of the CIA, such as supply of various kinds of unmanned aerial and maritime drones to foreign countries, including Ukraine, reshore of semiconductor production to the U.S., as well as the supply of small-module nuclear reactors.
Initially, we doubted the veracity of the source’s information. Yet, as it was with the investigation surrounding Chanda Creasy, a yoga coach and a head of the CIA division responsible for arms transfers to militants in Africa and Middle East, painstaking analysis and careful sieving of information made it possible to determine that it was the Anyon Minds LLC……………………………………………………………………………………..
It seems like this outlet is not a trading platform, but a certain communication hub for a dedicated circle of persons…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
We are also extremely curious what kind of advice the cannabis company could receive from a former Chief of Staff of the 82nd Airborne division, Jouni Keravuori, who also worked at the SAS Institute, General Dynamics and the same Pax Mondial and Pax Safe. Perhaps his daughter-in-law and, concurrently, Brigadier General Rose Lopez Keravuori, helps him with this. Since 2023, she has been serving as the Director of intelligence (J2) of the U.S. Command in Africa………………………………………………………………………………..
Drones’ modernization and delivery to foreign countries
According to our source, Mr. Benitez maintained close cooperation with Johnna Holeman and another member of Noetic International, Hans Mumm, mentioned in one of our previous investigations.
The cooperation was focused on:
⦁ improving capabilities of automated drones manufactured by the Airgility and the Safehaven Marine paramilitary companies;
⦁ optimizing the automated functionality of existing UAVs, including an anti-missile drone capable of intercepting shells and counterattacking a missile launch site;
⦁ improving the “world’s fastest sea drone” with a customer-tailored weapons system (aerial and underwater) (Project Barracuda by Safehaven Marine).
⦁ Noetic team also discussed a special “Vanilla program” related to a new unmanned aerial system. Check the project summary here…………………………………………………………………………………………………
What’s the most interesting is that the representatives of the Anyon Minds DIRECTLY negotiated with the Ukrainian authorities. It should be noted that during his trip to Kyiv in October, 2022, Benitez personally communicated with Mykhailo Fedorov, the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine for Innovations, Education, Science and Technology–Minister of Ukraine for Digital Transformation. They discussed the issues related to the supply of drones as part of military assistance. …………………………………………………..
This war not only fabulously enriched Benitez and his team, but also allowed the CIA to establish gray-trading schemes and market channels for the sale of unmanned vehicles to Ukrainian officials. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
PART II
The Gallant Nights LLC
Below we talk about one dubious private military company (PMC) also involved in CIA’s corruption scheme in Ukraine. We will show how the agency uses Hollywood celebrities to empty the wallets of their fans……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/04/01/cia-front-companies-play-crucial-role-in-arms-pipeline-to-ukraine-and-profit-from-the-human-misery-it-generates/?mc_cid=af5fe30ca7&mc_eid=65917fb94b
The Looming Ukraine Debacle
There is indeed a serious risk that, rather than the West teaching Russia a lesson and putting Putin in his place, the opposite may occur.
by Matthew Blackburn , The National Interest, Sun, 07 Apr 2024
With Ukraine’s military situation deteriorating, NATO foreign ministers have gathered in Brussels to develop a long-term plan to deliver the necessary supplies to Kyiv. As NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg put it, “Ukrainians are not running out of courage, they are running out of ammunition.” Distracted by other matters, America increasingly looks to Europe to coordinate the defense of Ukraine. But, other than scrambling for shells and money or unveiling a modest EU defense industry strategy, European leaders do not appear to have the ideas or the means to intervene in a decisive or timely fashion.
French president Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion that NATO troops may enter Ukraine was supported by Poland and Czechia but caused some consternation in France itself. More importantly, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States still rule out boots on the ground. Instead of a new approach, the old pattern continues: NATO mulls over how to help Ukraine without provoking open war with Russia and fails, in the end, to deliver the kind of decisive assistance needed to turn the course of the war.
Another established pattern is the repetition of moralistic binary language. The West “cannot let Russia win.” The “rules-based order” could unravel. Then there is the new domino theory: if Ukraine falls, Russian hordes will flood further west. The personalization of the conflict onto one evil man, Vladimir Putin, continues with the death of Alexei Navalny. It is a Manichean struggle of good and evil, democracy and authoritarianism, civilization and darkness. There can be “no peace until the tyrant falls.” The Western alliance must not waver in its commitment to Ukraine.
What is lacking throughout the discourse is realism. What is the real balance of power between the warring nations, and what can be concluded from two years of Russia-NATO hard power competition? Unsurprisingly, Western leaders are reluctant to admit that the dire situation facing Ukraine is related to their own fundamental miscalculations about Russia. Russia’s multiple blunders in this war are well-known but what of those made by the Western alliance?
The West’s Plan A Failed; Russia’s Plan B is Slowly Succeeding.
About two years ago, it became clear that Russia’s Plan A in Ukraine failed. Putin’s initial approach was a sudden movement of troops into Ukraine that, in the best case, could topple Ukraine’s government or, at least, coerce Kyiv into signing a new and less favorable version of the Minsk II agreement. Russia’s Plan A was resisted by the Zelenskyy government, whose military forces held firm on the outskirts of Kyiv in March 2022. After the collapse of the Istanbul peace negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow in April, Russia shifted to Plan B: waging a grinding war of attrition to exhaust Kyiv’s will and capacity to resist while testing the Western alliance’s collective ability to sustain Ukraine.
Russia’s Plan B had mixed results in 2022……………………………………
As the slow success of Russia’s Plan B becomes more apparent, the failure of the West’s own Plan A to deal with Russia is now clarified. ………………………………………………………..
Western sanctions were thus a double failure: they did not wreck the Russian economy or destabilize the elite coalition around the regime.
The other set of assumptions was military in nature……………………………………. The claims of astronomical Russian losses reinforced the long-standing assumption of NATO military superiority over Russia, creating a remarkable war optimism in the West. Ukraine would now use higher caliber Western weapons, tactics, and training to defeat Russia comprehensively. NATO’s game-changing wonder weapons were kept on the sidelines and could be introduced when Ukraine needed decisive assistance.
These military assumptions have now been proven incorrect. The drip-feeding of advanced weaponry, calibrated to avoid crossing Russian redlines too flagrantly, did not allow the Ukrainians to achieve decisive success in 2023…………………………………..
Overall, NATO was not well prepared for the war in Ukraine; its military doctrines foresaw interventions in civil wars or conflict with weaker opponents, not a proxy war of attrition with a peer competitor.
In contrast, Russia was better prepared for the long haul of military production and has also successfully innovated in response to the military setbacks it has experienced. ……………………………….. On the tactical and operational level, Russia is engaging many parts of the front simultaneously, forcing Ukraine into an exhausting and constant redeployment of troops. Presenting Russian military successes as “human wave” or “meat assaults” is clearly inaccurate. Russia’s approach is gradual, attritional, and anything but mindless………………………………………………….
Despite all the above indicators, many in the West want to continue Plan A: more sanctions on Russia, new weapons, and more training for Ukraine, all to somehow prepare Ukraine to launch another offensive in 2025. Yet it remains unclear how Ukraine can survive 2024 if Russia is outproducing the West by more than three-to-one in shells and has more troops at its disposal. Something has to give in the next phase of the war.
What Next?
The current rather desperate effort to scrape together munitions to ensure Ukraine’s immediate survival does not constitute a Plan B for the West in Ukraine. A definition of “victory” is still lacking. It is unclear what prerequisites must be in place for “honorable” negotiations with Russia. The Western alliance’s Plan B must be a choice between rapidly developing an effective means of doubling down its support for Ukraine or starting to talk about a compromise with Russia…………………more https://nationalinterest.org/feature/looming-ukraine-debacle-210160
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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