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One day after pagers detonated across Lebanon, reportedly killing twelve people ... a second wave of explosions has been reported across the country. Today's detonations were reportedly through the manipulation of walkie-talkies made by ICOM, a Japanese firm whose American branch also serves as a significant supplier to the U.S. military. The combined confirmed death toll has already reached 26, and roughly 3,000 people have been reported injured. The Tuesday explosions are primarily linked to the ICOM IC-V82, an electronic receiver with both military and civilian uses. ICOM, based in Osaka, Japan, has a global footprint. U.S. government disclosures show that the company's American affiliate has received at least $8.2 million in contracts with the U.S. federal government since 2008. The series of explosions in Lebanon have raised concerns about the future of war that includes infiltration of supply chains and limitless exploits through electronically connected devices. The attacks will likely fuel increased scrutiny over military and civilian supply chain security, which has long been a potential vulnerability. The two rounds of blasts happened one day after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly stepped up demands for the U.S. to support "military action" against Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia linked to Iran. Social media posts have also claimed that ATMs, solar panels, and other electronic devices across Lebanon exploded today.

Note: Intelligence agencies from several countries have infiltrated computer supply chains to spy on people more easily. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

Two large-scale, coordinated attacks this week rocked Lebanon – the latest iteration in a historical pattern of booby-trapping electronics. On Tuesday, one attack caused pagers to explode across Lebanon and Syria, injuring thousands of people and killing at least 12. A second wave of bombings unfolded on Wednesday, when explosives detonated inside a slew of hand-held radios across the country, leaving nine dead and 300 wounded. Israel, which is widely assumed to be behind both attacks, reportedly booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah members, carrying out a similar feat with the hand-held radios. The bombings appear to be supply-chain attacks – meaning the gadgets were tampered with or outright replaced with rigged devices containing explosives and a detonator at some point prior to arriving in the hands of the targets. The tactic of turning an electronic gadget into an explosive device ... dates back at least half a century. Field Manual 5-31, titled simply "Boobytraps" and first published by the U.S. Department of the Army in 1965, describes the titular objects as explosive charges "cunningly contrived to be fired by an unsuspecting person who disturbs an apparently harmless object or performs a presumably safe act." In 1996, the Israeli Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet, is said to used a similar technique to detonate a small charge of explosives near the ear of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash.

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

The reporting team of the In the Dark podcast has assembled the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11–nearly eight hundred incidents in all. Much of the time, the reporting concluded, the military delivers neither transparency nor justice. The database makes it possible, for the first time, to see hundreds of allegations of war crimes–the kinds that stain a nation–in one place, along with the findings of investigations and the results of prosecutions. We limited our search to ... allegations of violence perpetrated by U.S. service members or deaths in U.S. custody that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. Of the seven hundred and eighty-one cases we found, at least sixty-five per cent had been dismissed by investigators who didn't believe that a crime had even taken place. In a hundred and fifty-one cases, however, investigators did find probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn't been justified. These include the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim's ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility. Yet, even in these cases, meaningful accountability was rare.

Note: Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.

On the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo colorfully described the US military's contingency plan for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as flooding the narrow Taiwan Strait between the two countries with swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets. "I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities," Paparo said, "so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything." China has a lot of drones and can make a lot more drones quickly, creating a likely advantage during a protracted conflict. This stands in contrast to American and Taiwanese forces, who do not have large inventories of drones. The Pentagon's "hellscape" plan proposes that the US military make up for this growing gap by producing and deploying what amounts to a massive screen of autonomous drone swarms designed to confound enemy aircraft, provide guidance and targeting to allied missiles, knock out surface warships and landing craft, and generally create enough chaos to blunt (if not fully halt) a Chinese push across the Taiwan Strait. Planning a "hellscape" of hundreds of thousands of drones is one thing, but actually making it a reality is another.

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

The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing. This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act – a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs – found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future. That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue. Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating "use them or lose them" weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation.

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

It is often said that autonomous weapons could help minimize the needless horrors of war. Their vision algorithms could be better than humans at distinguishing a schoolhouse from a weapons depot. Some ethicists have long argued that robots could even be hardwired to follow the laws of war with mathematical consistency. And yet for machines to translate these virtues into the effective protection of civilians in war zones, they must also possess a key ability: They need to be able to say no. Human control sits at the heart of governments' pitch for responsible military AI. Giving machines the power to refuse orders would cut against that principle. Meanwhile, the same shortcomings that hinder AI's capacity to faithfully execute a human's orders could cause them to err when rejecting an order. Militaries will therefore need to either demonstrate that it's possible to build ethical, responsible autonomous weapons that don't say no, or show that they can engineer a safe and reliable right-to-refuse that's compatible with the principle of always keeping a human "in the loop." If they can't do one or the other ... their promises of ethical and yet controllable killer robots should be treated with caution. The killer robots that countries are likely to use will only ever be as ethical as their imperfect human commanders. They would only promise a cleaner mode of warfare if those using them seek to hold themselves to a higher standard.

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and military corruption.

The Ukrainian military has used AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems identified targets in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza. Growing conflicts around the world have acted as both accelerant and testing ground for AI warfare while making it even more evident how unregulated the nascent field is. The result is a multibillion-dollar AI arms race that is drawing in Silicon Valley giants and states around the world. Altogether, the US military has more than 800 active AI-related projects and requested $1.8bn worth of funding for AI in the 2024 budget alone. Many of these companies and technologies are able to operate with extremely little transparency and accountability. Defense contractors are generally protected from liability when their products accidentally do not work as intended, even when the results are deadly. The Pentagon plans to spend $1bn by 2025 on its Replicator Initiative, which aims to develop swarms of unmanned combat drones that will use artificial intelligence to seek out threats. The air force wants to allocate around $6bn over the next five years to research and development of unmanned collaborative combat aircraft, seeking to build a fleet of 1,000 AI-enabled fighter jets that can fly autonomously. The Department of Defense has also secured hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to fund its secretive AI initiative known as Project Maven, a venture focused on technologies like automated target recognition and surveillance.

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

Last week, the Biden administration said it would allow the Azov Brigade, a Ukrainian military unit, to receive U.S. weaponry and training, freeing it from a purported ban imposed in response to concerns that it committed human rights violations and had neo-Nazi ties. A photo posted by the unit itself, however, seems to suggest that the U.S. was providing support as far back as December of last year. The photo, in tandem with the administration's own statements, highlights the murky nature of the arms ban, how it was imposed, and under what U.S. authority. Two mechanisms could have barred arms transfers: a law passed by Congress specifically prohibiting assistance to Azov, and the so-called Leahy laws that block support to units responsible for grave rights violations. The State Department said this month that weapon shipments will now go forward after a Leahy law review, but won't comment on if and when a Leahy ban was in effect. The congressional prohibition, the U.S. says, does not apply because it barred assistance to the Azov Battalion, a predecessor to the Azov Brigade. The original unit had earned scrutiny for alleged human rights violations and ties to neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies. The U.S. has not made clear about when the apparent ban started, but a deputy Azov commander and media reports indicate some type of prohibition has been in effect for nearly a decade – though the congressional ban has only been in effect since 2018.

Note: Facebook changed its censorship policies to permit calls for the death of Russian soldiers and praise for the Azov Battalion. Learn more about US covert military support for Neo-Nazis in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S., this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations. The 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons ... has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power. [One] Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. The post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest. The violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. The government in Kiev [deployed] neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms. In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it.

Note: More than 1 million people on both sides have been either killed or injured. This article was written by Jeffrey Sachs, world-renowned economist and public policy analyst. This isn't about defending Russia, but highlighting how US foreign policy has exploited Ukraine for strategic interests–fueling ongoing conflict rather than promoting peace. Azov Battalian is a neo-nazi group tied to credible human rights violations, a group that the CIA directly supported with weapons and military training leading up to the 2014 Maidan coup.

The Pentagon is turning to a new class of weapons to fight the numerically superior [China's] People's Liberation Army: drones, lots and lots of drones. In August 2023, the Defense Department unveiled Replicator, its initiative to field thousands of "all-domain, attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems": Pentagon-speak for low-cost (and potentially AI-driven) machines – in the form of self-piloting ships, large robot aircraft, and swarms of smaller kamikaze drones – that they can use and lose en masse to overwhelm Chinese forces. For the last 25 years, uncrewed Predators and Reapers, piloted by military personnel on the ground, have been killing civilians across the planet. Experts worry that mass production of new low-cost, deadly drones will lead to even more civilian casualties. Advances in AI have increasingly raised the possibility of robot planes, in various nations' arsenals, selecting their own targets. During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes ... and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis. "The Pentagon has yet to come up with a reliable way to account for past civilian harm caused by U.S. military operations," [Columbia Law's Priyanka Motaparthy] said. "So the question becomes, ‘With the potential rapid increase in the use of drones, what safeguards potentially fall by the wayside? How can they possibly hope to reckon with future civilian harm when the scale becomes so much larger?'"

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

Abdul Raziq [was] one of America's most important partners in the war against the Taliban. American generals cycling through Afghanistan made regular pilgrimages to visit him, praising ... the loyalty he commanded from his men, who were trained, armed and paid by the United States and its allies. The Americans were by his side until the very end. When he was gunned down by an undercover Taliban assassin in 2018, he was walking next to the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, who celebrated him as a "great friend" and "patriot." But to countless Afghan civilians under his reign, Raziq was something else entirely: America's monster. His battlefield prowess was built on years of torture, extrajudicial killings and the largest-known campaign of forced disappearances during America's 20-year war in Afghanistan. He transformed the police into a fearsome combat force without constraints, and his officers abducted hundreds, if not thousands, of people to be killed or tortured in secret jails. Most were never seen again. The culture of lawlessness and impunity he created flew in the face of endless promises by American presidents, generals and ambassadors to uphold human rights and build a better Afghanistan. Raziq's tactics ... stirred such enmity in parts of the population that the Taliban turned his cruelty into a recruiting tool, broadcasting it to attract new fighters. Many Afghans came to revile the American-backed government and everything it represented.

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

In late April, students at universities across the United States set up tent encampments and occupied buildings, protesting their campuses' complicity in the Israeli war in Gaza. Wouldn't it have been nice if protesters had extended their critique of U.S. foreign policy to include Ukraine? The Biden White House has extended massive new military aid packages to Ukraine that include long range weapons designed to strike into Russia. Ukraine is the graveyard for the post-Cold War neo-conservative dream of establishing American unipolar power. The late Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's former National Security Adviser, argued that, "if Moscow regains control over Ukraine with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state." To help advance this strategy, the George W. Bush administration supported a 2004 color revolution that brought to power pro-Western leader Viktor Yushchenko who pursued North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership against the will of the vast majority of Ukrainians and ended his term with a 2.7% approval rating. When Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych won 2010 elections and sought to strengthen Ukraine's economy by keeping Ukraine's access to the Russian market, the Obama administration backed the February 2014 Maidan coup. The coup resulted in the replacement of Yanukovych with a regime that compromised Ukraine's economic and political sovereignty, terrorized the political opposition, and deliberately provoked a war with Russia as Ukraine was turned into a de facto CIA base whose ports were upgraded to fit U.S. warships. The U.S. calculatingly sabotaged the Minsk peace agreements, which provided a way to resolve the conflict between western and eastern Ukraine that resulted from the 2014 coup.

Note: This isn't about defending Russia, but highlighting how US foreign policy has exploited Ukraine for strategic interests–undermining its sovereignty and fueling ongoing conflict rather than promoting peace. Meanwhile, the Russia-Ukraine war has led to half a million war casualties and the Pentagon is unable to account for the billions of US weaponry and financial aid flowing into Ukraine. Read a former CIA's agent sobering view on US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Google and Amazon are both loath to discuss security aspects of the cloud services they provide through their joint contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Both the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are Nimbus customers. According to a 63-page Israeli government procurement document ... two of Israel's leading state-owned weapons manufacturers are required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs. Though details of Google and Amazon's contractual work with the Israeli arms industry aren't laid out in the tender document, which outlines how Israeli agencies will obtain software services through Nimbus, the firms are responsible for manufacturing drones, missiles, and other weapons Israel has used to bombard Gaza. Project Nimbus ... has already created a public uproar. Google and Amazon have faced backlash ranging from street protests to employee revolts. Following anti-Nimbus sit-ins organized at the company's New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices, Google fired 50 employees. Emaan Haseem, [was] a cloud computing engineer at Google until she was fired after participating in the Sunnyvale protest. "A lot of us signed up or applied to work at Google because we were trying to avoid working at terrible unethical companies," she said. "Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I'm any better than Raytheon?"

Note: When Google employees protested Project Maven, a DoD drone program that used Google technology, the Big Tech giant dropped the contract with the Pentagon in 2018. Read about how Silicon Valley has been infiltrated by intelligence agencies.

SpaceX recently secured a classified contract to build an extensive network of "spy satellites" for an undisclosed U.S. intelligence agency, with one source telling Reuters that "no one can hide" under the prospective network's reach. The U.S. is funding or otherwise supporting a range of defense contractors and startups working to create a new generation of space-bound weapons, surveillance systems, and adjacent technologies. In other words, America is hell-bent on a new arms race – in space. The Space Force, an entirely new branch of the military "focused solely on pursuing superiority in the space domain," was launched in 2019, signaling renewed emphasis on space militarization as U.S. policy. Space Force's Space Development Agency recently granted defense contractors L3Harris and Lockheed Martin and space company Sierra Space contracts worth $2.5 billion to build satellites for the U.S. military's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), a constellation of hundreds of satellites, built out on tranches, that provide various warfighting capabilities, including the collection and transmission of critical wartime communications, into low-Earth orbit. The PWSA will serve as the backbone of the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control project, an effort to bolster warfighting capacities and decision-making processes by facilitating "information advantage at the speed of relevance." Other efforts are just as sci-fi-esque.

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

According to Wikipedia, the United States has been involved in 107 wars since its founding and 41 of these were fought against the Indigenous peoples of North America. Most of these wars are ignored by schools, textbooks and the media, but the pressure to become involved in additional conflict is ever-present. At times the number of private contractors has been larger than that of enlisted troops. In April 2008, there were 163,900 contractors and 160,000 enlisted troops in Iraq. But when most media reported the number of Americans in the war zone, they reported the number of enlisted troops and not the contractors. This results in a predictable under-estimate of American involvement and additional earnings for contractor providers. Every year, the defense industry donates millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress, creating pressure on the legislative branch to fund specific weapons systems, maintain an extremely high Pentagon budget, and add ever more military spending. In 2022 the weapons/defense industry donated $10.2 million to the 84 members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. And the wars continue. In his book "The United States of War," David Vine reports that, "In the nearly two decades since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has fought in at least 22 countries." If we are to escape a future of forever wars, all justifications for war should be questioned and debated before the killing starts.

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

The United Nations has delivered more than $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized control, resulting in the flow of U.S. funds to the extremist group, according to a recent government report. The U.N. deposits the cash into a private Afghan bank and disburses funds to the agency's aid organizations and nonprofit humanitarian groups. But the money does not stop there. Some winds up at the central bank of Afghanistan, which is under the control of the Taliban. The group took over the country after the withdrawal of U.S. forces in August 2021. The report, from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, provides the first detailed account of how U.S. cash falls under the control of the Taliban and adds to a growing body of evidence that contributions to the U.N. are not always reaching Afghans in need. After getting the money from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.N. flies shrink-wrapped $100 bills to the Kabul International Airport. The money arrives on a regular basis, as much as $40 million at a time. "Aid diversion does happen, and when it does, humanitarian work has to halt and solutions need to be found," said one U.N. official who was not authorized to make public comment. "There are cases where the Taliban seek to take control of distribution according to their priorities, or other cases where aid work is stopped altogether." The only way to stop [the diversion of foreign aid] would be to halt the flow of money.

Note: Read more about how the Taliban are now arms dealers after the US military left billions of dollars worth of weapons in Afghanistan. Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erik Prince has been many things in his 54 years on Earth: the wealthy heir to an auto supply company; a Navy SEAL; the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, which conducted a notorious 2007 massacre in the middle of Baghdad. Last November, Prince started a podcast called "Off Leash," which in its promotional copy says he "brings a unique and invaluable perspective to today's increasingly volatile world." On an episode last Tuesday, [he said] that the U.S. should "put the imperial hat back on" and take over and directly run huge swaths of the globe. Here's are Prince's exact words: "If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it's time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we're going to govern those countries ... 'cause enough is enough, we're done being invaded. You can say that about pretty much all of Africa, they're incapable of governing themselves." Prince's co-host Mark Serrano then warned him that listeners might hear his words and believe he means them: "People on the left are going to watch this," said Serrano, "and they're going to say, wait a minute, Erik Prince is talking about being a colonialist again." Prince responded: "Absolutely, yes." He then added that he thought this was a great concept not just for Africa but also for Latin America. Previous bouts of the European flavor of colonialism led to the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world.

Note: Erik Prince's Blackwater served as a "virtual extension of the CIA." Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

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