One year ago, I published my first investigation based on documents I obtained through the “Twitter Files.” I visited the San Francisco office of the social media company several times and took many notes. Below, I am republishing my initial investigation, which explores the secret assistance that Twitter gave to the Pentagon to assist with a fake account network used to manipulate Arabic-language communities in the Middle East. Twitter claimed that it shut down all state-backed influence operations, yet gave special tools to the U.S. military for its propaganda network.
TWITTER EXECUTIVES HAVE claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.
Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.
Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done to protect privacy, not Twitter.
THE DIRECT ASSISTANCE Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.
On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”
“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Twitter at the time had built out an expanded abuse detection system aimed in part toward flagging malicious activity related to the Islamic State and other terror organizations operating in the Middle East. As an indirect consequence of these efforts, one former Twitter employee explained, accounts controlled by the military that were frequently engaging with extremist groups were being automatically flagged as spam. The former employee, who was involved with the whitelisting of CENTCOM accounts, spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including @yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, @yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were “accurate” and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.
Other accounts on the list were focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq. One account discussed legal issues in Kuwait. Though many accounts remained focused on one topic area, others moved from topic to topic. For instance, @dala2el, one of the CENTCOM accounts, shifted from messaging around drone strikes in Yemen in 2017 to Syrian government-focused communications last year.
On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
One engineer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that he had never seen this type of tag before, but upon close inspection, said that the effect of the “whitelist” tag essentially gave the accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Twitter verification would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.
KAHLER TOLD TWITTER that the accounts would all be “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues.” That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
The Internet Archive does not preserve the full history of every account, but we identified several accounts that initially listed themselves as U.S. government accounts in their bios, but, after being whitelisted, shed any disclosure that they were affiliated with the military and posed as ordinary users.
This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”
The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.
The Stanford report did not definitively tie the sham accounts to CENTCOM or provide a complete list of Twitter accounts. But the emails I obtained show that the creation of at least one of these accounts was directly affiliated with the Pentagon.
One of the accounts that Kahler asked to have whitelisted, @mktashif, was identified by the researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to obscure its real identity. Initially, according to the Wayback Machine, @mktashif did disclose that it was a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM, but at some point, this disclosure was deleted and the account’s photo was changed to the one Stanford identified as a deep fake. The new Twitter bio claimed that the account was an unbiased source of opinion and information, and, roughly translated from Arabic, “dedicated to serving Iraqis and Arabs.” The account, before it was suspended last year, routinely tweeted messages denouncing Iran and other U.S. adversaries, including Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Another CENTCOM account, @althughur, which posts anti-Iran and anti-ISIS content focused on an Iraqi audience, changed its Twitter bio from a CENTCOM affiliation to an Arabic phrase that simply reads “Euphrates pulse.”
The former Twitter employee told me that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department’s shifting tactics. “It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s deeply concerning if the Pentagon is working to shape public opinion about our military’s role abroad and even worse if private companies are helping to conceal it,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a nonprofit that works toward diplomatic solutions to foreign conflicts.
“Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, our citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on our endless wars,” Sperling added.
FOR MANY YEARS, Twitter has pledged to shut down all state-backed disinformation and propaganda efforts, never making an explicit exception for the U.S. In 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles, in a testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said that the company was taking aggressive efforts to shut down “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” attributed to government agencies.
“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics,” said Pickles.
In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military. But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts.
The emails obtained by The Intercept show that not only did Twitter whitelist these accounts in 2017 explicitly at the behest of the military, but also that high-level officials at the company discussed the accounts as potentially problematic in the following years.
In the summer of 2020, officials from Facebook reportedly identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM’s influence operation on its platform and warned the Pentagon that if Silicon Valley could easily out these accounts as inauthentic, so could foreign adversaries, according to a September report in the Washington Post.
Twitter emails show that during that time in 2020, Facebook and Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon’s top attorneys to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, used for highly sensitive meetings.
“Facebook have had a series of 1:1 conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD’s [general counsel] re: inauthentic activity,” wrote Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at Twitter. “Per FB,” continued Roth, “DOD have indicated a strong desire to work with us to remove the activity — but are now refusing to discuss additional details or steps outside of a classified conversation.”
Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
Jim Baker, then the deputy general counsel of Twitter, in the same thread, wrote that the Pentagon appeared to have used “poor tradecraft” in setting up various Twitter accounts, sought to potentially cover its tracks, and was likely seeking a strategy for avoiding public knowledge that the accounts are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.” Baker speculated that in the meeting the “DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD.”
What was discussed at the classified meetings — which ultimately did take place, according to the Post — was not included in the Twitter emails provided to The Intercept, but many of the fake accounts remained active for at least another year. Some of the accounts on the CENTCOM list remain active even now — like this one, which includes affiliation with CENTCOM, and this one, which does not — while many were swept off the platform in a mass suspension on May 16.
In a separate email sent in May 2020, Lisa Roman, then a vice president of the company in charge of global public policy, emailed William S. Castle, a Pentagon attorney, along with Roth, with an additional list of Defense Department Twitter accounts. “The first tab lists those accounts previously provided to us and the second, associated accounts that Twitter has discovered,” wrote Roman. It’s not clear from this single email what Roman is requesting – she references a phone call preceding the email — but she notes that the second tab of accounts — the ones that had not been explicitly provided to Twitter by the Pentagon — “may violate our Rules.” The attachment included a batch of accounts tweeting in Russian and Arabic about human rights violations committed by ISIS. Many accounts in both tabs were not openly identified as affiliated with the U.S. government.
Twitter executives remained aware of the Defense Department’s special status. This past January, a Twitter executive recirculated the CENTCOM list of Twitter accounts originally whitelisted in 2017. The email simply read “FYI” and was directed to several Twitter officials, including Patrick Conlon, a former Defense Department intelligence analyst then working on the site integrity unit as Twitter’s global threat intelligence lead. Internal records also showed that the accounts that remained from Kahler’s original list are still whitelisted.
Following the mass suspension of many of the accounts this past May, Twitter’s team worked to limit blowback from its involvement in the campaign.
Shortly before publication of the Washington Post story in September, Katie Rosborough, then a communications specialist at Twitter, wrote to alert Twitter lawyers and lobbyists about the upcoming piece. “It’s a story that’s mostly focused on DoD and Facebook; however, there will be a couple lines that reference us alongside Facebook in that we reached out to them [DoD] for a meeting. We don’t think they’ll tie it to anything Mudge-related or name any Twitter employees. We declined to comment,” she wrote. (Mudge is a reference to Peiter Zatko, a Twitter whistleblower who filed a complaint with federal authorities in July, alleging lax security measures and penetration of the company by foreign agents.)
After the Washington Post’s story published, the Twitter team congratulated one another because the story minimized Twitter’s role in the CENTCOM psyop campaign. Instead, the story largely revolved around the Pentagon’s decision to begin a review of its clandestine psychological operations on social media.
“Thanks for doing all that you could to manage this one,” wrote Rebecca Hahn, another former Twitter communications official. “It didn’t seem to get too much traction beyond verge, cnn and wapo editors promoting.”
CENTCOM did not initially provide comment to The Intercept. Following publication of this story, CENTCOM’s media desk referred The Intercept to Brigadier Gen. Pat Ryder’s comments in a September briefing, in which he said that the Pentagon had requested “a review of Department of Defense military information support activities, which is simply meant to be an opportunity for us to assess the current work that’s being done in this arena, and really shouldn’t be interpreted as anything beyond that.”
THE U.S. MILITARY and intelligence community have long pursued a strategy of fabricated online personas and third parties to amplify certain narratives in foreign countries, the idea being that an authentic-looking Persian-language news portal or a local Afghan woman would have greater organic influence than an official Pentagon press release.
Military online propaganda efforts have largely been governed by a 2006 memorandum. The memo notes that the Defense Department’s internet activities should “openly acknowledge U.S. involvement” except in cases when a “Combatant Commander believes that it will not be possible due to operational considerations.” This method of nondisclosure, the memo states, is only authorized for operations in the “Global War on Terrorism, or when specified in other Secretary of Defense execute orders.”
In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure known as Section 1631, a reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, further legally affirming clandestine psychological operations by the military in a bid to counter online disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, and other foreign adversaries.
In 2008, the U.S. Special Operations Command opened a request for a service to provide “web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” The contract referred to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, an effort to create online news sites designed to win hearts and minds in the battle to counter Russian influence in Central Asia and global Islamic terrorism. The contract was initially carried out by General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics, in connection with CENTCOM communication offices in the Washington, D.C., area and in Tampa, Florida.
A program known as “WebOps,” run by a defense contractor known as Colsa Corp., was used to create fictitious online identities designed to counter online recruitment efforts by ISIS and other terrorist networks.
I spoke to a former employee of a contractor — on the condition of anonymity for legal protection — engaged in these online propaganda networks for the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. He described a loose newsroom-style operation, employing former journalists, operating out of a generic suburban office building.
“Generally what happens, at the time when I was there, CENTCOM will develop a list of messaging points that they want us to focus on,” said the contractor. “Basically, they would, we want you to focus on say, counterterrorism and a general framework that we want to talk about.”
From there, he said, supervisors would help craft content that was distributed through a network of CENTCOM-controlled websites and social media accounts. As the contractors created content to support narratives from military command, they were instructed to tag each content item with a specific military objective. Generally, the contractor said, the news items he created were technically factual but always crafted in a way that closely reflected the Pentagon’s goals.
“We had some pressure from CENTCOM to push stories,” he added, while noting that he worked at the sites years ago, before the transition to more covert operations. At the time, “we weren’t doing any of that black-hat stuff.”
And with the 2024 US presidential election less than a year away, both Google and its video sharing platform, YouTube, have confirmed that they plan to censor content they deem to be “harmful” in the run-up to the election.
In its announcement, Google noted that it already censors content that it deems to be “manipulated media” or “hate and harassment” — two broad, subjective terms that have been used by tech giants to justify masscensorship.
However, ahead of 2024, the tech giant has started using large language models (LLMs) to experiment with “building faster and more adaptable” censorship systems that will allow it to “take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”
Google will also be censoring election-related responses in Bard (its generative AI chatbot) and Search Generative Experience (its generative AI search results).
Like Google, YouTube confirmed that it will enforce its existing censorship policies ahead of the 2024 elections, including those that apply to election “misinformation” and “harmful conspiracy theories.” These policies resulted in the censorship of tens of thousands of videos and many popular channels in the buildup to and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
Additionally, YouTube will demonetize videos that it deems to contain “demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in elections.”
While Israel is causing starvation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers are cheerfully filming themselves destroying food, looting, and vandalizing Palestinian property.
Defence for Children Palestine | December 18, 2023
Dunia A., 12, and her family were struck by an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip. Dunia’s family was killed and she lost her leg.
While she was recovering in Naser Hospital in Khan Younis, an Israeli tank-fired shell hit the hospital and killed Dunia. This video was filmed on November 25 during a seven-day truce between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups and Dunia was killed on December 17, 2023.
WASHINGTON – California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis on Wednesday wrote to Secretary of State Shirley Weber demanding that she explore “every legal option” to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot.
“Based on the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling in Anderson v. Griswold (2023 CO 63), I urge you [Weber] to explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential ballot,” Kounalakis wrote in her letter.
Kounalakis said she was prompted by the ruling to conclude that Trump is ineligible to appear on the state ballot as a presidential candidate due to his alleged involvement in the so-called insurrection on January 6, 2021. Kounalakis also said Colorado’s decision could serve as the basis for a similar decision in California.
“California must stand on the right side of history,” the letter said. “The constitution is clear: you must be 40 years old and not be an insurrectionist.”
The White house has said on its website that the US Constitution lists three qualifications for the presidency – the president must be at least 35 years old, be a natural born citizen and must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years.
On Tuesday night, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump is disqualified from the 2024 Republican primary ballot due to his role in the events on January 6 at the US Capitol, citing the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. The amendment restricts people who are engaged in insurrection from holding public office.
The Trump campaign described the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling as being a “flowed decision” and said they will appeal.
Former US Senate aide Tara Reade, who has accused US President Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her while serving as a senator, filed a civil rights complaint against the FBI on Wednesday. Reade’s attorney says the federal government sought to intimidate and harass her during and after the 2020 election campaign.
In a complaint sent to the Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Justice, Reade called for an investigation of FBI practices that “target Biden family whistleblowers for exercise of their First Amendment right to free speech,” according to a press release by Dr. Jonathan Levy, her London-based attorney.
Reade also requested copies of all information about her that the FBI may have obtained “through unconstitutional surveillance, search, and seizure tactics” and to have her FBI file expunged.
In a letter to the DOJ seen by RT, Levy described how the FBI – and, in particular, its Sacramento, California office – allegedly began an “operation” against Reade after April 2019 “in order to silence and surveil her and if possible falsely arrest her for criminal activities.”
At the time that the purported FBI probe began, Reade had just made public that Biden, then a US senator, had allegedly subjected her to a “violent sexual assault” on the Capitol grounds in 1993. Though she had reported the incident through the proper channels, her case was “suppressed by Congressional investigators to protect Senator Biden and the records sealed,” according to Levy.
Reade was not “an agent or associate” of former President Donald Trump, whom Biden challenged in the 2020 election, nor was she sponsored by any political organization or made any monetary demands of Biden, Levy noted. The attorney also pointed out that there was no indication of her involvement in any criminal activity.
According to the complaint, the FBI launched its operation “for the specific purpose of unlawfully intimidating, harassing, surveilling, and discrediting,” as well as potentially arresting Reade. Among those allegedly involved, Levy named Director Christopher Wray, Special Agent Michael Catalano, and NCA1 Supervisory Senior Resident Agent Andrew D. Forristel.
The lawsuit demands “an investigation of FBI practices” that led to a whistleblower becoming the target of a federal grand jury investigation and a criminal probe in California, “even after she requested FBI protection from death threats.” The DOJ IG was also asked to investigate the extent of the FBI’s alleged surveillance of Reade, including her “social media, communications and financial accounts,” and to provide copies of all the records thus obtained before they are expunged from her FBI dossier.
Reade has sought to protect her reputation by writing a book and starting a podcast. She has also contributed a number of articles to RT about the weaponization of sexual misconduct charges and whistleblower retaliation, among other subjects.
Earlier this year, fearing arrest for “an ominous menu of kangaroo-court offenses,” she sought political asylum in Russia while visiting Moscow.
Hamas political leaders are in talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) about how to govern Gaza and the West Bank after the war with Israel ends, with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)reported on 20 December.
“We don’t fight just because we want to fight. We are not partisans of a zero-sum game,” Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’ Doha-based political bureau, stated. “We want the war to end.”
The Hamas leader’s statement marks a change from 7 October, when the armed wing of the group led an assault on Israeli military bases and settlements in which more than 1,200 Israelis were killed, both by Hamas and Israeli forces themselves due to the Hannibal Directive.
Hamas wished to break the 17-year siege on Gaza and put the Palestinian issue back on the table in the international arena.
During the attack, Hamas took over 200 Israeli soldiers and civilians captive hoping to exchange them for the freedom of thousands of Palestinians long held in Israeli prisons.
Now, after Israel has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’s political wing is seeking an end to the conflict.
“We want to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Badran said.
Badran also stated Hamas wishes to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which represents Palestinians at the United Nations and other international forums.
“It will be a national dialogue,” Badran said. “We have always said the PLO should contain any Palestinian faction.”
Badran and other Hamas officials say the talks have also included Mohammed Dahlan, a former Gaza security chief with close Emirati and Egyptian support, and former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
“I am no friend of Hamas,” Dahlan said. “But do you think anybody is going to be able to run to make peace without Hamas?”
The Hamas political leaders indicated they would be willing to join the PLO and support negotiations for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
But Badran said that Hamas had no plans to recognize Israel as long as the occupation continues. “The world has no right to ask when people are being killed,” he said. “It’s not logical to ask this question at this time.”
Badran denied rumors of a division between Hamas’ Gaza branch and its political leadership in Doha. “The leadership of Hamas, both inside Gaza and outside it, is in complete agreement on strategies and political positions across various issues,” he said.
Badran says Hamas is seeking a full-scale ceasefire and a full exchange of captives from both sides. “If there is a ceasefire, our stance is crystal clear: We want an exchange of all-for-all,” he said.
Israel has for years sought to foster divisions between Hamas and the PA, led by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he has for years approved Qatari payments to Hamas in Gaza, while ensuring the PA remained weak and unable to win the establishment of a Palestinian state through peaceful diplomatic means.
Israel has also sought to use the PA security forces to dismantle Palestinian resistance groups in the West Bank.
The US and Israel appear to disagree on a final solution for Gaza. The US wants a PA security force to crack down on Hamas after the war and to administer Gaza, said Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian peace negotiator. “They essentially want the PA’s role as Israel’s security subcontractor in the West Bank to be expanded into Gaza,” she said.
Buttu said the US is willing provide renewed financial and political support for the PA to maintain what New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman this summer called the “shared fiction” of a Palestinian state. “There is a longstanding and continuing false promise of Palestinian statehood,” Buttu added.
However, Israel has vowed it will not allow the PA to take control in Gaza. Numerous Israeli political and military figures have called for destroying Gaza, forcing its 2.3 million residents to flee to Egypt or Europe as refugees, and to rebuild the Jewish settlement in Gush Katif on the Gaza coast that was evacuated in 2005.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman has strongly condemned the Israeli regime’s complicity in drafting and approving the human rights resolution against the Islamic Republic, saying the move is nothing but a big political and moral scandal for Western countries.
Nasser Kan’ani made the remarks in a statement on Wednesday, noting that the action of some Western countries in drafting and approving a resolution against Iran in the United Nations General Assembly on the issue of human rights “is a clear example of the double standard and the use of human rights as a tool for illegitimate political purposes.”
He said the human rights resolution against Iran was proposed by some Western countries while these nations are turning a blind eye to the Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and some of them are fully supporting the criminal regime.
“This regime is a criminal, and even more ridiculous is that it is also one of the co-founders of the resolution against Iran,” Kan’ani added, emphasizing that the Israeli collusion devalues the concept of human rights.
He further stressed that countries that have a long history of systematically violating human rights all over are not in a position to give human rights recommendations to the government and people of Iran, while reiterating that the resolution lacks any legitimacy or validity.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a system based on religious democracy and has always been very serious about promoting human rights and fulfilling its international obligations, he said.
On December 19, a resolution dubbed “Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran” was adopted in the third committee of the UN General Assembly, condemning what it claimed as “rights abuses against women” in the country.
The resolution was adopted by 80 votes in favor, 29 against, and 65 abstentions.
If the US decides to launch direct attacks on Yemeni forces imposing a blockade against Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, it will only make Washington’s tenuous situation in the Middle East worse and expand the conflict across the region at a time when the US public is increasingly opposed to such wars, a journalist told Sputnik.
Several major global shipping companies announced that they are to seek alternate routes from the Red Sea after the Yemeni militant group Ansarallah, better known as the Houthi movement, closed it to Israeli cargo traffic, throwing global trade into chaos. In response, the US has mobilized an international task force dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian to keep the sea lanes open.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is weighing whether its patrols will be purely defensive in nature or will also include offensive strikes against Ansarallah targets in Yemen, which the group mostly controls after eight years of brutal civil war and Saudi-led military intervention.
Ansarallah’s actions, which include capturing several Israel-linked vessels in the area in recent weeks, are in response to Tel Aviv’s invasion of Gaza, which has killed nearly 20,000 people and displaced almost the entire population of 2.3 million. The group has also fired ballistic missiles at the southern Israeli port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea.
Beirut-based broadcaster and journalist Laith Marouf told Sputnik that the multinational task force assembled by the US includes several European allies but also Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf state that hosts a massive US Navy base, and the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean with a coast guard composed of nine small patrol boats used to combat piracy and illegal fishing.
“This is the alliance that the United States is going to face Yemen with to try to allow shipping to go through to the Zionist colony and not make it feel the pain that the Palestinians are feeling with the blockade in Gaza,” he said.
“The [recent] attack that the government in Sana’a did on the two ships in the Red Sea was the first attack recorded in any military of a ballistic missile hitting a naval target that is moving at 60-somewhat knots, which was [the speed at which] these ships were moving. So we see now that the Yemenis have actually some of the most advanced land-to-sea missiles in the world.
“Knowing that the American aircraft carrier is now parked on the shorelines of Somalia facing Yemen, they are in the range of these missiles. Probably the Yemenis will not need to hit this aircraft carrier if the United States actually attacks Yemen or any of the sites of launching these missiles from Yemen. The Yemeni forces, all they have to do is sink a few destroyers and that aircraft carrier will scurry running back home because it wouldn’t have any protection.”
“This is now a dangerous game that the United States is playing, all to defend this Zionist colony. And the American people hearing us right now must understand that the deaths of any American soldiers that are going to come in the next few days will be because the United States is defending the Zionist colony and is not defending itself. They will be dying for the sake of Israel,” he said.
“Canadian, French, British and American ships will be sinking if the United States or this coalition dares to attack Yemen. Yemen has been under attack for a decade by the United States and its vassals in the region, and even the vassals that were co-operating in the attacks on Yemen – namely the Saudi government and the United Arab Emirates government – have refused to join this coalition. Why? Because their assets will be fried if the United States attacks Yemen. And this is why we’re seeing right now: these vassals are each one of them being given a role.”
“The Emirates and the Saudis are continuing to allow trade to come through their ports on trucks to Jordan to the Zionist colony, and they’re all going to be kept out of this war. In this situation, it’s not only that their assets, their oilfields, would be attacked if they join this coalition, but also because they need to continue to be the lifeline of the Zionist colony in terms of trade in the future as this rolls out,” Marouf said.
Marouf added that “we will be entering a new stage of this war” if Yemen fires back on the coalition ships because it will trigger wider attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria by allied militia forces, which have been happening at a somewhat low intensity since early October.
The Axis of Resistance’s regional coordination against Israel and its allies “is going to be taught in military schools and strategists’ schools for decades to come,” Marouf told Sputnik.
“What has been rolling out for the last two and a half months, clearly, the Resistance Axis that includes all these groups in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Yemen and Iran are very coordinated,” he said.
“They have all now shared all their capabilities in terms of military and training. So we see units of each one of these components that fought in the different battlefields across the last 15 years in the region. And the technology knowledge on building capabilities has been passed along across this whole region. So now we have a more kind of homogeneous coalition between these groups.
“They all have one thing that they agree on, which is ending American presence in the region and then sovereignty for the peoples. So to see them, how they are playing out right now, each one of them, their own role separately is a brilliant thing to watch. And the United States and Israel are in a quagmire, and the end is clear for everybody to see.”
Growing US Public Opposition
He likewise noted that opposition to the Israeli attack on Gaza has continued to grow in the United States, where new protests are happening daily in hundreds of cities and towns, and constituents are pressuring politicians to take a stand against the war.
“For the American voters, it’s becoming problematic as we come closer and closer to the elections in the United States. Both parties are championing genocide and the Zionist colony, and the vast majority of Americans do not want to be associated with this genocide and do not want their country to carry the brunt of financing and weaponizing this genocide,” he said.
“So what happens in the next election? I think Palestine, just like Vietnam in the 1970s, is going to be one of the decisive things that drive this election and actually the conversation of the United States as a whole. And I hope people of all walks of life take advantage of how Palestine now has exposed all the true lines of power and the limitations of the so-called ‘democracy and freedoms’ that were touted to be given to them and figure out something before the next election. Maybe to push for a third party, if that’s even possible at this moment.”
“But if the United States is in a regional war that is spilling into a global war before this election, it may be that this election will never happen in the United States. I’m maybe too pessimistic, but I see things from now till next year, if this war keeps on going in the stages that are and how long these stages are taking us, as we see it now, it’s taking us two and a half months to get to the stage of real possibility of a regional war. And once this a regional war, how long is it going to take for it to become a global world war? Those are things that may be indicating that all this experiment of democracy in the West is dead.”
Israel’s Economy in Dire Straits
Marouf noted that Israel was suffering severe economic repercussions due to the war, not just from the recently imposed Yemeni blockade, but also due to the constant bombardments from Gaza, the simmering border war with Hezbollah, and simply due to having mobilized hundreds of thousands of citizens into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
“There are 7 million ‘Jewish colonists’ in Palestine and already close to a million of them have left. And you know, many of them already have second citizenships, and we heard countries like Portugal all talk about 10,000 Israeli families applying for citizenship. These are the ones that don’t have citizenship that are already applying to European countries. And so we have an exit from the Zionist colony on a scale that we haven’t seen ever since 1948. And now we also, of course, all the economy of the state is at a total standstill because they have mobilized so many people into the military.”
“Ansarullah, the government in Yemen, has been able to shut down all trade, almost 88% of trade has stopped into the [Israeli] ports, even the ones in the Mediterranean. Because remember now, although all the ones that were supposed to go to the Red Sea port in the Aqaba Gulf had to turn around.
“So now there’s a delay in an empty space in Israeli ports for the next two weeks. So, the country is in a total standstill and it’s now living off the handouts coming from the West. And the American public has an ability to make a difference if they cut these handouts, because this country cannot continue to exist at this moment without that.”
The Malaysian government has imposed an indefinite ban on vessels owned by an Israeli shipping cargo company from docking at its ports in response to the bloody Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Ships en route to the occupied Palestinian territories and Israeli-flagged vessels will also be barred from loading cargo at any port in the largely Muslim Southeast Asian nation.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said in a statement on Wednesday that the Transport Ministry has been instructed to enforce the ban with immediate effect.
Anwar singled out Israel’s biggest shipping firm ZIM.
Malaysia’s cabinet had in 2002 authorized Israeli-registered companies to dock vessels at Malaysian ports; and in 2005, allowed Israeli-registered ships to anchor in Malaysia. However, Wednesday’s statement said that authorizations had been rescinded.
“The Malaysian government decided to block and disallow the Israeli-based shipping company ZIM from docking at any Malaysian port,” Anwar said.
“These sanctions are a response to Israel’s actions that ignore basic humanitarian principles and violate international law through the ongoing massacre and brutality against Palestinians.”
Malaysia “also decided to no longer accept ships using the Israeli flag to dock in the country” and ban “any ship on its way to Israel from loading cargo in Malaysian ports.”
Anwar said his country was confident its trade would not be affected by the decision.
Malaysia does not have diplomatic ties with Israel.
Malaysians have kept up a strong show of support for the Palestinian people’s struggle to claim their sovereign rights, and strongly condemned the cruelties being perpetrated by the Israeli regime in Gaza.
Malaysians in various parts of the country have held marches and motorcycle convoys to voice their support for the Palestinian people, who are suffering from oppression and atrocities committed by the Israeli regime.
Muslim scholars have called on all people to show undivided support for Palestine because the Palestinian issue is related to humanity and not just religion.
Israel waged the brutal war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,667 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 52,586 others.
Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.
The US-led joint patrol in the Red Sea following Houthi militia attacks against ships heading toward Israel shows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in Gaza is not only affecting the whole region, but also the international community. Chinese analysts pointed out that the root cause of the trade route problem is the ongoing conflict in Gaza, and only a sustainable cease-fire and allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza via land and sea routes can solve the problem in the Red Sea.
China will pay close attention to the situation, and Chinese naval vessels that conduct UN authorized anti-piracy missions in the region will keep performing their duty, analysts said, adding that China will stick to the priority of realizing a cease-fire and clear the way for humanitarian aid for the people in Gaza, rather than joining the US to conduct any military operations without UN authorization to escalate the crisis in Gaza.
The US and a host of other nations are creating a new force to protect ships transiting the Red Sea that have come under attack by drones and ballistic missiles fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Tuesday in Bahrain, the AP reported.
The UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain have joined, Austin said. Some of those countries will conduct joint patrols while others will provide intelligence support in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
The Houthi militia attacked two commercial ships in the Red Sea with naval drones on Monday. The recent attacks have caused concerns about the impact on the passage of oil, grain and other goods on what is an important global trade route, and have pushed up the cost of insuring and shipping goods through the Red Sea, Reuters reported.
The Shanghai-based news website The Paper reported on Tuesday that following other international shipping companies including Denmark’s Maersk and France’s CMA, Chinese shipping giants like COSCO and Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) also suspended transport through the Red Sea.
Ma Xiaolin, dean of the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean Rim at Zhejiang International Studies University, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the trade route via the Red Sea is truly important for China as it connects Europe, Asia and Africa, so China will pay close attention to the situation.
“However, although China has naval vessels in the region, their mission is about anti-piracy, rather than intervening in regional issues and other countries’ internal affairs. Only a solution to the ongoing crisis in Gaza can effectively solve the problem in the Red Sea,” Ma said.
On December 9, Al Jazeera reported that the armed group in Yemen claimed that “it will target all ships heading to Israel, regardless of their nationality, and warned all international shipping companies against dealing with Israeli ports.”
“If Gaza does not receive the food and medicines it needs, all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality, will become a target for our armed forces,” the group’s spokesperson said in a statement on Saturday, according to Al Jazeera.
Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the “Houthis are specifically targeting Israel, so it’s unlikely it will attack Chinese vessels. China doesn’t need to be too worried about the situation and the Chinese warships in the region will stick to their plan.”
“China will keep making efforts to realize a sustainable cease-fire and clear the way for humanitarian aid to get into the Gaza Strip. This is the real priority that needs to be done,” Wang Jin, an associate professor at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwest University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
If Washington and its allies want to solve the Red Sea problem, they should play a responsible role in the UN Security Council to pass a cease-fire resolution and to put concrete efforts into improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which would be more effective than sending warships to conduct joint patrols, experts said.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains severe. According to Reuters on Tuesday, Israeli missiles and air strikes on the Rafah area in southern Gaza struck three houses killing at least 20 Palestinians, Gaza health officials said on Tuesday. Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have crammed into Rafah on Gaza’s border with Egypt to escape Israeli bombardments.
The lack of unity in the UN that is mainly caused by the US is another key reason why the situation is far from easing. The UN Security Council delayed until Tuesday morning a vote on an Arab-sponsored resolution calling for a halt to hostilities in Gaza to allow for urgently needed aid deliveries to a massive number of civilians as members intensified negotiations to try to avoid another veto by the US, the AP reported.
Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a routine press conference on Tuesday that “the UN General Assembly has adopted two resolutions with an overwhelming majority. We hope the US will listen to the voice of the international community, stop single-handedly blocking Security Council resolutions, and play its due role to promote an immediate cease-fire and prevent an even larger humanitarian catastrophe.”
The UK appears to be close to launching a new dangerous anti-Russian naval policy. According to reports, the British Navy will send new combat ships and heavy weapons to the Black Sea in order to help Ukraine strengthen its regional presence there. It appears that a formal agreement between both countries will be signed in the near future, setting out the terms for naval cooperation, which will obviously result in increased tensions with Russia.
The data was published by The Telegraph. The outlet’s sources claim that the agreement between the UK and Ukraine will be signed “in the coming weeks”, generating expanded British participation in the activities of the Ukrainian Navy. The Black Sea, which is currently a conflict zone between Russian and Ukrainian forces, is expected to receive a large number of British military ships that will support Kiev in hostilities.
The news comes shortly after the British Ministry of Defense announced the sending of at least two mine clearing ships to Ukraine. The measure was taken within the framework of a coalition of naval support for Kiev that also involves Norway. As the UK is one of the most active sponsors of the Ukrainian regime, constantly sending packages of weapons and equipment to Kiev, the delivery was not seen as something “surprising” at the time, but, apparently, London still plans to further deepen its interventionism, starting to participate in even more actions in the Black Sea.
According to anonymous sources mentioned by the newspaper, the new agreement would also make it possible to send heavy ground and air weapons, with the aim of making Ukrainian units close to the Black Sea more “interoperable” with NATO. More modern and lethal versions of British ship-based Brimstone missiles are also expected to supply the Ukrainian Navy, giving it more capability for the high-intensity fighting that is currently taking place in the region.
In addition, it is planned to advance in the training of commando troops focused on amphibious assault and mine-clearing operations. The UK has been training many Ukrainian troops since the beginning of the Russian military intervention. It is estimated that more than 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers were trained by the British last year as part of the so-called “Operation Interflex”. Now, it is believed that, under the new agreement, the Navy’s special forces training programs will be expanded.
Unconfirmed rumors also indicate that the new security pact between the UK and Kiev will have as one of its objectives to provide guarantees to Ukraine regarding post-conflict British aid. Faced with Ukraine’s evident military defeat, concerns are growing about possible aid packages to rebuild Ukraine in a post-war scenario, which is why Kiev officials are expected to pressure their partners to include guarantees in this regard in new agreements signed with Western countries.
In fact, all these measures seem irresponsible and anti-strategic from a realistic point of view. It is more than clear that no Western aid will be able to make Ukraine reverse the military scenario of the conflict, which is absolutely controlled by the Russian Federation. Defeats on the battlefield, territorial losses and the humiliating failure of their attempted “counteroffensive” have proven that Kiev’s forces have no chance of defeating their adversaries, and that it is pointless to continue supporting the neo-Nazi regime with weapons, money and equipment.
The situation is particularly delicate for Ukraine in the Black Sea, where Russia is focused on destroying all enemy targets, including suspicious commercial ships and critical infrastructure. Kiev has been using the region’s ports to store weapons, as well as transporting military equipment and troops via ships disguised as commercial vessels. After suffering several attacks against its territory due to the Ukrainian military use of civilian naval infrastructure, Moscow decided to consider such suspicious ships and ports as legitimate targets.
In this sense, the UK may be making a serious mistake by planning to expand its participation in Black Sea’s hostilities. British ships sent to the Ukrainian Navy will be seen by the Russians as a priority target and it is likely that most of the vessels will be neutralized even before they begin to be operated by Kiev’s forces. Moscow is not willing to tolerate any foreign interventionism in the region and is focused on preventing further attacks on Russian civilians from Ukrainian units in the Black Sea, so there will certainly be efforts to destroy all equipment sent by London.
Instead of creating new military agreements and aid packages, the West should simply encourage Kiev to negotiate peace, ending hostilities without further damage.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
The US must ensure Russia does not defeat Ukraine in order to preserve America’s global hegemony, Republican Congressman Rich McCormick has said in an interview with C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.
The comments come as US lawmakers remain deadlocked over continued financial assistance to Kiev. Republicans have refused to support President Joe Biden’s latest military aid package, including an additional $60 billion for Ukraine, unless a deal is reached on domestic border security and significant immigration reforms.
Georgia Congressman McCormick was asked to comment on concerns that the US could end up “betraying Ukraine” if it delays further assistance, spelling defeat for Kiev’s forces. The lawmaker stressed that he supports Ukraine, while claiming that “every single former [US] secretary of defense” that he has talked to also believes that Washington must prevent a Russian victory.
“First of all, we made a promise. To support a country that was invaded by a communist country,” McCormick said. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, and Russia has not been a communist nation ever since.
The congressman further insisted that the Russia-Ukraine conflict was a “fight between democracy and autocracy.”
Kiev’s defeat, McCormick continued, would not only affect all of Europe, but also the Far East, where he suggested China would invade Taiwan and threaten US microchip supplies. It would also mean that Ukraine’s vast amounts of grain, steel, titanium, and other resources “would make Russia stronger” and “support China,” which would “break up the US global leadership,” he claimed.
“This is a very important battle we need to have,” McCormick insisted, adding that “we can’t continue to slow roll this” and that the US and Europe must do their part to “end this quickly.”
Moscow has repeatedly described the Ukraine conflict as a proxy war being waged against Russia by the US. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Washington is willing to fight Moscow “until the last Ukrainian.”
Putin also claimed last week that Kiev’s desperation over its failed counteroffensive had caused it to send troops on suicide missions in an attempt to breach Russian positions. “I don’t even know why they do that,” the Russian leader said, adding that Ukrainian soldiers themselves describe some operations as a “one-way trip.”
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
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Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
