What’s Behind U.S./Israeli Strikes On Iranian Pistachio Factories?
Inside The Role Zionist Billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick Have Played In Shaping The Iran War
The Dissident | April 6, 2026
Open source reports have indicated that “The pistachio warehouses of Iranian Pistachio Company near Rafsanjan Airport were targeted by American/Israeli fighter jets in the first week of Farvardin”, “ which has been described as “the heart of Iran’s pistachio industry.”
This strike was likely a gift to Lynne and Stewart Resnick, the Zionist billionaires who own the California-based Wonderful company, the largest producer of pistachios in the world.
Investigative journalist Yasha Levine has documented that Lynne and Stewart Resnick took over the pistachio market after the U.S. embargo on Iran in 1979, noting that, “For as long as anyone can remember, Iran had been the world’s main supplier of pistachios. But Carter’s 1979 embargo on the country effectively cut off Iranian pistachio growers from the American market and created a need for alternative pistachio production, which was virtually nonexistent in the United States.” Adding, “the Resnicks began to snap up thousands of acres from Mobil Oil and Texaco in order to create pistachio and almond orchards. They steadily bought up more and more acreage all through the 1980s for rock-bottom prices because of a long period of drought. By the end of the decade, the Resnicks had amassed enough farmland to rival Oligarch Valley’s biggest and oldest billionaire farmer clans: 100,000 acres—nearly 160 square miles—growing cotton, pistachios, almonds, oranges, lemons and grapefruit. They didn’t just grow the crops, but packaged, processed and distributed them as well.”
In a 2008 interview with the Independent, Stewart Resnick stated his desire to keep up American hostilities with Iran in order to corner the pistachio market.
“Three years ago, with the flourish of a visionary, pistachio king Stewart Resnick, the chief executive of processor Paramount Farms, started paying growers about twice what they were used to getting for their nuts,” the Independent noted, adding:
“How does one create enough demand for the increased supply that’s coming on in the industry?” Mr Resnick asked at a Paramount conference last week in Monterey.
His answer: export them, especially to Europe. Paramount plans to sell 300 million pounds of pistachios around the world over the next five years, with Europe representing nearly a third of that target.
The article added, “Along the way, it will run into its old foe, Iran. The man on Paramount’s front line taking on the challenge is the vice-president of worldwide sales, Mark Masten. ‘We don’t mind stealing share from the Iranians,’ he declared last week.”
As Yasha Levine has documented, Resnick has helped keep American hostilities with Iran going by funding neocon and Zionist think tanks lobbying for a hawkish American policy towards Iran.
“Economic sanctions are what have allowed the Resnicks to create their pistachio empire, which would suffer a severe blow if relations with Iran were ever normalized. Iran’s pistachios are considered to be superior to America’s, so much so that Israelis still buy Iranian pistachios shipped in through Turkey” Levine noted, adding that the “Resnicks did what any smart and ruthless American would do: they made common cause with oil companies, Islamophobes, neocons and Likudniks, and began funneling money to think tanks and political advocacy groups that take a hardline approach with Iran. Economic sanctions, sabotage, vilification—all these things worked in the Resnicks’ interest. Bombing some of Iran’s pistachio fields wouldn’t be so bad, either”.
Levine documented that:
Tax filings from 2008 show that Stewart Resnick and his wife Lynda are on the board of trustees of the highly influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, which was created as an AIPAC spin-off in the ’80s. In the realms of US government mid-east policy and media reporting about the region, the think tank is considered to be one of the most influential in the country. It is also ridiculously hawkish on Iran, calling for heavy sanctions and military strikes against the country. In 2005, the Resnick Foundation gave $20,000 to the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy. Unfortunately, the real amount of money the Resnicks have given to the institute is hard to gauge, as any funds that did not go through their personal foundation would not have to be reported on any of their IRS documents.
Stewart Resnick is also board member of the American Friends of IDC, a not-for-profit foundation that serves as the fundraising arm of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a think tank with close links to the Israeli intelligence and military establishment. Like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Herzliya is considered to be the most influential think tank in Israel on security matters. American Friends of IDC funneled $10 million to Herzliya in 2006.
Yasha Levine noted in 2018 that , “Stewart and Lynda Resnick are donors and supporters of of some of the most powerful and influential neoconservative organizations in America, including the AIPAC spinoff WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) where they have been on and off the board for over a decade. WINEP has been extremely hawkish on Iran. One of its executives has openly called on Israel to provoke a war with Iran in order to pull in the United States.”
“Through their family foundation, the Resnicks have also funneled money to the American Jewish Committee, which is one of the most active lobbyists pushing for a sweeping Iran sanctions bill that was eventually signed into law by Obama in 2010,” Levine added.
He also documented in 2024 that the Resnicks, have “given anywhere from $500,000 to $200,000 to the Israeli military every year, with most of it funneled through an outfit called the American Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces”, noting that this is done through a convergence of their loyalty to Israel and their pistachio monopoly “based off of U.S. meddling in the Middle East”.
Levine noted this January :
The Resnicks’ personal Zionist politics and their business politics are very much in alignment. It’s also very circular because American foreign policy created the Resnicks’ business: US meddling in Iran and subsequent economic sanctions created the conditions for the emergence of California’s pistachio industry. Then profits from that industry circulate and cycle right back into this imperial machine that works to basically create a consensus in America that Iran is our greatest enemy. When I first started reporting on the Resnicks back in 2009, there were numerous domestic Jewish lobby groups who were lobbying against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. At the time, the Resnicks were giving a lot of money to those Jewish organizations. Then, over the years, they have donated millions to American Friends of the IDF and sat on the board of the hawkish Middle East policy think tank, Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They are recycling their profits right back into supporting the imperial logic that made their business possible.
While America is losing the war with Iran, the Resnicks seem to be profiting from their investment in the war.
The New York Times reported :
More than a month into the war with Iran, ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is at historically low levels, which has stymied exports from the region.
The potential removal of a major player in the market is good news for farmers in California, who are likely to get higher prices for their pistachios.
“With this war, it’s going to limit what Iran is able to do, able to ship, to customers in Europe and China,” said Adam Orandi, who farms 1,600 acres of pistachio orchards in the San Joaquin Valley. His father imported saplings from Iran in the 1970s.
Given this context, the U.S./Israeli strikes on Iranian pistachio warehouses can be best seen as a gift to Lynne and Stewart Resnick, who have funded the Zionist and Neo-con lobbies behind the war based on a convergence of their Zionist loyalties and desire to corner the pistachio and take out a potential competitor.
Battle for Hungary: EU attacks on Orban are a sign of worse things to come
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | March 28, 2026
About a century ago – between those two World Wars which Europeans have generously given to the history of humanity – there was a joke about Hungary: It was a monarchy without a king and a landlocked country ruled by an admiral. It was funny because it was true.
Nowadays, though, we have proudly advanced. Now, we have a whole European Union, with 27 member states and 450 million people, run by an unelected German who really serves the US and has, a bit like Siegfried or Brunhilde, a special “shield” (about which more below) to protect a “democracy” administered and defined by an non-transparent, privileged, and aloof nomenklatura of equally unelected bureaucrats.
Contemporary Hungary, meanwhile, is, by the sober standards of reality, by no means a perfect but a perfectly normal country, that is, neither better nor worse than most of the rest. No longer a weird monarchy with a gaping hole at the top but a run-of-the-mill Western-style capitalist democracy, it has a feisty prime minister for a leader instead of an admiral without a coast. That prime minister, Viktor Orban, is a typical if especially canny and successful professional politician, who combines a knack for crowd appeal, demagoguery included, with deft political power plays.
It is true, if electoral districts need re-designing in Hungary, the party in power is likely to favor its own chances, just like they do in the EU’s big “daddy” the US, for instance. Likewise, if you are doing business in Hungary, being close to the party – or parties –in power tends to be better for your company. But that’s no different in, again, the US (with the caveat that there the current president and his extensive clan are now taking an extra large cut for themselves). Or, indeed, in Germany and France. The latter, as it happens, has just reached a new low in Transparency International’s annual corruption index.
Hungary may not have unbiased mass media, as its critics indignantly charge. But then, who does? Certainly not Germany, Britain, France, or, for that matter, the US. As a matter of fact, it is the EU and the German authorities which are currently obstinately misusing a sanctions regime designed for foreign policy purposes – and not working, but that’s another matter – to circumvent ordinary legal procedures, trample on civil and human rights, and punitively destroy the existence of individual dissidents and critical journalist.
Hungary’s elections may suffer from that media slant and some sharp administrative practice, too. But that again, is at least equally true of all major states in Europe and of the US as well. Indeed, say what you will about voting under real-existing Orbanism, it has not featured the brutal, EU-driven manipulation we have recently seen in Romania and Moldova.
And there is also nothing comparable in Orban’s Hungary to the extremely suspicious (to say the least) manner in which the last German elections featured a statistically bizarre accumulation of “mistakes” that eliminated the New-Left BSW from parliament.
Since it seems likely that a correct – or clean – result would make Germany’s current ruling coalition impossible, the implications of this case of deeply flawed elections at the very center of the EU are most disturbing: at this point, Germany may have an electorally baseless government, the German parliament’s refusal to permit a clearly necessary recount is either more foul play or indistinguishable from it, and Berlin’s political course – domestically and abroad – would be principally different under a government that would have to rely on the correct election results.
And let’s not even mention minor details, such as that Hungary’s mixed election system (combining first-past-the-post districts and national party lists) is far more representative than that of that “cradle of parliamentary democracy” and police-state-for-Zionism Great Britain.
In view of the above, you would expect, if anything, Budapest going after Brussels as well as some other individual EU member states to demand better democratic behavior. But this is the alternative-reality world of the EU’s sectarian “elite,” where genocidal Israel is only defending itself, “Europe is the values of the Talmud” (perish the thought its history may have a little more to do with first Christian and then Enlightenment ideas), the US is a good and reliable ally, and four white, blonde women serving the same radical Centrism proudly constitute “diversity.”
Hence, in topsy-turvy land, it is, obviously, once again the EU that is charging Hungary with flunking the test of “democracy.” That, in and of itself, might not be important: words are cheap. The problem is that, as before in Romania and even Moldova – not even a member state – the EU Commission has long passed from mere talk, at which it excels, to mean action, which makes everything only worse. Indeed, the EU’s meddling in Hungary has recently escalated.
The catalyst for this escalation is the upcoming Hungarian election. To be held on April 12, domestically, back in Hungary, the outcome will merely decide if Orban can stay in power – which he has been without interruption since 2010 – or will be replaced by the opposition’s new hope, Peter Magyar, a former Orbanist himself. Yet there are good reasons Politico has called these “the EU’s most important elections” this year despite the fact that Hungary is a small country of less than 10 million citizens.
For one thing, Orban is the primus inter pares of a group of very inconvenient sovereigntist rebels inside the EU, which also includes Slovakia’s leader Robert Fico, the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babis and, occasionally but with special weight, Bart de Wever from Belgium, which is an EU founding member. Orban’s toppling would not only weaken this loose group of leaders that still remember that they are supposed to serve their countries first but also make for a chilling object lesson in what happens to those frustrating Brussels too much.
Especially, if they resist the Commission party line on three topics: the relationship with Russia, the Western – now entirely EU-financed – proxy war waged against Moscow by means of Ukraine, and, last but not least, money, in particular money to be wasted – or not – on Kiev’s Zelensky regime. In all three areas, Orban has been Brussel’s main irritant, consistently arguing for normalization with Russia through diplomacy, a quick negotiated end to the proxy war, and an end also to the pathological inter-dependence with Zelensky’s ultra-corrupt and extremely dangerous regime.
Recently, this Hungarian resistance has led to repeated clashes with both the EU establishment and Kiev. Zelensky has publicly threatened Orban with violence in the worst Mafia style; Budapest has taken action against extremely suspicious transports of tens of millions of euro and dollars as well as bullion to Kiev; Hungary and Ukraine have been sparring over Kiev’s attempts to block the Druzhba pipeline; Budapest has been blocking yet another massive “loan” (never to be paid back) for Zelensky and his crew, and, most recently, Orban has called on Kiev to immediately withdraw its agents and operatives from Hungary.
And, by the way, you may suspect Orban of seeking an electoral boost. But even if that is the case, it makes no difference to the fact that aggressive subversion is exactly what the Zelensky regime does. Ask the Germans how things with their pipelines went. The braver ones might dare answer.
As we live in modern, online times, the shape much of the escalating EU meddling on the side of Orban’s opponents in Budapest and Kiev has taken is a nasty combination of social media manipulation at scale, illicit surveillance and spying, and the targeted dissemination of what is meant to be compromising information.
A smelly affair features a Hungarian journalist who has produced a source-free report alleging massive Russian interference in the elections, while spending his free time facilitating an EU country’s intelligence service eavesdropping on Hungary’s foreign minister. Some interference indeed. The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
In Brussels, meanwhile, under the overall umbrella of the “European Democracy Shield” (EDS) initiative and the Digital Services Act (DSA), a so-called Rapid Response mechanism has been activated to – so the official brief tells us – combat disinformation and foreign influence. Yet, in reality, this is a set of compulsory measures that permit the Commission’s dependent auxiliaries to police social media platforms, suppress content in favor of Orban and, thus, promote his rivals.
What makes all of this particularly dreadful is not simply that it is so almost comically Orwellian: The “European Democracy Shield” is really a shield to protect the EU’s unelected bureaucrat rulers and their ideologized technocrats from democracy as a recent report has correctly argued. Its tools, from so-called “fact-checking” to systematic denunciation by “trusted flaggers” to “prebunking” – that is AI-based preventative propaganda campaigns – amount to a box of horrors.
Yet what is even worse is that all of this is only a small part of a much larger and long-term strategy that has been gathering steam for a decade already. The “European Democracy Shield” and the DSA exist in a large, constantly pullulating eco-system of narrative control that also includes, for instance, a “Defense of Democracy Package,” a “European Democracy Action Plan,” and a Digital Markets Act. Attached to this weaponized spearhead for manufacturing Brussels consent is an extensive – and very expensive – train of so-called civil-society organizations and NGOs that provide both censorship assistance and indoctrination.
Hungary, put simply, is a harbinger of more and even worse to come, of what Brussels wants for our future. The EU ‘elites’ are displaying an unbroken will to power over what we are allowed to think, say, and vote for. That is why – whether you like or dislike Viktor Orban – and I heartily dislike him because of his outrageous siding with genocidal Israel – you should certainly greatly dislike and resist the methods that the EU is fielding to stop him. Because they are coming for all of us.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
The deep-rooted culture of corruption in Ukraine
By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 27, 2026
Recently, the Kiev regime halted the regular deployment of troops for training abroad. This reveals more than a mere administrative change. In reality, it is a symptom of deeply entrenched structural problems within the country’s state and military apparatus. Under the pretext of logistical difficulties and the supposed lack of preparedness of Western instructors, Kiev authorities appear to be promoting a strategic reconfiguration that opens even greater space for corrupt practices.
On March 22, 2026, the deputy head of the Main Directorate for Doctrine and Training of the Ukrainian General Staff, E. Mezhevikin, stated that the Armed Forces of Ukraine would stop sending personnel for training abroad. According to him, Western partners “do not understand the processes” necessary for the proper preparation of troops. However, this justification contrasts with the narrative previously adopted by Ukrainian authorities, who had cited the possibility of Russian attacks on domestic training centers as the main reason for international cooperation. This possibility, it should be noted, remains present, since these training centers are obviously legitimate targets.
The shift in narrative raises legitimate questions. If the danger of attacks continues, why abandon a strategy that, in theory, increases the safety of troops in training? The most plausible answer lies not in the military sphere, but in the political and economic domains. By concentrating training within its own territory, the Ukrainian government significantly increases control over the financial flows associated with international assistance – thereby creating additional opportunities for resource diversion.
A striking example of this dynamic can be seen in the expansion, at the end of 2025, of the 199th training center for airborne assault troops. Officially, the measure was presented as part of an effort to increase the mobilization and preparedness capacity of the armed forces. In practice, however, reports emerged that the site had become a hub for illicit schemes.
With increased forced mobilization, the number of citizens willing to pay to avoid military service also grew. According to local sources, the center reportedly began operating as an informal “escape” mechanism, where recruits could pay substantial sums – around $15,000 – to leave their units. Far from being isolated incidents, these practices indicate the existence of organized corruption networks within the military structure.
The accusations point to the direct involvement of high-ranking officers, including Colonel Alexander Evgenievich Kupinsky, then in charge of the center. Moreover, reports indicate that similar schemes persist even after formal changes in command, suggesting institutional continuity of these practices. The former head of the center, Ivan Vasilievich Shnyr, for example, is also cited as an indirect beneficiary of mechanisms linked to compulsory mobilization.
Another relevant aspect is the source of the funds involved. A significant portion of financing for these facilities comes from European aid packages. In theory, these funds should be used to strengthen Ukraine’s defensive capacity. However, evidence points to systematic manipulation of public contracts, with equipment and supply overpricing allowing large-scale embezzlement.
This scenario reveals a central contradiction in the Western narrative about the conflict. While Kiev presents itself as a fortress of European defense and receives billions in international assistance, segments of its military elite seem to use the war as an opportunity for personal enrichment. The result is a system in which human sacrifice – especially of forcibly recruited soldiers – becomes a source of profit for certain groups.
Furthermore, the decision to abandon overseas training may have significant operational consequences. Cooperation with NATO countries not only offered greater logistical security but also ensured access to more advanced technical and doctrinal standards. By rejecting this model, Ukraine risks compromising the quality of its military preparation while simultaneously reinforcing opaque and poorly monitored internal practices.
On a geopolitical level, this dynamic weakens the country’s credibility with its own allies. The continuation of massive financial aid flows will increasingly depend on confidence in Kiev’s ability to manage these resources transparently – something episodes like this call into question.
Ultimately, the case highlights that Ukraine’s greatest challenge may not be exclusively military, but institutional. Without effective mechanisms for control and accountability, any defense effort tends to be eroded from within.
Villains of Judea: Leonid Radvinsky
How Leonid Radvinsky built a pornography empire to bankroll a foreign ethnostate
José Niño Unfiltered | March 24, 2026
Leonid Radvinsky, the reclusive Jewish billionaire who transformed OnlyFans from a modest subscription platform into a multi-billion dollar pornography empire, died on March 20, 2026, following an alleged battle with cancer. He was 43 years old.
“We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Leo Radvinsky. Leo passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer,” OnlyFans stated on Monday. “His family have requested privacy at this difficult time.”
Radvinsky’s death caps a career marked by extraordinary wealth accumulation alongside persistent allegations of enabling sexual exploitation, child abuse material, sex trafficking, and suspicious financial activity. Radvinsky amassed an estimated net worth of $7.8 billion as of October 2025, per Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaire rankings, while largely avoiding public scrutiny through extreme reclusiveness. At the time of his death on March 20, 2026, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.7 billion.
Leonid “Leo” Radvinsky was born in 1982 to a Jewish family in the port city of Odesa, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His family emigrated to the United States when he was a child and settled in the Chicago area. The source of his father Savely’s wealth remains unclear, with reports noting real estate investments and business dealings whose exact nature has never been fully explained.
Radvinsky graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in economics in 2002. He married Yekaterina “Katie” Chudnovsky and lived in Florida. He also owned property in Chicago and other assets. Radvinsky was famously secretive. He gave almost no public interviews, few photographs of him ever surfaced, and he seldom appeared publicly.
Radvinsky’s entrepreneurial career began at age 17 in 1999 when he helped incorporate Cybertania Inc., a website referral business registered in Illinois with his mother Anna serving as the registered agent. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, he built more than 10 websites including “Password Universe,” “Working Passes,” and “Ultra Passwords” that claimed to offer “illegal” and “hacked” passwords to pornography sites. He earned affiliate revenue for every click.
Forbes found that Password Universe” published a link claiming to offer “illegal pre-teen passwords” and “Working Passes” linked to purported “illegal teen passwords” and bestiality content. Forensic News also found that Radvinsky held hundreds of domain names. Ultra Passwords alone reportedly generated $1.8 million per year in revenue.
Radvinsky encountered legal troubles in 2004, when Microsoft sued him for allegedly sending millions of deceptive emails to Hotmail users. The case was eventually dismissed. Additional lawsuits filed by Microsoft and Amazon in 2003 and 2004 alleged spamming and impersonation of their companies to redirect traffic to pornography ventures and “free money from the government” offers. All cases were settled out of court in 2005, and Radvinsky and his businesses were barred from using Amazon’s name in spam or any of Microsoft’s email tools.
In 2004, Radvinsky founded MyFreeCams, a live adult streaming and webcam site through his holding company MFCXY, Inc. The platform became enormously successful, processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payments annually. To users and the thousands of performers, he was known simply as “AdminLeo.”
In 2018, Radvinsky purchased a majority stake in OnlyFans’ parent company Fenix International Ltd. from British founders Tim and Guy Stokely, reportedly for approximately $30 million. He later acquired full ownership. Under his direction, OnlyFans pivoted heavily toward adult content and experienced explosive growth, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The platform generated $6.6 billion in gross payments as of its fiscal year ending November 2023, with over 305 million registered users and 4.1 million creators, according to its annual report filed with UK Companies House. Radvinsky received $472 million in dividends in 2023 alone. CBS News reported, citing Bloomberg, that the company paid him approximately $1.8 billion in dividends since 2021. As of mid-2025, Radvinsky was reportedly in talks to sell OnlyFans at a valuation of approximately $8 billion.
Even as he built one of the most profitable pornography platforms on the internet, Radvinsky quietly directed significant sums toward charitable work. On his personal website, Radvinsky listed donations to organizations including the University of Chicago Medicine. He donated $5 million to Ukraine relief in 2022 following Russia’s invasion. In 2024, Radvinsky and his wife were major public supporters of a $23 million grant program for cancer research, announced at a gastrointestinal research foundation gala.
His interests beyond OnlyFans extended into the technology sector as well. Radvinsky operated a venture capital fund called “Leo” founded in 2009 that invested mainly in tech companies. Notable investments included B4X, an Israel-based open-source software development tools company. But it was not his tech investments that drew the sharpest public scrutiny. In February 2024, investigative outlet The Lever published a story based on leaked internal AIPAC donor documents showing that Radvinsky and his wife Katie Chudnovsky had pledged $11 million to AIPAC, the largest single contribution on the leaked list.
The $11 million pledge appeared under the name “Mr. Anonymous Anonymous” and Katie Chudnovsky, but personal contact information and a short bio in the documents identified “Mr. Anonymous” as Radvinsky, according to both The Lever and Jacobin. The pledge came in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, during a period when AIPAC raised approximately $90 million in total. Internal AIPAC documents reviewed by The Lever showed a wire transfer from Chudnovsky to AIPAC.
Radvinsky denied the contribution. “I didn’t donate or pledge $11M,” he wrote in an email to The Lever, adding “this appl[ies] to me / my foundation / my family.” When asked why AIPAC listed him as a donor, he replied, “I don’t know.” When pressed about the wire transfer documentation, he stopped responding.
AIPAC declined to confirm or deny the list’s accuracy. When The Lever asked AIPAC’s spokesperson to identify any inaccurate information, the organization did not respond despite three follow-up requests before publication. Because AIPAC is organized as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, it is not legally required to publicly disclose its donors.
Following these revelations, multiple OnlyFans creators called for a boycott of the platform. Sex workers expressed concern that their earnings were being funneled to AIPAC, which had launched a $100 million campaign to oppose pro-Palestinian candidates in the 2024 elections. Organizers drew parallels between their own struggles against exploitation and the Palestinian cause.
The AIPAC controversy was not the first time questions had been raised about where Radvinsky’s money flowed. Long before the donor leak, banks themselves had flagged his financial operations. For at least 13 years, multiple banks filed Suspicious Activity Reports on Radvinsky’s companies, totaling well over $1 billion in flagged transactions, according to Forensic News. Reports from Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and others repeatedly identified patterns “consistent with payment layering,” a money laundering technique, involving offshore payment processors in Curacao, Belize, and Germany. Romania’s anti-money laundering agency requested MyFreeCams banking records from the U.S. Treasury in 2012.
The financial red flags were not the only source of controversy. The platforms Radvinsky built also faced mounting allegations of facilitating harm to the very people who generated their revenue. A major Reuters investigation in 2024 uncovered extensive allegations of nonconsensual content on OnlyFans, identifying 128 cases in which people complained to U.S. law enforcement that sexual content featuring them had been posted without their consent between January 2019 and November 2023. In approximately 40% of these cases, the content also appeared on mainstream social media platforms to drive traffic to OnlyFans. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation labeled OnlyFans a “serial sexual exploiter” and called on the DOJ to investigate.
Dozens of former models on both MyFreeCams and OnlyFans alleged arbitrary account closures and withheld wages. Forensic News documented multiple cases where creators had accounts deleted with pending balances and received generic responses about “suspicious/fraudulent activity” with no specifics. Some models lost wages when Choice Bank in Belize, used by MyFreeCams for payments, collapsed in 2018.
In 2022, competitor FanCentro and other plaintiffs filed lawsuits alleging that OnlyFans and Radvinsky paid bribes to Meta employees to have competing adult content performers placed on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) database, effectively destroying their businesses. The payments were allegedly routed from Fenix International through a secret Hong Kong subsidiary into offshore Philippines bank accounts. Both Meta and OnlyFans denied the allegations, though a federal judge refused to dismiss the case.
The allegations of anticompetitive sabotage were serious enough on their own. But the most disturbing questions surrounding Radvinsky’s platforms involved not rival businesses but vulnerable people, including children. MyFreeCams maintained an advertising deal with Chat Avenue, one of the internet’s oldest chat platforms, where the age requirement was just 13 and loosely policed. MyFreeCams ads promoting adult webcam content appeared in the “boys,” “girls,” and “teens” chat rooms for approximately a decade. Federal court documents show multiple predators were arrested for child sex crimes committed on Chat Avenue during this period.
A BBC investigation in 2021 found that minors had used fake identification to set up accounts and sell explicit videos on OnlyFans. In one case, a 14-year-old used her grandmother’s passport. The UK’s most senior police officer for child protection called children on the platform “exploited.” A U.S. Homeland Security Investigations special agent confirmed he had seen child sex abuse material (CSAM) originating from OnlyFans during a 2021 call with Mastercard executives, noting the paywall makes it exceptionally difficult for law enforcement to discover offending accounts.
A Reuters investigation in January 2025 revealed a whistleblower complaint submitted to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network alleging that Mastercard and Visa were aware since at least 2021 that their payment networks were being used to process proceeds from CSAM and trafficking on OnlyFans, accusing them of “turning a blind eye to flows of illicit revenue.” The complaint was filed in January 2023 with FinCEN and the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments.
Reuters also reported on women who said they had been sexually enslaved, sometimes by a partner, to produce content for the platform. The platform became central to high-profile trafficking cases, most notably involving influencer Andrew Tate, who was charged in Romania with rape and sex-trafficking charges connected to an operation that allegedly forced women to create pornographic content on OnlyFans.
A 2022 study by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII) and the University of New Haven found a “high volume” of OnlyFans accounts with “common indicators” of CSAM or sex trafficking using open-source research methods. The NCOSE called on the Department of Justice to investigate OnlyFans, noting the platform profits from “the sexual abuse and exploitation of women, children, and men.”
Radvinsky’s path mirrors that of many Jewish magnates whose fortunes are built upon the erosion of social mores. His wealth, harvested from cultural collapse, is then re-directed to strengthen the political and strategic footholds of his tribe in the Middle East. Taken together, these forces amount to a zero‑sum game in which the spiritual and cultural bankruptcy of one people finances the geopolitical leverage of another.
Fidel Castro’s War on Jewish Mobster Meyer Lansky
How a Jewish gangster helped build—and then lost—Cuba’s Sin City
José Niño Unfiltered | March 21, 2026
For more than two decades, Meyer Lansky built what he believed would be his permanent kingdom in the Caribbean. The Jewish gangster from New York’s Lower East Side had transformed Havana into the gambling capital of the Western Hemisphere, a glittering playground where American tourists could indulge every vice under the protection of a dictator on the mob’s payroll. Then came Fidel Castro, a young Catholic revolutionary from the Cuban countryside who would destroy everything Lansky had built in a matter of weeks.
Their conflict was never personal. The two men likely never met or spoke. But the collision between Lansky’s criminal empire and Castro’s revolutionary movement would reshape Cuba, spawn assassination plots that entangled the CIA, and leave a trail of consequences that echoes into the present day.
More than half a century later, as Washington once again toys with the idea of remaking Cuba’s political order, the ghost of Meyer Lansky’s Havana hangs over every discussion of regime change: the dream of turning the island back into a glittering casino colony has never fully died.
Meyer Lansky entered the world as Maier Suchowljansky on July 4, 1902, in Grodno, a city in the Russian Empire that now belongs to Belarus. His family was part of the vast population of Eastern European Jews who migrated to America in the early 20th century. In 1911, Lansky emigrated with his mother and brother Jacob through the port of Odessa, joining his father Max, who had arrived two years earlier and settled first in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The family later moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Max worked in the garment industry and young Meyer grew up among the crowded tenements where Yiddish filled the streets and opportunity meant whatever you could grab with your own hands.
Young Meyer found his opportunities in crime. By 1918 he and his friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel were running floating dice games on the streets. They graduated to auto theft, then burglary, and when Prohibition arrived, they plunged into the liquor smuggling trade that would make fortunes for a generation of gangsters. Lansky also befriended Charles “Lucky” Luciano, an Italian immigrant who would become one of the most powerful mob bosses in American history.
The three young men rose together. Lansky and Siegel developed a squad of killers for hire that became the prototype for Murder, Inc. Lansky allegedly persuaded Luciano to arrange the 1931 assassination of mob boss Joe “The Boss” Masseria, a murder that consolidated power and helped establish the National Crime Syndicate between 1932 and 1934.
What set Lansky apart from the gunmen and enforcers around him was his financial chops. He became known as the “Mob’s Accountant,” the man who used Swiss bank accounts and shell companies to launder the Mafia’s wealth and hide it from federal investigators. He oversaw the syndicate’s finances as its unofficial banker and was instrumental in shifting the mob’s focus from bootlegging to gambling after Prohibition ended in 1933. His gambling operations stretched from Florida to New Orleans to Las Vegas.
But Lansky’s grandest ambition lay 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
Building the Havana Empire
Lansky’s relationship with Cuba began in 1933, the same year Prohibition ended, and a young military strongman named Fulgencio Batista seized control of the island nation. Lansky pitched Batista a proposal to open Mafia-owned casinos and nightclubs in Havana. The arrangement was straightforward. Batista and his inner circle would receive regular payments from the mob, and in return the gangsters could operate without interference from Cuban authorities.
By 1938, Lansky had been formally invited to help clean up and professionalize Havana’s gambling operations, which had been plagued by fixed races and crooked dealers. He was the fixer, the man who could make the casinos run honestly enough to keep the tourists coming back.
The landmark event came in December 1946 with what became known as the Havana Conference. More than 20 mob bosses from across the United States gathered at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba for a meeting organized by Lansky on Luciano’s orders. The expansion of mob operations in Cuba sat at the top of the agenda. Lansky then visited Batista, who was temporarily out of power and living in Florida, and urged him to return to Cuba to fulfill their grand plans.
Batista obliged. He returned to power through a military coup in 1952, and the arrangement with the mob became even more lucrative. The Batista-Lansky Alliance, included a deal where Batista agreed to match dollar for dollar any hotel investment over one million dollars, with each project automatically including a casino license. Casino hotels were exempted from Cuban taxes.
Lansky owned or held financial interests in at least three major gambling operations. The crown jewel was the Habana Riviera, which opened in December 1957 as the largest Mafia-owned hotel casino outside Las Vegas. It featured 440 rooms that were booked solid for its first winter season. Cuban development banks subsidized half of the $14 million construction cost.
But Lansky did not build this empire alone.
The Inner Circle
Jake Lansky, Meyer’s brother, served as his most trusted man on the ground in Cuba. Jake managed the casino at the Hotel Nacional, Cuba’s most prestigious hotel. By spring 1957, it was reportedly bringing in as much cash as the biggest casinos in Las Vegas.
Joseph “Doc” Stacher was a lifelong Lansky associate dating back to their youth in Newark, New Jersey. Born Gdale Oistaczer in Letychiv, in what is now Ukraine, Stacher was also Jewish and had risen through the criminal ranks alongside Lansky. He operated as the official bribe paymaster to Batista, managing the corrupt payments that kept the dictator and his inner circle cooperative.
Norman “Roughhouse” Rothman was another mobster deeply embedded in the Havana gambling scene. He was a close associate of Santo Trafficante Jr. and operated casinos in Havana, most notably the Sans Souci. Cuba’s slot machine concessions were controlled by Roberto Fernandez y Miranda, Batista’s brother-in-law and army general, who held them as a personal fief.
Ed Levinson, a longtime Lansky associate, ran illegal gambling operations from the Midwest to Kentucky. In Cuba, Levinson’s name appeared on the casino license for the Habana Riviera itself. Lansky kept his own name listed only as the hotel’s kitchen director while Levinson served as the official licensee.
Dino Cellini, though Italian-American rather than Jewish, worked hand in glove with the Lansky operation. He served as casino manager at the Habana Riviera before being replaced by Frank Erickson, and was later detained alongside Jake Lansky at the Tiscornia immigration camp after Castro took power.
The operation also included powerful Italian-American mobsters. Santo Trafficante Jr., the Tampa crime family boss, openly operated the Sans Souci nightclub and the Casino Internacional at the Hotel Nacional. He was also suspected of having behind-the-scenes interests in the Habana Riviera, the Tropicana Club, the Sevilla-Biltmore, the Capri Hotel Casino, the Commodoro, the Deauville, and the Havana Hilton.
The Revolutionary in the Mountains
While Lansky counted his profits in Havana’s glittering casinos, a revolutionary movement was gathering strength in the mountains of eastern Cuba.
Fidel Castro came from a background that could not have been more different from Lansky’s. Born on August 13, 1926, near Birán in Oriente Province, Castro was the son of a prosperous Spanish immigrant landowner. He was raised Catholic and educated at Jesuit schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana, including the prestigious Colegio de Belén. He studied law at the University of Havana beginning in 1945, earned his degree in 1950, and briefly practiced as a lawyer before turning fully to revolutionary politics. Where Lansky had clawed his way up from immigrant poverty through criminal enterprise, Castro came from rural privilege and channeled his ambitions into armed struggle against the Batista regime.
Castro’s 26th of July Movement directly targeted the Mafia’s presence in its propaganda. In 1958, the revolutionaries denounced the mobsters in radio broadcasts from their guerrilla redoubt in the Sierra Maestra, accusing them of turning Havana into a center of commercialized vice through gambling, prostitution, and drugs. The casinos, the brothels, the drugs, the corruption that enriched Batista and his American gangster partners would all be swept away when the revolution triumphed.
The Fall
On December 31, 1958, Batista’s army was defeated at the Battle of Santa Clara. That night, Batista fled the country for the Dominican Republic, abandoning his gangster partners along with everything else. Lansky left Cuba on January 7, 1959, the day before Castro marched into Havana.
What happened next was a settling of accounts that played out in the streets of Havana. On January 1, 1959, citizens took to the streets after hearing news of Batista’s flight, ransacking casinos, smashing slot machines, and dragging gambling equipment into the streets to be burned. To many Cubans, the American-owned hotels symbolized a corrupting foreign influence. At the Riviera, Lansky’s crown jewel, campesinos (peasants) reportedly brought a truckload of pigs into the lobby. Castro vowed to “clean out all the gamblers.” The revolutionary government eventually nationalized the Riviera and all other Mafia-owned properties, though the final nationalization of hotel casinos did not come until October 1960. Some casinos briefly re-opened on February 19, 1959, after casino workers who depended on tourism jobs marched to the presidential palace demanding their livelihoods back, but tourists stopped coming. Lansky, who told many associates that Cuba had ruined him financially, looked to other outposts in the Caribbean and South America.
Not everyone fled immediately. Jake Lansky and Dino Cellini were arrested by Cuban authorities in May 1959 and detained at the Tiscornia immigration camp outside Havana, the same facility where Santo Trafficante Jr. was also being held. According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger had sent a list of suspected drug traffickers to Cuban authorities that included both Jake Lansky and Cellini. Jake Lansky and Cellini were detained for approximately 25 days before being released; Trafficante was held until August. All eventually left Cuba.
By October 1960, Castro formally nationalized all hotel casinos on the island and outlawed gambling entirely.
Revenge and Assassination Plots
Lansky did not merely accept his losses. He actively sought to use the U.S. government and its intelligence apparatus to reclaim his Cuban empire.
According to Doc Stacher, Lansky “indicated to the CIA that some of his people who were still on the island might assassinate Castro” and was “quite prepared to finance the operation himself.”
This was not Lansky’s first collaborative effort with American intelligence. During World War II, he had served as a key intermediary in Operation Underworld, a classified program in which the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence enlisted the Mafia to counter Axis sabotage on the northeastern seaboard. That wartime relationship established a precedent for cooperation between organized crime and the U.S. government.
In August 1960, according to a report by Salon, Lansky struck a deal with exiled Cuban politician Manuel Antonio Varona, offering him several million dollars to form a Cuban government-in-exile to replace Castro. Lansky also promised to arrange a public relations campaign to polish Varona’s image, with the single-minded objective of reopening the Mafia’s casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in a post-Castro Cuba.
Around the same time, the CIA formally recruited mobsters with deep ties to the Havana gambling operations into plots to eliminate Castro. In September 1960, the agency enlisted Chicago Mob operative Johnny Rosselli through former FBI agent Robert Maheu. Rosselli brought in Chicago boss Sam Giancana and Tampa boss Santo Trafficante Jr. The CIA created poison pills to be slipped into Castro’s food, but the attempts failed. The CIA-Mafia assassination partnership was scuttled in early 1963, though the CIA continued plotting against Castro through other means.
Norman Rothman’s trajectory after the revolution was particularly dramatic. Before the revolution succeeded, Rothman had actually been running guns to Castro’s rebels alongside Joe Merola and the Mannarino brothers of Pittsburgh. Sam Mannarino had reasoned that if Castro won, the mobsters who helped arm him would be in the driver’s seat for Cuba’s gambling industry. Rothman advised Mannarino to place his bets on Castro, predicting he would allow the casinos to remain under Mafia control. When that calculation proved disastrously wrong, the scheme unraveled. The weapons in question, 317 guns, had been stolen from a National Guard armory in Canton, Ohio. A plane carrying 121 of the stolen weapons was captured at Morgantown, West Virginia on November 4, 1958. Rothman was convicted on February 4, 1960, along with five co-defendants, for possession, receiving, transportation, and exportation of firearms stolen from the United States government.
Lansky also explored contingency plans in case Cuba could not be recovered. He traveled to the Dominican Republic in 1958 to meet with dictator Rafael Trujillo about potentially relocating the entire Havana operation there. None of these schemes succeeded.
The Final Years
Lansky spent his final years living quietly in Miami Beach. In 1970, facing federal tax evasion charges, he fled to Israel, hoping to claim citizenship under the Law of Return. But after two years, Israel rejected his bid for permanent residency due to his criminal record and deported him back to the United States, where he was arrested at Miami International Airport.
He was acquitted of the tax evasion charges, in part because the government’s main witness lacked credibility, and other indictments were abandoned due to his chronic ill health. He died on January 15, 1983, at age 80 from lung cancer. Despite nearly half a century of involvement in organized crime, the most serious conviction he ever received was for illegal gambling in 1953, which resulted in only a brief jail term.
Despite a lifetime running one of the world’s most profitable criminal enterprises, a granddaughter later claimed he left behind just $57,000 in cash. The FBI believed he had hidden at least $300 million in offshore bank accounts, but this money was never recovered. His heirs later filed a compensation claim against Cuba for the Riviera with the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, valuing the property at $70 million.
The mob never returned to Cuba. The casinos that Lansky built were nationalized, and gambling was outlawed entirely. The slot machines that crowds smashed in the streets on New Year’s Day 1959 were never replaced. The Habana Riviera still stands on the Malecón waterfront, declared a National Monument in 2012 and now managed by the Spanish chain Iberostar, still maintaining its original 1950s style. Staff members still refer to it as “el hotel de Meyer Lansky.”
Fidel Castro outlived Meyer Lansky by more than three decades, dying in 2016 at age 90. The revolutionary who had vowed to clean out all the gamblers kept that promise, at least regarding the foreign mobsters who had turned Havana into their personal playground.
The confrontation between these two men, the Jewish gangster from the Lower East Side and the Catholic revolutionary from Oriente Province, ended decisively in Castro’s favor.
Castro’s revolution did what no rival gangster or corrupt strongman ever managed: it toppled the dictatorship that shielded Lansky’s operations and erased his Havana casino empire almost overnight. In the name of sovereignty, the new regime shut down the glittering hotels and gambling halls that had turned Cuba into a playground for American tourists, mafiosi, and intelligence services alike.
But the pressures now bearing down on Cuba suggest that history’s wheel is turning back toward Lansky’s original blueprint. A successful regime change engineered from abroad would not simply “liberate” the island; it would open prime waterfront real estate and tourist infrastructure to the same forces of vice, speculation, and foreign ownership that once made Havana the mob’s favorite casino.
The danger is that Cuba’s next great transformation would replace revolutionary austerity not with genuine self‑determination, but with a return to what Lansky always wanted. Namely, a Caribbean Macau where the house is global finance, the chips are Cuban sovereignty, and the people of the island are once again reduced to serving drinks on someone else’s casino floor.
How Zionist Control Is Hurting US Interests
By Abbas Hashemite – New Eastern Outlook – March 14, 2026
The recent US attack on Iran has raised criticism both internationally and at home due to President Trump’s shift from America First to Israel First and over the Zionist control over the US establishment.
US-Israel Strategic Alignment: Historical Patterns
Escalating tensions between the US, Israel, and Iran have raised a critical concern in global geopolitics: has the US attacked Iran to protect its regional interests, or has it jumped into this fray to defend Netanyahu’s Zionist regime in Israel and its strategic interests? The history of American foreign policy decisions since the establishment of the illegitimate Israeli state suggests that protecting Israel’s national and strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond has become a key aspect of the United States’ strategic priorities.
Throughout history, whenever Israel felt threatened or insecure by a regional power, Washington has always supported it directly or indirectly. The historic rivalry between Israel and Iran and its escalation after the recent genocidal operation by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has rendered the situation more intense. Israel considers Iran’s missile capabilities and nuclear program as a threat to its sovereignty and security. Moreover, Iran’s regional proxies also pose a significant threat to Israel’s expansionist agenda.
Recently, the United States and Iran were engaged in negotiations over the latter’s nuclear program. Reports propose that the two sides have made significant progress in resolving the issue peacefully. However, the United States and Israel launched a combined attack on Iran, targeting its key military and political leadership. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other high-level military and political leaders of the country were killed in the US-Israel joint strikes. These strikes, despite positive progress in the US-Iran peace negotiations, created an international perception that the United States is fighting Israel’s war in the Middle East.
Domestic and International Backlash Against US Involvement
Dissenting voices regarding the US involvement in a foreign war are rising even within the United States. People from within the US Army are raising questions over the country’s involvement in a foreign war. Even former soldiers are asking whether the US military personnel should sacrifice their lives to secure the strategic interests of Israel. Reportedly, many US soldiers have expressed their concerns over their participation in this war against Iran. They seek to know the moral and legal status of a war waged merely to protect the interests of a specific allied country. The United States faced a similar issue during the Cold War, especially in the Vietnam and Iraq wars, when numerous military personnel criticized and questioned policies that led the country into those wars. Within both U.S. military and civilian policy circles, there is mounting pressure to more clearly distinguish between America’s core national interests and the interests of its allies.
Economic and Global Implications of the Conflict
The Middle East is the center of global energy politics, and the Persian Gulf is one of the key maritime routes for global oil supply. Iran has already blocked the Strait of Hormuz, leading to disruption in global oil and energy supply, causing inflation around the world. Oil and energy prices have surged across Europe, Asia, and other regions, impacting everyday consumers and households—including those in the United States. Due to the aggressive policies of former US governments, the country has lost trillions of dollars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The recent US war against Iran would prove far more expensive because of the latter’s geostrategic location and greater regional influence.
On the diplomatic front, this war will further tarnish Washington’s international image. Most of the Global South is already hostile to the United States’ interventionist policies. A prolonged war with Iran would not only widen the gulf between the US and its European allies, but it would also increase Russia and China’s global support. This war has already shifted global public opinion against the United States, weakening the country’s international credibility. Many developing nations are increasingly aligning themselves with Russia and China, signaling their interest in joining the BRICS coalition.
Washington’s involvement in this war, at the behest of Israel, has created significant intricacies for its regional allies. It has exposed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a key US ally in the Middle East, to significant Iranian attacks. Iran is repeatedly targeting US interests across the region. The GCC countries are also facing disruption in the supply chain, leading to significant economic losses, due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. Moreover, it has undermined the security and safety of the UAE for global investors. This suggests that this war would create visible fractures in the US-GCC relations.
However, the United States’ involvement in this conflict, despite knowing that it will lead to severe public backlash and impinge on the country’s interests in the Middle East and beyond, demonstrates that in Washington, it’s not the US leadership but the Zionist lobby that actually calls the shots. The release of the Epstein files further strengthens the notion that the Zionists use such tools to blackmail and influence the US leaders, including President Trump, to mold the US policies to protect Israel’s interests in the Middle East and around the world.
Аbbas Hashemite is a political observer and research analyst for regional and global geopolitical issues. He is currently working as an independent researcher and journalist
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The Three Big Lies about Mammography Screening
By Peter C. Gøtzsche | Brownstone Institute | March 6, 2026
I dedicate this article to all women invited to mammography screening and those who love them because the public has consistently been lied to, for over 40 years. In invitations to screening, women have been told that by detecting cancers early, screening saves lives and leads to less invasive surgery.1,2 I shall demonstrate that all three statements are wrong.
Women are still being told these lies, by professional associations, screening advocates, screening researchers, cancer charities, and national boards of health.3-5 The American Cancer Society declares in a headline that “Mammography Saves Lives”4 and claims, with no references, that results from many decades of research clearly show that women who have regular mammograms are less likely to need aggressive treatments like surgery to remove the entire breast (mastectomy).5
Screening Does Not Save Lives
In the randomised trials of mammography screening, the risk ratio for overall mortality after 13 years of follow-up was 0.99 (95% confidence interval 0.93 to 1.03) for those trials with adequate randomisation.6 The estimate happened to be the same for the other trials, some of which were so poorly randomised that the average age in the two compared groups was not the same, which makes an analysis of overall mortality unreliable.
For two of the three adequately randomised trials, those from Canada and the UK, there are follow-up data after 25 and 23 years, respectively.7,8 The risk ratio for overall mortality was 1.01 (95% confidence interval 0.98 to 1.03) for all three trials (both with a fixed effect and a random effects model, Comprehensive Meta Analysis Version 3.0). In the table, the year means the year the trial started:
This is a very strong result as it is derived from a total of 25,046 deaths. We can therefore say with great confidence that mammography screening does not save lives.
If we restrict the analysis to the two trials with a very long follow-up, the result is the same, a risk ratio of 1.01 (0.99 to 1.04).
Breast Cancer Mortality Is a Seriously Flawed Outcome
It will surprise most people to learn that we cannot trust what has been reported in the randomised trials about the effect of screening on breast cancer mortality but this is an objective fact.6
A minority of the women who died were autopsied, and in several trials, cause of death was not assessed blindly.6 I have documented that assessment of cause of death was seriously biased.6,9 If we include all trials in the analysis, we would expect to see the greatest reduction in breast cancer mortality in those trials that were most effective in lowering the rate of node-positive cancers (cancers that had metastasised) in the screened group.
This was indeed the case, but the regression line was in the wrong place. It predicts that a screening effectiveness of zero (i.e. the rate of node-positive cancers is the same in the screened groups as in the control groups) results in a 16% reduction in breast cancer mortality (95% confidence interval 9% to 23% reduction).6,9 This can only happen if there is bias, and further analyses showed that assessment of cause of death and of the number of cancers in advanced stages were both biased in favour of screening.
Systematic reviews that include all the trials, also the poorly randomised ones, have reported that mammography screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 16-19%.6,10 As this estimate is of the same size as the bias in the regression analysis, this suggests that screening does not lower breast cancer mortality.
Another reason why breast cancer mortality is a flawed outcome is that screening leads to overdiagnosis, which is the detection of cancers and precursors to cancer (carcinoma in situ), which would not have come to the attention of the woman in her remaining lifetime and therefore would not have become a problem without screening. Since it is not possible to distinguish between harmless cancers and dangerous ones, they are all treated, and radiotherapy and chemotherapy given to women who are healthy increase their mortality.6
If we take into account the cardiac and lung cancer deaths caused by the type of radiotherapy used when the screening trials were carried out and generously assume that screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 20% and results in only 20% overdiagnosis of healthy women, then there is no mortality benefit from screening.11
Finally, it is noteworthy that the most unreliable trials were those that reported the greatest reductions in breast cancer mortality.6 The difference in the effect estimates between the adequately randomised trials and the poorly conducted trials was statistically significant, both after 7 and 14 years of follow-up (P = 0.005 and P = 0.02, respectively).12
Total Cancer Mortality
Since misclassification of cause of death often concerns deaths from other cancers,6 total cancer mortality is a less biased outcome than breast cancer mortality.
Some trialists have not reported what the total cancer mortality was but we have data from the three adequately randomised trials.6,8 There was no effect of screening on total cancer mortality, including breast cancer, risk ratio 1.00, 95% confidence interval 0.96 to 1.04. There were two different age groups in the Canadian trial, 40-49 (a) and 50-59 years (b):
Since total cancer mortality is less biased than breast cancer mortality, it is of interest to see what the expected cancer mortality (including breast cancer mortality) would have been if the reported reduction in breast cancer mortality of 29% after 7 years in the poorly randomised trials6 were true.
It would have been a risk ratio of 0.95, which is significantly lower (P = 0.02)6 than what was actually found. This provides further evidence that assessment of cause of death was biased in favour of screening.
Breast Cancer Is Not Detected Early but Very Late
If we assume that the observed doubling times in longitudinal tumour studies are constant from initiation till the tumour becomes detectable, the average woman has harboured the cancer for 21 years before it acquires a size of 10 mm and becomes detectable on a mammogram.13
Given this large time span, it is misleading to call it “early detection” also because the effect of screening is trivial, namely to advance the diagnosis by less than a year.13
Yet all authorities repeat this mantra. As it is impossible that everyone working with cancer is unaware of the basics of tumour biology, we can draw the conclusion that the public all over the world is being misinformed. This is fraud because it is deliberate and because women think “early detection” will save their lives.
I once asked a famous tumour biologist, Keld Danø, during a coffee break at an international meeting, whether he agreed with me that it was impossible to lower breast cancer mortality by 30% with screening, based on our knowledge of tumour biology.14 He agreed. When I asked why people like him didn’t participate in the scientific debate, he didn’t reply and it is not difficult to imagine why. It is not wise to point out that your colleagues are wrong when you are on the receiving end of major funds from a cancer charity that touts screening.
The women suffer while everyone else prospers.
The earliest cell changes, carcinoma in situ, are not detected unless the women get a mammogram. In our systematic review of countries with organised screening programmes, we found an overdiagnosis of 35% for invasive cancer and 52% when we included carcinoma in situ.15
Although less than half of carcinoma in situ cases progress to invasive cancer,16,17 the women are nevertheless routinely treated with surgery, drugs, and radiotherapy.
The deep irony is that the surgery is often mastectomy because the cell changes may be diffusely spread in the breast, and sometimes even in both breasts. In New South Wales, one-third of women with carcinoma in situ had a mastectomy,18 and in the UK, carcinoma in situ was more often treated by mastectomy than invasive cancer,19 and the number of women treated by mastectomy almost doubled from 1998 to 2008.20
This brings us to the third big falsehood in the propaganda about mammography screening.
Screening Does Not Decrease but Increases Mastectomies
Because of the substantial overdiagnosis of invasive cancer and carcinoma in situ, and because screening only advances detection of invasive cancers slightly,13 it is inevitable that screening increases mastectomies.
In the randomised trials of screening, we found 31% more mastectomies in the screened groups than in the control groups.6
Denmark is a unique country to study this in practice as we had a period of 17 years (1991-2007) where only about 20% of potentially eligible women were invited to screening because some counties did not have screening.21 When screening starts, more breast cancer diagnoses than usual will be made and there will be more mastectomies. However, as can be seen on the graphs, the huge increases in mastectomies are not compensated by a drop in mastectomies later where there was a similar decline in mastectomies in non-screened areas as in screened areas:22
Moreover, as the next graph shows, there is no compensatory drop in old age groups:22
Yet women are told that screening leads to less invasive surgery, with fewer mastectomies. This is disinformation in the extreme.
The most commonly used trick used to disinform the women about this issue is to report percentages instead of numbers.3 Imagine a town with a certain level of crime. You divide the crimes into serious and less serious ones. Over a period of time, the rate of serious crime increases by 20% and the rate of less serious crime by 40%. This is a development for the worse. But although more people are exposed to serious crime and more people are exposed to less serious crime as well, a trickster would say that, as there are now relatively fewer cases of serious crime, the situation has improved.
It is deplorable that people who know better – screening researchers, cancer charities, national boards of health, etc – have lied to the public this way3 and still do, in direct contrast to logic and the scientific evidence.
The Final Layers of Dishonesty
The mammography screening area is riddled with dishonesty. So much that I needed to write a whole book detailing all the elaborate ways in which researchers and others had made it look like the Emperor was dressed when in fact he was naked.3
The deception is total because it always continued after I had pointed out in letters to the editor what the researchers had done wrong, and to which they responded.3,14 They therefore cannot claim they didn’t know that they continued to manipulate the data and to deceive the public.
Three of the most dishonest and most prolific authors are László Tabár, Stephen Duffy, and Robert Smith. Over many years, they aggressively attacked my extensive research on mammography screening but never with convincing arguments3,14 – they excel at ad hominem arguments.
László Tabár was the primary investigator for the Swedish Two-County study, an early trial that reported a huge effect of screening, a 31% reduction in breast cancer mortality.23 This trial was instrumental for introducing screening. However, there are so many serious discrepancies in numbers, and some of the findings are so implausible and incompatible with reported tumour characteristics, that it looks like scientific misconduct.3,6,24-27 Tabár has made a fortune on mammography screening and has a habit of threatening with litigation whenever anyone gets too close to his secrets.3,14,23
One would not think that Stephen Duffy is a professor of statistics because he has bent the data beyond belief and beyond what is appropriate in many creative and obscure ways.3,6,14 Robert Smith was once the Director of Cancer Screening at the American Cancer Society.
This triumvirate reported a 63% reduction in breast cancer mortality in an observational study.28 I pointed out some of the problems with their study,29 but in their reply,30 they compared women who attended screening with women who didn’t, although it is clear from their own paper that they were aware that such comparisons are seriously misleading.
These authors claimed, based on the Two-County study data, that they had found a “statistically significant 13% reduction in mortality in association with an invitation to screening.”31,32 This is plain wrong and totally impossible. Even if screening was 100% effective and prevented all deaths from breast cancer, it could not reduce total mortality by 13%.
They furthermore predicted that when a screening programme had been running for some time, one could expect a reduction of 3-4% in total mortality.31 This is also impossible unless screening prevents all breast cancer deaths. The lifetime risk of dying from breast cancer is 2.5-3%,33 and it was 3-4% in many countries before screening was introduced.
I dryly remarked in my book that if they continued their line of research for other diseases, they may find the recipe for eternal life.3 I also noted that the problem with lying is that
sooner or later people usually contradict themselves, which they did in relation to a study they had published in The Lancet.3
A common way of duping the readers is to say that early detection of breast cancer “reduces mortality”34 without specifying what kind of mortality this is, which makes the reader believe that screening saves lives.
The most common error in the screening literature could be that people falsely translate a recorded effect on mortality from a cancer into an effect on all-cause mortality. We see claims everywhere that common cancer screening tests save lives but a systematic review of the randomised trials found that the only screening test with a significant lifetime gain was sigmoidoscopy. It extended life by 110 days on average, and as the 95% confidence interval went from 0 to 274 days, this result was on the verge of not being statistically significant.35
Another common trick is to use hypothetical statements when we have certain knowledge. For example, authors may write – even in our most esteemed medical journals – that overdetection “may” occur for invasive cancers and that it “may” cause harm through unnecessary labelling and treatment of patients who, without screening, “might” never have been diagnosed.34 These are not hypothetical possibilities; they are inevitable consequences of screening.
Final Remarks
Starting in 2000, I have published numerous scientific articles, letters to the editor, newspaper articles, and two books about mammography screening that do not leave a shred of doubt that this intervention is very harmful.37
Even though I know that no one will ever be convicted, I consider it a crime that women have been systematically lured into believing that screening is good for them. According to the principles for informed consent, people must be fully informed about the most important benefits and harms of interventions they are offered, but this ethical requirement has been brutally ignored. To such a degree that in many countries, women receive an “invitation” to mammography screening with a pre-allotted time for a mammogram they never asked about.1 This makes them believe it is very important that they show up and puts pressure on them to cancel the appointment if they don’t want a mammogram taken. If they refuse, they are often subjected to highly coercive and paternalistic follow-up letters.
Here are some examples of the deeply unethical practice:1
“We have reserved a time… If the time is very inconvenient, we ask you to contact the mammography screening centre as soon as possible;” “I am concerned that you have not yet responded to our recent invitation for a screening mammogram;” “If you would like to avoid participation, we ask you to fill out a form. You obtain this form by calling the breast-diagnostic centre;” “During the past two years, over 340,000 Queensland women have benefited from taking part in the BreastScreen Queensland Programme,” “You can take a positive step to decrease your own risk, and help us achieve our goal, by deciding to take part.”
What matters is to ensure a high uptake, “our goal,” not that the women understand what they are being subjected to.
I advise women in all countries to not go to mammography screening and to do nothing if they are “invited,” which my wife did. She had no obligation to decline an “invitation” with a pre-allotted time she never asked for, and the letter made her angry.
Screening is harmful in many other ways than those I have mentioned here, e.g. between one quarter and one half, depending on the country, of all women attending screening repeatedly will experience at least one false positive result, which can be distressful for several years.36 It therefore constitutes another tremendous harm.6,14
As I have explained elsewhere,38 the Cochrane Collaboration refused to allow us to update our Cochrane review on mammography screening last year, even though I had updated it three times before and the update was only about adding more deaths to two of the trials.
Absurdly, the ”Sign-Off Editor” noted that our review might create a potentially damaging firestorm of misinformation and we were accused of having pre-conceived ideas about no benefit of screening “rather than considering it may actually have benefit not detected.” We were also forbidden to use the term overdiagnosis even though this is standard and appears in other Cochrane reviews of cancer screening, including our own.6,12
When I first published the Cochrane review, in 2001, there was a huge scandal39 because Cochrane forbade us from publishing our data on the most important harms of screening, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment.3 This should have made the Cochrane leaders handle our update professionally, but they preferred to support the prevailing dogma about screening rather than telling the women the truth.
Only one question remains: Which country will be the first to show a little sanity and respect for the science and abandon screening?
References
1 Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Content of invitations to publicly funded screening mammography. BMJ 2006;332:538-41.
2 Gøtzsche P, Hartling OJ, Nielsen M, Brodersen J, Jørgensen KJ. Breast screening: the facts – or maybe not. BMJ 2009;338:446-8.
3 Gøtzsche PC. Mammography screening: truth, lies and controversy. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2012.
4 Mammography Saves Lives. American College of Radiology 2026; Feb 27.
5 American Cancer Society Recommendations for the Early Detection of Breast Cancer. 2026; Feb 27.
6 Gøtzsche PC, Jørgensen KJ. Screening for breast cancer with mammography. Cochrane Database Sys Rev 2013;6:CD001877.
7 Miller AB, Wall C, Baines CJ, et al. Twenty five year follow-up for breast cancer incidence and mortality of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: randomised screening trial. BMJ 2014;348:g366.
8 Duffy SW, Vulkan D, Cuckle H, et al. Effect of mammographic screening from age 40 years on breast cancer mortality (UK Age trial): final results of a randomised, controlled trial. Lancet Oncol 2020;21:1165-72.
9 Gøtzsche PC. Relation between breast cancer mortality and screening effectiveness: systematic review of the mammography trials. Dan Med Bull 2011;58:A4246.
10 Humphrey LL, Helfand M, Chan BK, Woolf SH. Breast cancer screening: a summary of the evidence for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Ann Intern Med 2002;137(5 Part 1):347-60.
11 Baum M. Harms from breast cancer screening outweigh benefits if death caused by treatment is included. BMJ 2013;346:f385.
12 Gøtzsche PC, Nielsen M. Screening for breast cancer with mammography. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2006;4:CD001877.
13 Gøtzsche PC, Jørgensen KJ, Zahl PH, Maehlen J. Why mammography screening has not lived up to expectations from the randomised trials. Cancer Causes Control 2012;23:15-21.
14 Gøtzsche PC. Mammography screening: the great hoax. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024 (freely available).
15 Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Overdiagnosis in publicly organised mammography screening programmes: systematic review of incidence trends. BMJ 2009;339:b2587.
16 Nielsen M, Thomsen JL, Primdahl S, et al. Breast cancer and atypia among young and middle-aged women: a study of 110 medicolegal autopsies. Br J Cancer 1987;56:814-9.
17 Welch HG, Black WC. Using autopsy series to estimate the disease reservoir for ductal carcinoma in situ of the breast. Ann Intern Med 1997;127:1023-8.
18 Kricker A, Smoothy V, Armstrong B. Ductal carcinoma in situ in NSW women in 1995 to 1997. National Breast & Ovarian Cancer Centre 2000;April 15.
19 Patnick J. NHS Breast Screening Programme: annual review 2011. NHS Breast Screening Programme 2012.
20 Dixon JM. Breast screening has increased the number of mastectomies. Breast Cancer Res 2009;11(Suppl 3):S19.
21 Jørgensen KJ, Zahl P-H, Gøtzsche PC. Overdiagnosis in organised mammography screening in Denmark: a comparative study. BMC Womens Health 2009;9:36.
22 Jørgensen KJ, Keen JD, Gøtzsche PC. Is mammographic screening justifiable considering its substantial overdiagnosis rate and minor effect on mortality? Radiology 2011;260:621-7.
23 Tabár L, Fagerberg CJ, Gad A, et al. Reduction in mortality from breast cancer after mass screening with mammography. Randomised trial from the Breast Cancer Screening Working Group of the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. Lancet 1985;1:829-32.
24 Zahl P, Kopjar B, Mæhlen J. Mammografistudier. Tidsskr Nor Lægeforen 2001;121:2636.
25 Gøtzsche PC, Mæhlen J, Zahl PH. What is publication? Lancet 2006;368:1854–6.
26 Zahl P-H, Gøtzsche PC, Andersen JM, Mæhlen J. Results of the Two-County trial of mammography screening are not compatible with contemporaneous official Swedish breast cancer statistics. Dan Med Bull 2006;53:438-40.
27 Gøtzsche PC. Whistleblower in healthcare (autobiography). Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2025 (freely available).
28 Tabár L, Vitak B, Chen HH, Yen MF, Duffy SW, Smith RA. Beyond randomized controlled trials: organized mammographic screening substantially reduces breast carcinoma mortality. Cancer 2001;91:1724-31.
29 Gøtzsche PC. Beyond randomized controlled trials. Cancer 2002;94:578.
30 Tabár L, Duffy SW, Smith RA. Beyond randomized controlled trials. Authors’ reply. Cancer 2002;94:581–3.
31 Tabár L, Duffy SW, Yen MF, Warwick J, Vitak B, Chen HH, Smith RA. All-cause mortality among breast cancer patients in a screening trial: support for breast cancer mortality as an end point. J Med Screen 2002;9:159–62.
32 Duffy SW, Tabár L, Vitak B, Yen MF, Warwick J, Smith RA, Chen HH. The Swedish Two-County trial of mammographic screening: cluster randomisation and end point evaluation. Ann Oncol 2003;14:1196–8.
33 Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. Mortality Statistics: cause 1988. London: HMSO; 1990. (Series DH2 no. 15. Table 2).
34 Irwig L, Houssami N, Armstrong B, Glasziou P. Evaluating new screening tests for breast cancer. BMJ 2006;332:678-9.
35 Bretthauer M, Wieszczy P, Løberg M, et al. Estimated lifetime gained with cancer screening tests: a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. JAMA Intern Med 2023;183:1196-1203.
36 Brodersen J, Siersma VD. Long-term psychosocial consequences of false-positive screening mammography. Ann Fam Med 2013;11:106–15.
37 Gøtzsche PC. Mammography screening is harmful and should be abandoned. J R Soc Med 2015;108:341-5.
38 Gøtzsche PC. Cochrane on a suicide mission. Brownstone Journal 2025; June 20.
39 Horton R. Screening mammography – an overview revisited. Lancet 2001;358:1284-5.
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
Blackmail and death threats, Zelensky embarrasses the EU, but there’s no condemnation
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 9, 2026
The money-laundering Kiev regime has gone from cutting off oil supply for EU member states to now issuing death threats to heads of state – and all that the regime’s patrons in Brussels can do is squirm with embarrassment.
The latest twist in the corrupt regime of Vladimir Zelensky is his death threat to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
That was then followed by the Hungarian authorities impounding an armed convoy transporting $100 million in cash and gold bullion from Austria over Hungary’s borders to Kiev – no doubt as part of the war mafia operating under Zelensky.
You couldn’t make this up. A comedian actor who used to dress up in high heels and played a soap-opera hero president is now ruling by decree as a dictator propped up by EU taxpayers, and only because of Brussels indulging in the largesse of their Russophobic obsessions. And now this fictive creation is threatening the assassination of elected leaders.
Zelensky didn’t mention Orbán by name, but in a press briefing last Thursday, he said that “the address of the person” (Orbán) who has blocked a proposed €90 billion loan from the EU to Ukraine was being given to “our military guys” who would “speak in their own language.”
The Hungarian prime minister denounced Zelensky’s words as a “threat to my life”. The country’s foreign ministry condemned the Ukrainian leader for “crossing all limits.”
Yet the European Union has not condemned Zelensky. A junior spokesman for the European Commission merely released a perfunctory statement, saying “that type of language is not acceptable… There must be no threats against EU member states.”
Where is a full-throated denunciation from European leaders like Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, or Kaja Kallas, the Commissioner for Foreign Affairs?
Let’s get this straight. Ukraine’s nominal president tells a head of an EU state that his name is on a hit list, and the bloc’s highest officials say nothing about that. They leave it to some low-level press officer to make a bland statement about it “not being acceptable.”
This shows how deeply corrupted the EU leadership has become in the proxy war racket in Ukraine against Russia. Threats of assassination are being made and played down out of embarrassment, not because such threats are a grave violation of international law.
The background is even more damning. Hungary and Slovakia are being subjected to energy blackmail by the Ukrainian regime because the countries have refused to terminate buying their oil supplies from Russia, as demanded by Brussels and Zelensky.
On January 27, the oil supply to Hungary and Slovakia was cut off after the Kiev regime claimed that a Russian drone strike damaged the Drushba pipeline carrying the oil over Ukrainian territory from Russia. Budapest and Bratislava have accused the Kiev regime of “energy blackmail.”
A Russian air strike did not hit the pipeline. Why would Russia deprive its customers? It doesn’t make sense, and Moscow rejected the claim.
As always, the question is: Who gains?
The Kiev regime has unilaterally cut the supply as a way to pressure Hungary and Slovakia into lifting their opposition to the EU donating more loans and military aid to Ukraine.
Tellingly, Ukraine has delayed supposed “repairs” to the Drushba pipeline. Hungary and Slovakia are facing a critical shortage of oil supply, which is destabilizing their economies. Kiev is even refusing to allow independent inspectors to assess the alleged damage. It’s obvious this is a set-up. There’s probably not even any physical damage other than turning off the pumps.
Last month, Orbán’s government caused a major upset in the European Union when it vetoed a proposed €90 billion loan from Brussels to Ukraine. The loan is seen as a vital lifeline to prop up the Kiev regime and extend the war. Budapest’s refusal was partly in response to the “energy blackmail.”
The block on the money supply has put Kiev and its EU sponsors in a quandary. The regime will not be able to keep fighting the war against Russia without more purchases of military equipment from NATO. Just as important, the block on the loan by Hungary means an obstacle to the money racket that the West has been running under the Zelensky regime, whereby billions of taxpayer funds get laundered into profits for corporations with a hefty cut for the Kiev mafia.
This would explain the bizarre convoy of cash and gold bullion that Hungarian authorities busted and impounded last Thursday. Two armoured vehicles were apprehended carrying $80 million in cash and $20 million in gold bars on their way to Ukraine from Austria. Among those detained were former Ukrainian intelligence officials.
The physical transport of such large amounts of funds, rather than by electronic bank transfer, indicates that the funds were meant not to be traced. The finding exposes once again the illicit money laundering by Zelensky’s regime. This is not in the least bit surprising, given the repeated scandals of corruption and embezzlement in Kiev under Zelensky and his circle, who have acquired luxury portfolios of overseas properties over the last four years.
Hungary and Slovakia are the only EU members out of 27 nations that have shown any principles about stopping the proxy war in Ukraine and ending the racket of robbing European citizens and saddling future generations with astronomical debts.
For taking that stand, the Brussels leadership has turned a blind eye to the Kiev regime’s cutting off oil supplies and using energy blackmail. Now the regime has gone even further to issue death threats to a European head of state, and the Brussels elite has effectively said nothing.
What the EU’s proxy war sponsors seem more concerned about is that their overindulged, corrupt puppet in Kiev is a public relations embarrassment. The blatant criminality of terroristic blackmail and death threats betrays the complicity of the EU’s leadership.
Von der Leyen, Kajas and the Brussels elites are more worried that Zelensky’s mafia threats might rebound by galvanizing Hungarians to vote for Orbán’s party in parliamentary elections next month.
Their message is: you can launder millions, use blackmail and issue death threats. Just don’t make it obvious.
Openly Pro-Israel Tech Group Now Has Control over UK’s Most Sensitive National Security Data
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | February 7, 2023
This is the story of how a multibillionaire who has dedicated his life to advancing the cause of the Israeli national security state is now in control of Great Britain’s most sensitive public and military data.
In 2020, software giant Oracle won a gigantic contract with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) to provide it with cloud infrastructure, digital assistance, data visualization software, mobile hub and development tools. The military is far from the only British institution entrusting its most sensitive data to the Texas-based firm, however. The Home Office, Office of National Statistics and National Health Service, among others, also rely on Oracle databases to function.
For years before signing the MoD agreement, Oracle founder Larry Ellison had been ingratiating himself with the British establishment, employing all manner of well-connected individuals at his foundation. Among these included media executive and father-in-law of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Matthew Symonds, who earned over $600,000 per year as the executive director of the Larry Ellison Foundation. Richard Meredith, a longtime director of the U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was also snapped up at a similar salary to become deputy executive director.
Many other well-connected British government officials, including Vel Gnanendran, went straight from the Larry Ellison Foundation into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and worked there at the time that the body signed off on the lucrative Oracle contracts. For years, the Larry Ellison Foundation also bankrolled the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the former U.K. prime minister’s new political project.
Yet, just after as the partnership with the Ministry of Defence was secured, Ellison abruptly shut down his foundation, prompting speculation that it had fulfilled its purpose.
“Our mission to support Israel”
Why this should be of concern is that both Ellison and key Oracle figures have made clear that their business model is less about making money, and more focused on furthering the interests of the Israeli national security state.
Furthermore, few people realize how important Oracle is to the functioning of the modern world. It is the third-largest software company globally. Yet because it sells its products to businesses and governments rather than consumers, it is far less known than competitors such as Microsoft or Amazon. Nevertheless, it is as important to the modern hi-tech economy as its rivals, its software and databases powering the likes of Netflix, Zoom, financial corporations such as JPMorgan Chase, as well as a myriad of educational institutions.
While opening a new data center in Jerusalem in 2021, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, Safra Catz, laid out Oracle’s purpose, stating,
We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry [Ellison] and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”
Catz made the comments in response to a question about Israel’s poor human rights record and the rebellion of Silicon Valley employees refusing to facilitate the country’s war crimes. In 2017, Catz was offered the position of U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
Safra Catz, Oracle’s CEO, poses with Alon Ben (left), CEO of Tel-Aviv-based Oracle data partner, Bynet
Ellison, if anything, is even more forthright in his support for the Israeli government and its agenda. The billionaire – currently the fourth-richest individual in the world – has bankrolled the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for years, giving tens of millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF, including the largest single donation the organization has ever received. In 2017 alone, he pledged $16.6 million to build a new training facility for IDF soldiers defending, in his words, “our home”. As Ellison explained:
Through all of the perilous times since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home. In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank Friends of the IDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.”
This was far from his first donation to the organization. Three years previously, he gave $9 million at a star-studded gala – the largest donation on a record-breaking night for the FIDF.
The big tech mogul also has a direct hand in furthering the Israeli settlement project. In 2007, he met with then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to pledge half a million dollars in support to the Israeli border town of Sderot.
But if Ellison can count Livni as a friend, then Benjamin Netanyahu is virtually family. The pair have been close for many years; Ellison even flew Netanyahu out to his private Hawaiian island to vacation together. There, he offered the embattled prime minister a seat on Oracle’s board, replete with a salary of $450,000.
Netanyahu had previously gone to Ellison, encouraging him to buy out the struggling Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper in an attempt to change the outlet from an adversary of his political project into a mouthpiece for his Likud Party.
Unsurprisingly, Oracle has signed numerous deals with the Israeli national security state.
“The Israelis think they control the Foreign Office. And they do!”
In recent years, Israel and pro-Israel groups have managed to amass considerable influence over U.K. government policy. A measure of this is the fact that, by 2021, one-third of the cabinet – including then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson – were directly funded by the Israeli government or pro-Israel organizations. Chief amongst these groups is the Conservative Friends of Israel, who have claimed that 80% of Tory members of parliament belong to their organization.
The Israel lobby has been able to shape government policy, to the point where they blocked Boris Johnson’s appointment of Alan Duncan to the post of Middle East Minister. Johnson, according to Duncan, was “indignant”. “They shouldn’t behave like this”, the prime minister reportedly said about the Israelis, but acquiesced to their demands. “The Israelis think they control the Foreign Office. And they do”, Duncan later wrote. Home Secretary Priti Patel (a longtime champion of the apartheid state) also secretly flew to Israel for “off the radar” talks with Netanyahu – a huge breach of ministerial codes, for which she later resigned.
The Israeli Embassy also played a key role in the coordinated smear campaign demonizing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, an operation that helped to ensure Johnson’s electoral victory in 2019.
In addition to this, there have also been national security questions raised about the extent to which Israeli businessmen have bought up key British industries. Last year, for example, Patrick Drahi’s attempt to purchase 18% of BT, the formerly state-owned telecoms giant that owns and controls much of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure, was put on hold due to concerns over national security.
That a company like Oracle that defines itself so explicitly as pro-Israel raises serious concerns over the nature of the work they do for the United Kingdom or any other nation. How can the Ministry of Defence or the Home Office’s data be considered uncompromised in these hands?
The CIA in all but name
“The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything,” Ellison once said, adding,
The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database.”
This should be of concern to everyone, as Oracle itself started off as a project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, Ellison named his company after Project Oracle, a 1970s CIA operation he worked on.
“Our very first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency,” Ellison boasted, telling the story of how, in 1977, the CIA commissioned his firm to build them a database. From there, Ellison immediately began pitching to other wings of the national security state, and within months had secured contracts with Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and the NSA. The bottomless pit of money available for the military has helped turn Oracle from a tiny operation to a $46 billion dollar per year behemoth.
One of Oracle’s largest deals came in 2020, when it was part of a consortium that won a 15-year contract with the CIA and the other 16 U.S. intelligence agencies said to be with tens of billions of dollars.
Part of the reason the CIA trusts Oracle is that the company’s upper echelons are filled with ex-CIA executives. A case in point is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was appointed to the company’s board in 2015. David Carney, who spent 32 years at the agency, rising to become its third-in-command, also joined Oracle, heading up its information assurance center.
Indeed, on its own website, Oracle aggressively recruits CIA agents, sharing stories of former spooks who have gone on to succeed in its ranks. One of those is Senior Technical Program Manager Andrew C. “As an Intelligence Officer in the US Navy, as well as in the CIA, Andrew has had to lead, build teams, and work on fast-breaking projects, all things Oracle requires on a regular basis,” Oracle writes, before actively encouraging other agents to apply,
Now that you’ve heard about Andrew’s experience, are you ready to join Oracle National Security Region team? If you hold a U.S. Government Top Secret SCI or higher clearance, click here to check out our latest opportunities. Once you’ve found an opening that fits your talent, passion, skills, and background, apply for us to consider you. Create the future with us.”
Oracle, a firm that stores reams of your sensitive data, openly boasts of its cozy ties to the CIA
The revolving door between Oracle and the CIA also swings the other way, with Oracle staff finding employment in Langley, VA.
The Silicon Valley giant also works closely with the U.S. military. “Oracle Cloud is advancing Department of Defense mission success”, it boasts on its website. Oracle notes that it is “delivering real-time intel to warfighters”, thereby “securing command and control at the tactical edge.” Thus, by the company’s own telling, it is a centerpiece of both the military-industrial-complex and the national security state. Big media outlets agree: “Larry Ellison is a billionaire today thanks to the CIA” concluded Business Insider.
Surveillance State
If Ellison had his way, however, Oracle would be an even more crucial part of a greatly expanded national security state. In the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, he flew in for a series of meetings with top Bush-era officials, including NSA chief Michael Hayden and Attorney General John Ashcroft. There, he likely pitched an idea he had been promoting for some time: a single, comprehensive national security database that collected every piece of information possible to identify someone, from thumbprints and iris scans to medical history and social security details. “The single greatest step we Americans could take to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was copied into a single, comprehensive national security database,” he insisted.
In the end, even the Bush administration balked at such a sweeping project. Nevertheless, Oracle has deeply ingratiated itself into the world of policing and surveillance. In 2012, at the height of an anti-NATO demonstration, U.S. law enforcement used Oracle’s Endeca software to match protestors’ tweets with data about their criminal records, 911 calls and other information to pre-arrest demonstration leaders before the action took off.
Since then, Oracle has sold the same or similar software to authorities in Europe, South America, the Middle East and China. Job listings for developers at Guantánamo Bay also note that familiarity with Endeca and Oracle software is a desired trait.
Oracle is far from the only Silicon Valley giant with questionable ties to intelligence. Here at MintPress, we have exposed how Facebook’s top ranks are filled with former FBI and CIA agents, how ex-Israeli spies have found roles working for Microsoft and Google, and uncovered what we termed a “NATO to TikTok pipeline.”
Yet the openness with which Oracle and Ellison work with the Israeli state to further its interests should be highly concerning to those working in national security. Israel already has a long history of using its tech industry to surveil and eavesdrop on foreign governments.
Can it really be a wise idea for the United Kingdom to entrust its most sensitive government, health and defense data to a company with such close ties to the Israeli government?
So far, Great Britain has overlooked the potential grave national security threat this poses. Surely this cannot continue indefinitely.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic, political campaigner, and a MintPress video and podcast host. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique, and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network, and The Peace and Justice Project founded by Jeremy Corbyn.
The General who swallowed his truth
By Jasim Al-Azzawi | MEMO | March 5, 2026
General Dan Cain, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered a private warning to President Trump with the bluntness that democracies depend upon and empires routinely ignore: “We don’t have enough ammunition to win this war. It would not be pretty.” This was not timidity. This was the solitary act of institutional honesty still flickering inside the corridors of American military power.
Trump’s response was the response of a carnival barker, not a commander-in-chief. On Truth Social — that funhouse mirror of American political life — he swatted away the warning with a salesman’s swagger: “Oh no, no, no. If we do it, it will be easily won.” A sober assessment became a sales pitch. A caution became a lie.
But the greater lie came next. When Cain’s warning leaked, Trump did not merely dismiss it. He inverted it. He told the American public, with the breezy confidence of a man who has never been held accountable for anything, that the general had said the opposite — that the United States had plenty of missiles, plenty of munitions, plenty of everything. “That’s not what he said at all,” Trump declared. He put triumphalist words in the mouth of a man who had spoken warnings.
And General Cain said nothing.
That silence is not a footnote in this story. It is the story. By staying quiet, Cain allowed the American public to absorb a fabrication as truth. He did not say: “No, Mr. President, that is not what I said.” He did not invoke the oath he swore, or the soldiers who would pay with their lives for the gap between political rhetoric and logistical reality. He chose the safety of silence over the danger of truth. In doing so, he did not merely fail himself. He failed the republic.
This is the rot at the core of American militarism.
As the historian Andrew Bacevich has long warned, the professional military has become less a defender of democratic values than a tool of imperial ambition, its senior officers more attentive to their next posting than to the Constitution they swore to uphold.
Cain’s silence was not an aberration. It was a symptom.
The logistics picture Cain reportedly described in private is not theoretical. The math is unforgiving. Current inventories of interceptors and precision munitions cannot sustain a prolonged air campaign against a nation three times the size of Iraq. The Wall Street Journal has documented an “alarming gap” in US missile stockpiles, reporting that reserves “fell significantly short” of requirements for high-intensity, sustained operations. Pentagon contractors have been instructed to “double or even quadruple” production of Patriot interceptors, SM-6s, and precision strike missiles — a tacit admission that the arsenal built for Cold War scenarios is inadequate for the war being prosecuted today.
Consider Gaza. Israel, the most lavishly armed military power in the Middle East, with complete air and sea dominance, has reduced a tiny coastal strip to a moonscape desolation over two and a half years, and still has not broken Hamas. Gaza is thirty-seven kilometres long.
Iran is a nation of ninety million people, mountainous, strategically deep, with hardened infrastructure and a battle-tested Revolutionary Guard. The idea that it collapses under a few weeks of American airstrikes is not a strategy. It is fantasy dressed up as resolve.
“God help us if this continues, if it even reaches its fourth week,” Colonel Daniel Davis warned on the Deep Dive podcast. He was speaking militarily. The same prayer applies politically.
When Trump now floats the prospect of ground troops, he is not escalating from a position of strength. He is improvising from a position of denial. The admission that airpower and missiles alone cannot achieve the political objective is the admission that the original objective was never honestly assessed. This is the pattern of American war-making at the end of empire: grandiose promises, catastrophic miscalculations, and then the slow, terrible reckoning paid in blood by those who never had a seat at the table where the lies were told.
The costs are already accumulating — not merely in the currency of munitions and treasure, but in the currency that empire always spends last and regrets most: credibility. America’s word, already devalued by two decades of manufactured justifications for war, grows cheaper by the day.
Democracies can endure miscalculation. They can endure bad presidents. What they cannot long endure is the institutionalization of a culture in which truth is spoken in whispers behind closed doors and swallowed whole in front of cameras. When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs permits his own words to be weaponized as propaganda — when the man charged with counting the missiles will not correct the president who pretends there are plenty — something more than military credibility collapses.
What collapses is the social compact between the governed and those who send them to die.
Cain’s silence was not caution. It was complicity. And in the machinery of empire running low on ammunition and low on honesty, complicity is the one resource that never seems to run short.
Because when the missiles finally run out, slogans will not replace them.
Reality will.
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From the Archives
Wartime internment camps in Australia
National Archives of Australia
World War I
During World War I, for security reasons the Australian Government pursued a comprehensive internment policy against enemy aliens living in Australia.
Initially only those born in countries at war with Australia were classed as enemy aliens, but later this was expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants born in enemy nations and others who were thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.
Australia interned almost 7,000 people during World War I, of whom about 4,500 were enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.
Records of World War I internment camps
World War II
During World War II, Australian authorities established internment camps for three reasons – to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.
Unlike World War I, the initial aim of internment during the later conflict was to identify and intern those who posed a particular threat to the safety or defence of the country. As the war progressed, however, this policy changed and Japanese residents were interned en masse. In the later years of the war, Germans and Italians were also interned on the basis of nationality, particularly those living in the north of Australia. In all, just over 20 per cent of all Italians resident in Australia were interned. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Seyed M. Marandi: Negotiations Collapsed – Return to War
- Tomorrow’s naval blockade showdown
- ‘Israel’ attacks civilians to hide its embarrassing military failures & out of pure sadism
- Any Foreign Military Vessel Approaching Hormuz Under Any Pretext ‘Will Be Dealt With Severely’: IRGC
- Diplomats slam US negotiators’ performance in Iran talks
- Trump Refuses Exit Ramp, War with Iran will Continue
- Trump Says US Naval Blockade in Strait of Hormuz Will Begin Shortly
- US, Iran end 21-hour talks without agreement
- US IRAN TALKS: Who Are the Crazy Ones Here? /Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Talks with the US end without a deal over excessive US demands: Iran
- If Americans Knew
- US-Iran ceasefire negotiations make zero progress – Daily Update
- Pro-Israel ‘Thinktanks’ and Individuals who Influence U.S. Foreign Policy
- Mearsheimer reveals how Israel dictates US policies on Iran, Gaza – video
- After killing 350+, Israel still has a “score to settle” with Lebanon before ceasefire – Daily Update
- Military aid to Israel emerges as the latest political litmus test for Democrats
- The only Palestinian children’s rights organization closes following years-long Israeli campaign against it
- ‘I Can’t Forget the Smell’: Lebanese Reel After Israel Kills Over 300 in Single Day
- DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel
- TCN: Is Israel Blackmailing President Trump?
- Israel killed at least 303 Lebanese yesterday – who were they? Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
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