Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please."

– Niccolò Machiavelli

"Without a doubt, psychological warfare has proven its right to a place of dignity in our military arsenal."

– General Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The influence of politics on war do not belong to the nature of war, but, on the contrary, contradict it."

– Carl von Clausewitz

1. The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again

2. The Cries of Byai Phu (Myanmar, north Korea, Ukraine, Gaza, and Anti-semitism and Israel)

3. How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War

4. The Sixties’ Toxic Legacy

5. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 9, 2024

6. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 9, 2024

7. Ukraine shows even the toughest tanks can't go to war anymore without cage armor to shield them from exploding drones

8. Israel's special forces hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, report says

9. US army aided Israel in bloody military op launched from Gaza 'Aid Pier'

10. Fake Aid Truck Used to Carry Out Rescue Operation - US 'Special Cell' Participated in Nuseirat Massacre

11. Israel's special forces hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, report says

12. Inside Israel’s hostage rescue: Secret plans and a deadly ‘wall of fire’

13. Israel rescues 4 hostages in attacks that kill over 270 Palestinians

14. Ukrainian Activist Traces Roots of War in ‘Centuries of Russian Colonization’

15. Gen Z Plumbers and Construction Workers Are Making #BlueCollar Cool

16. Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s Hail Mary Pass in Manila

17. Israel’s Euphoria Over Hostage Rescue May Be Fleeting

18. Blaming Israel for Rescuing Its People

19. How Israel Saved a Hostage Rescue Mission That Nearly Failed

20. From the Editor: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work - Irregular Warfare Initiative

1. The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again

Will the warnings be heeded? What is the IC assessing? (they probably appreciate Michael Morrell helping to sound the alarm)

Excerpts:

These steps to identify threats are critical, but action to prevent attacks is even more important. Given the particular vulnerability of the southern border, Biden’s recent executive order to restrict asylum processing is a valuable step toward limiting entry to the United States. But with U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting close to 200,000 encounters with migrants at this border each month so far in 2024, and with thousands of people each week crossing the border undetected, the government will need to take additional action—including the use of national emergency authorities—to ensure that terrorists are not exploiting this overwhelmed channel to enter the country.

Action is also required to address threats before they come overseas. ISIS-K poses the most immediate threat, but it is based in Afghanistan, where the United States has not had a military presence since its withdrawal in 2021. Washington may therefore need to do something otherwise unthinkable: work with the Taliban. The group, which again rules Afghanistan after two decades of war with the United States, considers ISIS-K an adversary. The possibility of coordinating with the Taliban to target ISIS-K militants has been raised before, including by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in 2021. Washington does not need to provide weapons to the Taliban or put boots on the ground, but it should consider limited intelligence exchanges in which the United States offers information about possible ISIS-K targets inside Afghanistan in return for information from the Taliban about ISIS-K’s capabilities and plans for overseas attacks. The United States should likewise work with Pakistan, where ISIS-K also operates, to neutralize the group.

Taking these steps would be difficult in the best of times, let alone ahead of an election. But terrorists can strike without warning, and they feel no need to respect the U.S. political calendar. For the past two decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the efforts of thousands of Americans in the military and intelligence communities have spared the country a second 9/11—or worse. This is an extraordinary achievement, but the work is not done. A terrorist attack is a preventable catastrophe. As the threat increases, policymakers must rise to the challenge to protect the U.S. homeland.

The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again

Echoes of the Run-Up to 9/11

By Graham Allison and Michael Morell

June 10, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Graham Allison and Michael Morell · June 10, 2024

From his confirmation hearing to become Director of Central Intelligence in May 1997 until September 11, 2001, George Tenet was sounding an alarm about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. In those four years before al Qaeda operatives attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Tenet testified publicly no fewer than ten times about the threat the group posed to U.S. interests at home and abroad. In February 1999, six months after the group bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, he claimed, “There is not the slightest doubt that Osama bin Laden . . . [is] planning further attacks against us.” In early 2000, he warned Congress again that bin Laden was “foremost among these terrorists, because of the immediacy and seriousness of the threat he poses” and because of his ability to strike “without additional warning.” Al Qaeda’s next attacks, Tenet said, could be “simultaneous” and “spectacular.” In private, Tenet was even more assertive. Breaking with standard protocols, he wrote personal letters to President Bill Clinton expressing his deep conviction about the gravity of the threat. And several times in 2001, he personally discussed his concerns about al Qaeda’s plans with President George W. Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The CIA and the FBI may not have uncovered the time, place, or method of the 9/11 plot, but Tenet’s warnings were prophetic.

Two and a half decades later, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, is sounding similar alarms. His discussions within the Biden administration are private, but his testimony to Congress and other public statements could not be more explicit. Testifying in December to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wray said, “When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment.” Yet after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he added. In speaking about those threats, Wray has repeatedly drawn attention to security gaps at the United States’ southern border, where thousands of people each week enter the country undetected.

Wray is not the only senior official issuing warnings. Since he became commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) in 2022, General Erik Kurilla has been pointing out the worrying capabilities of the terrorist groups his forces are fighting in the Middle East and South Asia. These include al Qaeda, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and especially Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the ISIS affiliate that operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Christine Abizaid, the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, described “an elevated global threat environment” while speaking at a conference in Doha last month. And in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee just last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, said that the “threat level . . . has gone up enormously.”

Only with complete access to intelligence information could one form a fully independent view of the threat. But the FBI director’s and the CENTCOM commander’s statements almost certainly reflect the classified intelligence they are reading and the law enforcement and military operations in which their organizations are involved. Their words should be taken seriously. In the years since 9/11, other officials have warned about terrorist threats that, fortunately, did not materialize, but that does not mean Wray’s and Kurilla’s comments today should be discounted. The wax and wane of terrorism warnings over the years has generally corresponded with the level of actual risk. In many cases, too, those warnings triggered government responses that thwarted terrorists’ plans. Given the stakes, complacency is a greater risk than alarmism.

Combined, the stated intentions of terrorist groups, the growing capabilities they have demonstrated in recent successful and failed attacks around the world, and the fact that several serious plots in the United States have been foiled point to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion. Put simply, the United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead.

Fortunately, the United States has learned a great deal over the past 30 years about how to combat terrorist threats, including threats that are not yet well defined. President Joe Biden and his administration should now use that playbook. It includes steps the intelligence community should take to better understand the threat, steps to prevent terrorists from entering the United States, and steps to put pressure on terrorist organizations in the countries where they find sanctuary. One of the best models to follow is the set of measures Clinton authorized when the terror threat rose in the summer and fall of 1999. Those steps prevented a number of attacks, including at least one attack on the U.S. homeland. That success—as well as the United States’ failure to prevent 9/11—offers valuable lessons for modern policymakers. Today, as then, it is better to be proactive than reactive.

PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

Without access to classified intelligence, piecing together information from public congressional testimonies, successful terrorist attacks abroad, and foiled plots in the United States and elsewhere is the best way to build a picture of the threat. Clues about unsuccessful attempts in the United States in particular have come into view since the Biden administration persuaded Congress in April to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the provision that allows the U.S. government to compel U.S. telecommunications and Internet providers to turn over the communications of foreigners outside the United States whose communications travel through the United States.

In at least eight appearances before Congress since last fall—including one just last week—Wray has identified three different categories of threats to the U.S. homeland: international terrorism, domestic terrorism, and state-sponsored terrorism. All three, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in December, are “simultaneously elevated.”

Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee in March, he said that “the number one category” of terrorist threats in the United States included “lone actors or individuals operating in small cells using readily available weapons.” Noting the influence of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Wray has warned of “homegrown violent extremists” motivated by both Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response. He has said that the FBI is investigating many such individuals, but he has not provided further detail.

Assessing the threat from abroad, Wray told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last October that Washington cannot “discount the possibility that Hamas or another foreign terrorist organization may . . . conduct attacks here” in the United States. In April, he told the House Appropriations Committee that “the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland” was “increasingly concerning.”

The United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead.

Wray has focused on one country as a potential state sponsor of terrorism: Iran. In October, he told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that Tehran continues to plot against high-ranking “current or former” U.S. government officials as a means of exacting revenge for the United States’ assassination of senior Iranian military official Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Although Iranian plans have failed so far, there is no guarantee that the next one will. The successful killing of a U.S. citizen, especially if it takes place on U.S. soil, would not only strike fear among the American public but also plunge Tehran and Washington into a crisis on a scale unseen since the Iranian regime took power in 1979.

The FBI director has also highlighted a specific security vulnerability. In December, Wray warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that foreign terrorists trying to get into the United States have the “ability to exploit any point of entry, including our southwest border.” In March, he drew the Senate Intelligence Committee’s attention to “a particular network [operating on the southern border].” He told the committee that this smuggling network has overseas facilitators with “ISIS ties that we are very concerned about.”

Kurilla has been sounding similar alarms from CENTCOM. The forces under his command conducted 475 ground operations and 45 airstrikes against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria last year—killing or capturing almost 1,000 of the group’s fighters. In a March statement, Kurilla affirmed that both ISIS and al Qaeda “remain committed to inflicting violence.” Although U.S. forces have kept ISIS from controlling large portions of Iraq and Syria, by Kurilla’s count, the group still has at least 5,000 fighters. Over the span of just two weeks in early 2024, ISIS conducted 275 attacks—its highest rate in years. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, continues to operate from Afghanistan and Yemen.

Kurilla has called particular attention to ISIS-K, the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March 2023 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he warned that the group would be able to carry out an “operation against U.S. or Western interests abroad in under six months with little to no warning.” His words proved prescient earlier this year, when ISIS-K mounted the deadliest terror attack Iran had experienced since the founding of the Islamic Republic, where two suicide bombers killed at least 95 people at a memorial on the anniversary of Soleimani’s death. ISIS-K struck again in March, when four terrorists killed 145 people and injured 550 more in a brazen attack on a concert hall in Moscow.

The commander of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), General Michael Langley, has painted a similar picture. In testimony in March before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Langley noted that al Qaeda and ISIS are exploiting “underdeveloped, undergoverned areas” and that “recent military takeovers in West Africa are giving space to violent extremist organizations.” Langley told the committee that his forces conducted 18 attacks on those terrorist groups in 2023 as part of a larger campaign. His testimony is consistent with the assessment of most terrorism experts in and out of government that al Qaeda and ISIS groups in Africa are thriving.

Law enforcement officers near the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow, March 2024

Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Observable trends add weight to these officials’ concerns. Most important is the growing number of both successful and foiled attacks. According to the Global Terrorism Index, deaths from terrorism increased by 22 percent from 2022 to 2023. This year has already seen the two large ISIS-K attacks in Iran and Russia. And were it not for the outstanding work of German intelligence and police, the list of successful acts of terrorism in the past few months would have been longer. German authorities arrested foreign nationals who were allegedly planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral late last year and the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm in March.

Foiled plots inside the United States should be the ultimate wake-up call. In April 2022, the Justice Department charged an Iranian government official based in Tehran with attempting to hire a hit man to assassinate former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton. The following month, the FBI reported that it had thwarted the plans of an Iraqi national living in Ohio to smuggle four people across the southern border to assassinate former President George W. Bush. Most recently, the FBI—as part of the Biden administration’s effort to convince Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—shared declassified intelligence with Politico showing that the agency had stopped a plot to attack critical infrastructure in the United States last fall. According to the FBI, the organizer inside the United States was in regular contact with a foreign terrorist group, had identified specific targets, and had made sufficient preparations to put the plan into motion.

A final piece of the puzzle is the string of recent statements by terrorist groups calling for attacks. Many pegged their threats to the events of October 7. Shortly after that day’s attack, al Qaeda issued a statement urging Muslims around the world to seize a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to commit acts of violence in support of Hamas’s cause. In January, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released videos calling for attacks on commercial flights worldwide and on targets in New York City. And in March, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, an ISIS-K spokesperson called on individuals to carry out lone-wolf attacks on Christians and Jews in the United States, Europe, and Israel. When terrorist groups make explicit threats to the United States, Washington should listen. It is not uncommon for an adversary to say precisely what they are going to do—as bin Laden did before 9/11.

THE LOGIC OF THE THREAT

Identifying terrorist threats involves identifying motive, means, and opportunity—the three key elements in any criminal investigation. In the case of terrorism, however, one more element is necessary: organizational capacity. If an individual or a group does not have the skills or connections to turn plans into action, they will not cross the threshold from a potential risk to an active one.

Motives abound for potential perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as U.S. drone strikes in more than a dozen other countries, have generated resentment toward the United States that could drive individuals to seek violent retribution. More recently, Israel’s ongoing response to the horrific attacks on October 7 has killed at least 36,000 people (of which more than half are civilians) in Gaza. That operation will have what Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has called a “generational impact on terrorism” and will create what Kurilla has described as “the conditions for malign actors to sow instability throughout the region and beyond.” The assassination of Soleimani in 2020, too, has prompted Iran to attempt attacks in the United States ever since. These efforts may accelerate as Iran faces a deepening conflict with Israel and instability at home following the death of its president. Even the threat of domestic extremism and lone-wolf attacks—the least predictable forms of terrorism—is likely to grow more serious as the United States approaches a polarized election between two candidates who regularly issue dire warnings that a victory by the other side would be the death knell of American democracy.

Next, consider means and opportunity. Airport security may have tightened significantly since 9/11, but weekly mass shootings prove that it remains relatively easy in the United States to buy high-powered assault weapons and enough ammunition to kill large numbers of people in a short period of time. Last year, hundreds of individuals on the United States’ terrorist watch list attempted to enter the country via the southern border. It is not difficult to imagine a person, or even a group, with the intent to do harm slipping across a border—where U.S. officials reported 2.5 million encounters with migrants in 2023—and then purchasing assault rifles and carrying out a large massacre. There is no shortage of locations across the United States where hundreds, if not thousands, of people gather on a regular basis—and all may be ready targets for those seeking to incite terror.

The final factor is organizational capacity. The United States’ “war on terror” has eliminated large numbers of fighters and planners. But as Kurilla warned earlier this year, ISIS and other groups still have the leadership, foot soldiers, and organizational structures necessary to orchestrate attacks. Wray, too, has urged lawmakers not to take too much comfort in terrorist groups’ shrinking sizes. As he said in December, “let’s not forget that it didn’t take a big number of people on 9/11 to kill 3,000 people.”

PREVENTING THE UNTHINKABLE

The Biden administration already has a lot on its plate, between supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s large-scale invasion, bracing for the possibility that Israel’s failing war against Hamas in Gaza will turn into a wider war against Iranian proxies in the region, and maintaining its focus on China. But policymakers should not underestimate the threat of a terrorist attack inside the United States. Assessments of national security threats must account for both the level of risk and the scale of potential consequences—and in the case of terrorism, both should compel the administration to take action.

Biden should launch a comprehensive campaign to halt any terrorist planning that may be underway, taking a page from the playbook Clinton adopted at the end of his second term. After listening carefully to the intelligence community’s warning about potential terrorist plots, Clinton resolved to take action. The attacks that were prevented at the turn of the century offer lessons today—as do the ones that weren’t prevented on 9/11.

When terrorist groups make explicit threats, Washington should listen.

In the fall of 1999, U.S. intelligence agencies collected information that strongly suggested bin Laden and al Qaeda were preparing to launch multiple attacks to coincide with the millennium. Although the adversary and the timing were clear, the targets and method of attack were not. This lack of detail did not stop Clinton from ordering a swift and sweeping response. As Tenet recounts in his memoir, what followed was a “frenzy of activity”: the CIA conducted operations in 53 countries against 38 targets, including the detention of dozens of suspected terrorists. The CIA engaged foreign partners, most notably working with Canadian authorities to break up an Algerian terror cell in Canada and helping Jordanian authorities arrest 16 terrorists planning an attack on tourists in Amman. As a result, no terrorist group successfully carried out an attack at the millennium. Among the more celebrated successes was the arrest of al Qaeda operative Ahmed Ressam, which thwarted the group’s plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999. Immigration officers in Port Angeles, Washington, were on high alert because of the Clinton order, and they pulled Ressam aside at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing. In the trunk of his car, they discovered 100 pounds of high explosives and materials for multiple detonators. Ressam was later convicted on terrorism charges.

For Washington to mount a similar effort to counter today’s terror threat, the intelligence and security community must explain the danger to policymakers and the American public more consistently. Wray and Kurilla have been vocal about their concerns, but other officials have so far been more reserved. It is not clear whether this public reticence is merely a political calculation or an indication of disagreement. To clarify officials’ assessment of the threats, congressional intelligence committees should convene unclassified hearings with the directors of National Intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, and the National Counterterrorism Center and ask each agency to offer its candid views. Diagnosis must precede prescription. Policymakers need a clear picture of the threat before they can determine how to proceed and how to bring the American public on board.

Next, U.S. intelligence agencies should review all previously collected information related to terrorism. A reexamination of earlier reporting can yield new insights or even uncover information that was overlooked the first time. Tenet ordered a similar review in the summer of 2001. Although it did not stop 9/11, the exercise did reveal that the CIA had learned in 1999 that two al Qaeda members who later became hijackers possessed U.S. visas, but the CIA did not put them on the watch list at the time. When this information came to light, the two men were immediately put on the watch list and the FBI began to search for them, albeit unsuccessfully. Similar clues could be out there today, and to find them, intelligence professionals will need to start doing what they call “shaking the trees.” One of the most effective measures they could take would be to ask the United States’ international counterterrorism partners to detain and interview—within their legal authority—individuals with ties to terrorism.

Wray at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., March 2024

Julia Nikhinson / Reuters

These steps to identify threats are critical, but action to prevent attacks is even more important. Given the particular vulnerability of the southern border, Biden’s recent executive order to restrict asylum processing is a valuable step toward limiting entry to the United States. But with U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting close to 200,000 encounters with migrants at this border each month so far in 2024, and with thousands of people each week crossing the border undetected, the government will need to take additional action—including the use of national emergency authorities—to ensure that terrorists are not exploiting this overwhelmed channel to enter the country.

Action is also required to address threats before they come overseas. ISIS-K poses the most immediate threat, but it is based in Afghanistan, where the United States has not had a military presence since its withdrawal in 2021. Washington may therefore need to do something otherwise unthinkable: work with the Taliban. The group, which again rules Afghanistan after two decades of war with the United States, considers ISIS-K an adversary. The possibility of coordinating with the Taliban to target ISIS-K militants has been raised before, including by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in 2021. Washington does not need to provide weapons to the Taliban or put boots on the ground, but it should consider limited intelligence exchanges in which the United States offers information about possible ISIS-K targets inside Afghanistan in return for information from the Taliban about ISIS-K’s capabilities and plans for overseas attacks. The United States should likewise work with Pakistan, where ISIS-K also operates, to neutralize the group.

Taking these steps would be difficult in the best of times, let alone ahead of an election. But terrorists can strike without warning, and they feel no need to respect the U.S. political calendar. For the past two decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the efforts of thousands of Americans in the military and intelligence communities have spared the country a second 9/11—or worse. This is an extraordinary achievement, but the work is not done. A terrorist attack is a preventable catastrophe. As the threat increases, policymakers must rise to the challenge to protect the U.S. homeland.

GRAHAM ALLISON is Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University.
MICHAEL MORELL is Senior Counselor and Global Head of Geostrategic Risk at Beacon Global Strategy. He was Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Foreign Affairs · by Graham Allison and Michael Morell · June 10, 2024

2. The Cries of Byai Phu (Myanmar, north Korea, Ukraine, Gaza, and Anti-semitism and Israel)

Starting the week off with a powerful essay.

One of the minor things that pains me is the co-option of resistance and liberation in support of Hamas and other terrorism organizations and malign actors. Their "resistance" is not the same as Ukrainian resistance or the resistance that will need to take place in Taiwan against the PLA. They are or will be resisting the axis of aggressors/dictators. We should not let those organizations legitimize themselves through the use of the term resistance with its positive connotations against dictators.

The Cries of Byai Phu - Algemeiner.com

algemeiner.com · by The Algemeiner · June 9, 2024

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during the 8th Congress of the Workers’ Party in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this photo supplied by North Korea’s Central News Agency (KCNA) on January 13, 2021. Photo: KCNA/via REUTERS/File Photo.

Civilians forced to sit in the open for two days, with no sustenance, under a blazing sun. Soldiers handing bottles filled with their own urine to those begging for water. Men bearing tattoos deemed to be politically offensive screaming in agony as their skin is burned off with lighted petrol. Soldiers, many of them drunk, demanding shovels to bury the bodies of those whom they executed. Women, men and children beaten brutally when answering questions barked at them by the soldiers, irrespective of what actually came out of their mouths.

I wish I could give you the details of the demonstration this weekend that’s been organized to protest these foul atrocities, but there isn’t one. These horrors didn’t afflict Palestinians in Gaza, and they weren’t carried out by Israeli troops. They occurred in the village of Byai Phu in the state of Rakhine in the far west of Burma, the East Asian country renamed “Myanmar” following a military coup in 1989. An account of these atrocities—not the first time something like this has happened during the brutal civil war that’s raged for three years and likely not the last—was tucked away in the corner of the BBC News website last week, which I happened to stumble on.

Everyone, it seems, has heard of Rafah, but few people know of Byai Phu, and those who have heard of it now will probably forget its name within a day or two. Yes, life is cruel, and for millions of people around the world, it’s an unceasing struggle to keep themselves and their families alive and afloat amid economic crisis, war and political repression. But that rather trite observation cannot, must not, be the final word.

Instead, let me speak plainly and bluntly. The cause of Palestine has become emblematic of the sickness at the heart of Western culture. It has become a fixation and an obsession, fueled by the ludicrous notion that the presence of a Jewish state and the absence of a Palestinian one “from the river to the sea” is the only explanation for the persistence of conflict and strife in today’s world. The terrible vice that is tunnel vision has become a virtue, something sacred, and challenging this dogma will get you “canceled” in progressive circles.

For the Iranian terror proxies in the Middle East, this state of affairs is cause for delight. “[S]ignificantly, the U.K. youth showed greater interest unfolding of the war on Gaza than in other global conflicts,” the pro-Hezbollah website Al-Mayadeen observed in its report of a June 5 opinion poll showing that 54% of Britons between the ages of 18 to 24 believe that Israel has no right to exist, compared with 21% of the same age group who think the opposite. The same article crowed at the statistic that 38% of young Brits are “very interested” in the war in Gaza, while only 19% feel the same about Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

We’ve periodically seen similarly worrying polls about how Israel is regarded throughout the first quarter of the present century. But what’s different, and what makes the question “why?” more urgent now than before, is that Israel is facing a proximate existential threat from Iran and its regional allies. What’s also different is that the world’s authoritarian states are much more emboldened now than they were 20 years ago, bolstered by the puerile notion among many Westerners that there is no essential difference between a country like the United States and one like North Korea.

If you were to ask the same audience whether they believe North Korea, which I’ve described in the past as “not so much a country, but a concentration camp with a seat at the United Nations,” has the right to exist, my informed guess is that the answer would either be “yes” or bemusement that the question was being asked in the first place. They wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care that North Korea is an artificial entity carved out at the close of the Korean War, or that the state exists to service its unchallenged dictator, Kim Jong-un, and his inner circle. Equally, the fact that one of the most grotesque forms of torture practiced in North Korea involves detainees being forced to watch their families being beaten and raped wouldn’t disturb too many of these Palestine Firsters, especially as North Korea vocally supports the Palestinians.

Part of the explanation for this is, of course, antisemitism, which artfully molds itself to fit in with the political agendas of every new generation. It’s also rooted in the notion that human beings aren’t fundamentally equal and equally deserving of the same human and civil rights, irrespective of where they happen to live. The nasty authoritarian streak that courses through progressive circles these days determines that the state—and not the individual—is paramount. If a persecuted or terrorized individual happens to be a citizen of a state damned as an ally of Western imperialism, then they deserve what’s coming to them. It’s not just Israelis, and by extension, Diaspora Jewish communities, that have suffered from this distinction; Ukrainians, Kurds and Burma’s various ethnicities are among those who have suffered from it, too. “All eyes” turn to Rafah because Rafah is being targeted by Israel, and Israel is, according to this schema, the link between police violence against black people in America, or Muslim communities in Europe, and the Palestinians, who—just like Jesus Christ—suffer for all of us.

By the end of this year, if not sooner, Israel may well find itself mired in a new war in Lebanon since Hezbollah shows no sign of ending its terror campaign to make the north of Israel an unlivable zone. There lies the rub; Israel’s first responsibility is to protect its citizens, but each time it does so, its reputation takes another pasting. As the tentacles of the Iranian octopus—Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, Islamist militias in Syria and Iraq—squeeze around Israel’s neck, the bitter reality is that many of our own neighbors will enjoy the spectacle. The discourse of peace and equality has been replaced by a fetish for war (“resistance”) and hierarchies of race and religion (“liberation”).

That’s bad news for us, but even worse news for the people of Byai Phu.

algemeiner.com · by The Algemeiner · June 9, 2024

3. How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War

Dr. Annale Newitz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalee_Newitz) (perhaps unknowingly) provides some "history" (with a lot of spin), that explains why we are so risk averse to psychological warfare/psychological operations.

To summarize Newitz' thesis: they basically argue all our ills and wrongs today - political divisions, culture wars, racism, etc., are all the result of the development of the US Army psychological operations doctrine in 1948.

You can hear Newitz explain this in their own words at On the Media at the 40 minute mark at this link: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/a-former-disinformation-reporter-is-running-the-onion-plus-birds-are-real?utm (The entire On the Media episode is on disinformation and worth listening to.)

Newitz thinks the US military is deliberately and effectively employing PSYOP and the weaponization of stories is far more dangerous than kinetic operations. If only the US military were as good as they think it is.

Excerpts:

Newitz contrasts Bernays’s cynicism with the idealism of Paul Linebarger, who wrote a handbook for the U.S. Army in 1948 called “Psychological Warfare” — offering “the opportunity of strategic advantage without the cataclysmic danger of a worldwide showdown” — and published novels under various pen names. As Cordwainer Smith, he wrote science fiction; he had formidable “worldbuilding” skills that he was able to carry over into the military’s psychological operations, or psyops, designed to influence adversaries’ opinions and behaviors. Given that he believed the alternative to words was the bomb, Linebarger was prone to think about his work in optimistic terms. “Psychological warfare is good for everybody,” he declared, deeming it “the affirmation of the human community against the national divisions which are otherwise accepted in war.”

The book goes on to narrate numerous instances of weaponized storytelling at work. Newitz is so skillful at elucidating such a tangled, morally contentious history that I never felt lost, though I sometimes thought that the word “psyop” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” which claimed that racial disparities in economic success were due mainly to genetics, more usefully characterized as a “psyop” or a terrible, odious book? What kind of analytical purchase is gained by using the phrase “the psyops known as Jim Crow laws” to describe racist legislation whose primary purpose wasn’t just to demoralize Black Americans in the South but to restrict their actual bodies?

NONFICTION

How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War

In a new book, the journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz shows how we have used narrative to manipulate and coerce.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/books/review/stories-are-weapons-annalee-newitz.html

One of Wonder Woman’s earliest appearances in a comic book, in 1942. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, “wanted to empower women” and believed that “propaganda was a progressive force.”Credit...Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

By Jennifer Szalai

June 5, 2024

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STORIES ARE WEAPONS: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, by Annalee Newitz

A story can entertain and inform; it can also deceive and manipulate. Perhaps few stories are as seductive as the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves — those reasonable, principled creatures so many of us presume ourselves to be.

As Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” propaganda is premised on exploiting the discrepancy between surface beliefs and unconscious motives. A clever propagandist can get any number of people who see themselves as invariably kindhearted to betray their ideals. Newitz gives the example of anti-immigration campaigns: Make humans so fearful that even pious, churchgoing grandmothers will countenance rounding up their fellow humans in detention camps.

Not that Newitz, a journalist and science fiction author who uses they/them pronouns, depicts all propaganda as necessarily evil. “Stories Are Weapons,” an exploration of our culture wars’ roots in psychological warfare, contains a chapter on comic book artists like William Moulton Marston, the psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman, who “wanted to empower women” and believed that “propaganda was a progressive force.” But much of the book is about stories that have been used to undermine, to exclude and to wound: myths about the frontier and the “last Indian”; pseudo-intellectual treatises expounding junk-science racism; conspiracy theories about “pizza-eating pedophiles”; and moral panics about rainbow stickers.

And then there are the stories that sow confusion. Newitz explains that they began researching this book in the middle of 2020, while the pandemic was raging and the president was promoting the healing powers of sunlight and bleach. The gutting of reproductive rights and the introduction of anti-trans bills, Newitz says, made them feel as if they were under siege.

“For anyone who has been told that they should not be alive,” Newitz writes on the dedication page. “Together we will survive this war.” Stories are weapons — but Newitz argues that they can also open up pathways to peace. “As a fiction writer, I knew there were other ways to get at the truth, to make sense of a world gripped by absurdity and chaos. I had to tell a story.”

That story is introduced through the exploits of two central figures. The first is Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the field that became known as “public relations.” To sell Lucky Strike cigarettes to women, Bernays devised a publicity campaign that linked the product to women’s desires for freedom. “Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally,” Newitz writes, recounting how he later worked with the C.I.A. to drum up antipathy toward Guatemala’s democratically elected government. A prime beneficiary of the eventual coup was Bernays’s client, United Fruit, which owned huge swaths of Guatemalan land.

Newitz contrasts Bernays’s cynicism with the idealism of Paul Linebarger, who wrote a handbook for the U.S. Army in 1948 called “Psychological Warfare” — offering “the opportunity of strategic advantage without the cataclysmic danger of a worldwide showdown” — and published novels under various pen names. As Cordwainer Smith, he wrote science fiction; he had formidable “worldbuilding” skills that he was able to carry over into the military’s psychological operations, or psyops, designed to influence adversaries’ opinions and behaviors. Given that he believed the alternative to words was the bomb, Linebarger was prone to think about his work in optimistic terms. “Psychological warfare is good for everybody,” he declared, deeming it “the affirmation of the human community against the national divisions which are otherwise accepted in war.”

The book goes on to narrate numerous instances of weaponized storytelling at work. Newitz is so skillful at elucidating such a tangled, morally contentious history that I never felt lost, though I sometimes thought that the word “psyop” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” which claimed that racial disparities in economic success were due mainly to genetics, more usefully characterized as a “psyop” or a terrible, odious book? What kind of analytical purchase is gained by using the phrase “the psyops known as Jim Crow laws” to describe racist legislation whose primary purpose wasn’t just to demoralize Black Americans in the South but to restrict their actual bodies?

Of course, military lingo packs an emotional payload, which is presumably why Newitz uses it. Tell people that they’re being pummeled by propaganda or a psyop, and you put them on guard. After all, nobody likes to think they are easily manipulated. Newitz shows how conservatives are well versed in the tactic of declaring harm, too: Denouncing something as “woke propaganda” can mobilize people to boycott Wonder Woman or ban a book.

There is a tension, then, between the imperative to seek the truth and the imperative to win the war. The vocabulary of war divides the world into stark binaries: Whatever helps the cause is good; whatever hampers the cause is bad. Complexities that don’t fit neatly into the ironclad narratives brandished by either side can get obscured.

“Stories Are Weapons” critiques this dynamic, but sometimes Newitz succumbs to the urge to oversimplify. The Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election by slipping anti-Democratic propaganda into people’s social media feeds, “unleashed a new kind of psyop on the American people,” Newitz writes, presenting the presidency of Donald Trump as proof of concept: “It’s hard to argue with results like the ones we saw in the 2016 election.”

But people have done just that, maintaining that Russian trolls weren’t the decisive factor in Trump’s victory. Even Newitz recognizes that the metaphor of war is constraining and can take their story only so far. They condemn how online disagreements swiftly degenerate into violent recriminations and death threats — something that appalls Newitz, but is arguably made more likely when stories are equated with violent attacks.

Psychological disarmament, along with a commitment to a shared future, is made harder by the decimation of trust during wartime. Still, Newitz is hopeful. Weapons, whether rhetorical or physical, offer the power to dominate, but there’s so much more they cannot do. “We do not reach consensus by threatening one another with death,” Newitz writes. “Instead, we promise one another a better life.”

STORIES ARE WEAPONS: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind | By Annalee Newitz | Norton | 246 pp. | $27.99

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

4. The Sixties’ Toxic Legacy

Another essay for reflection at the beginning of the week.

NextGen Marxism.

Excerpts:

But woke-friendly corporations, billionaires, foundations, and individuals with impressive foreign ties are demonstrating the effectiveness of funding campus radicals. Echoing similar anti-Western violent hate-marches throughout Europe and elsewhere, these indoctrinated know-nothings burn American flags, vandalize Founders’ statues with Islamist garb, paint swastikas on cemeteries, threaten and attack peaceful fellow students, police, and even janitors.

Fortunately, the majority of ordinary Americans are repelled by such tactics. Will that translate into increased vigilance regarding what students learn, how the media operates, and who wishes to destroy our system of government? Not without concerted and strategic popular engagement. Thus, NextGen Marxism concludes on a positive but urgent note. It is up to each of us to “engage in the process of ensuring that this nation is governed responsibly…. The time is now. We have a country to save.” A civilization, in truth.

The Sixties’ Toxic Legacy

aier.org · by Juliana Pilon · June 4, 2024

Juliana Geran Pilon

– June 4, 2024 Reading Time: 6 minutes

Pro-Palestine protesters’ encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles. April 2024.

The Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989 was a deceptive victory. Exhilarated by crumbling stones, the West did not notice the crumbling of its own culture. Overlooked, too, was the complete failure of Western intelligence to anticipate not only the timing but the circumstances of the collapse. After “winning” the Cold War, it was back to pursuing the American dream of consumerist happiness. Americans showed little interest in seeking to understand the ideology that, had its lethality been appreciated, might have prevented millions of deaths from totalitarianism. They didn’t know, and they didn’t want to know.

Overconfident, underinformed, and naïve Americans squandered the unique unipolar moment when they stood as the sole superpower in history. They forgot that the age-old dialectic pitting pluralist communities against monolithic autocracies is endemic to history. So, the end of one tyranny can mean the start of another, even more deadly. The American foreign policy establishment had long ignored virulent fundamentalist Islamism, despite its having been brewing for decades, oblivious that its own inattention enabled that growth. Not having taken Osama Bin Laden at his word, America was caught entirely unprepared as a new century of strife dawned. 9/11 was literally a bolt out of the sunny blue sky.

In an instant, everything came to a standstill. A stunned, outraged citizenry demanded safety now. So Congress appropriated money — lots of it. The administration sprang into action. The president declared “an axis of evil,” then hardly ever mentioned it again. How had all this come about? How is Sunni Islamism related to, say, North Korea’s communism or Iran’s theocratic Shiia “democracy”? No clue.

While for the US to do nothing was not an option, waging one war and then another without an articulated strategy, nor the institutional framework to synchronize all elements of national power or adequate counterinsurgency and counterintelligence capabilities, plus nonexistent public diplomacy, was no recipe for victory.

Incompetent statecraft only reinforced the anti-American shift in a culture already being sabotaged. Sixties radicals entrenched in the academy and the media, joined by corporate fellow travelers, were using new and improved tactics. They repurposed an old template: millenarian utopianism in the name of the oppressed. For decades, monovocal professors defined knowledge as a construct benefiting the oppressor-colonialist-capitalists. Truth itself became suspect. Dialogue gave way to insults and a polarizing cacophony took the place of rational discourse.

To understand how this happened, a good primer is the well-researched NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How To Combat It, by Mike Gonzalez, a distinguished former State Department official and Wall Street Journal writer, now a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and Katherine Gorka, former presidential appointee at the Department of Homeland Security and expert on terrorism. The latest of a growing number of excellent studies focusing on the effect of cultural Marxism on the Western zeitgeist, the book is a page-turner. It deftly exposes the roots of this ideology — a sinister, fundamentally irrational, civilizational death-wish in the European intellectual tradition.

Set in historical context, this phenomenon begins in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when the lava that had first erupted during the French Revolution erupted again. The brilliant heir of rabbis, Karl Marx — whose hatred of his own religious heritage was excelled only by a diseased vision of a dystopian future where an abstract humanity was exchanged for actual people — created the template for perpetual social upheaval. The book traces how German, Russian, and later Soviet bureaucracies of political warfare used the deeply flawed, self-contradictory cant of “dialectical materialism” as an instrument of power.

In the US, it was opportunistically midwifed through the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, which resonated during the Vietnam Era. It would eventually morph into the network that is currently paralyzing America’s campuses. Marxism was perfectly suited to be repurposed, a formidable ideological hydra whose seemingly infinite heads can regenerate according to the “struggle” being singled out for opprobrium: Oppressor, Colonialist, Capitalist, White, Racist, Nazi, Zionist, Satan — Big or Small — etc. In typically sinister semantic inversion, its proponents would assign to their adversary’s kettle the color of their own evil souls.

Gonzalez and Gorka describe this ideology as “a zero-sum view of the world, a world of irreconcilable antagonisms,” where dissent is forbidden, and perfection is perpetually elusive. According to this worldview, America is depraved and must be destroyed, guided by a self-styled elite that believes itself empowered to transform human nature. Revamping economic, political, and personal relationships would presumably reboot Genesis and abolish the Fall. Apples would be rationed.

1989 was pivotal. Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, Felicity Barringer, captured the moment: “As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders.” It was also the year when legal scholars of black, Asian, and at least one Mexican-American descent, officially founded and named the discipline of critical race theory (CRT), which “recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with a radical assessment of it.”

And Eric Mann, a former member of the sixties-era terrorist group Weather Underground who had worked for the Black Panthers and had spent prison time for assault and battery, opened the Labor Community Strategy Center to implement the revolutionary blueprint. In 2001, the Center recruited a teenager who would make history: Patrisse Cullors. She took to heart Mann’s call to action: “We have to build a Third World Movement, with third-world people in this country,” leading a “Black/Latinx/Third World united front with an agreed-upon black priority.”

In 2013, Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza, who in 2015 told an audience of fellow revolutionaries: “Black Lives Matter is much more than a hashtag. In fact, [BLM] is an organized network, in twenty-six cities, globally.” She added: “our task is to build the Left.” The occasion was a premier gathering of global Marxists sponsored by the Left Forum in Oakland, California, titled “No Justice, No Peace.” The sinister network of participants and their leaders, constituting what Mann described as “a little division of labor,” are amply referenced.

Their job was uniting every constituency opposed to the Western system of values, and the sixties anti-war movement provided the perfect meme. One gay radical, for example, had told Mann that the Gay Liberation Fund got its name “[b]ecause we believed in the National Liberation Fund of Vietnam. We weren’t just wanting gay marriage, we wanted to overthrow the government as part of being queer.” They had both “come out of the tradition where wherever you started, we’re all trying to make the same revolution.”

Seizing the moment in the post-ideological mirage was crucial. In 1991, Harvard professor Cornell West observed that “the inchoate, scattered yet gathering progressive movement that is emerging across the American landscape… now lacks both the vital moral vocabulary and focused leadership that can constitute and sustain it.” But he predicted that soon “it will be rooted ultimately in current activities by people of color, by labor and ecological groups, by women, by homosexuals.” Four years later, he would author the foreword to the main text of CRT, helping forge the vocabulary and jargon used to infiltrate classrooms, newspapers, and the electronic universe.

In 2001, the anti-capitalist Red Tent went full global, inaugurating the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Six years later, the American offshoot US Social Forum (USSF) held a massive conference in Atlanta, Georgia, covering all fronts: global warming, economic transformation, race, gender, and more. The topics were veneer; everyone there knew this was “just tactics,” observe Gonzalez and Gorka. “The connecting tissue is Marxism.” The aim is destroying capitalism.

One of the largest workshops, on “revolutionary strategy and organization,” was led by Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, Bring the Ruckus, Marxist study groups from the Bay Area and NYC, the Left Forum, and of course, Eric Mann’s LCSC. The comrades were duly getting their marching and (mostly) peaceful-protesting orders. As in the sixties, once again police were called pigs.

Besides race in America, there was race in Palestine — Jews having been relegated to Whiteness. In 2015, Cullors would show up in Gaza alongside the antisemitic cCongresswoman Linda Sarsour, sponsored by National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP). A decade later, NSJP is orchestrating nation-wide sit-ins with nifty tents and slick posters advocating “From the River to the Sea” (read: liquidate Israel) and “Genocide Joe,” and free water bottles. Admittedly, Cullors’ lavish lifestyle, enabled by the organization whose unaccounted millions led to its flagship’s fundraising being suspended in California and New York, has set the construction project back a little.

But woke-friendly corporations, billionaires, foundations, and individuals with impressive foreign ties are demonstrating the effectiveness of funding campus radicals. Echoing similar anti-Western violent hate-marches throughout Europe and elsewhere, these indoctrinated know-nothings burn American flags, vandalize Founders’ statues with Islamist garb, paint swastikas on cemeteries, threaten and attack peaceful fellow students, police, and even janitors.

Fortunately, the majority of ordinary Americans are repelled by such tactics. Will that translate into increased vigilance regarding what students learn, how the media operates, and who wishes to destroy our system of government? Not without concerted and strategic popular engagement. Thus, NextGen Marxism concludes on a positive but urgent note. It is up to each of us to “engage in the process of ensuring that this nation is governed responsibly…. The time is now. We have a country to save.” A civilization, in truth.

Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Among her books are An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism and the American Left (2023) The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom (2019), and The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World (2016).

She has taught at the National Defense University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, Emory University, American University, and the Institute of World Politics. She serves on the Israel Journal for Foreign Affairs’ International Board of Advisors and the Information Professionals Association’s Board of Directors.

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aier.org · by Juliana Pilon · June 4, 2024

5. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 9, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-9-2024

The US policy change, while a step in the right direction, is by itself inadequate and unable to disrupt Russian operations at scale. ISW assesses that the West maintains the ability to substantially disrupt Russian operations at scale by allowing Ukraine to use Western-provided weapons to strike Russia’s operational rear and deep rear areas in Russian territory.

Key Takeaways:

The Biden Administration’s limited policy change permitting Ukraine to use US-provided weapons to strike some Russian military targets in a small area within Russian territory has reduced the size of Russia’s ground sanctuary by only 16 percent at maximum. US policy still preserves at least 84 percent of Russia's ground sanctuary – territory within range of Ukrainian ATACMS.

Likely Ukrainian forces struck a Russian Su-57 fighter aircraft at the Akhtubinsk Airfield in Astrakhan Oblast between June 7 and 8.

Ukrainian forces may have struck a Russian large landing ship or patrol boat in Yeysk, Krasnodar Krai on the night of June 8 to 9.

The Kremlin's concerted effort to remove and arrest senior Russian defense officials may be extending to civilian regional administration officials.

The pro-Kremlin Moldovan Victory opposition electoral bloc held its second congress in Moscow on June 9 following a series of meetings between pro-Kremlin Moldovan opposition politicians and Russian officials from June 6 to 9.

Former pro-Russian Moldovan president and current head of the Moldovan Socialist Party Igor Dodon gave interviews to Russian state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti on June 9 in which he promoted several known Kremlin narratives targeting the current Moldovan government – many of which Moldovan opposition politicians also promoted at the Victory bloc congress.

The Kremlin will likely try to exploit its ties to Dodon as part of its wider efforts to destabilize Moldovan democracy and influence the Moldovan government.

Russian forces recently advanced near Kupyansk, Siversk, Chasiv Yar, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City.

Russian officials continue efforts to coerce migrants into military service.

6. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 9, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-june-9-2024

Key Takeaways:

Israel: Israeli War Cabinet minister Benny Gantz resigned from the coalition government on June 9. Gantz’s resignation will not on its own cause the collapse of the Netanyahu government.

Rafah: The IDF expects to conclude clearing operations in Rafah in the “next few weeks,” according to an Israeli Army Radio correspondent.

Iran: Iran’s Guardian Council approved six candidates to participate in the June 28 Iranian presidential elections. The council only approved one reformist politician, and it disqualified prominent moderate politician Ali Larijani for the second consecutive presidential election.

Lebanon: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least 10 attacks into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on June 8.

West Bank: Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters in at least three locations across the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on June 8.

Yemen: A Houthi attack in the Arabian Sea on June 9 caused two ships to catch fire.

7. Ukraine shows even the toughest tanks can't go to war anymore without cage armor to shield them from exploding drones

Ukraine shows even the toughest tanks can't go to war anymore without cage armor to shield them from exploding drones

Business Insider · by Chris Panella

Military & Defense

Chris Panella

2024-06-09T14:18:01Z

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A repair battalion soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine prepares slat armor's elements for welding onto a T-64 tank on February 3, 2024 in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. Dmytro Larin/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .

Recent photos appeared online showing a US-provided Abrams tank with cages to protect against drones.
Both sides of the war in Ukraine have been welding cages onto their battle tanks.
With drones reshaping modern warfare, tanks will need to adapt to survive on future battlefields.

The heavily armored M1 Abrams tank is widely regarded as one of the best and toughest tanks in Ukraine today, but even it can't ride out without cages to shield it from drones.

The overwhelming presence of drones, including ones that fly into military vehicles and explode or burst into flames, has become a defining element of the war in Ukraine, and both sides are working quickly to adapt to this growing threat.

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

Battle tanks and other armored vehicles, including US-provided Abrams and Bradleys, other Western tanks like the German Leopard, and top Russian tanks like the T-90M, have at times fallen prey to one-way attack drones. In many cases, elite weapons worth millions are being taken out by systems worth only a few hundred dollars.

What started as unusual has become commonplace. Main battle tanks often sport large, welded "cope cages" to stop exploding drones from taking them out. Some have looked crude and ineffective, but more recent models have appeared sturdier, more refined.

The growing consensus is that these cages and defenses like them aren't going anywhere because unmanned systems like those seen in Ukraine are the future of warfare.

"It's absolutely here to stay," Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

"The idea has been around for a little while," he said, calling attention to the US employing cages around its Strykers in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect against enemy rocket-propelled grenades. And now," with the ubiquity of drones, it has gained momentum, and I think is now a permanent part of armored vehicles," he added.

US-supplied M1A1 Abrams MBT in Ukrainian service, sporting a significant number of field modifications, including Kontakt-1 ERA bricks and improvised cage armor. pic.twitter.com/gdw5LyGENi

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) May 24, 2024

Photos shared online last month showed a US-supplied M1A1 Abrams tank with improvised cages.

Like previously documented examples, the cages look to be built around the sides and top of the turret, giving the tank an exterior defense to protect it from exploding unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly small first-person-view drones.

The recent pictures suggest that even the Abrams, considered the best tank Ukraine's received from its Western allies, needs some extra help to stop drones and other anti-tank weapons, but that's not necessarily a shocking development.

Israel's special forces hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, report says

sg.news.yahoo.com · by Rebecca Rommen9 June 2024 at 4:20 am·3-min readLink copied

Israel's June 8 hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, The New York Times reported.
US specialists provided key intelligence and logistic support to Israel's military.
The operation that freed four hostages caused over 200 Palestinian casualties, Gaza officials said.

Israel's rescue operation that freed four hostages on June 8 was supported by intelligence from US sources, The New York Times reports.

A team of US hostage recovery specialists stationed in Israel provided key intelligence and logistical support to the Israeli military, assisting a daytime operation that brought the hostages back to Israel after being held captive for eight months in Gaza, said several unnamed US and Israeli officials, the report said.

Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv were rescued in the special forces operation, which IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari called "daring."

Palestinian gunmen kidnapped around 240 hostages following the terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Argamani's ordeal went viral on social media when she was kidnapped on October 7. She was abducted from the Nova festival via motorbike, and footage of her pleading "Don't kill me!"

The Pentagon and CIA has been providing real-time intelligence from drone surveillance over Gaza, communications intercepts, and other sources, supplementing Israel's capabilities, said the NYT report.

"The United States is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by terrorists," National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement.

"We won't stop working until all the hostages come home and a cease-fire is reached," said President Joe Biden.

The hostage rescue operation took place in central Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp.

Gaza's Government Media Office said at least 210 people were killed in the raid, per Al Jazeera.

Hamas' armed al-Qassam Brigades said that Israel's operation also killed some hostages.

Israel, "by committing horrific massacres, was able to free some its hostages, yet it killed some others during the operation," Briades' spokesperson, Abu Ubaida, said on Telegram, per Reuters.

Israeli military spokesperson Peter Lerner called the allegation a "blatant lie," per CNN.

It is not the first time Israel has been accused of killing hostages accidentally.

Efrat Katz, an Israeli grandmother who died on October 7, was likely killed by her own military in a friendly-fire incident.

She was in the process of being abducted from her kibbutz by Hamas militants when her own military opened fire on the vehicle she was traveling in.

In December, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages they mistakenly perceived to be threats.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to Gaza's health ministry that Hamas runs.

Read the original article on Business Insider

sg.news.yahoo.com · by Rebecca Rommen9 June 2024 at 4:20 am·3-min readLink copied

9. US army aided Israel in bloody military op launched from Gaza 'Aid Pier'

I have seen no other reporting on this. Is this disinformation?

I do not have any information about this website other than what is on it. The best information comes from it X/twitter site:

The Cradle

@TheCradleMedia

The Cradle is an online news magazine covering West Asian geopolitics from within. Support us: http://patreon.com/thecradlemedia

Media & News CompanyWest Asiathecradle.coJoined July 2021

A scan of the news and podcasts syndicates a strong anti-Israel bias.

US army aided Israel in bloody military op launched from Gaza 'Aid Pier'

The operation saw the mass killing of over 200 Palestinians, with health officials describing the inside of Al-Aqsa Hospital as a 'slaughterhouse'

News Desk

JUN 8, 2024

https://thecradle.co/articles-id/25343?utm

(Photo Credit: US Central Command via AP)

A video shared widely by Hebrew Telegram channels on 8 June shows that the Israeli army made use of the US-built pier installed in central Gaza as part of a bloody rescue operation that saw the killing of at least 210 Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Furthermore, according to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, a special US military unit specialized in rescuing captives “supported the effort” that decimated the Nuseirat camp.

Multiple Israeli media outlets reported on Saturday afternoon that a special forces unit penetrated deep into the Nuseirat camp to recover four living captives amid heavy bombing by Israeli warplanes.

They were then flown out of Gaza via the US-built pier, which had been reinstalled on the coast on Friday after undergoing tens of millions in repairs.

On Saturday, the Israeli army announced that it has started “securing the coastal area of the US military's Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) pier in Gaza.”

Upon announcing the project earlier this year, Washington stated that the floating pier was built to serve as a “maritime corridor” to deliver desperately needed aid into Gaza.

“I’m directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier on the Gaza coast in the Mediterranean. This pier will facilitate the arrival of large ships loaded with food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters,” US President Joe Biden said earlier this year when announcing plans for the pier, purportedly to make up for an Israeli blockade of all land crossings into the besieged enclave.

Nevertheless, the Palestinian resistance repeatedly warned that the floating pier was built to deliver weapons to Israel.

“The pier is intended to provide cover for Washington’s support for the occupation state with weapons … International and regional talk about introducing aid has had no real impact on the famine in the strip,” Hamas said last month.

The Cradle columnist Suat Delgen recently questioned whether the US-built pier is meant to serve as a “smokescreen for political maneuvers.”

“The suspicion is that the project, while ostensibly ‘facilitating’ aid delivery, might also allow for increased control over the entirety of Gaza under the guise of humanitarian assistance. This control could potentially streamline Israel’s military operations and fortify its strategic positions within Gaza, ultimately influencing the broader geopolitical dynamics of the conflict.”

10. Fake Aid Truck Used to Carry Out Rescue Operation - US 'Special Cell' Participated in Nuseirat Massacre

From the Palestine Chronicle.

Fake Aid Truck Used to Carry Out Rescue Operation - US 'Special Cell' Participated in Nuseirat Massacre

palestinechronicle.com · by admin · June 8, 2024

Exclusive footage obtained by Al-Jazeera showed Israeli special forces using an aid truck to carry out the operation. (Photo: video grab, via Al-Jazeera)

Exclusive footage obtained by Al-Jazeera showed Israeli special forces using an aid truck and a civilian car to carry out the operation.

A US special “hostage cell” played a crucial role in the rescue of four Israeli captives, the American news website Axios reported on Saturday, citing a US administration official.

Meanwhile, exclusive footage obtained by Al-Jazeera showed Israeli special forces using an aid truck and a civilian car to carry out the operation.

The images depict civilian cars escorted by Israeli military tanks penetrating the western areas of the Nuseirat camp, amid a series of unprecedented air raids targeting the camp and various central Gaza Strip areas, resulting in over 200 Palestinian deaths and dozens of injuries so far.

US Dock

The Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza issued a statement, condemning the “horrific massacre committed by the zionist enemy through its planes, warships, tanks, and special forces in the Nuseirat camp”.

“The massacre in the Nusseirat camp clearly and unequivocally reveals and confirms the participation of American enemy forces stationed on the floating dock in killing and slaughtering our people,” the statement continued adding that this happened “despite the criminal American administration’s assertion that this dock’s purpose is solely to pump humanitarian aid”.

The Israeli captives were evacuated from Gaza using the US 'humanitarian' pier. pic.twitter.com/tkY7X1dfDh

— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) June 8, 2024

“The resistance’s retention of more than 130 captives after eight months of destructive war, despite all the capabilities of the Zionist enemy and its American and Western allies, from advanced technology, intelligence, and surveillance equipment, is a true pride written by the men of the resistance,” the Committees said.

The statement also warned “the zionist enemy, its criminal leaders, and the families of the Zionist captives,” assuring that “this aggression puts the lives of all captives held by the Resistance factions in serious danger.”

“We call on all media outlets, journalists, media professionals, and social media activists to focus on the zionist massacre committed by the zionist Nazi killers against children and women and to expose these crimes,” the statement concluded.

Families of Captives

The families of the Israeli prisoners emphasized on Saturday that the Israeli government has a duty to return all 120 detainees held in Gaza.

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that an officer in the Yamam Unit was killed during the operation to recover the four detainees.

The Israeli army announced that the operation was coordinated between the Internal Security Service (Shin Bet) and the Special Police Unit from two separate areas in the heart of Nuseirat.

Exclusive Al-Jazeera footage: A group of the Israeli army infiltrated Nuseirat disguised as humanitarian relief workers and used humanitarian aid trucks to release the four captives in the central Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/W0vbQSrDsF

— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) June 8, 2024

The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation aired images purportedly from the shores of Gaza, showing the transfer of detainees to Israeli army helicopters.

It noted that Palestinian fighters chased and fired upon the vehicle carrying the prisoners, causing damage.

A source mentioned that the army could not insert a helicopter near the evacuation site, necessitating additional reinforcements.

Horrific Massacre

The Government Media Office in Gaza said in a statement on Saturday that the death toll from the massacre in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza has risen to 210, with over 400 injured.

Meanwhile, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital is overwhelmed with the injured and the bodies of the deceased, most of whom are children and women.

Due to the lack of beds and basic medical supplies, many have been placed on the floor and in hospital corridors.

Death Toll Rises to 210 in Nuseirat Massacre – Hospital Appeals for Blood, Intl. Intervention (VIDEO)

The Israeli bombing targeted the market in Nuseirat and the area around the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah.

Hospital spokesman Khalil Al-Dakran stated that many of the wounded are at risk of death due to the severity of their conditions and the lack of medical resources.

Ongoing Genocide

Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 36,801 Palestinians have been killed, and 83,680 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.

Moreover, at least 7,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

Scores Killed – Israel Announces Release of Four Captives amid Unprecedented Bombing of Central Gaza

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.

(PC, AJA)

palestinechronicle.com · by admin · June 8, 2024

11. Israel's special forces hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, report says

Israel's special forces hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, report says

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/israels-special-forces-hostage-rescue-112005539.html?utm

Rebecca Rommen

Sun, 9 June 2024 at 7:20 am GMT-4·3-min read

Israel's June 8 hostage rescue was aided by US intelligence, The New York Times reported.
US specialists provided key intelligence and logistic support to Israel's military.
The operation that freed four hostages caused over 200 Palestinian casualties, Gaza officials said.