There's a term, coined by Linsey McGoey in her book The Unknowers, for this tactic of denying culpability & asserting expertise in situations of uncertainty: strategic ignorance; a political/legal alibi of "reasonable doubt." I bet we'll soon hear the familiar claim that it was a "tragic mistake."

EXCLUSIVE: Entire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s actions could spark investigations for war crimes or outright murder, sources told The Intercept. theintercept.com/2025/12/02/h...

Useful explainer for media covering the boat strikes. Here’s the gist: It’s not an armed conflict, so the boat strikes are murder. If it were an armed conflict, targeted killing of civilians is a war crime. EVEN IF these are combatants in an armed conflict, killing the shipwrecked is a war crime.

This is exactly right - the 1st strike was murder and extrajudicial killing; but even on the administration’s misguided theory that IHL applies, the “no quarter” order and 2nd strike constitute a war crime. Good to see that Senators are being well briefed!

Textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing "Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ... ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions." Report by @alexhorton.bsky.social @ellenwapo.bsky.social o.bsky.social

My latest for @972mag.com reveals how Palantir and Dataminr have been involved in hashing out the Trump-backed "peace plan" for Gaza. It's a story of how US surveillance firms are poised to sediment a new paradigm of Israeli control over the strip www.972mag.com/ai-surveilla...

Jack Goldsmith was head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W Bush.

This is a lot of words to say, “Yikes! That Washington Post story about us illegally killing survivors on the open seas was 100% correct!”

Exclusive: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody” in the first strike on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. After two men survived, the mission commander ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, according to two sources.

Former US military lawyers speak out: "The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both." Statement on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes 1/2

Published today: my op-Ed for Sifted on why the dynamics of VC are too risky for defence. I’m grateful to the editors for letting me make this point in the ‘lion’s den’ sifted.eu/articles/def...

Nicolas Malevé and Katrina Sluis review THE BIRTH OF COMPUTER VISION (Dobson), highlighting how the book reconstructs the early history of computer vision and its ties to military funding, computational methods, and changing ontologies of the image. Link: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...

U.S. Africa Command over the weekend carried out its 100th airstrike of the year in Somalia, showcasing how a campaign against Islamic militants in east Africa now represents one of its most aggressive operations worldwide www.stripes.com/theaters/afr...

Gaza after the ceasefire is defined by the ‘yellow line’ — drawn by Israel, and dividing the strip in two. Our evidence suggests that Israel seeks to make the line permanent, as ‘reconstruction’ plans normalise this new stage of Israel’s occupation: frames.forensic-architecture.org/gaza/ceasefire

This is a very good essay from the @ACLU’s Brett Kaufman making the case that Trump’s boat strikes should be viewed as the logical end point of legal arguments normalized by OLC lawyers during the war on terror. Highly recommend. www.justsecurity.org/124776/secre...

intriguing new special issue on weapons and unnecessary suffering - by Thomas Gregory, Maartje Abbenhuis & Jeremy Armstrong www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

In this Heliotrope piece, I use Virilio and Sekula to explain how Colin Powell's infamous WMD satellite images serve as a primary case study of the analogue and performative antecedents of GenAI imagery and what this means for how we define “evidence.” www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/bythem...

'I still can't believe I'm alive': Sudanese civilians recount their flight from El Fasher – video

"I use haunting here as more than a convenient metaphor for race’s often underwritten presence within this technology. Race is an elusive, ghostly category, neither fact nor mere fiction, that nonetheless relentlessly haunts certain bodies and not others."

Further shocking but completely unsurprising revelations of how the Biden administration disregarded US law to continue virtually unconditional arms transfers to Israel for the slaughter in Gaza. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

🧵NEW: Airwars has published an interactive tool tracking all publicly declared U.S. strikes targeting small boats in the Caribbean & Pacific. This resource aims to aid public understanding & enhance transparency surrounding those killed in the campaign. airwars.org/conflict/u-s...

NEW: TRUMP’S YEMEN STRIKE KILLED 61 IMMIGRANTS AND NO COMBATANTS The attack on Sa’ada detention center violated humanitarian law and should be investigated as a war crime, says Amnesty International. theintercept.com/2025/10/28/t...

"So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“Narco-terrorist” isn’t a thing. This is just lawless killing.

"The Trump admin is not the 1st to use an OLC opinion to clear away concerns that a controversial new form of warfare might violate the law. The Bush & Obama admins did likewise. Nonetheless, the OLC opinion on the boat strikes is—beyond its still-undisclosed substance—significant for 2 reasons..."

Travel data has historically been a correlative proxy. Early 2000s data mining used one way flights (*purchased third party) in terror algorithms. These apparent “errors” by HMRC illuminate machine learning logics: 1/ combine gov cloud data www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Fantastic article in which actual experts on AI and higher education cut through the nonsense surrounding the infinite garbage engines and expose a system captured by the techbro sales pitch. "A general ban is necessary, but nobody dares to say so."

USAF soliciting private land lease proposals for AI data centers on 5 of its bases in Tennesse, Arizona, California, New Jersey, and Georgia. To be competetive, "a project must require more than 100 megawatts of new load and be worth at least $500 million ...".

Trump: "I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we're just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like dead."

Former advisor in disbanded Civilian Protection Center of Excellence: “I can only guess, and frankly hope, that his resignation was in protest”... [over] a “blatant violation of not only international law but the Constitution...Time will reveal that, but I find his silence so far even more telling.”

ShieldAI exec Armor Harris' hype on their not yet field tested X-BAT: the world's "first autonomous fighter jet...has the ability to organically close its own kill chains w/o reliance on third party assets..." responsiblestatecraft.org/autonomous-f...

"it is deeply concerning that military legal advisors at every level of the chain of command may have provided the proverbial green light for this attack, and perhaps even more concerning if they were cut out of the decision-making process" www.thecipherbrief.com/a-dangerous-...

US Caribbean boat bombing campaign keeps getting worse. Colombia says US killed Colombian fishermen in Colombian waters. Add international incident to illegal, unethical, and bad strategy. This isn’t national security, it’s murder. Who’s selecting these targets? Is this why Adm. Holsey resigned?

The viral "Definition of AGI" paper tells you to read fake references which do not exist! Proof: different articles present at the specified journal/volume/page number, and their titles exist nowhere on any searchable repository. Take this as a warning to not use LMs to generate your references!

One target at a time: The logic that helped Israeli liberals commit genocide www.972mag.com/israelis-log...

"[M]eaningful control...requires moving outside of the frame that sustains warfighting’s self-justifying logics, enabling greater investments in diplomacy & new forms of accountability to democratic processes, in which those in whose names war is perpetuated have the governing voice."

Amoore and colleagues always worth reading to understand better the politics of governance by gen AI: "The prompt frames, delimits and condenses what can be known of the problem (‘what do we know about?’) and aligns that problem ever closer to the task that best fits the model’s view of the world."

While the perpetrators of Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland | Nesrine Malik

1/ Since March 2025 Airwars has documented a number of alleged civilian harm incidents in Gaza in which a previously unknown munition was used by Israeli forces. Dozens of civilian casualties were reported. We have so far published three of these cases: bsky.app/profile/muni...

Having followed the AI industry for over a decade, which began as the extropian cult, I am so grateful to @edzitron.com for his brilliant break down of the AI bubble: "sold by career charlatans with their reputations laundered by a tech and business media." www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

The ethical duty to refuse an unlawful order will become really important it seems ...

Spain prohibits transit of US military aircraft and vessels carrying arms, ammunition, or equipment destined for Israel through its bases at Rota (Cadiz) and Moron de la Frontera (Seville), sources familiar with the functioning of the US-Spain Joint Committee confirmed. www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/sp...

THREAD: this investigation took up over half my year, but it's here in @thecontinent.org: A Djiboutian drone strike in January was depicted as a army operation targeting rebels. It was actually a massacre of civilians. The bloodshed & coverup implicating Ethiopia, Djibouti, France & Turkiye. #OSINT

"A study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that some types of wounds – such as burns or injuries to legs – were more common among civilians in Gaza than among US soldiers fighting in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan". www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

“Reparations are not just about money; they are a formal recognition of the harm and a vital final step toward a full stop for survivors. When this crucial component is absent, the so-called ‘accountability process’ reveals itself as little more than an elaborate exercise in futility” aje.io/mf9pm7

@mariaressa.bsky.social ’s call at UNGA could not be more urgent. The time for AI self-regulation is over. 200 Nobel laureates, former heads of state, and industry experts just signed a statement: "We urgently call for international red lines to prevent unacceptable AI risks"

Brave Israeli army refusers defy harsher backlash to protest genocide Facing longer prison terms and greater public hostility, a new cohort of conscientious objectors insist refusal is both a moral duty and an act of hope. www.972mag.com/israeli-army...

critical intervention by Or Bassok - "banality of evil in the Gaza war is not embodied in malicious individuals but in routine work of jurists who authorized orders for air strikes that have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians while relying on IHL." www.haaretz.com/magazine/202...

The three most damning paras in the UN Report alleging that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza: Siege starvation, attacks on health care, direct targeting of children as patterns that cannot be explained except if group destruction is one animating purpose.