"In this convergence, the synthetic and the documented have fused into a single continuum of representation -- a feedback loop in which anticipation and action constantly reinforce one another."

"[T]he US & Israel declared hitting more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days – a rate of strikes near unprecedented in modern conflict...Tehran bore the brunt of these attacks, with 87 civ casualty events recorded in Tehran province – more than half of those reported in heavily populated areas.

To name more than 150 people killed or injured in the school strike on Minab, our team worked with hundreds of sources and built on community-led memorials by Iranian groups. We group the children who died by age, starting with the six year olds. airwars.org/civilian-cas...

Put simply, long-range OWA drones are enabling belligerents to conduct punishment attacks on civilian populations. As these systems spread, we will see more civilians impacted. 'Ukraine hit Moscow with nearly 200 drones in its largest-ever attack on the city' giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Killed walking home from school: why did Somali children become targets of US drone strikes?

New report by @privacyinternational.org & @paxforpeace.nl out today: 'When algorithms go to war Tech giants, the arms industry and the weaponisation of AI paxforpeace.nl/publications...

"[S]hifting the blame to an “AI problem” to avoid responsibility is another long-standing concern raised by the US’ use of AI in Iran. The intel failure was more likely a result of poor human judgement, which may have been exacerbated by the employment of AI systems in contexts of pressure & speed."

"But democracies that stop systematically counting civilian deaths risk abandoning something fundamental: the principle that the use of force must remain publicly accountable to the societies in whose name it is exercised."

"There is also moral value in recognising and naming the terrorism committed by the Trump administration within the Unites States and abroad. Doing so reveals the illegitimacy of the administration’s actions and highlights the extraordinary toll inflicted by these actions on innocent people..."

Reporting on an investigation into the victims of US extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, identifying 13 of the victims. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Countries need to strengthen their ability "to review intelligence provided by the U.S. at a time when Washington has removed many of the institutions and teams responsible for mitigating harm to civilians." Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen on what steps the Dutch are taking:

NOT TO BE MISSED: Insightful interventions by @gaborrona.bsky.social on the connections between aggression and the (mis)application of IHL and the use of AI in targeting and by @eliavl.bsky.social on the legal relevance of the US President’s rhetoric and the vain logic of reprisals.

Is it possible to legally evaluate US targeting in the air war against Iran, 28 February-8 April? In this discussion I defended why a preliminary legal analysis is possible & necessary and address 4 types of targets struck by the US (& Israel) in Iran that raise distinct legal questions:

NEW: Airwars-supported cross-border investigation identifies victims of US boat strikes. Journalist collective reveals victims are labourers, fishermen, cab drivers. Almost 200 have been killed since Sept 2025. No trial, no defence. 🔗 www.elclip.org/los-bombarde... #LosBombardeados

Haven't watched it yet, but given the speaker list ( @kevinbaker.bsky.social, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, @beenwrekt.bsky.social, and Lily Hu), I am sure this will be excellent!

Pesky EU regs (sarcasm): "Microsoft's investigation uncovered "usage patterns" consistent with terms of service violations. Some of Microsoft's services to Israel are delivered via Europe—abuse of which which could put Microsoft in legal trouble w/ European regulators."

"[D]aily usage hit approx 20 billion tokens. For comparison, in civilian contexts, a single Q&A w/ a chatbot can require several hundred tokens, while an individual power user w/ a high-level paid account—someone using AI to write code, for instance—can burn up to a quarter-million tokens a day."

"If history is any guide, we could be living through yet another historical cycle, during which dismay about lack of efficacy of, and widespread disregard for, IHL ultimately gives rise to reinvigorated efforts to innovate and strengthen its application." opiniojuris.org/2026/05/05/t...

Former Google employa, Laura Nolan on the risks of military AI: "Systems trained to detect anomalies or correlations will, by design, produce false positives...These are not edge cases. They are structural properties of how such systems operate when deployed at scale."

"[T]here's something undeniably sinister..irreducibly degrading in the combo of intimacy & detachment in the footage..by these FPV drones of their victims’ final moments..the aestheticisation of the act of killing, its rendering as a kind of viral entertainment..feels ethically wounding to witness."

Excellent article on the lawless form of #war that #Israel and the #USA are pursuing in #Gaza, #Lebanon, #Syria, #Iran... and wherever is next. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

One of the problems with the tech elite celebrity is that all attention is garnered by the individual & their shiny toys, not the vast scale of human suffering they cause. It creates an aversion to seeing this suffering in favour of the spectacle. We see this a lot in the context of AI warfare too.

"[Palestinians] are not superior to any other life, but no other life is superior to us." Palestinian-American activist, academic, and author Noura Erakat tells @mehdirhasan.bsky.social about the double standard the West applies to war crimes against Palestinians. Watch: zeteo.com/p/iran-gaza-...

If you’re looking for an example of technofascism this is it: Palantir’s manifesto. See also my article on technofascism link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Despite the administration’s rhetoric and bogus legal theories, the supposed armed conflict with “narco-terrorists” appears to be entirely make believe. Murder is the general term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict.

@pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social published an essay I wrote related to my book “Artificial Religion” pghrev.com/the-myths-we... and an excerpt of the book pghrev.com/talk-to-me-p... on publication day 🙂

My new book "Artificial Religion" is published today by @mitpress.bsky.social !!! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205221...

We stand in solidarity with the Catholic community in the wake of President Trump’s attack on Pope Leo. Between denigrating the pope, portraying himself as Jesus, and sarcastically praising Allah, the president’s mockery of religion is both deranged and insulting.

"While mainstream international legal scholarship has long treated race as a peripheral concern—or a historic injustice to be remembered but not redressed—this volume argues that racialization is foundational to the discipline, shaping its doctrines, epistemes, and interlocutors." It's open access!

"So, rather than asking whether the US military is hiding casualties, a more productive question is this: What kinds of deaths are allowed to appear, and under what conditions? ... Because the ...  numbers themselves are part of the machinery through which war is made acceptable."

The Pentagon suggested Iran was responsible. But new evidence further shows tit were U.S. PrSMs (which blast thousands of tungsten pellets outwards) that killed 21 civilians in Lamerd, Iran, including a toddler and several children. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/w...

"The spending proposal suggests the [DoD] intends to transform the DAWG into an Autonomous Warfare Command, which would be a jt org focused on orchestrating drone & boat swarms in a Hellscape-like scenario. The template already exists w/ Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force & Russia’s Rubicon complex."

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

AI-enabled targeting can allow a military to cause unprecedented civilian death tolls whilst claiming data-driven precision, writes Future of Life Institute head of military AI governance Anna Hehir. We need legally binding national and international rules on the use of AI in warfare, she says.

Whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative. www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-...

This thread shares three stories from Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria, shedding light on the often overlooked human cost of conflict—the lives lost and family members left to navigate the aftermath airwars.org/casualty-rec...

This is an excellent and moving read: "This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest." Indeed. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...

The dangers of militarized AI are no longer theoretical—they’re already here. To effectively resist the harms and contain the technology’s human cost, we must look beyond Anthropic’s immediate dispute with the DoD and enforce clear humanitarian obligations, argues Tech Justice Law’s Madeline Batt.

"Despite Hegseth’s claims of a new type of American strategy, and his slap-down of the 'foolish...leaders of the past', his promise of 'the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history' appears to be less an innovative approach to warfare than a recycled version of the same old thing."

Pope Leo: "Airplanes should always be carriers of peace, never of war. No one should be afraid that threats of death & destruction might come from the sky...After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombings should have been banned for ever...” 1/2

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

"One of the more pronounced features of the Gaza doctrine—and of contemporary warfare more generally—is turning life-saving medical sites like hospitals, health clinics, and ambulances into targets..."

“God, It’s Terrifying”: How the Pentagon Got Hooked on AI War Machines — excerpt of PROJECT MAVEN book in Bloomberg Businessweek www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

It is not LLMs that matter, but "what Maven did to the process: it consolidated the systems, compressed the time & reduced the people...The US mil has been trying to close the gap b/w seeing something & destroying it for as long as that gap has existed & every attempt has produced the same failure."

“What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science, because it’s baked into this technology”

"The aspect of AI which sabotages it in social settings, its tendency to generate collateral damage through out-of-distribution errors & so-called hallucinations, ceases to be a problem in conflicts where maximum indiscriminate damage is the actual point" zenodo.org/records/1890...

A must-read for anyone wanting to understand the worldview within US military targeting operations that underpins such strikes: Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud has written an excellent book, "The World According to Military Targeting." bsky.app/profile/mitp...

Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at AI Now: "The difference often separating AI-DSS, which is how they're currently being used & AI-driven AWS is a human in the loop...If Anthropic itself admits that its models are too unreliable for LAWS, that would imply they are not reliable for AI-DSS either..."

Most of the talk about OpenAI, Anthropic and “mass surveillance” neglected to mention that widespread scraping of the web is in itself mass surveillance.

“[D]ual use” as an idea and/or as a materially identifiable site, object, or body is a fiction of liberal lawmaking & warmaking. Drawing on the notion of ‘martial politics’ we argue that civ & mil spaces are importantly co-constitutive, co-produced & thus only ever partially disentangled, if at all.