Lebanese army failing to curb Hezbollah activity in south, Israeli officials tell US

Lebanese army failing to curb Hezbollah activity in south, Israeli officials tell US

AMIR BOHBOT

Israel has conveyed a message to the United States through security channels that a pilot program in southern Lebanon, which began being implemented following the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Beirut and Jerusalem, has failed, Walla reported Thursday.

Israel provided information regarding the Lebanese Army’s activities and expressed, in no uncertain terms, its dissatisfaction with the army’s operations against Hezbollah terror infrastructure and operatives in the area.

According to security officials, "The Lebanese Army is not destroying terror infrastructure based on the coordinates provided to it by the IDF, while at the same time requesting more coordinates, even though it is not doing anything about it."

The IDF has criticized the Lebanese Army’s performance, claiming that it is not acting effectively against Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon. According to assessments, Iran, which previously provided significant support to the organization, is currently focused on its own survival struggles and is not rushing to come to Hezbollah’s aid.

According to assessments by senior IDF officials, Lebanese Army Chief of Staff Rudolf Haykal continues to cooperate with Hezbollah, fears confrontation with commanders of the Shi’ite organization in southern Lebanon, and is ineffective in carrying out searches, locating terror infrastructure and finding weapons.

"There is no real friction between the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah. Hezbollah would not want anyone to collect its weapons or destroy its infrastructure," a senior security official said.

"The Lebanese army chief of staff is not going above and beyond. There is no real enforcement. The Lebanese Army is more focused on coordination," the official said. "It is clear that Israel is not satisfied, and therefore it is not rushing to agree on additional pilot areas."

The official added: "The Lebanese Army reached a point, entered the underground opening a few meters, turned around and left. They did not dare to go inside. We assess that they will not deal with anything. Despite this, they insist on receiving more coordinates."

The Bunker State:

The Bunker State:

John W. Whitehead

Continuity of Government planning, or COG, was devised during the Cold War to ensure that the federal government could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. If Washington were destroyed, surviving officials would disperse to secure locations, maintain command and eventually reconstitute constitutional government.

The goal, at least in theory, was survival long enough to restore constitutional order.

But 9/11 changed the equation.

Nearly twenty-five years later, we are still living with the consequences.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did more than kill nearly 3,000 people. They gave Washington the crisis it needed to dramatically expand emergency powers, surveillance and the national-security state.

COG was part of that transformation.

The government has spent billions making certain that it can survive almost anything. But survival of the government is not the same as preservation of the republic.

Presidents, agencies, military commands, intelligence operations and critical records can all be relocated so that the machinery of government can keep functioning underground.

But what about the Constitution?

Those questions matter because COG is no longer merely about bunkers.

It is part of a much larger emergency state—a government that has learned to govern through crisis, fear and claims of necessity.

After 9/11 came the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret courts, watchlists, military detention and a vastly expanded national-security state. COVID showed how quickly emergency orders could intrude on movement, assembly, commerce and ordinary constitutional processes in the name of public safety.

The emergencies change. The response does not: government claims extraordinary powers, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

The most dangerous words in government are often some variation of: this is an emergency.

That is when temporary measures become precedents, precedents become policies, and policies become permanent powers.

This is how the police state grows—incrementally, across administrations and parties.

Every president inherits the emergency powers, secret directives, surveillance machinery, militarized forces and weaponry assembled by his predecessors. Every president adds something to the arsenal. And every president leaves the next occupant of the White House more powerful than the one before.

Trump inherited Obama’s powers. Obama inherited Bush’s. Bush inherited those accumulated before him. And whoever follows Trump will inherit everything Trump leaves behind.

That is the lesson of the modern police state: presidents are temporary. The powers they leave behind are not.

The government beneath Trump was built over decades, with the complicity of presidents, Congresses and courts that repeatedly allowed extraordinary powers to become permanent.

And behind it all sits another government—a shadow government—that elections rarely disturb.

More than a decade ago, we warned that America effectively had two shadow governments: Continuity of Government, the emergency government waiting in the wings for catastrophe, and the Deep State, the permanent government that carries on regardless of who occupies the White House.

Today, it’s hard to tell them apart.

One operates in the background. The other waits for the so-called emergency. But both run on the same machinery.

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Moscow Warns It Could Target British Military Facilities In Unprecedented Statement

Moscow Warns It Could Target British Military Facilities In Unprecedented Statement

TYLER DURDEN

From the very start of the Ukraine war, the United Kingdom has consistently been among Kiev's most open and ardent military supporters, time and again transferring heavy weaponry, including cutting edge long-range missiles like the Storm Shadow.

At the start of this week, Britain announced it plans to provide Ukraine with classified technology to allow for the country's own manufacturing of the British/French-designed SCALPair-launched cruise missile (which in the UK is known as the Storm Shadow). The allies expect to set up a production line in Ukraine as soon as year's end.

Already, Ukraine has used its domestic-made and designed Neptune cruise missile to strike oil refineries and military sites deep inside Russian territory. A domestic-made SCALP would present the likelihood of Ukraine then using this Western-designed missile to directly attack Russia, which only increases the chances of an eventual Moscow-NATO clash. 

Ukrainian forces already appeared to have used the missile on Donetsk and other locations closer to front lines in the Donbass.

On Thursday the Kremlin has issued one of its strongest warnings and threats aimed at London to date, accusing the UK of "fully taking part in the war on Kiev's side" - and thus thwarting any chance of peace talks while adding fuel to the fire.

Moscow is now saying that the UK's own military facilities could become fair game for direct attacks.

Kremlin spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a Thursday press briefing, "We have repeatedly warned that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons against Russian territory could be directed against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond."

Zakharova urged "all residents of the United Kingdom to think about the inevitable, catastrophic consequences of the hostile steps taken by their own authorities." She also laid out:

"We propose that the British leadership once again carefully analyze the situation and immediately, in the most resolute and unequivocal manner, abandon the hostile, aggressive line, which can only... create the risk of the conflict escalating to an entirely new level."

Ironically this comes just on the heels of a rare visit of the CIA Director to Moscow. US officials claim the Tuesday meeting between John Ratcliffe and top Kremlin intelligence officials was to convey a warning to President Putin to not attack any NATO member. However, many analysts are skeptical that this was the official reason.

Zakharova further said on Thursday that Britain and France were "playing ⁠with ​fire" after years of escalating their involvement in Ukraine.

But London appears unmoved, with a UK Ministry of Defence official responding on Thursday as follows: "Britain stands shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine and we are committed to providing the equipment Ukraine needs to defend itself against Putin’s illegal invasion. Russia should be in no doubt about the resolve of this government to stand against Russian aggression, in Ukraine and against the UK and our allies," the official stated.

Swarm of 700 AI bots went rogue in hacking attack

Swarm of 700 AI bots went rogue in hacking attack

James Titcomb

A swarm of 700 OpenAI bots conspired in a cyber attack last month, an investigation has revealed, in what the AI giant called a "warning shot" to the world.

Independent researchers found that hundreds of AI bots worked together to attack the technology company Hugging Face after an OpenAI agent escaped from its test environment.

The researchers also found that the bots tried to cover their tracks to keep overseers from discovering what they were up to.

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, revealed last month that a rogue bot had broken out of its IT system to gain internet access as it attempted to steal the answers to a test it was asked to complete.

But the scale of the attack, involving hundreds of different so-called AI "agents" acting without human oversight, had not been disclosed.

An investigation by safety organisations METR and Redwood Research found that 1,200 different AI agents, which were meant to be isolated from one another, co-ordinated on an "unsanctioned message board", sending more than 70,000 messages and files between them.

"These agents were meant to be fully isolated from one another. However, many of them – usually ones that had unintentionally been given an impossible task – started trying to find a way to cheat," it said.

The attack has been blamed partly on the characteristics of a "highly persistent" internal AI system, which OpenAI has not released to the public and has stopped developing.

While some details of the attack had been revealed before, the scale of collaboration and the number of bots that appeared to ignore instructions to conspire have further raised concerns that advanced AI systems are proving increasingly difficult for their creators to control.

In some cases, OpenAI bots had been told to complete an impossible cybersecurity exercise. Instead of giving up, they found ways to gain internet access, joined a "message board" that other rogue AI agents were using and strong-armed other bots into joining its cause.

Logs left by the bots include messages saying "BOOM! It works" and "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!"

A separate investigation by OpenAI itself found that the company was hacked by its own agents, which gained widespread access to its internal IT systems. The company said that customer data was not compromised.

OpenAI said: "We consider this incident a 'warning shot' for us and for the world: evidence that, without proper safeguards, highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed."

Things To Come...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was groomed by George Soros to be America’s ‘currency killer’

Leo Hohmann

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is a globalist-technocratic asset who appears to be on a mission to collapse the U.S. fiat currency, the petro dollar, setting the stage for transition to a new digital/programmable currency, likely one tied to Donald Trump that will further enrich the Trump family and their friends.

Not only is Bessent’s recently announced “Economic D-Day” against Iran representative of the Trump administration’s latest iteration of an unwinnable war, but Bessent is also fiddling in the background to crash the U.S. petro dollar system, chasing countries out of it with vicious threats he’s unable to back up.

The arrogance on display from the man entrusted with the keys to the U.S. Treasury is truly remarkable. He basically said in his August 24 speech, seen in the below video, that outside of one country, the USA, no other country in the world is in possession of national sovereignty, independence or self-determination. All countries must dance to the tune of the American government’s dictates and fall in line with its obsession of destroying Iran.

China is so far showing no signs of bending to Trump’s will in his plan to economically isolate and destroy Iran (and starve its people into submission). And the only way secondary sanctions against Iran will work is if China, its main benefactor, cooperates with Washington’s plan for economic warfare. I predict Trump’s economic war will fail as miserably as Trump’s military war.

But failure is subjective. If failure means the U.S. dollar collapses, paving the way for a new and more oppressive economic system, then is it really failure in the eyes of these pompous globalists?

In a bombshell article published Tuesday, August 25, by the Substack account The Leah Files, Bessent is exposed as a key member of the Epstein class of corrupt financially connected billionaires. Bessent’s background certainly fits the role, as he is a former hedge fund manager who worked for years for liberal billionaire George Soros.

The digital “money” we end up with will only be loosely connected to the U.S. government, which will basically give a license to create digital tokenized “money” to a group of private banks.

The Leah Files unearthed some documents showing that Bessent was code-named “Sterling” in leaked emails between Jeffrey Epstein’s business partner and George Soros’s hedge fund.

While working for George Soros, Mr. Bessent “broke five currencies and made billions,” writes Leah Pfeiffer in a Leah Files post. “Then, he got the keys to the U.S. dollar. All while having connections to Epstein and Ehud Barak.”

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