Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill

By Candace Millard

Anchor Books (2017)

Book Review

This book charts the early career of Winston Churchill in South Africa’s Boer War in South Africa and how he deliberately used his military escapades to propel his career in Parliament.

On graduating from the Sandhurst (Britain’s royal military college), Churchill opted to follow example of his illustrious ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill), to propel himself into his politics.

Believing he was destined to be prime minister, he joined the Spanish Army in 1895 to suppress a revolt by Cuba’s independence movement prior to the start of the Spanish American War.

In 1896 he was assigned to the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars in India and allowed to serve simultaneously as a cavalry officer and a war correspondent (for the Pioneer and the Daily Telegraph).

Publishing his first book in 1897 (The Story of the Malakand Field Force), he left the army in 1898 in debt and with no training for any non-military occupation. Unsuccessful in obtaining a commission to fight in Sudan, he stood for Parliament for the first time at age 23, campaigning (unsuccessfully) for the Oldham seat.

Three days after the Boers declared war on Britain for trying to annex the Boer state of Transvaal, Churchill traveled to South Africa as a war correspondent. Even before the British launched their first attack on the Boers, Churchill found himself arrested as a prisoner of war for his role (as a war corespondent) in defending a troop transport train that came under guerilla attack.

Imprisoned in a former school in Pretoria, he begged to participate in an escape plan hatched by two fellow reporters. In the end, Churchill preempted their plan, leaving them stuck in prison, while he struggled to find his way alone without food or water through 300 miles of enemy territory.

After a brief stint in the South African Light Horse Cavalry, Churchill returned home in 1900. Thanks to the massive publicity generated by his escape, he easily won the Oldham parliamentary seat the same year.

Millard perfectly captures Churchill’s personality as a conceited school bully who read  voraciously but came last in his class, was continuously shunned by his peers as self-centered and self-promoting, and who, like Theodore Roosevelt, had a driving need to prove his manhood through military valor.

I also really like her detailed summary of the multinational (Dutch, German, and French Hugenot) Boer population who settle at the southern tip of Africa after assisting the Dutch East India Company in establishing a trading station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Ten years after the discovery of diamonds in the Transvaal, the British attempted to annex it. In 1895, they would lose the first Boer War, forcing the resignation of mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, the first prime minister of Britain’s Cape Colony.

Millard also brilliantly portrays the hopelessness of conventional British military tactics against the Boer guerillas – there was no way conventional British cavalry and infantry could fight an enemy they. Ultimately the only British option (which Hitler copied in Nazi Germany) was the wholesale arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps of Boer farmers who supported the guerillas. Twenty six Boer civilians (22,000 of them children) died in the 45 concentration camps – due to starvation, lack of medical care and appalling sanitary conditions.

The  book also has an interesting section on the heroic role the pacifist Mohatma Ghandi and his supporters played as battlefield stretcher bearers during the Boer War.

Cognipresent

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Those words do not come from a conspiracy website or a Palestinian propagandist. They come from Avner Cohen, the Israeli government official who was responsible for religious affairs in Gaza for more than twenty years. He said them to the Wall Street Journal in 2009, for an article the paper itself titled “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.” Cohen had watched the whole thing happen from the inside, and back in the mid-1980s he had even written an official warning to his superiors, urging them to “break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face.”

[…]

The Setup: Two Kinds of Palestinian Resistance

Start with a simple fact: after Israel’s founding in 1948, the Palestinians who lost their homes and land did not agree among themselves about how to respond. Over time, two rival movements emerged, and the rivalry between them is the key that unlocks everything that follows.

The first movement was secular nationalism. These were Palestinians—Muslims and Christians alike, since a significant share of Palestinians were Christian—who wanted one thing: a Palestinian state. Their politics were worldly, not religious. In 1957, a young activist named Khalil al-Wazir proposed creating an organization with “no visible Islamic coloration or agenda but which has the stated goal of liberating Palestine.” Out of that idea came Fatah, founded in 1958–59 by Yasser Arafat and his circle, which soon became the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO—the umbrella group that the world came to know as the face of the Palestinian cause. From 1965 onward, Fatah waged guerrilla war against Israel. For the next several decades, when Israel spoke of its enemy, it meant the PLO.

The second movement was religious fundamentalism, and its vehicle was the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 with a very different goal: not national liberation, but the Islamization of society and, eventually, an Islamic state governed by religious law. It spread into Palestine early—by 1947 it had twenty-five branches there with as many as 25,000 members.

[…]

1967: New Rulers, New Rules

In June 1967, Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in six days and seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—placing roughly a million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.

For the secular nationalists, the occupation meant what you would expect: surveillance, arrests, deportations, and war. But for the Islamists, something strange happened. Things got better.

Ahmed Yassin walked free from Nasser’s jail—liberated, in effect, by the Israeli conquest. And the new Israeli military administration took a notably relaxed attitude toward religious activism.

[…]

The numbers tell the story of what this permissiveness produced. Between 1967 and 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza tripled, from 200 to 600. In the West Bank, they grew from 400 to 750. The Islamic religious endowments came to control ten percent of all the real estate in Gaza, plus hundreds of businesses and thousands of acres of farmland. Every one of those new mosques and properties grew under an occupation authority that demolished Palestinian homes for far smaller offenses. None of it could have happened without Israeli approval.

The 1970s: From Tolerance to Partnership

In 1970 came a demonstration of whose side the Brotherhood was really on. That September, the PLO—then headquartered in Jordan—fought a civil war against King Hussein and lost, in the bloody episode known as Black September. The Muslim Brotherhood sided with the king against the Palestinians. Israel, for its part, helped the king too, threatening to intervene if Syria came to the PLO’s rescue. Israel, Jordan, and the Brotherhood had just fought, in effect, on the same side of a war against the PLO. It would not be the last time.

[…]

1978: Begin Makes It Official

[…]

Begin’s government acted on that logic almost immediately. In 1978, it formally licensed Ahmed Yassin’s Islamic Association—granting legal recognition to the Islamist movement at a time when the PLO remained an outlawed terrorist organization whose sympathizers filled Israeli prisons. Dreyfuss describes the move as part of a “full-court press against the PLO” fought on two fronts: fostering the Islamists, and creating so-called Village Leagues—puppet local councils run by anti-PLO Palestinians vetted by the Israeli military. Yassin’s Brotherhood won heavy influence inside the Leagues; up to 200 League members received paramilitary training from Israel, and the Shin Bet used the network to recruit paid informers. (The Leagues themselves flopped—ordinary Palestinians scorned them as collaborators—but the Islamists kept gaining.)

And the support wasn’t just legal recognition. It was money, and we know this because the man who wrote the checks bragged about it to a reporter. David Shipler of the New York Times recorded the Israeli military governor of Gaza, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, explaining how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the communists.

[…]

A Detour Through Syria: Proof This Was a Strategy

[…]

During these same years—the late 1970s and early 1980s—Israel and Jordan were jointly supporting a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist insurgency against a different secular Arab enemy: the government of Hafez Assad in Syria. The Brotherhood’s campaign there was savage: assassinations of officials, car bombs in Damascus, and in 1979 a massacre at a military school in Aleppo where eighty-three cadets were locked in a building and killed with automatic weapons and firebombs. A 1981 car bomb in Damascus killed two hundred people.

The Brotherhood fighters trained in camps in northern Jordan and in Israeli-controlled parts of Lebanon. Israel’s proxy militia commander in south Lebanon, Major Saad Haddad, didn’t even hide it—he issued public communiqués announcing the opening of Brotherhood training camps, boasting at the seventh one that his 200 mostly Syrian trainees would receive commando training “not available anywhere else in the region” to “liberate Syria from the factional Alawi regime.”

[…]

Robert Baer, the veteran CIA field officer, confirmed to Dreyfuss that the CIA had standing instructions not to even treat the Muslim Brotherhood as an intelligence target. “Our approach to the Middle East was defined by the Cold War, and if these guys were going after Assad, well, so what?”

[…]

1983: The Weapons That Weren’t for Israel

Back to Gaza, and to the first of two episodes in Yassin’s life that have fed decades of suspicion—voiced most loudly by his Palestinian rivals—that his relationship with the Shin Bet went beyond mere tolerance.

[…]

And here is the detail that made even his enemies’ jaws drop: Yassin’s own explanation was that the weapons were gathered not to attack Israeli forces at all, but to fight other Palestinian factions. Dreyfuss calls the incident “curious and still unexplained” and notes that it led Yassin’s critics to suspect “secret ties to the Shin Bet.” At minimum, it tells you exactly what everyone—including the Israelis who released him—understood his organization’s guns to be for. They were pointed at the PLO.

1987: The Creature Gets a Name

In December 1987, the occupied territories exploded. The first intifada—the word means “shaking off”—was a mass Palestinian uprising against twenty years of occupation: general strikes, boycotts, stone-throwing youths against soldiers. It caught everyone by surprise, including the PLO leadership in exile.

It was in this moment, in 1986–87, that Yassin founded Hamas—an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.”

[…]

Did Israel’s support simply stop at that point? The record says no.

[…]

The tolerance ended only in 1989, when Hamas began attacking Israelis rather than Palestinians. Israel then cracked down hard, arresting Yassin and many of the leadership. The pet project had begun to bite.

[…]

The 1990s: Peace Almost Breaks Out, and Two Sets of Extremists Kill It

The intifada had one great political effect: it convinced Israel’s Labor Party that the occupation was unsustainable and pushed it toward negotiating with the PLO. The result was the Oslo peace process, launched in 1993 with the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake: the PLO recognized Israel, Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and a step-by-step path was laid out that was widely expected to end in a Palestinian state.

For Hamas, Oslo was an existential threat. Its entire reason for being was that the secular nationalists were frauds and only Islam could deliver.

[…]

Step back and look at Yassin’s whole career: freed from Nasser’s jail by Israel’s conquest in 1967; freed by Israel after serving one year of a thirteen-year weapons sentence in 1984; freed by Israel again in 1997. Three times the man who built Hamas walked out of prison, and all three doors were opened by Israel. Israel finally killed him—by helicopter gunship, in 2004—only long after the asset had definitively become a liability.

2000–2005: Sharon Finishes the Job

In 1999 Netanyahu fell and Labor’s Ehud Barak revived negotiations, coming close to a comprehensive deal with President Clinton’s help. Once again the right supplied the spark. In September 2000, Likud’s Ariel Sharon—a man Palestinians knew as the officer responsible for cross-border massacres in the 1950s and for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut—staged a heavily guarded, deliberately provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif, the Jerusalem holy site Jews call the Temple Mount. Dreyfuss calls it “an action calculated to provoke the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalists, and it did.” The second intifada erupted—this one dominated by suicide bombings—and the terrified Israeli electorate swept Sharon into the prime minister’s office, killing any chance of a deal.

What followed reads less like counterterrorism than like the careful curation of an enemy. In 2001, when the PLO actually secured a pledge from Hamas to halt attacks, Sharon ordered the assassination of a senior Hamas official—an act that, as the Israeli journalist Alex Fishman wrote in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, deliberately shattered “the gentlemen’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.” In 2002, ninety minutes before Yassin was scheduled to announce a ceasefire, Israel bombed a Hamas building in Gaza, killing seventeen people, including eleven children. The Harvard scholar Sara Roy, quoted by Dreyfuss, summarized what analysts were concluding: even while assassinating Hamas leaders, Israel “is simultaneously pursuing its old strategy of promoting Hamas over the secular nationalist factions as a way of ensuring the ultimate demise of the Palestinian Authority.”

The strategy worked—on the Palestinians. In 1996, polls showed only fifteen percent of Palestinians backing the Islamists. By 2002, after the crushing of the secular alternative, a Birzeit University poll found forty-two percent supporting Hamas’s vision of an Islamic state—a shift Roy called “totally unprecedented.”

Even Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza—the move that handed the territory to Hamas, which seized full control in 2007—was explained by its own architects in these terms. Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s closest adviser, described the withdrawal’s purpose with a metaphor that deserves to be remembered forever: “The plan provides the amount of formaldehyde required so that there will be no political process with the Palestinians.” Formaldehyde: the chemical that preserves a corpse. The corpse being preserved was the peace process, and Hamas’s rule in Gaza was the preservative.

2009–2023: The Suitcases of Cash

Dreyfuss published his book in 2005, but the story did not end there. It simply changed instruments—and this final chapter comes to us almost entirely from the mouths of senior Israeli officials.

[…]

Which meant Hamas had to be kept alive. And it was—with cash. Beginning in 2018, with the explicit approval of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, the Gulf state of Qatar began delivering roughly fifteen million dollars a month into Gaza to sustain the Hamas government—famously, in literal suitcases full of cash, driven into Gaza through Israeli territory with Israeli permission. Israel’s own Mossad helped arrange and defend the pipeline.

[…]

Via https://cognipresent.wordpress.com/2026/07/05/how-israel-helped-build-hamas-the-story-nobody-wants-to-tell/

By Kit Klarenberg

On June 27th, a plane ferrying a “specialized” team of “highly trained search and rescue specialists” flew into Venezuela from Damascus. Dispatched at putative Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa’s direct order, the 15-strong group is assisting disaster efforts launched by Caracas in response to devastating twin earthquakes. Among them are members of the notorious White Helmets. A bogus humanitarian group constructed by MI6, they played a central role in Britain’s protracted coup of Bashar Assad. Are the White Helmets similarly in Venezuela to assist regime change?

Sana highlighted the “exceptional field experience” of the White Helmets sent to Caracas, who reportedly acquired “advanced expertise in dealing with complex rubble and the extraction of trapped survivors” throughout the West’s dirty war against the now “deposed regime” of Assad. This “accumulated experience” has reportedly “enabled Syrian rescue specialists to participate in international emergency response missions,” with Venezuela being their debut. While Damascus provides “experienced rescue personnel,” key dirty war sponsor Qatar supplies “heavy machinery and specialized equipment required for field operations.”

The White Helmets will “work in close coordination” with international rescue units in shattered Caracas for up to 10 days, “with the possibility of extending the mission depending on operational requirements and developments on the ground.” An “operational requirement” of the rescuers may be assisting in the construction of quasi-state structures in Venezuela, ala Syria, ensuring Western powers have the requisite people, organisations and structures in place locally to take over when the embattled interim government of Delcy Rodríguez finally collapses.

As CNN has reported, “Rodríguez’s Venezuela is in such dire straits she can’t afford to reject aid from either friends or foes.” The White Helmets are a self-evident menace. The group was established in 2014 by ARK, a shadowy British intelligence cutout founded by MI6 veteran Alistair Harris. Over the subsequent decade, operating in areas controlled by foreign-backed extremists, the White Helmets played a major propaganda role in the dirty conflict against Assad.

Even more insidiously, the group and other ARK-created quasi-state structures shored up the dominance of Jahbat al-Nusra, which subsequently rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, before violently taking power in Damascus in December 2024. By providing state-like rescue services in HTS-occupied areas, the extremist faction’s credibility as a governance actor with local Syrians was significantly enhanced, to the extent HTS became “synonymous with opposition to Assad.” Leaked documents show British intelligence well-knew these activities assisted HTS’ “growing influence”, in the years leading up to Assad’s ouster.

Since then, the White Helmets have become Syria’s emergency services under al-Sharaa’s illegitimate rule. Meanwhile, fellow ARK construct the Free Syrian Police, with which the White Helmets worked hand-in-glove, has been anointed the country’s national police force. Separate leaks show this was Britain’s plan all along, with Damascus’ post-war “recovery” providing a beachhead for local MI6 assets to “[expand] into newly liberated territory” before all-out regime change. Venezuela’s recently-arrived planeload of White Helmets could represent a new, insidious front in the West’s long-running war on Chavismo.

‘Extremist Groups’

Leaked documents trace the White Helmets’ inception to a secret British program launched July 2013. Once constructed, the so-called Syrian Civil Defence enabled “direct and public linkages between donor funding and support to the Syrian opposition,” while “[enhancing] the legitimacy of local governance actors.” The group had strong links to, and worked in intimate conjunction with, Western-backed extremist groups, and foreign-created anti-Assad civil society and media operations. The White Helmets were a perfect conduit for opaquely funnelling aid and financial assistance to opposition-occupied territory.

Accordingly, the White Helmets were at the forefront of constructing parallel state structures, in advance of the day Assad was finally ousted. A leaked file refers to how in April 2015, ARK mobilised its networks of Syrian opposition actors of every stripe, including the White Helmets, to gather information at the British government’s request on “the situation in Idlib city following its liberation.” This included insights on “humanitarian conditions and service provision, as well as the evolving governance and security space.”

With British, Japanese and US funding, and in close coordination with the Qatar-created Syrian National Coalition, ARK sought “to galvanise international attention on the issue of protection of civilians,” while “mobilising social media, the international press, global advocacy partners and private entrepreneurs” to promote the White Helmets. In 2014, ARK produced a documentary about the White Helmets, Digging for Life, which racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and elevated the group to international stardom.

In leaked files, ARK boasts about the “impact” such propaganda had within and without Syria. One film the intelligence cutout produced “on the indefatigable spirit of a struggling female protestor” prompted “the eruption of anti-regime protests” in Idlib in 2013 – “protestors chanted her name.” The same ARK staffer behind Digging for Life also produced a “documentary profile” of the Free Syrian Police. Like the White Helmets, the FSP was much-venerated by the Western media, and promoted by ARK via “posters, booklets and broadcast products.”

As with the White Helmets too, the reality of the FSP was considerably darker than what emerged in major news outlets – at least initially. From 2012 onwards, the force operated in close tandem with violent militant factions, and courts punishing residents of opposition-occupied territory under obscenely strict interpretations of Sharia Law. However, a March 2017 BBC profile of the FSP repeatedly stressed the force didn’t “carry weapons in order to administer law and order in the country”,” or “cooperate with extemist groups.”

Nine months later though, the FSP’s intimate relationships with multiple ultra-violent militant sects, including HTS-forerunner Jabhat al-Nusra, were publicly revealed. This extended to assisting in the execution of women who disobeyed al-Nusra’s theocratic codes. These disclosures led to the suspension of British funding for the FSP, but this was reinstated within mere weeks as the force’s sinister alliance with extremist elements was “already known” to the Foreign Office. Indeed, the FSP’s entire purpose was assisting HTS and affiliated armed cliques in unseating Assad.

‘Service Delivery’

When the FSP’s true nature was publicly exposed, management of the project had been passed to British intelligence cutout Adam Smith International. Leaked ASI files from 2016 refer to the necessity of the FSP and other British ‘humanitarian’ initiatives supplanting “pre-2011” Syrian institutions, as part of a wider “expansion into newly liberated territory.” The White Helmets, FSP et al could “take advantage of systems and structures already in place…[demonstrating] the continuity of service delivery by the opposition rather than the regime,” the documents state.

The FSP formally absorbing Assad-era security infrastructure ensured “consistency between emerging police forces across opposition Syria, facilitating their future integration at the right moment.” More generally, it “[prepared] Syrian institutions for a peace agreement and transition.” The FSP could “inform as well as respond to the political process” – in other words, regime change. Meanwhile, it was forecast that “presenting a functioning yet consistent model in Syria’s liberated areas will strengthen the opposition and be the basis for a new civilian-led and accountable state security architecture”:

“The shifting front lines of the Syrian conflict mean that the FSP…must be ready to respond quickly when new stations are needed within current frontlines or when territory changes hands.”

In January 2019, HTS took power outright in north west Syria. Almost instantly, the FSP was formally dissolved, its members continuing their activities under the al-Nusra successor’s banner. Leaked documents testify to how HTS was “less likely to attack” British intelligence-created “moderate opposition” entities, including the White Helmets, which “demonstrably [provided] key services” to the local population. After all, residents of HTS-occupied territory increasingly supported the militant group, precisely due to “receiving services” under HTS’ chaotic rule.

As MI6-conceived “moderate” service providers flourished under HTS, British intelligence cutouts produced slick propaganda for national and international dissemination, providing audiences with “compelling narratives and demonstrations of a credible alternative to the [Assad] regime.” A particular target were Syrians who may once have supported regime change in Damascus, but believed the “revolution is dead” in the wake of Assad declaring victory in December 2018, fighting effectively ceasing outright, and HTS- and Kurdish-dominated enclaves being left to their own devices.

Of course, the West’s insurrectionary assault on Syria was far from over. In lieu of kinetic conflict, brutal sanctions ensured what remained of the country’s once prosperous economy stayed shattered after almost a decade of grinding proxy war, while deliberately preventing reconstruction of its eviscerated industry, infrastructure, previously excellent public education and health systems, and much more besides. Conversely, with the help of British intelligence “service provision”, HTS ever-strengthened not merely within territory it occupied, but the country more widely.

Come December 2024, Damascus was so crippled HTS easily sent the Syrian Arab Army scurrying – with MI6’s constellation of ‘humanitarian’ groups ensuring “continuity of service delivery.” In Venezuela, authorities have been enfeebled by decades of US-led economic warfare, leaving them unable to respond vaguely adequately to the recent earthquakes. Collapsing the decayed vestiges of Caracas’ revolutionary system wouldn’t require military action, but an influx of foreign “service providers”. Syria’s MI6-installed government has the necessary experience to finish Delcy Rodríguez’s administration permanently, via “international humanitarian operations.”

[…]

Via https://uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com/2026/07/05/the-white-helmets-invade-venezuela/

Lebanese President Najib Mikati

Mohamad Hasan Sweidan:

“Summary of a series of meetings I held in Tehran over the past few days:

• Everyone in Iran confirms that progress in negotiations with the United States is tied to ending the war in Lebanon.

• The Lebanese authorities are one of the obstacles to achieving a ceasefire in Lebanon.

• Their refusal to appoint a Lebanese representative to the joint US-Iran-Lebanon committee overseeing the ceasefire is delaying the committee from beginning its work.

• There are ongoing contacts between the Lebanese authorities and the Americans aimed at ensuring Lebanon is not included on the negotiating table with the Iranians.

• What the Lebanese authorities are doing through direct negotiations will not affect Iran’s insistence on achieving an end to the war and securing an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.

• In Iran, all Israeli ceasefire violations and attacks are being closely monitored, and the Iranian leadership is in full coordination with the resistance and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri.

• There are ongoing Arab-Iranian contacts regarding Lebanon, particularly with Saudi Arabia.”

[…]

Via https://t.me/thecradlemedia/63423

The Cradle

Andy Burnham, who is a potential future UK prime minister, is expected to remove US tech firm Palantir from the National Health Service (NHS).

Burnham, who is widely seen as a possible successor to Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader and prime minister later this month, is reportedly reviewing the government’s artificial intelligence strategy, according to The Telegraph.

The move comes two years into Palantir’s seven-year £330 ($440) million contract with the NHS.

[…]

Via https://t.me/thecradlemedia/63373

The Cradle

A cross-party group of 75 British parliamentarians has formally called on Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to impose immediate sanctions on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin.

The letter, organized by Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan, expresses profound alarm over the government’s failure to address the “systematic torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees, including children, in Israeli detention.”

The lawmakers acknowledge the previous government-level sanctions placed on Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, yet argue these measures have proven insufficient in curbing state-sponsored abuse.

“While the sanctions announced in June 2025 against ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich remain welcome, they have done little to change the government of Israel’s approach to Palestinian detainees,” the letter states. The MPs further emphasize that the responsibility for these atrocities reaches the highest levels of the Israeli leadership, citing findings from UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

“Responsibility for the systematic and well-documented torture of Palestinian civilians lies with the government of Israel, including Prime Minister Netanyahu,” the MPs wrote. “Since the sanctions were announced, the systematic torture of Palestinians, including children, has escalated, with near total impunity.”

The signatories are now urging the UK government to abandon its reticence and utilize the full weight of its legal and diplomatic authority to hold those responsible for designing and authorizing these policies to account.

[…]

Via https://t.me/thecradlemedia/63382

By Jim Hoft

Explosive testimony before the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets reveals decades of CIA crimes against unwitting Americans, evidence destruction, secret torture sites in Germany, and a continuing deep state effort to hide the truth from Congress and the American people.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) chaired a powerful hearing Tuesday titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments,” dropping bombshell after bombshell on one of the darkest chapters in American intelligence history.

The CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program, which ran from 1953 to 1973, subjected countless unwitting victims, including American citizens, hospital patients, prisoners, and veterans, to LSD, psychological torture, electroshock, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation in a quest for mind control techniques.

In her opening remarks, Luna called the program “crimes committed by the Central Intelligence Agency against American citizens” and “crimes against humanity.”

“This was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation… authorized by the very top of U.S. intelligence apparatus,” Luna said.

She detailed how CIA Director Richard Helms personally ordered the destruction of MKULTRA records in 1973 as he left office. Sidney Gottlieb and his team spent an entire day burning 152 files.

Gottlieb then had his personal papers destroyed. The head of the CIA’s own records center protested in writing and was overruled.

[…]

Via https://hellboundanddown.com/2026/07/03/former-cia-officer-drops-bombshell-at-mkultra-hearing-i-dont-believe-the-research-stopped-luna-says-congress-was-lied-to-for-50-years/