Glencore Joins Project Vault With $500 Million Cobalt Commitment

By Charles Kennedy - Sep 23, 2026

Glencore committed $500 million to VaultCo, the Export-Import Bank public-private partnership sourcing critical minerals for a US government stockpile, Reuters reported Wednesday. The commitment makes Glencore the fourth supplier named to Project Vault, joining Hartree Partners, Mercuria Americas and Traxys seven months after EXIM's board approved the program's underlying loan.

EXIM's board approved a $10-billion direct loan for Project Vault on February 2, 2026, paired with roughly $2 billion in private capital for a $12-billion total that finances a partnership between original equipment manufacturers and private capital providers. The original roster named Clarios, GE Vernova, Western Digital and Boeing as offtakers and Hartree Partners, Mercuria Americas and Traxys as suppliers.

Glencore told investors during its February 2026 earnings call it planned cobalt purchases tailored to fulfilling commitments to the US stockpile, months before VaultCo's structure took it on as a fourth supplier. 

Glencore holds major cobalt assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces most of the world's mined cobalt. Delivering material directly into VaultCo lets Glencore bypass the Chinese refining capacity that dominates the processing side of that supply chain.

Project Vault's stated purpose is shielding U.S. manufacturers from foreign supply chain disruptions across every mineral the US Geological Survey designates critical. 

So far, none of the direct-sourcing efforts meant to route DRC cobalt to the U.S. without Chinese refining has moved past setting targets. EGC-EVelution Energy is targeting up to 40% of US cobalt demand with a 1,775-tonne 2026 quota. Virtus Minerals is acquiring Chemaf SA, aimed at roughly 20,000 tonnes of annual capacity. Orion Critical Minerals is pursuing a 40% stake alongside Glencore.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

CUNY Discloses Investments in Israeli Apartheid After Years-Long Campaign

CUNY has direct investments in weapons manufacturers enabling Israel’s genocide, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin

.
By Shireen Akram-Boshar ,

Truthout

September 10, 2026

City University of New York (CUNY) students occupy the central quad of the CUNY campus with a Gaza Solidarity encampment, on April 26, 2024, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis

On Wednesday, September 9, activists from CUNY4Palestine broadcast their findings regarding the City University of New York’s (CUNY) investment portfolio in a press conference in front of New York City Hall.

“Following years of campus organizing and after a wave of demonstrations that erupted to protest CUNY’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the students have won disclosure!” the student group said in a statement shared with Truthout.

CUNY has now disclosed its ties to companies profiting from Israel’s crimes – including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

The fight for disclosure is just a stepping stone in the larger struggle across the U.S. to compel academic institutions to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s crimes.

In mid-August, CUNY agreed to settle and disclose its stock and bond holdings by September 2, following a two-year battle with activists. The legal battle began with CUNY4Palestine and CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine filing a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request in 2024, which was quickly denied by the university. The activist groups then filed a lawsuit demanding that CUNY disclose its investments in companies involved in Israeli apartheid and genocide dating back to January 2020. A judge ruled in 2025 that CUNY could not withhold its records, but the university appealed the ruling. Finally, in August 2026, the university agreed to a settlement that included disclosure.


Op-Ed |
NYPD Assault on CUNY Gaza Encampment Shows Why We Need Sanctuary Universities
My lived experience of Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship drives my opposition to the current US crackdown on dissent. By Ángeles Donoso Macaya , Truthout  May 22, 2025

Corinna Mullin, who was among four adjunct professors fired by CUNY for speaking in solidarity with Palestine in June 2025, spoke at the Wednesday press conference. (Three of those professors have since been reinstated, including Mullin.)

“Let’s be clear – CUNY did not volunteer this information,” Mullin said. “They fought us every step of the way.”

“It took a FOIL lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court, an encampment, speakouts, protests, petitions, demonstrations at board of trustee hearings, and a relentless campaign of pressure” to get the university to disclose, she went on.

“And this campaign, although accelerated by the urgency of the genocide against the Palestinian people started in October 2023, dates back years,” she added.

CUNY4Palestine “has identified numerous investments in CUNY’s portfolio,” the organization explained in the statement, “that confirm CUNY’s direct complicity in colonization, genocide, war crimes, prison labor, border militarization, imperialist military interventions, mass incarceration and fascist attacks on our immigrant communities.”

The university has direct investments in multiple weapons manufacturers involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the activists announced, including over $212,407.10 in unsecured Boeing stocks, $107,488.89 in Boeing common stocks, $141,201.34 in Raytheon stocks, and $65,302.74 in Lockheed Martin stocks.

“Boeing in particular facilitates ongoing massacres in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine through its manufacturing of F-15 fighter jets, Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, and the notorious bunker-buster bombs,” the activists went on.

The activist group also noted that CUNY has holdings in GEO Group and CoreCivic, private contractors who operate immigration jails including Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. These corporations “profit from prison labor, ICE detention, deportations, and surveillance,” Mullin said in her speech.

“Even as CUNY management claims to support immigrant students, it has invested the funds of our public university in terrorizing their communities and detaining them and their families,” Mullin added.

She then called for CUNY to respond to the needs of the diverse community it serves.

“We shouldn’t have had to fight for this. This is a public institution. This is the so-called ‘People’s University,’” Mullin said.

Veronica Salama of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the student activists in the legal fight, noted in a press release in August that investment records disclosure “is a basic responsibility and function of a public institution.”

CUNY is the largest urban public university in the country. It now joins the only other U.S. universities that have disclosed their investments in companies complicit in Israel’s crimes – the University of Minnesota and the University of California, both of which disclosed in 2024 due to the pressure of pro-Palestinian student encampments that spring.

In May 2025, the University of San Francisco announced that it would divest from four companies that contract with the Israeli military by June 2025 – Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace, and RTX Corporation, also after a persistent campaign by student activists.

In 2024, students across the country set up at least 130 encampments at colleges and universities in order to bring attention to the U.S.’s role in Israel’s genocide. One of the primary demands of the encampments was divestment.

In her speech on Wednesday, Mullin referred to the encampment as central to the fight for disclosure and divestment, and for a better university.

“When we organized against all of this – when we built that beautiful encampment at City College in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and against the genocide – we created something extraordinary,” she said. “We showed what a People’s University could actually look like.”

But the university’s response — and the response of universities across the country to the student-led encampment movement — was repression.

“They called in the [New York City Police Department Strategic Response Group], with the full support of the governor and mayor at the time, to repress our peaceful encampment. Over 100 protesters were arrested that evening,” Mullin recalled. “They attacked and punished student organizers.”

Despite the repression, activists intend for the disclosure to become a blueprint for a divestment campaign at CUNY, and a model for other universities.

The State University of New York (SUNY) BDS chapter echoed this sentiment in a statement sent to Truthout, saying, “Our goal is to develop a SUNY-wide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that reaches across all 64 SUNY campuses.”

Profane flight-path signs to greet Trump as he approaches Ireland: 'Great big unwelcome'

David Edwards
September 11, 2026 

RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Air Force One for a trip to the Republican National Midterm Convention, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S. September 9, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY


An attempt to shield President Donald Trump from protests in Ireland has likely failed after a Co. Clare family painted a profane message across the field behind their house, directly under the flight path he will use on Saturday.

The woman behind the sign, who was not named, described the project on Today FM's Ray Foley Show, saying the field sits beneath the approach to the main runway at Shannon Airport.

Trump is due to land at Dublin Airport on Saturday morning before flying west to Shannon and traveling on to his golf resort at Doonbeg, which is hosting the Irish Open this weekend.

The woman's original plan was to protest outside the resort itself, she told Today FM, but she abandoned it once she understood how tightly the area would be sealed.

"I was going to go down and try and protest down there, but I'd say we wouldn't even get near it. So we just said we'll do this instead," she said.

Ray Foley asked her during the interview whether the house was actually in the flight path, and she said that it was.

It took weeks of persuading her husband, Paul, to help, she said.

"I've been troubling him for a long time to do this, because we knew he was going to be coming," she said, adding that she kept needling him until he gave in.

The finished letters spell out "F— TRUMP" and dwarf the house beside them, according to the Daily Beast, which reported that the sign stretches across the entire field.

A second message appeared on Thursday on a beach in Dublin Bay, under the approach to Dublin Airport, RTÉ reported.

The campaigning organization Uplift carved the words "NO KINGS — GAZA IRAN ICE" into the sand, the broadcaster reported.

Waterford environmental artist Seán Corcoran designed the piece using rakes, according to RTÉ, and Uplift said it chose sand so the work would vanish with the tide.


"We want to send a message to Trump that he is not welcome here in Ireland," Uplift executive director Siobhán O'Donoghue said in a statement.

"We chose sand to drive home the message that Trump's administration will one day be history," O'Donoghue said.

Both messages were finished ahead of a shutdown that An Garda Síochána has described as "one of the biggest policing and security operations" it has ever mounted.


The force has declared an extraordinary event, and officers will work more than 10,000 12-hour tours of duty between Friday and Sunday, the Press Association said.

The Phoenix Park in Dublin was sealed off at 11 p.m. on Thursday and is expected to stay closed until 6 p.m. Saturday, RTÉ reported, closing Dublin Zoo and the Magazine Fort to visitors.

In Clare, access to Doonbeg village and stretches of the N67 road is restricted, the broadcaster reported, and drone flights are barred near Dublin Airport. The Irish Aviation Authority has placed temporary restricted areas over Shannon Airport and the Doonbeg course, and a maritime exclusion zone is in force off Co. Wicklow.


"We have robust policing plans in place and will arrest and prosecute those committing offenses," Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly told reporters on Friday.

Justin Kelly also said there would be "no tolerance" for public disorder, and that the force's water cannon would be on standby, according to the Press Association, though he said he hoped it would not be needed.

Gardaí have said they will facilitate peaceful protest, and several demonstrations are going ahead, RTÉ reported.


The Irish Neutrality League plans to assemble at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin and march to the GPO at 1 p.m. Saturday, the broadcaster reported, with further protests at the entrance to Shannon Airport, at an agreed location in Doonbeg village, and in Galway city center.

"We hope to give Trump a great big unwelcome when he arrives in Shannon on Saturday morning," Futureproof Clare member Sinead Sheehan told the Clare Champion.

The Trump Organization's Boeing 757 touched down at Shannon shortly after 6:30 a.m. Friday with Eric Trump aboard, Clare FM reported, and a cavalcade of Garda and U.S. Secret Service vehicles reached Doonbeg about an hour later.

The flight path message can be seen here.

• 
  
• 

  GylesNaMopaleen

  @gylesnamopaleen

  Sep 11

  

  Giant 'Eff Trump' under flight path for Air Force One at Shannon Airport

  From corkbeo.ie
• 

  JiVE TuRKeY JoBiN

  @JiveJobin87338

  19h

  trump i$ a WIFE CHEATIN' - DRAFT DODGiN' - TAX CHEATiN' - EMPLOYEE STiFFiN' - DAUGHTER LUSTiN' - RACi$T - RAPi$T - $$$ GRUBBiN' - IN$URReKKKtiON INCiTiN' - PEDOPHILE PEDOPHILE PEDOPHILE LOSER LOSER LOSER !! RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES NOW NOW NOW !!

25 Years of War Was the Exact Wrong Response to 9/11

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy and start rebuilding our country.


Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers walk toward reporters after conferring together at the President’s ranch August 23, 2004 in Crawford Texas.

(Photo by Duane A. Laverty-Pool/Getty Images)



Medea Benjamin

Nicolas J.S. Davies
Sep 09, 2026

Common Dreams

The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson.

Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.

Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence.

As Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks...

We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way.

At 2:40 pm, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld convened a meeting at the Pentagon. Notes taken by Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, later obtained by CBS News, recorded Rumsfeld demanding the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.”—meaning Saddam Hussein—“at the same time” as Osama bin Laden. Then came the chilling instruction: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Twenty-five years later, we can look back and see how the US government used September 11 to unleash a crusade of violence, war crimes and chaos across the world. Experts like Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz and military historian Michael Howard warned from the beginning that declaring a “war on terror” made no sense and would make matters worse.

They were right, of course. But when the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2004 showed an unprecedented increase in global terrorism following the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice simply cancelled and discontinued the report, replacing it with a new one with different criteria to prevent comparison with previous years.

But, as Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks, and for the remilitarization of the United States after the small reduction in its military spending after the end of the Cold War.

Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent.

Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for these counter-productive choices, and the appalling human costs of these wars on the countries the United States has attacked, bombed or invaded make this an especially atrocious way to squander our nation’s wealth.

The history of the United States during this period calls to mind an old Greek myth. Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Oracle told him, “If you cross the Halys river, a great empire will fall.” Encouraged, Croesus launched the invasion. But he lost the war, and the empire that fell was his own.

In pursuing their global imperial ambitions, our leaders and ruling classes have discounted and betrayed the real sources of America’s prosperity and security: the well-being of the American people and peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world.

They have led us into war, poverty and extreme inequality, and hollowed out a system of government that was slowly becoming more democratic. At home, decades of political struggle by labor, civil rights and other social movements produced enormous advances, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, major investments in public infrastructure and education, and a highly progressive tax system—with the top income tax rate at 91% until 1963—that helped finance those public goods and narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Contrary to the “End of History” theory embraced by many policymakers after the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous insistence that “there is no alternative” to the extreme neoliberal capitalism that she and Ronald Reagan ushered in, societies always have political and economic alternatives. It is only a transparently self-serving choice by America’s corrupt ruling classes that saddles us with a system that keeps all decision-making power in their own hands in order to build their own wealth to the detriment of the country we all share.

We can see one alternative today in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing a different set of priorities: expanding free childcare, making major investments in affordable housing, improving public transportation, and freezing rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Electoral politics can be part of the solution, but only if it reflects what ordinary people really want, instead of limited choices between oligarchic “lesser evils.”

Americans are demanding a renewal of social progress, with universal healthcare, quality public education, and all the things we need but can’t afford as long as this bloated, destructive war machine remains our government’s top priority. As Martin Luther King lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

Twenty-five years is a long time to keep moving in the wrong direction, especially when that direction involves endless war and the destruction of other countries. We are a long way from where most Americans would like our country to be. But we have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and what we need to do:

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy. Start rebuilding our country, and replace war and militarism with cooperation and problem solving. Take public ownership and responsibility for things we all need and use, like education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and utilities. Abolish ICE, and other militarized institutions that waste our national resources and do not serve the public good. Insist that the military be scaled back to its legitimate role of defending the United States against a possible, but very unlikely, foreign military attack.

If we have truly learned the lesson of the past twenty-five years, then we must translate it into policies that reflect that. The real test is not whether we can finally see what went wrong after 9/11. It is whether we are able to change course.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran" (2018); "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now" (2005).

Full Bio >

Nicolas J.S. Davies
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Full Bio >

Revealed: The shocking reason Trump is dismantling America’s spy agencies

U.S. President Donald Trump and John Ratcliffe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), speak as they depart after a Cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool

Sarah K. Burris

September 09, 2026

ALTERNET

As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, President Donald Trump has decided to overhaul the post-9/11 overhaul of the intelligence community, which he has seen as his enemy for so long.

Trump has held a notable hostility toward the intel community since his first term, when he learned that he was included in investigations around 2016 Russian meddling in the election. Trump has a belief that officials investigated him, specifically, and leaked damaging information about him. That paranoia that the "deep state" is quietly leaking things about him and his Cabinet has only deepened in his second term.

National Public Radio reported on Wednesday that Trump's attitudes toward the intelligence community are now leading to changes that don't make the U.S. safer; rather, they make Trump feel better personally.

Ex-CIA officer John Sipher told NPR that when he was working at the agency, he spent much of his time focusing on Russia, but after the U.S. was attacked in 2001, the community shifted to crafting new technologies, expanding data collection, improving communications and using drones and other tools to track terrorist networks.

He explained that all of those things helped in locating Osama bin Laden and bringing down al-Qaeda and ISIL.

"Frankly, tracking and hunting terrorists, finding people, finding a needle in a haystack was not something that we trained for," said Sipher.

When the Department of Homeland Security was created, it became one of the largest departments in the U.S. government, second only to the Pentagon.

Trump appears readying to dismantle that. He portrays national security and intelligence officials as corrupt actors working against him. Critics say that after decades of work, Trump is tearing it down without any plan to replace it. He's now installing loyalists with little experience into key positions, including Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Kash Patel at the FBI and John Ratcliffe at the CIA. They are all more likely to tell Trump what he wants to hear rather than provide an independent assessment.

John Feeley, the former US ambassador to Panama, told The Guardian last month about an incident in which he first entered Trump's office, where the president demanded to know what Panama did for the United States. Feeley walked through all the ways that the East Coast is able to purchase affordable goods because the Panama Canal has ships that can shuttle goods from one hemisphere to the other more easily.

He recalled Trump's response was "Huh... Who knew?"

"I kid you not, man," said Feeley. "And that's one of the things that contributed to my — I mean, all joking aside, that contributed to my unease about continuing to be his personal representative. This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant, who is surrounded by people who are not ignorant, who in their presentation toward a region that I dedicated about 30 years of my life to have such a fundamentally superficial view."

The report mentioned Steven Cash, who abandoned government employment after he said Trump turned work of career officials against Americans.

One issue is that Trump has essentially eliminated the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While someone is there, the one who briefs Trump is the CIA director. So, instead of using the person who coordinates 18 separate intelligence agencies, Trump wants his CIA guy.

"Counterterrorism is getting second fiddle to the threats from China and Russia, and the current administration's focus on the border and narco-trafficking means a shift of resources to the Americas," said former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos. "I am afraid that counter-terrorism will not be a priority until a mass casualty event, and then it very much will be once again," Sipher says one of the most damaging ideas that's taken root is that career intelligence officials actively take sides in partisan politics.

"We have allowed our partisan anger, and specifically the Trump administration, to create this narrative that there's a deep state and that the intelligence services work for one party or another. I think it's a real danger," he said.

But the damage has already been inflicted after Trump alienated the world with his trade war, tough talk and bombastic rants online.

"The CIA in particular relies or depends on intelligence sharing with friendly and not so friendly foreign intelligence services," Weiner said. "It it is still only 20,000 people, and they cannot cover the entire world. They need the British. They need the Dutch. They need the Saudis. They need help."

After Sept. 11, help was easy to come by, he said. That has changed, however.

After 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ Was a War of Terror

The crusade that George W. Bush launched 25 years ago to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it.

A fiery blasts rocks the World Trade Center after being hit by two planes September 11, 2001 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

LONG READ

Norman Solomon
Sep 09, 2026

Common Dreams

Three days after terrorists killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush stood behind a pulpit at the Washington National Cathedral and spoke to a nation in shock. “Our responsibility to history is already clear,” he proclaimed, “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The vow was, of course, preposterous. Yet the “war on terror” that followed was scarcely more realistic.

“Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic,” retired US Army General William Odom told C-SPAN viewers in 2002. “It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.” But the American military crusade became more about persisting than winning. The ultraviolent momentum became its own reason. The destructive search for enemies created more. As years went by and the “war on terror” label faded, US warfare was so normal in so many places that it no longer needed a name or much of a rationale.

But 25 years ago, the impulse to avenge the horrors of 9/11 was instant. Fear and rage blended into high octane for war machinery. Suddenly, overwhelming public emotions were fully in sync with the psychology of a military-industrial complex set for large-scale killing.

Even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date.

None of the 19 hijackers were Afghan, and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s ties were much tighter with Saudi Arabia, but his presence in Afghanistan put that country in the Pentagon’s gunsights. The question in US media was not about whether, but when, to attack. The answer came on October 7 when American missiles began to explode in Afghanistan. Hours later, a Gallup poll found that “90 percent of Americans approve of the United States taking such military action, while just 5 percent are opposed, and another 5 percent are unsure.”

The air war remained quite popular in the United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held daily live televised briefings that catapulted him to national adulation. A pattern set in, taking for granted that American warfare was beneficent in intent and benign in meaningful impact. People dying under American bombs and less directly didn’t count for much. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld asserted. And he added, “The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.”

Rumsfeld’s style went over big. “Everyone is genuflecting before the Pentagon powerhouse,” exclaimed the Washington Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, who called Rumsfeld “America’s new rock star.” That winter, after the Taliban government fell, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press program congratulated Rumsfeld on the air: “Sixty-nine years old and you’re America’s stud.”

The war in Iraq, launched with a March 2003 invasion, relied on massive air power and more than 150,000 US ground troops. The Saddam Hussein dictatorship fell quickly, but the promised “cakewalk” turned into year after year of combat and slaughter. Mainstream US media outlets were more than comfortable with above-it-all bombing that signified American air prowess. But the toll of American deaths and severe injuries gradually depleted enthusiasm as soldiers were called back for two, three or even more tours of duty. For many, the images of glory days turned into real-life nightmares.

The ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.

President Bush could not accept defeat in Iraq, and later Barack Obama could not countenance defeat in Afghanistan. Early in his presidency, Obama—in deed and word—made the “war on terror” expressly bipartisan. Less than a year after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in late 2009, the American troop level in Afghanistan reached 100,000, triple the number when he had entered the White House. During a visit to Bagram Air Base near Kabul, Obama provided the service members with star-spangled oratory that could be heard as uplifting or perhaps macabre: “I’ve been humbled by your sacrifice in the solemn homecoming of flag-draped coffins at Dover, to the headstones in section 60 at Arlington, where the fallen from this war rest in peace alongside the fellow heroes of America’s story.”

In effect, even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date. Through it all, the ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.

* * *

Faraway uses of Pentagon air power had human consequences that hardly registered on political scales back home. For officialdom, tech innovations like drones were unalloyed marvels. The people who experienced terror had no voices, no faces, no names. On the rare occasions when that wasn’t the case, general interest was scant. After seven months in Taliban captivity, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from rugged terrain in Pakistan and later recounted what it was like to have US drones constantly hovering overhead: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

The proclaimed war on terror had also become a war of terror.

A few days into his presidency, Obama sent Predator drones into Pakistan, killing three children and a dozen adults. A week later, a former “whiz kid” at the Pentagon during escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Pierre Sprey, appeared on the PBS program hosted by Bill Moyers. Sprey saw where US officials were headed with their air war. “I’d be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact a militant,” he said. “You can’t tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody’s a Taliban…. Most likely, you’re relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.” But, Sprey added, “bombing is always politically popular, relative to sending infantry and killing our boys.”

Obama officials were enamored with the American air war, in spite of evidence that it was routinely killing many bystanders. In 2022, Phyllis Bennis at the Institute for Policy Studies offered this assessment: “The so-called ‘global war on terror’ has, from its origins, been characterized by attacks by US Special Forces, by airstrikes, by armed drones, and more, that routinely kill far more civilians than the targets identified on the ‘kill lists’ prepared by presidents and top White House officials. The routine recitation of ‘there is no military solution to terrorism’ has always been an anodyne rhetorical ploy, never an actual guide to what actions might actually work to change the conditions that give rise to terrorism.”

Ironically and tragically, the conditions giving rise to terrorism included the US war waged in the name of ending it. The process was foreseeable. In 1998, the Pakistani-American political scientist Eqbal Ahmad wrote: “A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.”

Killing from the skies fueled desires for retribution. “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” Pakistani photographer Noor Behram said in 2011. For three years, he had been documenting the immediate aftermath of drone attacks in the mountainous Waziristan region near the Afghan border. “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.” As a result, Behram said, “The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack.”

Many thousands of miles away, military personnel in the US were peering at blurry images on computer screens and firing the drone missiles. “The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women or children,” former tech sergeant Lisa Ling recalled. For several years, she had trained Air National Guard members on how to operate Air Force drones. Ling was among the drone whistleblowers who went public during the terror war’s second decade. One of them, the young intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, spent nearly three years in prison because he disclosed facts about the drone program’s human toll. “With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of ten people killed are innocent,” he said. “You have to kill part of your conscience to do your job. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated? The thing I feared most was the temptation not to question it. So I contacted an investigative reporter… and told him I had something the American people needed to know.”

Hale provided The Intercept with classified documents that led to a landmark expose in October 2015. It reported, “Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the US has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.”

Early in his second term, at the National Defense University, Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech that addressed downsides of the terror war, then in its twelfth year. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Unlike the men who immediately preceded and followed him in the Oval Office, Obama seemed aware that perpetual war had negative effects on US society. Yet he didn’t proceed to do much about it. During the 44 months that followed his speech, through his last year in office, Obama maintained bombing of Afghanistan at about half the rate of his first term while drastically escalating the attacks in Iraq and Syria, with 30,743 bombs and missiles dropped on those two countries in 2016 alone.

* * *

Like Obama, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden ordered air strikes on Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In his second term, Trump has widened US bombing missions to also include Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela along with targeting nonmilitary boats and killing more than 225 civilians during the last year in international waters.

The withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021 seemed to mark a turn away from nonstop warfare. “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war,” President Biden declared weeks later at the United Nations. He added, “We’ve turned the page.” But actually, America was bound into a high volume of war. The “war on terror” was morphing and continuing on several continents. In fact, during the same month as Biden’s UN speech, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released a new report documenting that “counterterrorism operations have become more widespread in recent years.” The project’s co-director, Catherine Lutz, said: “The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful… and the war continues in over 80 countries.”

Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight.

The day after the Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations stood outside the Security Council chambers and said, “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” During the next six weeks, the New York Times later revealed, Israel “routinely” used 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza “in areas it designated safe for civilians.” Within nine months, Reuters reported, the large quantities of munitions supplied to Israel by the Biden administration included “more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs.” Speaking to the UN General Assembly as the war in Gaza neared the end of its second year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We’re wiping out the terror regime of Hamas and ensuring that its savagery will never threaten Israel again.” By then, the US government had provided more than $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organizations Physicians for Human Rights—Israel and B’Tselem unequivocally concluded that what has happened in Gaza is genocide. It was enabled by the United States.

Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight. While institutional racism is widely understood to exist inside the United States, an unexamined assumption is that its pernicious aspects stop at the water’s edge. But public discourse about the “war on terror” has eluded a fact well worth pondering: virtually every man, woman and child killed by Pentagon firepower in this century has been a person of color. This is not to say that they were attacked because of their racial identity. But racial biases in the US, unconscious and otherwise, have made it politically easier to launch and sustain wars bringing horrors to their lives.

Current findings from the Costs of War Project include: “An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died ‘indirectly,’ as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”

In foreign countries, the overall “reverberating effects” have crushed countless lives. However, the only casualties of the “war on terror” that have really resonated in US politics are American losses. Yet many of the casualties are far from obvious. While “over 7,053 US service members died in the post-9/11 wars,” the Costs of War Project notes, “at least four times as many US service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars died by suicide than in combat.” In addition, “An estimated 8,189 contractors for the US military died during the post-9/11 wars. Foreign workers for US contracting firms often do not have their deaths recorded or compensated.”

Such figures don’t include the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Veterans Administration now says that 15 percent of those wars’ veterans were suffering from PTSD “in the last year” and 29 percent “at some point in life.” Meanwhile, traumatic brain injury (TBI) from the two wars often afflicts veterans who were violently jolted by explosions and other wartime events. Analyzing Pentagon data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that “more than 450,000 US service members were diagnosed with a TBI from 2000 to 2021.” Four years ago, the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA published an in-depth study of TBI among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “Our study suggests that post-9/11 military veterans face a higher mortality burden across multiple causes of death than the total US population,” the study said. “We also found that exposure to moderate to severe TBI was associated with even higher mortality rates and excess mortality from accident, suicide, cancer, CVD [cardiovascular disease], homicide, and other causes.”

* * *

One day in mid-December 2002, three months before the “shock and awe” bombardment of the city began, I sat at a picnic table in a Baghdad park with the middle-aged Iraqi man who was my driver. There was no one around, no walls or fixtures that might conceal listening devices. He said that he wished Iraq had no oil, because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion.

Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability.

During the last 25 years, while plenty of public discourse has faulted policymakers for tactical mistakes and dubious judgment in war policies, more nefarious motives have received little attention. The rallying cry “No blood for oil” was common among those actively opposing war in Iraq but a nonstarter in mainstream media and politics. “The slogan is neither intelligent nor honorable,” Washington Post columnist George Will said in a commentary for ABC News shortly before the Iraq invasion began. “Intelligent people can honorably differ about the wisdom and morality of war against Iraq. But we should be able to agree that oil, an economic motive, is not driving US policy.”

Four years later, General John Abizaid, former head of US Central Command and military operations in Iraq, said: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.”

In his memoir, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Before becoming Defense secretary, Senator Chuck Hagel said in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability. The start of the Afghanistan War in October 2001 began supercharged bonanzas for Pentagon contractors. The 20 years of that war overlapped with upward of $2 trillion in government funds going to the biggest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman—an increase of 188 percent. “Those five firms spent over $1.1 billion on lobbying between 2001 and 2021,” Quincy Institute senior advisor Eli Clifton wrote. “That number seems like a staggering sum to spend on influencing policymakers but it may have been the most financially prudent decision these companies have made in the past 20 years.”

Investing in war stocks was likewise prudent for stock-market players. As the war in Afghanistan came to a close, journalist Jon Schwarz did the math: “If you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001—the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295. This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613. That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.”

* * *

The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact. Midway through Trump’s first term, the Democratic Party’s leaders in the House and Senate saluted when the commander in chief proposed an 11 percent Pentagon budget increase over two years. “In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense,” Representative Nancy Pelosi boasted. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” Senator Chuck Schumer proclaimed. “US taxpayers spend far more on the military and war than most people realize,” says a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight, which documents that “there are several ways to calculate the true cost of our military” and “all add up to at least $1.5 trillion.” A two-year 11 percent military spending increase now looks almost dovish in comparison to the outlays on the near horizon. Even without enactment of Trump’s proposed half-a-trillion-dollar increase for the 2027 fiscal year military budget, the status quo is deeply mired in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” If budgets are moral documents, America has been plunging into one moral abyss after another.

The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact.

With a very different style, Donald Trump’s basic lawless approach to international conflict is akin to Bush’s “war on terror” approach. Rhetoric aside, the actions have been clear: if the USA wants to attack another country, it will. This year’s unprovoked bombings of Iran signify how America’s foreign policy comes full spiral.

The crusade that George W. Bush launched to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it. Now, as the nation’s military juggernaut advances, the mindsets that propel it are in dire need of direct challenge.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
Full Bio >