Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

On Friday — 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks — the CIA released a trove of presidential daily briefings leading up to that day, providing a stark chronological timeline of flashing warning signs missed by multiple administrations.

The CIA said the collection is the agency’s single largest release of declassified President’s Daily Brief products related to 9/11, “providing unprecedented transparency on America’s most sensitive intelligence publication from the years before and the day after one of the darkest moments in our history.”

“The products trace the story of CIA analysts’ evolving understanding of al-Qa’ida and efforts to highlight and warn of Usama Bin Ladin’s attack plotting despite sparse, vague, and imperfect information,” the CIA said in its release.

While much of the information had been revealed in the last 25 years, including through the 9/11 Commission Report, most of the documents themselves have not been seen by the American public. The documents reveal the consistent drumbeat of intelligence presented to then-Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

Most striking is a PDB from Dec. 4, 1998, detailing a suspected hijacking plot. Previously reported on by The Washington Post in 2004, the memo — starkly titled “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks” — wrote in plain language, “Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking.”

The memo indicates sources said that “two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport” and noted “some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training,” raising questions as to why airport security was not increased in the subsequent years leading up to 9/11.

A U.S. official told MS NOW that CIA analysts at the time struggled to obtain information about al-Qaida and fully analyze it.

“It was a small team, a few dozen people,” the official said. “Counterterrorism was not a priority.”

The official said leading up to 9/11, Bin Laden was not a top focus in terms of intelligence collection.

“[Bin Laden] was not a priority collection target,” the official said, adding that information on the terrorist leader was “extremely sparse.”

But throughout the 71 documents starting on Feb. 13, 1998, CIA intelligence paints a clear picture of a Bin Laden determined to attack the United States — while being unable to pinpoint specifics.

The briefs repeatedly detail Bin Laden’s efforts to “procure unspecified chemical, biological, and nuclear substances” and his dependence on Taliban’s “goodwill” to provide safe harbor for him and his associates to conduct terrorist plots in Afghanistan.

As of June 1998, the U.S. had no information indicating Bin Laden had a terrorist cell in the U.S., with a September 1998 memo describing Bin Laden’s nongovernmental organization-funded network in the U.S. as “loosely connected.”

A July 3, 1998, memo detailing four reports from “highly questionable sources” suggests Bin Laden planned to conduct an attack in the U.S., including one in Washington “probably at a shopping mall.”

“We have little information on Bin Ladin’s operatives in the US,” it said.

Still, in September 1998 the U.S. maintained that the “most serious threat” of terrorism came from Bin Laden and affiliated groups despite his U.S. associates seeming “less structured than cells in other countries,” with Europe viewed more at risk.

“Intelligence provides no conclusive information on Bin Ladin’s intentions for future attacks,” a Sept. 10, 1998, memo says.

“Bin Ladin late last month said his preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington,” the memo warns. “The same group responsible for the bombings in Africa may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.”

A Dec. 11, 1998, memo built on the PDB a week earlier warns of an aircraft hijacking (see above) — “over the past two months suggest Bin Ladin’s group is preparing one or more terrorist attacks in the near future” … “several reports of impending anti-US terrorist operations” … “planning to hijack aircraft before Ramadan.”

By May 25, 1999, the daily brief reports that Bin Laden “is pursuing a variety of options for developing chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear capabilities” and includes a stark warning: “Scientists are developing a “nuclear weapon” at a facility in Heart, and Bin Ladin believes it could be ready in one to two months.”

Through the fall and winter of 1999 — two years before the 9/11 attack — intelligence memos consistently reported Bin Laden’s determination to target and attack the U.S., with an Aug. 3, 1999, memo noting, “The ongoing activity of Bin Ladin operatives reflects the resilience of his organization in the face of setbacks … his personnel still are planning attacks in widely scattered locations such as Washington.”

“The extent of Bin Ladin’s reach and the variety of targets make anticipating attacks difficult,” the report says. A manifesto seized in March 2000 recommended attacking “population targets, such as skyscrapers, airports, or nuclear power plants.”

The documents reveal an intelligence community struggling to “pinpoint targets of timing” for a possible Bin Laden-ordered attack, but still, the memos do not indicate an urgency to track down the al-Qaida leader nor meaningfully increase pressure on the Taliban to surrender him.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Clinton vigorously defended his administration’s counterterrorism record, saying his team broke up al-Qaida cells, prevented several terrorist incidents and tried numerous times to get Bin Laden. Clinton told the 9/11 commission that if the U.S. had actionable intelligence about where Bin Laden was, he would have mobilized special operations forces to take action.

“Usama Bin Ladin’s al-Qua’ida and sympathetic groups are determined to carry out spectacular terrorist attacks against the US before yearend,” a December 2000 briefing warns.

But the alarms persisted long after Clinton left office.

Several memos prepared for Bush throughout early 2001 caution against the threat of Bin Laden’s “extensive program to develop or acquire chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and materials,” as well as his desire to drive U.S. forces from the gulf and willingness to “try unconventional attacks to advance this goal.” One memo says Bin Laden designing or testing a nuclear device was the “least probable scenario,” with another noting, “Bin Ladin and his associates have experimented by crude means to make and deploy biological agents.”

Over the course of the spring and summer of 2001, threats became more specific — and prescient.

A May 22, 2001, memo says “planning is under way for three separate operations in [REDACTED] to take US diplomats or civilians hostage,” warning conspirators seeking release of U.S.-held prisoners “may hijack an aircraft or storm a US Embassy.”

“For the second time in two weeks [REDACTED] indicates that an expected imminent Bin Ladin-sponsored terrorist operation has been postponed, but preparations for other near-term attacks may still be in train,” a July 24, 2001 report says, adding, “Something they had expected to hear in the news is still planned but has been delayed a few months.”

A month before 9/11, the intelligence community warned of al-Qaida’s ability to attack within U.S. borders

“Al-Qa’ida members-including some who are US citizens—have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks,” an Aug. 6, 2001, memo says, noting that while the U.S. had not been able to corroborate “some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft,” FBI information since then still “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

Bush told the 9/11 commission that that memo — the 36th item that year related to Bin Laden or al-Qaida and the first specifically devoted to the possibility of an attack within the U.S. — was “historical in nature,” but did not recall discussing it with the attorney general or whether his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, had done so.

“[Bush] said that if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it,” the 9/11 Commission Report says. “That never happened. “

Speaking at a memorial ceremony at the Pentagon 25 years later, Rice gave a “deeply personal” apology to the families of the nearly three thousand people who lost their lives.

“Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11,” she said. “We did what we knew to do, but by definition, it was not enough.”

She called it a “miracle” that there was not a follow-up attack, expressing gratitude for the armed forces and intelligence community.

“Their service and their sacrifice in the war on terror kept us safe,” Rice said. “But I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured.”

Nora McKee, Peggy Helman, Kevin Frey and David Rohde contributed to this report.

By Gordon Thomas

Anti-Semitic conspiracists plan to flood the internet to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 attacks by resurrecting the old canard that Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, knew in advance of the attack – and did not warn the CIA and FBI.

The conspiracists say that the attack on the Twin Towers was a “false flag” operation organised by Mossad as part of an ongoing attempt by Israel to launch a war against its Muslim “enemies”.

The fact is that Mossad warned that an attack was impending.

From the day bin Laden’s suicide bombers partly destroyed the World Trade Center in 1993, Mossad had placed him at the top of its own list of most wanted terrorists. Its deep-cover field agents had picked up “whispers in the wind” that bin Laden was planning “something big,” said one report. Another spoke of a “strong rumour bin Laden is planning a Hiroshima type attack.” Still another revealed a flight simulator being used in an al-Qaeda training camp near Kabul. Then came the news that bin Laden had been trying to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons.

While Mossad analysts tried to connect the dots, the reports were also passed on through the long-established back channel to the CIA. The Pentagon was asked to evaluate the threat of an air strike. One of its analysts, Marvin Cetron, wrote, “Coming down the Potomac, you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House.” Another analyst, Martin Clefran, was told “look we can’t manage a crisis until it is a crisis”.

Before 9/11, there was a feeling in Washington that Mossad was once more crying wolf, that it had a vested interest in promoting Islamic fundamentalism as a threat because it feared its terrorists and wanted to persuade the United States that it also faced a similar threat. By the time Efraim Halevy, head of Mossad before 9/11, had come into office, dutifully read the files on terrorism threats, and seen the reaction to Mossad’s warnings, he had decided that, in the words of one of his senior officers, “there was no point in pushing against a bolted door.”

However, Haleavy confirmed to me that Mossad “had sent several warnings in the week prior to September that an attack was coming” and cited “credible chatter” Mossad agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. In his diplomatic way, he implied that the growing turf war between the FBI and CIA in 2001 was one reason why the warnings were ignored Both agencies had concrete evidence that al-Qaeda was an increasing threat: one of its operatives had been stopped at the last moment from flying a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and intel had emerged at Langley, indicating bin Laden was planning an air strike against the economic summit it Italy earlier in 2001. But the sense of paralysis and denial, compounded by the growing turf war between the FBI and the CIA, had continued to hold the U.S. intelligence community in its grip

After 9/11 Haleavy recalled the “hot line from Langley was superheated”. A dozen calls a day from George Tenet, then the CIA chief.

In one call Haleavy had snapped: “Where was your electronic surveillance?” to Tenet, who was facing intense criticism himself and wanted to know how much Mossad had known about the impending attack.

As conspiricists continue to spin their lies, the reality is that Mossad tried to warn the United States. As some choose to attack past events, those in the intelligence world need to continue to improve contact and sharing of vital information.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two former FBI officials were charged Friday with lying to Congress about their involvement in investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the latest in a series of splashy and politically charged actions the Justice Department has undertaken ahead of next month’s midterm contests.

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, former leaders of a since-disbanded task force set up to counter foreign election interference, appeared in federal court in Washington, where their lawyers pressed for a speedy hearing to contest allegations their clients lied to lawmakers by saying that they did not participate in FBI investigations of Biden.

The prosecution, a rare Department of Justice criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled and peculiar saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race. It also comes amid a broader, backward-looking effort by FBI Director Kash Patel, who before taking over the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was a harsh critic of it, to scrutinize high-profile episodes from the bureau’s recent past that for years have animated President Donald Trump’s conservative base.

Floris’ attorneys called her “a patriot” and said she has “served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years.”

“Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts,” her attorneys said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”

Attorneys for Benavides accused the government of bringing “baseless criminal charges against him in a transparently political complaint.”

“This is another sad day for the Department of Justice,” his lawyers said in an emailed statement. “But now we are in court, and the truth will come out: Brad Benavides is a true patriot who devoted his career to protecting this country and its people. These charges are a disgrace.”

A criminal complaint comes just before the midterms

The case was filed less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 elections via criminal complaint, which means prosecutors have not yet presented the allegations to a grand jury for an indictment. The Justice Department has repeatedly struggled in high-profile cases to convince grand juries in the nation’s capital to return indictments.

During the former FBI employees’ court appearance, both defense attorneys and the judge noted the unusual move to charge the case through a complaint, which is more often used by prosecutors when they have an urgent need to take people into custody because, for example, they present a danger or a risk of flight.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui remarked that it is “rare that we have charges this old coming in this nature,” and over the objections of prosecutors who pushed for more time, set a preliminary hearing for next Tuesday, citing what he said was the “sword of Damocles” hanging over the defendants’ heads.

The laptop discovery created turmoil in 2020 election

The revelation of the laptop’s existence in October 2020 injected a thorny storyline in the race between Trump, the Republican incumbent, and Biden’s father, Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger who went on to win the race.

The laptop was publicized by the New York Post, which said it had obtained from Trump ally Rudy Giuliani a hard drive of a computer dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop about a year earlier.

The criminal complaint aims to build on longstanding congressional Republican complaints about the FBI’s handling of the laptop, including allegations that the bureau was not forthcoming to the public that the materials on it — including emails that showed discussions of the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings — were authentic and not the product of Russian disinformation.

The curious circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian involvement, particularly at a time when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow that Russia was attempting to interfere in Trump’s favor in the election and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens. Dozens of former U.S. intelligence officials signed a letter saying that the laptop bore the “classic earmarks of an Russian information operation.”

But Trump’s then-director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said in a letter to Congress that there was no proof foreign actors had anything to do with the laptop. The FBI under then-Director Chris Wray subsequently endorsed that position.

Hunter Biden was charged with, and convicted of, gun and tax offenses during his father’s administration. Joe Biden pardoned him in his final weeks in office.

The case shines a light on an FBI task force on foreign intelligence

The complaint alleges that in their capacity as leaders of the Foreign Influence Task Force, Floris and Benavides were deeply engaged in the investigations into Hunter Biden, and that Biden was a recurring subject at FITF meetings.

Yet, the complaint says, both downplayed their firsthand knowledge of the laptop or involvement in investigations during 2023 testimony to lawmakers who were doing their own Biden investigation.

It accuses Benavides of making a false statement by saying he learned through Wikipedia that the FBI was in possession of the laptop, and says Floris falsely claimed to have had no knowledge of Hunter Biden having been the subject of discussions at FITF.

“Lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system. No one is above the law,” Patel said.

The case brings renewed attention to the work of the task force, which was established in the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation. The task force became a magnet of congressional Republican criticism in part because of the Hunter Biden investigation and was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The Justice Department has made other splashy moves

As FBI director, Patel has presided over widespread firings of agents who were involved in investigations of Trump or who are perceived as being against the Republican administration’s agenda.

He has also focused attention on years-old investigations like the Hunter Biden one that occurred before he became director and that have been the subject of grievances and complaints by Trump allies.

The Justice Department historically looks to avoid public and overt investigative acts in the direct lead-up to an election that involve candidates or that risk influencing a political outcome. But officials in the last two weeks have made a series of bold moves in cases with political undertones, including a search of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house in an immigration fraud investigation and a corruption indictment unsealed Thursday against powerful Democratic Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.

Omar and Lucas are both Trump critics. Omar, who’s from Minnesota, has called the search of her Washington home an “attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” Lucas has said she won’t be intimidated or bullied by the federal government in its case against her and “will not back down.”

But in the tangled mess that is the war in Ukraine, all of those gestures benefit Russia most — leaving a ceasefire, let alone peace, a distant prospect for besieged Ukrainians, and the Trump administration and U.S. Republicans still grappling with high diesel and gasoline prices ahead of the midterm elections.

To win effusive praise from Witkoff and announce a resumption in negotiations, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to do very little: release Stephen Hubbard, a detainee of little value, and then overcome an obstacle of Russia’s own making: professed grievances over Ukraine’s stepped-up drone and missile strikes that coincided with Russia’s parliamentary elections in September.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not disguise his dismay — or his cynicism about the diplomatic developments — as he used the latest Russian strikes on Kyiv to throw shade at Witkoff for praising Putin as a “humanitarian.”

“Three waves of ballistic strikes were launched by Russian ‘humanitarians’ against Kyiv from the evening,” Zelensky said. “They used 21 missiles. Unfortunately, there is a significant number of hits and damages in the city: ordinary houses, energy facilities, infrastructure of one of the stations and the metro, shopping centers, and enterprises. Among the damaged objects is even a monastery.”

“Twelve of our regions were under Russian strikes this night,” he continued. “In Kyiv and the regions, 34 people were injured, including five children. As of now, two deaths are known.”

Zelensky added: “Essentially immediately after the latest negotiations, Russia delivered a demonstrative strike. This means that there are no real changes in its attitude towards everything that is happening. It is important to continue trying to find the right solutions to end this war.”

As Kyiv and Moscow maneuvered for Washington’s favor Wednesday, Zelensky reiterated his willingness to freeze the fighting along current battle lines — a proposal that Trump had made just over a year ago and that Russia rejected, insisting that Ukraine surrender the entirety of its eastern Donetsk region, including the so-called “fortress” cities that Russia has tried and failed to capture for years.

Following Witkoff’s visit to St. Petersburg on Wednesday, high-ranking Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said the U.S. envoy’s points were so convincing that Moscow reconsidered its opposition to meeting a Ukrainian delegation and was willing to send delegates to Abu Dhabi in mid-November for technical talks, the first since February.

Ushakov said that Witkoff had informed Putin of the results of his talks with Zelensky in Oslo, adding there was little “substance” to the “new elements” of Ukrainian and European proposals. Ushakov said that he did not know how close the war was to ending but that “it is heading that way.”

Experts and analysts, especially in Ukraine, were less convinced.

“As experience shows, the mere fact that negotiations are taking place does not mean that a peace agreement is likely to be reached anytime soon,” Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko said in an interview. “It is more likely that the war will escalate at the same time, particularly the air war against Ukraine.”

“Russia’s attacks on Kyiv and Ukraine will be used as a tool to exert pressure on the negotiations,” he continued. “This is Putin’s preferred method. That is why I say that negotiations and an escalation of the war will take place simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and chair of the committee on foreign policy and interparliamentary relations, described the talks as “a charade.”

“Russia is using the negotiations as a propaganda tool — that’s all — while we are trying to work with the Europeans and have some discussions and so on,” he said. “But there are no results anymore, and there won’t be any, unfortunately.”

Tatiana Stanovaya, a political scientist and fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on X that while Witkoff’s readout generated little enthusiasm in Moscow, recent sanctions relief and Trump’s latest shift toward Russia “have given Putin sufficient grounds to agree to resume negotiations, particularly as doing so comes at little cost to Moscow.”

“It is prepared to engage in discussions for tactical gains, calculating that these, combined with the further deterioration of the Ukrainian state, may eventually produce a strategic shift in Russia’s favour,” Stanovaya wrote.

Other Russian officials have called the latest meeting with Trump’s envoys a sign that “Washington shares the assessment” about the lack of substance in what Kyiv and its European backers have proposed.

Russia has long sought Trump’s support for a negotiated end to the war that would deliver victory to Putin by allowing him to seize all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

“The talks … are undoubtedly a prelude to a potential diplomatic breakthrough,” Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky said. “The latest meeting has, in effect, brought the issue of a settlement in Ukraine back onto the negotiating track.”

The talks are set to include military officers and Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister now known for his revisionist history books about Ukraine. Putin, meanwhile, will head to China, where he is working to set up a joint meeting with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

That’s a format that the Russian leader has long seemed to prefer, in which he can push to end the war on his terms while bypassing Ukraine and Europe.

The idea of such a big-power summit has alarmed Ukrainian officials, with Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha writing on X: “A trilateral ‌meeting between ⁠the leaders of Ukraine, the US, and Russia could help end the war sooner. A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, China, and the US would do only the opposite: encourage Putin to continue this war.”

During his meeting with Putin, Witkoff hailed the diesel deal Trump struck with the Russian leader as “another example of what we can achieve by working together.”

The deal, which removes sanctions from Russia in a reversal of long-standing U.S. policy, is intended to lower fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections.

Putin has claimed that it lowered global diesel prices by 5 percent to 6 percent, a figure energy experts dispute. The amount of diesel Russia is releasing is marginal compared with overall U.S. usage and hardly enough to address the global energy crisis set off by the U.S. war with Iran.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said the first tanker with diesel bound for the U.S. was set to depart Thursday, even though the contract for the supplies has yet to be signed.

“This tanker will have a capacity of 40,000 tons,” Novak said. “And, certainly, further shipments will follow.”

To ship diesel to the U.S., Russia had to lift its own export embargo, imposed after systematic Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out some of the country’s largest oil refineries, creating shortages and price spikes for Russians.

Those strikes forced Russia to prioritize its domestic market, ration fuel at home and even temporarily permit the sale of lower-grade fuels to stabilize domestic availability.

Novak hinted that production limits were still in place and that the destination for diesel shipments will depend on “what volumes we can supply — over and above the needs of the United States.”

Details aside, the deal has given Putin a basis to push one of his mainstay talking points: that the West is hurting itself by imposing economic sanctions on Russia and ultimately won’t be able to meet its own needs without resuming purchases of Russian fossil fuels.

For Putin, who is also aware that Trump may flip positions again after the midterm elections, the current thaw with Washington creates an opportunity to improve ties with the U.S. while pushing ahead with a plan to make winter the most miserable yet for Ukraine in the nearly five-year-long invasion.

The Kremlin seems to hope that will break Ukraine’s resolve and European support for Kyiv will collapse.

But for Russia, there is also a risk of overplaying its hand, said Vladimir Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist.

“The Putin regime will never have a more favorable opportunity to extricate itself from this war than it does right now,” Pastukhov said. “The frantic, restless way Putin is acting suggests he may, in part, grasp this. But hubris — the eternal nemesis of Russian emperors — stands in the way.”

Pastukhov said Trump appears to have moved away from a belief that freezing the fighting would be the best way to end the war quickly and is instead mulling a solution “in the manner of a gangland showdown.”

“In any case, I believe that this is no ordinary moment in the history of this war … but a true point of no return, a juncture where an intense struggle is underway over the terms of peace,” Pastukhov said.

“In all likelihood, this round of ping-pong will prove inconclusive; what happens next will depend on whether Trump is capable of moving from hints to action — that is, whether he will risk openly siding with Putin in this war, thereby forcing Europe — and, along with it, Zelensky — to capitulate.”

In Ukraine, trust in U.S. support has already evaporated.

After Trump cut off direct military and financial aid, the three key remaining areas of U.S. assistance — intelligence sharing, Starlink satellite internet service and arms sales — each proved vulnerable during the past week, as the White House seemed to pressure Kyiv.

Fesenko, the political scientist, cited “a crisis in bilateral relations.”

“This is evidenced by Trump’s very harsh, sometimes aggressive statements, including calls for a change of president in Ukraine,” he said. “The risks have therefore become apparent precisely in the remaining areas of cooperation.”

On Thursday, Ukrainian commanders were still reporting issues with Starshield, the military equivalent of Starlink, despite assertions by the Trump administration that service had been restored.

“Starshield continues to operate across all sectors of the front line, but with a speed limit of 160 km/h. This has created certain problems for us,” Andriy “Klima” Klymenko, commander of the 414th Unmanned Systems Brigade “Birds of Magyar,” told The Washington Post.

“The worst part is that nobody warned us that the restrictions were being introduced,” Klymenko said. “We found out about them in the middle of combat missions, when we started losing aircraft.”

“We have now adapted, but the problem has not gone away,” he added. “At lower speeds, our drones become easier targets for the enemy. This directly undermines the effectiveness of operations.”

Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.

For me, the New York City skyline was close to home. Quite literally. I grew up just across the Hudson River, with the famed skyline of America’s biggest city visible from my bedroom window. Being a Palestinian American living just outside of the world’s most famous city meant that I spent part of my summers as a tour guide for family visiting us from the Middle East, who, like so many people around the world, wanted to see the Big Apple that the movies and live broadcasts from Times Square on New Year’s Eve had made so famous.

I took visitors to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park and the World Trade Center. My last tour was in the final days of August 2001. We went to the observation deck of the World Trade Center known as “Top of the World”. Little did I know that two weeks later that deck, where we had stood looking out at the amazing metropolis below, would come crashing down along with the entire World Trade Center, killing thousands and instantly changing the world as we had known it.

By the time of the September 11 attacks, I was back in my dormitory at university in New England and huddled around a 10-inch television screen with floormates watching ABC’s Peter Jennings cover the horrific news as it was unfolding that Tuesday morning. Among the early reactions was one from Benjamin Netanyahu, then a former prime minister of Israel. Asked by The New York Times what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Netanyahu replied, “It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy,” adding that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples”. This was his response while ground zero was still smouldering after an attack that had killed nearly 3,000 people.

It immediately hit me that not only was the world about to change, but my life in the US as a Palestinian American was about to become far, far more complicated. The US was about to embark on military engagement in the Middle East, and Netanyahu was excited by the opportunity this presented Israel.

To better understand the impact this moment had on US-Israel relations, it is crucial to consider the preceding context. I have argued elsewhere that the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 was a complicated one for US-Israel relations. For most of the history of the US-Israel relationship, the Cold War was the defining paradigm in international relations. For Israel, this was an easy paradigm to navigate. It billed itself to Americans as a like-minded, US-aligned democracy confronting Soviet-backed satellite states in the Arab world.

But as the Cold War ended, the political landscape shifted. The Berlin Wall fell, democratisation swept Eastern Europe, and apartheid ended in South Africa, while Israel was brutally repressing the first Palestinian Intifada. Suddenly, Israel did not fit so comfortably in this new world order. It was during this period that the US made its greatest investments in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, however flawed, and used some leverage to press the Israeli government on settlement building.

September 11 and the ensuing global “war on terror” changed all of this. With the second Palestinian Intifada under way, the September 11 attacks on the US provided an opportunity to once again put Israel and the US on the same side of a new defining global divide. Instead of communism, the new global bad guy was radical Islam.

Netanyahu and his allies understood this very well, just as he made clear to The New York Times 25 years ago this week. A wounded America was primed for Islamophobic narratives, and pro-Israel voices were often happy to provide them, as they understood that an America obsessed with “counterterrorism” would have to stay close to Israel.

There are numerous areas where we see the impact of this over time: enhanced US-Israel intelligence collaboration, growing US financial support for Israel and legislative initiatives supported by Israel’s backers in the US that used broadened anti-terror authorities to crack down on Palestinians, to name a few.

The narratives that helped support these outcomes also went beyond simply linking Israel and the US through a common “terrorist threat”. Palestinians were also more easily turned into a “security problem” to American audiences. Instead of asking why Palestinians were resisting oppression, American audiences were pushed to see Israeli repression as self-defence similar to US behaviour. Muslims were often cast as one of two types in American discourse: moderate or extremist, and those criticising Israel were routinely placed in the latter category, which led to stigma and a chilling effect.

Israeli military practices could be cast as useful for America as well. Surveillance, counterinsurgency, targeted killings and other tactics Israel had used in the West Bank and Gaza, which had occasionally been criticised by Washington, were used by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus increasingly legitimised before American audiences.

Some of the greatest purveyors of the Islamophobic narratives that characterised much of the post-9/11 period in the United States included David Horowitz, who consistently sought to connect Palestinians with terrorism and called for profiling to make Palestinian identity itself a security concern; Daniel Pipes, who often characterised Muslim organisations as potentially or secretly militant, casting suspicion on Muslim advocacy; Steven Emerson, who sought to popularise infiltration narratives to try to turn mainstream Muslim organisations into security subjects; Brigitte Gabriel, who regularly framed Islamism as a civilisational threat, thus casting Israel as a front-line defender of the West; and David Yerushalmi, who sought to expand the threat narrative to Sharia law and Muslim political influence, thus casting Muslim political participation as potentially subversive.

The general logic of these narratives was that terrorism was effectively synonymous with all things Palestinian/Arab/Muslim and thus Israel’s security model should be seen as legitimate, if not ideal, by Americans.

It is important 25 years later to reflect on the dangerous political opportunism that spewed hate into American discourse to cast Israel and Israeli policy in a favourable light. A quarter-century later, the US is once again embroiled in a seemingly intractable quagmire, this time in Iran, a losing effort that has already cost Americans more than $100bn through higher petrol and diesel prices. Given all of this, Americans today should be quick to question Islamophobic narratives, the dangerous paths they lead down and the real motives of those who spread them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Germany’s former foreign intelligence chief was accused of being a Russian spy before his arrest on suspicion of treason earlier this week.

August Hanning, 80, was arrested on Tuesday after being accused of passing highly classified information to a foreign intelligence agency in what would amount to Germany’s worst post-war spy scandal.

Weeks before his arrest, Mr Hanning, who ran the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1998 to 2005, sent an angry letter to the current head of the agency, demanding answers about an investigation into him.

In the letter, dated Aug 17, Mr Hanning asked Martin Jäger 11 questions about why the BND had forwarded a dossier containing allegations about him to an investigative authority without consulting him.

The dossier contained allegations by a former intelligence agent who had called Mr Hanning a Russian spy. Mr Jäger did not respond to the letter at the time.

‘Close contact’ with former Chinese general

Mr Hanning has also been accused of remaining in “close contact” with a Chinese former army general.

He is said to have passed him confidential “political information” partly based on the BND files over several years.

The German public prosecutor’s office claims Mr Hanning maintained contact for several years with “a representative of another foreign intelligence service”, named by Der Spiegel as Wang Jianzheng.

Mr Wang, who works at the military-aligned China Institute for International Strategic Studies, spent 23 years as a military diplomat in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

He was first posted to East Berlin from 1987 to 1990 and returned twice after its reunification, most recently from 2009 to 2013.

Mr Hanning appears to have met Mr Wang – considered one of the foremost experts on Germany in China – at conferences and the latter thanked him for his “hints and explanations” in the foreword to a book published in 2007.

The pair also sat on a board of advisers for a German-Chinese eco park in Qingdao, a port city in eastern China.

Investigators believe Mr Hanning obtained secret information from the BND for years after finishing his career in the civil service, and passed it on while working as a commercial consultant.

It is alleged he received information from Manfred Dankesreiter, 64, his former chief of staff.

Mr Dankesreiter is suspected of passing on around 2,000 documents in return for payment, including classified files such as briefing papers for the BND’s leadership before weekly intelligence briefings in the chancellery – meetings during which important world issues such as the Ukraine war and Iran’s nuclear programme are discussed.

It has also been reported that investigators suspect Mr Hanning of supplying information to Azerbaijan’s intelligence service.

Mr Hanning appeared on the participant list of a human rights forum in Baku in 2011, and later became a board member of the German-Azerbaijani Forum, a lobbying association.

His lawyer has denied the allegations against his client. He told Der Spiegel that, while Mr Hanning had confidential documents, it was untrue he passed on “information to the detriment of the Federal Republic of Germany”, let alone in return for payment.

August Hanning is accused of helping foreign governments. His arrest shook the German political world and had roots in a steakhouse-heiress kidnapping plot.