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war profiteers
US Contractor's Proposal Exposes Trump Gaza Plan as 'Vehicle for Mass Exploitation'
“Having spent three years looking at contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, this looks like highway robbery,” one expert said of the proposal—which has reportedly been halted—that would return 300% profits.
Feb 02, 2026
A reportedly withdrawn proposal from the US government contractor behind the "Alligator Alcatraz" concentration camp for immigrants in Floridawe to secure a seven-year monopoly on new trucking in the Gaza Strip was blasted Monday by critics accusing President Donald Trump of genocide profiteering.
The Guardian reported in December that Gothams LLC submitted a plan to the White House that would have guaranteed the monopoly and 300% profits from a contract to provide trucking and logistics for Trump's so-called Board of Peace in the obliterated Palestinian exclave.
The Austin-based company was previously known for being a leading recipient of no-bid contracts in Texas and for securing a $33 million deal to help run the South Florida Detention Facility, better known as Alligator Alcatraz, where detainees and human rights groups have described abuses including torture, inadequate and maggot-infested food, inability to bathe, flooding, and denial of religious practice.
Although Gothams LLC founder Michael Michelsen told the Guardian that he had withdrawn the Gaza proposal due to security concerns, critics contend that the story shows how Trump's Board of Peace is, as Center for International Policy vice president for government affairs Dylan Williams put it, "a vehicle for massive exploitation and corruption."
"Trump’s family and associates are poised to make billions at the expense of US taxpayers and Palestinian rights and lives," Williams said.
Ken Fairfax, who served as US ambassador to Kazakhstan during the Obama administration, said Monday on Bluesky, "As Trump continues to spread chaos, the constant graft by him and his buddies remains the only entirely predictable aspect of his rule."
"A built-in 300% minimum profit margin plus a guarantee of an absolute monopoly on all trucking for seven years," Fairfax added. "All for Trump's cronies."
my god, forget 19th-century colonialism, this is 17th-century colonialism. it's hard to shock me these days but "using genocide and the resulting famine to secure a royal colonial monopoly on trucking" is really somethingwww.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...
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— Henry Snow (@henrysnow.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 9:45 AM
US weapons-makers made billions of dollars arming Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, and sources told the Guardian that US contractors are now vying for a share of the estimated $70 billion Gaza reconstruction action.
“Everybody and their brother is trying to get a piece of this,” said one contractor familiar with the process. “People are treating this like another Iraq or Afghanistan. And they’re trying to get, you know, rich off of it.”
One year ago, Trump said that the United States would "take over" and "own" Gaza, which the president vowed to transform into the "Riviera of the Middle East." He later walked back his remarks, even as plans for US domination of the strip circulated.
Private equity billionaire and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner recently unveiled plans for a "New Gaza" replete with offshore fossil fuel production, luxury apartments, and industrial parks.
"It could be a hope, it could be a destination, have a lot of industry and really be a place that the people there can thrive, have great employment," Kushner said last month as Israeli forces continued their assault on Gaza that has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing since October 2023.
While Gothams LLC may have withdrawn its proposal for the trucking contract, Chris Vaneks, a partner at the company, is still involved in the project, according to records reviewed by the Guardian. A Gothams spokesperson told the newspaper that Vanek “has not had any discussions regarding financing, investment, or returns, and any suggestion otherwise would be inaccurate."
Addressing Gothams' initial proposal, Charles Tiefer, an expert on federal contracting law who was a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Guardian on Monday that “there’s never been a US government contract that had triple returns on capital, not in 200 years."
“Having spent three years looking at contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan," he added, "this looks like highway robbery.”
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The War Machine Loves AI: How Data Centers Draw New Battle Lines
Critical minerals are required for the operation of these data centers. The process of obtaining these minerals, supposedly also used for green technology, requires the militarization, destabilization, and total plunder of mineral-rich regions.
Jan 28, 2026
Early on Saturday, January 3rd, Venezuela was attacked on behalf of oil, mineral, tech, and weapons profiteers in a regime change operation. Since then, the Trump administration has threatened Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. What unites these threats? The US quest for endless resource extraction to power its increasingly deadly global empire. And it’s not slowing down. These resource wars and “operations” are emerging as the AI drive also ramps up. In July, Palantir and the Pentagon signed a 10-year, $10 billion agreement. In April 2025, Palantir won a $30 million contract with ICE — a significant development in their decade-plus-long partnership that we are now seeing play out in their increasingly militarized, unrestrained murders and abductions in Minneapolis and around the country. This increasingly inextricable partnership between AI and the war economy is throwing us into a fast track of climate and environmental chaos that threatens us all.
In August, I learned about an AI program created by the US-armed Israeli military called “Where’s Daddy.” The program is designed to track individuals Israel is targeting in order to kill them at home with their families. In October 2023, the AI war giant Palantir entered into a contract with the Israeli military. Since 2021, the Israeli Occupation Forces have been working with tech companies like Google on AI programs such as Project Nimbus, used to surveil and murder Palestinians. “Where’s Daddy” and other overlapping systems represent the newest phase of this. The program characterizes the families of these alleged combatants as “collateral damage” and is often far from accurate, killing entire families without the “intended targets” even being there. The tech companies developing these programs do not have anyone’s “safety” or “security” in mind; they are solely motivated by profit. This cruelty is no surprise— these companies are the same ones building toxic data centers across the US, largely in working-class and Black and Brown communities, in the newest phase of environmental injustice.
We’ve been hearing about AI more and more as it enters the commercial market in increasingly pervasive ways. In particular, much has been reported about AI data centers entering communities and the opposition to them. Many of these fights have been taken up by environmental organizations; it’s estimated that data centers could consume approximately 21% of global energy by 2030. In order to sustain this energy use, data centers need cooling. Mid-sized data centers use as much water as a city of 50,000 people. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana is projected to use as much water as the entire city of New Orleans. Another Meta center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is projected to use more power than the state of Wyoming itself.
These AI and tech companies are war profiteers.
These centers not only increase electricity bills for communities that can’t afford them, but they also generate significant air, water, and noise pollution. Some centers regularly use diesel “emergency” generators to meet increased demand. Each generator is the size of a railcar, and thousands are littered across data center hotspots like Northern Virginia. As a result, toxic chemicals are seeping into the lungs of residents, causing asthma and long-term illness. Data centers are known to create noise pollution, with constant hums that can lead to hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, and a host of other long-term issues. Furthermore, equipment is certain to break down and lead to toxic waste and electronic pollution.
“Critical” minerals are required for the operation of these data centers. The process of obtaining these minerals, supposedly also used for green technology, requires the militarization, destabilization, and total plunder of mineral-rich regions. These minerals are supposedly “critical” for energy transitions, and some have advocated more “sustainable” methods for maintaining data centers through “green” technologies.
The use of these minerals is clear: The Pentagon recently became the largest shareholder in MP Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in the Western Hemisphere. Why? Aluminum for fighter jets. Titanium for missiles. And copper, lithium, cobalt, and many others for data center batteries and semiconductors. The more data centers are built, the more minerals are needed. This process of extraction has murdered millions in the Congo, destroying the soil, water, and forest: one of the largest “lungs” of the planet. It has led to the newest phase of imperialist aggression on Venezuela, a mineral-rich country with the largest oil reserves in the world (oil, of course, is also essential for data centers). Additionally, it has led to the attempted subordination of the Philippines to semiconductor production. The US also seeks to use the archipelago as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the US’s looming war with China, its largest competitor in the AI and mineral race.
These are the impacts we already know to be devastating. But this is also new technology, which means there’s a lot we don’t know and a lot that’s being intentionally hidden. Lack of transparency is the norm in this industry. As data centers rapidly expand and buy up land around the country, the actual companies behind them hide behind non-disclosure agreements. This is not dissimilar to the intentional concealment of the military's role in global emissions, enacted through US pressure at the third U.N. Climate Change Conference in 1997. Decades later, the issue of militarism is still left out of climate conversations.
The parallel makes sense, considering how the AI industry has fused with the war machine. The US military is one of the most environmentally destructive forces on the planet. In its oil consumption alone, the US military is the world's largest institutional polluter. The 800+ US bases in 80 countries globally are known to regularly leak jet fuel and cancer-causing PFAS chemicals, along with a toxic cocktail of hundreds of other chemicals. While training exercises like RIMPAC in the Asia-Pacific region authorize the deaths of thousands of sea creatures, in environmental sacrifice zones like Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, toxic waste from military facilities has killed infants hours after birth. In bomb testing sites like Vieques, off the coast of mainland Puerto Rico, lung cancer and bronchitis rates have been shown to be 200% higher than on the mainland for men, and 280% for women. And the oil-motivated “war on terror” emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2001-2017.
Now we are entering a new era of resource wars that will further destroy the planet as the AI race with China accelerates. The relationship between AI and the US military goes beyond the Pentagon’s contracts with Palantir, Meta, and Microsoft: last June, executives Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Andrew Bosworth (Meta), Kevin Well (OpenAI), and Bob McGrew (Thinking Machines Lab, previously OpenAI) were sworn into the US Army as lieutenant colonels. Michael Obadal, executive of the AI-war manufacturing company Anduril, is now the Under Secretary of the US Army, still with hundreds of thousands in Anduril stock. Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, is himself a major funder of Anduril. In June 2025, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic entered into $200 million contracts with the Department of War. The more you look at the partnerships between such companies and their executives, the Pentagon, governmental departments, and other entities, the more tangled this military-tech-industrial complex all becomes.
Many organizing groups are rightfully building power against the data centers that literally fuel it all, pushing for increased regulation and transparency. At the same time as Palantir makes new deals with the Pentagon, regulations in sacrifice zones are being thrown out the window. On December 18th, the House of Representatives passed a bill backed by Microsoft, Micron, and OpenAI to fast-track data centers. The bill significantly reduces the number of environmental and financial factors that can be considered in permitting processes. It’s simple. These communities are becoming the Camp Lejeunes of a new age: the new toxic waste dumps in the belly of the beast used to power the war machine. They must be fought against at all costs.
Regulation is crucial. It’s also far from a long-term solution. There is a lot that we don’t know, because a lot is hidden: just how much of these companies are tied up with weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon, and proxies like Israel; the environmental destruction caused by military usage of AI; the specific usage of all of these data centers. But it is obvious that AI is becoming inseparable from war-making, that increased AI means increased war-making, and that increased war-making is resulting in new and increased forms of unfathomable environmental destruction to communities around the world and here within the belly of the beast.
AI has been creeping up our necks. The horrific “Where’s Daddy” program existed long before I heard of it. It seems like these products are popping up in every corner of the market before we can even start discussing them. Their emergence has been intentionally designed to not only conceal their role in environmental destruction, but also their role in the militarism destroying communities from Virginia to Gaza.
No part of this is sustainable—not the war economy, not unending extraction, regardless of how much “green tech” it produces, and not an AI-driven speculative economy. We cannot afford to have splintered conversations either; these AI and tech companies are war profiteers. The new Cold War on China drives this. The genocide in Palestine drives this. The war on Venezuela, Latin America, and the Caribbean drives this. And so our organizing must be unified against the impacts, mechanisms, and causes. Against data centers and the wars that drive them. We need to stop the blood. But we can’t lose sight of why and how the bullets are fired.
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Hope in Northampton: Tiny Protesters Faced Off Against US Military Capitalism... and Won!
In an astonishing verdict, a judge ruled in favor of four elderly people who confronted authorities inside the facilities of one of the most powerful outposts of the US military-industrial complex: L3Harris.
Jan 04, 2026
Northampton, Massachusetts District Court Judge Mary Beth Ogulewicz put her neck bravely within the noose of potential political and corporate retribution when she rendered the verdict on December, 23: “After consideration of the testimony, exhibits, applicable law, and arguments of counsel, I find the defendants Not Responsible on all counts.”
This is an astonishing verdict in favor of four elderly people who confronted authorities inside the facilities of one of the most powerful outposts of the US military-industrial complex on March, 19, 2025. They armed themselves with only conscience, play money, red paint, and a whimsical sense of in vivo political theater. They entered the lobby of munitions profiteer L3Harris and tossed the paint-soaked play money on the floor, refused to leave, and tried to serve L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik (who is headquartered in Florida) with an arrest warrant for war crimes. They fully anticipated that Northampton Police would arrest them, and they were predictably charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace.
From this point on, the narrative takes a turn toward the surreal. The defendants’ post verdict press release explains:
The case and the verdict are highly unusual for several reasons. First, Judge Ogulewicz converted the charges from criminal to civil offenses, with lower penalties, saying that the allegations against the Defendants did not merit criminal prosecution. In addition, the Judge allowed the necessity defense to be raised and argued at the hearing. Finally, victory in the use of the necessity defense in protest cases is extraordinarily rare.
The seldom used “necessity defense” appears to be a euphoric fantasy created as a gift for those committed to civil disobedience. The necessity defense gives legal flexibility to support those who violate legal norms in order to mitigate a more nefarious harm. A good Samaritan who breaks your house window to enter and put out a stove fire might use the necessity defense to avoid breaking and entering charges. Likewise, a well-intentioned bystander who prevents a rageful person from beating their own child might use the necessity defense if charged for assault.
Writ small, the necessity defense has a clear, logical function to assure that legal contradictions do not stymy justice. But writ large, what is the leeway given to a good Samaritan when confronted by the massive criminal intentions of their own government? Do we, as US citizens, hold the right to intervene in state-sponsored criminal violence? If I can legally prevent my neighbor from beating his child, why can’t I also attempt to stop my government from murdering countless children in... let us say, Gaza?
And even more subtly nuanced—can I attempt to confront my criminally violent government and its corporate proxies regardless of the likelihood that the confrontation will have the desired result? Is civil disobedience a subset of the necessity defense?
Judge Mary Beth Ogulewicz ruled that, indeed, civil disobedience ought to be seen as a perfectly legal, and critically useful, response to state-mandated crimes. Henry David Thoreau argued this position 165 years ago, but now the ideals of one of America’s preeminent philosophers has belatedly entered the realm of legal precedent.
The morning after Judge Ogulewicz’s decision, I spoke with Nick Mottern, an 86-year-old defendant found innocent of all charges. He was uncertain whether or not the case will be appealed, but of course the system will mobilize on behalf of war profiteers, he believed. We picketed L3Harris alone at first, before being joined by a sympathetic resident from an adjacent housing complex. The morning featured lovely cloud formations scattered by an icy wind. We struggled to keep our aging feet planted on a sleet-covered walkway. Two days before Christmas, the death factory looked half abandoned.
The fact that civil disobedience persists, led by people who could easily excuse themselves on the basis of their aged frailty, ought to be contemplated far and wide.
What will the decision mean for our quest to mobilize local opposition against our very own outpost of the military-industrial complex? How many people do we need to overwhelm the lobby of L3Harris? What if 1,000 people scrunched in—more people than the police have means to arrest? Can the police even arrest people on murderous L3Harris property after the courts have determined that civil disobedience conforms to the contours of the “necessity defense”? Nick and I parse these things often, but now something had moved, but how much?
Hope does not often assert itself when tiny protests face off against the might of US capitalism—a bizarre mismatch staged on a lonely sidewalk, a vigil of uncertainty. We are two aging, stubborn fixtures, to be ignored with a shake of the head. Our ritual may yield nothing, but it urgently must continue, and now, thanks to the court decision, the whole endeavor has been reframed.
Here is how the defendants reacted to their triumph:
Trish Gallagher:
L3H earns huge profits making weapons of war. We think this is blood money. The goal of our act of civil disobedience was to persuade L3H to stop making a killing on killing.
Priscilla Lynch:
We pushed for a jury trial because we believed that a jury of our peers would share our horror at what was and is happening in Gaza with weapons from L3 Harris and would share the belief in the necessity of our actions. In fact, the 75 or so “jury of our peers,” present in the courtroom and overflowing into hallway confirmed our belief. The Court’s verdict validates the necessity of our action against the perpetrators of Genocide, including L3Harris right here in Northampton.
Nick Mottern:
We are extremely grateful that our lawyer and the judge understood that the real lawbreaker in this case is L3Harris Technologies, which is violating various US and international laws daily to profit from the slaughter of Palestinians.
Paki Wieland:
The verdict gives weight to the Necessity Defense. This finding will strengthen Necessity as a stance in the future.”
(From the defendants’ post verdict press release)
The work of resistance begins again, a series of pauses and regroupings proceeds with new inspiration. The monstrosity of US war crimes, that did not begin with President Donald Trump (who merely carries on the traditions with newfound honesty), will not be halted by a few small town heroes like those quoted above. But the fact that civil disobedience persists, led by people who could easily excuse themselves on the basis of their aged frailty, ought to be contemplated far and wide. Nick hopes that the story of the court victory will be delivered on media platforms everywhere.
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