Wesley Morgan

Worth watching how Israel leverages newly occupied territory in Syria (Jabal al-Sheikh area) in its present Lebanon campaign:

In statement, Hizbullah says Israel attempted another helicopter-borne raid in east Beqaa, approaching from Syrian side of border and dropping troops on Serghaya Plain 🖼️

Suggests Israelis may be using Syrian approach to try to sever Beqaa.

“Bombs will fall Everywhere”: The American, Israeli and Iranian Weapons Being Deployed in Middle East - bellingcat Bellingcat has been monitoring strikes across the Middle East and has identified a wide variety of weapons that have been used in the conflict so far, including missiles and drones.

Bellingcat has monitored weapons used in the first few days of the war, such as the US Precision Strike Missile, used for the first time in combat and a variant of the Tomahawk missile, previously unknown to the public. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

Whole book sounds fascinating and I’m pre-ordering, but I’m especially curious to read this chapter!

Cover of book with text in yellow reading: The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, overlaid on an image of an angel in seventeenth-century dress with wings and a long gun.

Hello Bluesky! My new book, THE FIREARM REVOLUTION, is out on 14 April. It’s about how a new technology changed society, and how hard it was to control. Here’s a little thread of what’s inside:

Thanks for reading!

In Aug 2003, Colin Powell wrote to Paul Bremer that US troops on raids in Iraq “shouldn’t be taking the press with us or releasing photos” because the raids looked ugly.

To DOD’s credit, it ignored Powell and didn’t begin to curtail embedding until a decade later.

www.thetimes.com/article/00b2...

Dozens killed as Israeli special forces raid Lebanese village in search of 40-year-old remains Overnight, one Israeli operation saw at least 41 people killed and 40 injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Pretty serious allegation here. "Witnesses told the BBC that the Israeli soldiers had arrived disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization."
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Video Shows US Tomahawk Missile Strike Next to Girls’ School in Iran - bellingcat New video footage shows a US Tomahawk missile hitting an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facility in Minab, Iran, on Feb 28, showing for the first time that the US struck the area. The footag...

New from Bellingcat - Video Shows US Tomahawk Missile Strike Next to Girls’ School in Iran
www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

I would like to know too

Yes, that’s how the story starts

Easter egg: what do the seven sans serif letters spell out?

Cover of today’s NYT Magazine:

Apparent Israeli SOF air-assault operation in Beqaa valley. Would be first IDF ground operation that far north in Lebanon since their naval SOF did a raid on the coast north of Beirut in 2024—and as far as I know, the first ground operation in Beqaa since a major raid on a Baalbek hospital in 2006.

Maybe tanks should have flesh on the outside of their impressive armor too. Just a thought.

PSA, don’t be that guy who draws Dunkleosteus wrong

I’ve spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration’s Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them.

I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump.

Yes, it’s very unusual. Normally there would be an unnamed DUSTWUN announcement or something like that if there was uncertainty. But the casualty notification people would talk to the family before the release goes out either way.

My theory of the case is that someone wrote it with the word “presumed,” and then someone dumber than that person didn’t like the word “presumed” and replaced it with “believed to be.”

Why it wasn’t released as a DUSTWUN or MIA announcement, I have no idea.

They notified the family of the presumed death before putting out the press release. That’s why the press release took so long. That’s not the problem.

Muting this because too many people are misunderstanding the obvious problem and it’s driving me insane.

There’s a word they could have used instead of the bizarre “believed to be” construction (which would need to be “believed-to-be” at any rate) and that word is “presumed.”

That’s not the problem

And this is not AI writing. No AI screws up syntax like this. A human being wrote this, and another human being read and approved it.

The issue here has nothing to do with a failure to mention what caused the death, as I see some people suggesting. That’s not unusual. It’s a nonsensical arrangement of words. If you don’t see the problem with the syntax here, you are as bad as the people who wrote and approved this

It is real www.war.gov/News/Release...

This is an actual Pentagon press release. “An Army believed to be casualty…the believed to be death”

Exclusive: US investigation points to likely US responsibility in Iran school strike, sources say U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children on Saturday but have not yet reache...

“If a U.S. role were to be confirmed, the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the ​Middle East.” www.reuters.com/world/middle...

This is whose suffering this person is concerned about. A School of the Americas graduate of Italian descent and fascist persuasion

This is amazing. The Falklands were literally uninhabited until the French, British, and Spanish showed up in the 1760s. They were the original inhabitants.