Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master
The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags
The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags. These scenes – altogether too familiar today – come enabled by German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, whose software uses AI and big data to help the Israeli military surveil, target and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is also used by ICE, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement to destroy privacy, to attack whistleblowers, and to turn the Orwellian concept of “pre-crime” (identifying and tracking potential subversives before they commit any offense) into a reality.
The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party’s most powerful backers. Already one of the world’s most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a “shadow president,” wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.
Shadow President
Donald Trump is surging. A recent New York Times poll found the former president is ahead in several key battleground states, making the coming election too close to call. One man undoubtedly heartened by this news is Peter Thiel, the German-born tech entrepreneur and co-founder of such companies as PayPal and Palantir. Thiel, whose net worth stands at $10 billion, bankrolled Trump’s successful 2016 campaign when few others would. He served on his transition team and as an advisor, leading commentators to label him a “shadow president.”
This time, however, Thiel will enjoy even more influence in the White House, as Trump has selected Ohio Senator and Thiel protégé J.D. Vance as his vice president. Thiel – who has previously stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible- bemoaned the extension of the vote to women and denounced the public as an “unthinking demos” – took Vance under his wing when the latter was still at college. From there, Thiel secured Vance his first job in 2013. Two years later, Vance joined his venture capital firm, and in 2020, he provided the seed money for Vance to start his own investment group.
Vance is a political neophyte, first running for Senate only in 2021. He was able to do so thanks to an enormous $15 million donation from Thiel – the largest ever amount to a Senate candidate. That Thiel had plucked someone from his own firm and bankrolled his political career raised many eyebrows at the time, with many feeling the billionaire had essentially bought a senate seat and put a pawn in his place. However, the stakes have been raised considerably now that Trump has selected Vance as his running mate. “J.D. Vance owes both his political career and his previous venture capital career to Peter Thiel,” Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist who has closely tracked Thiel’s exploits, told MintPress News.
It has not always been plain sailing between Trump and Vance. The latter began his political career as a vocal “Never Trump” Republican, describing the 45th president as an “idiot” and “America’s Hitler.” It was Thiel himself who personally escorted Vance to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to smooth over the relationship. The tech mogul’s pitch was successful, and in July, Trump shocked many by picking the inexperienced senator as his VP – a decision that gave Thiel unprecedented power and influence over the country’s direction.
AI War Criminal
The United States government has unequivocally backed Israeli aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. And central to that support has been the role that Thiel has played. Thiel’s company, Palantir, is using AI to surveil the Palestinian population and help generate massive kill lists for the Israeli military based on that data.
According to an investigation by an Israeli outlet, +972 Magazine, Israel is using a piece of software called Lavender, which develops profiles on every person in Gaza, assigning them a score of 1-100 based on individuals’ perceived connections to Hamas. A wide range of characteristics, including sharing similar work schedules to or being in a WhatsApp group with a known Hamas member, would raise one’s score. If an individual’s number reached a certain level, they would automatically be put on a kill list. In the first months of the war alone, Lavender identified over 37,000 Palestinians to be executed.
Although not mentioned explicitly by name in the +972 Magazine report, Palantir is widely assumed to be part of the Lavender project. The group has long provided the Israeli military with vast amounts of AI hardware and software. Moreover, at the height of the Gaza onslaught, it announced it had entered into a new “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Defense Ministry to “supply technology to help the country’s war effort.” “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” the company’s executive vice-president, Josh Harris, said, adding: “This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation in Israel.”
Lavender is known to be distinctly hit-or-miss. Many professions with similar communication patterns to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, including police and firefighters, or even people with the same name as a resistance fighter, were flagged for execution. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sources suggest a 10% false positive rate.
Nevertheless, IDF analysts were told to treat Lavender suggestions as orders, turning the program into an automated kill list. One individual said that they devoted only 20 seconds to each target, only to check if the individual Thiel’s software marked for execution was male. Other than that, humans were there only to “rubber stamp” Lavender’s decisions.
Today, Israel also uses AI-powered “Smart Shooter” guns at checkpoints, capable of mowing down dozens of Palestinians without any human input whatsoever.
“An AI smart shooter sits atop this checkpoint.”
Mnar Adley visits the Palestinian city of Al Khalil to witness Israel’s automated apartheid in full effect. pic.twitter.com/3s5spk6DkQ
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) May 9, 2024
The Israeli military systematically targeted Gazans at night while entire families were in their own homes, sleeping. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one intelligence officer said, adding: “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in [their] homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” Israelis called this system “Where’s Daddy?” presumably a reference to the cries of newly orphaned Gazan children.
For most of these assassinations, the Israeli military preferred to use cheaper, unguided missiles, commonly referred to as “dumb bombs.” Unlike guided missiles, these munitions lacked precision targeting, and so needed to be larger and pack more explosives, causing massive collateral damage. Israel would use these bombs to destroy entire apartment buildings if Lavender identified even a suspected junior Hamas member living there.
For the IDF, it was simply a question of resources. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of precision guided bombs],” explained one intelligence officer. The massive collateral damage barely factored into the equation. Palestinian lives were considered so unimportant that Israeli commanders accepted up to 100 civilian deaths per Hamas target.
It was this deliberate destruction of entire apartment complexes that led to the unprecedented wiping out of entire extended families. Palestinian families often lived together in the same building. And when those buildings were felled every night, bloodlines would be extinguished with one keystroke or mouse click. MintPress News recently spoke to Ahmed al-Naouq, a Gazan who lost 21 members of his family to Israeli bombing.
Perhaps most controversially, Lavender also gave children a score of 1-100 and recommended many for execution. Israel was delighted with Lavender’s performance, with one commander explaining that human targeting produced “bottlenecks” that limited the IDF’s capacity for violence. “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day,” they said. The IDF’s insatiable thirst for destruction could only be quenched through AI Lavender only became less useful after Israel had leveled the strip, displacing nearly the entire population and causing complete chaos. This made the system less able to track individuals’ movements.
Israel’s Biggest Supporters
The level of destruction in such a short period of time is nearly unprecedented in the modern era. Serious estimates suggest that up to 335,000 people have been killed in less than one year. “The situation today in Gaza cannot be analyzed or qualified otherwise than as a genocide. I have not seen a genocide where the intent was so ostentatious and vindicated over and over,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Palestinian Territories, said. “This is one of the most critical cases of genocide, a tragedy foretold, because of the intent to eliminate the Palestinians with all means available – be it transferring them or neutralizing them or segregating them,” she added.
Israel is currently being investigated for genocide by the International Court of Justice. And Thiel is one of its key enablers.
When asked a question about Lavender at the Cambridge University Union, Thiel was flustered, stating:
My bias is to defer to Israel. It’s not for us to second-guess everything. And I believe that, broadly, the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they’re broadly in the right and that’s the sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that’s just simply absurd. And so I’m not going to concede that point.”
Thiel has done more than just defer to Israel, however. In January, he flew Palantir executives out to Tel Aviv to host a board meeting in “solidarity” with Israel. It was there that Palantir announced its new strategic partnership with the Israeli military. In October 2023, Palantir also took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, expressing its total commitment to the Israeli war effort. “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force. Palantir stands with Israel,” the company posted on Twitter. These actions precipitated an exodus of employees from the organization, as numerous staff members refused to be complicit in the violence.
Since October 7, Palantir has been the target of numerous protests, with groups condemning the company’s complicity in the slaughter. Palantir’s actions are so unethical that they have even caused significant cognitive dissonance for company executives. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?'” Palantir CEO Alex Karp once admitted. Nevertheless, Karp has denounced the student protests against Israel as “antisemitic” and warned that they pose a threat to the military-industrial complex, saying: “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West again.”
One group pushing for an end to the partnership between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military is Tech for Palestine, a community of tech workers who support Palestinian liberation. “I would like to see the tech industry fully divest from Israel. That would be a major step forward,” Paul Biggar, founder of Tech For Palestine, told MintPress, adding that Silicon Valley is directly contributing to Palestinian suffering:
The goals should be that Palestinian people are afforded full equality and freedom from the Apartheid and oppression of Israel. Any acts that are committed by tech companies that support the Israeli state are de facto apartheid actions. And any involvement in Israel’s war economy is supporting the violation of international humanitarian law and involvement in crimes against humanity.”
The Brains of Ukraine
Thanks to its use in Gaza, Palantir markets its products as battle-tested. But the company is deeply involved in the war in Ukraine as well, providing surveillance, intelligence and targeting solutions for the Ukrainian government. Palantir was one of the first Western corporations on the ground after the Russian invasion and has deeply embedded itself into the Zelensky administration. More than half a dozen ministries, including the Ministry of Defense, depend on its software. Palantir uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to assess battlefield situations and provide the military with digital kill lists, similar to what they do in Israel. The company is responsible for most of the Ukrainian military’s targeting capability. “It’s like a superpower,” one Ukrainian minister said of Palantir.
The organization presents its actions in Ukraine as a moral crusade for righteousness:
We believe that when we can make a difference in the service of a just cause, such as in the defense of Ukraine, we carry a moral responsibility to do so. And so, we are proud to provide our technical experience and technology to Ukrainian forces defending their homeland, national sovereignty, and personal freedoms.”
Yet, given its other actions around the world, it seems to act less as a champion for human rights and more as an extension of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. national security state.
“CIA Front”
Today, Palantir is a digital juggernaut valued at over $79 billion. But it was not always like that. In its early days in the 2000s, the business floundered and could find neither clients nor investors. A cash injection from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investments arm, rescued it from oblivion.
In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 and seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that can supply the intelligence community with cutting-edge technologies to keep them one step ahead of their competitors. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond franchise – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech. Many top tech firms today, including Google and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, enjoyed intimate relationships with the CIA and owe their prominence to the agency.
Palantir is no different, growing up alongside the burgeoning post-9/11 national security state. Its first customers were primarily intelligence agencies. Indeed, until 2008, the CIA was its only client. The government remains its most important customer; it currently possesses more than $1.5 billion in government contracts, including with the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, and Space Force. Many of these were secured during the Trump presidency when Thiel had unparalleled access to the presidency. In 2020, it moved its headquarters away from the Bay Area to Denver, cementing its attempt to position itself less as a tech group and more alongside military contractors such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton. Palantir is “arguably a CIA front company,” Webb told MintPress.
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Thank you for working to expose Peter Thiel and his deep complicity in serving as a traitor to the U.S. (most notably in the news recently as butt buddy deep pockets mentor for the ass clown 'JD Vance') , Peter has been serving at the behest of the Judaic Supremacist cartel from the very start of his startup CIA inQTell funded Palantir and before that back to his days going full wokeist suing a writer for outing him for being a depraved self hating closeted gay man. By the way - Palantir surveillance software - the underlying code (called "Promis" software) was originally created by a US electronics firm in the 1980s- was then stolen by the Mossad (notice they NEVER create anything of their own - always stealing from others) who then backdoored the software and sold it back to CIA /US intelligence agencies as well as shilling it all over the world to all the other despotic regimes etc who would buy it - thereby gaining backdoor access to anyone and everyone who bought their software. Robert Maxwell (father of submarine pilot and Mossad agent Ghislane's Maxwell girl pal of Epstein) was the flamboyant Mossad sales agent who brokered the sales of Promis software all throughout the world. And now Palantir, all these many years later - is STILL running on a modified version of this stolen 'Promis' software.