At the close of February 2016, Jeffrey Epstein was, as was often the case, trying to find a way to get together with his good friend, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. He would be in Europe the following month, he emailed him, then on his private island in the Caribbean, and if neither of those worked, he would be in Saudi Arabia at the end of the month.
“Certainly not in Saudi — just think I will avoid the Middle East for the next decade or so,” Thiel emailed back.
A decade later, Thiel is more entwined in the Middle East than he is in most other regions of the world. Thiel’s firm, Palantir, has a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense to supply its artificial intelligence tools and other technology to the Israeli military, used throughout the Gaza genocide for its indiscriminate bombing campaign. Thiel has personally dismissed ethical concerns about the partnership, saying that his “bias is to defer to Israel” and that its military is “broadly in the right.” As the United States and Israel wage war on Iran, Palantir is now providing one of the AI tools being used by the Pentagon for the war effort, which kicked off with the mass slaughter of Iranian schoolchildren.
The germ of Palantir’s involvement in the region may well have had its origins with Epstein, according to documents released earlier this year by the Department of Justice. Emails show Epstein connected Thiel with another friend, former Israeli defense minister and prime minister Ehud Barak, on account of their mutual interest in leveraging the tech sector for national security.
That Epstein was the point of connection between the two men, both friends of the convicted sex offender, was suggested by a February 2013 audio recording unearthed last month. In the recording, Epstein advises Barak, then preparing to leave his post as Israel’s defense minister and embark on a career in the private sector, to look into Thiel and Palantir as a future…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
