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The Pentagon used Palantir to use Twitter to acquire targets in Yemen
| Azure Massive Striped Hyena Casino | 07/10/25 |
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Date: July 10th, 2025 6:28 PM Author: Azure Massive Striped Hyena Casino and killed civilians in tents:
A Twitter account—operated by an individual whose bio says they are based in the Netherlands, using the handle @VleckieHond—apologized this week after the U.S. struck coordinates she erroneously suggested, in early April, were the location of an underground Houthi military position; it was not a military site. “Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” Vleckie posted. “Based on satellite imagery I'd marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such. I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake.” Vleckie had highlighted the coordinates in a thread that claimed to have uncovered a Houthi base, and they had relied, in part, on a secondary account, @Galal_Alsalahi, whose bio suggests they are based in Houston. That account, which is hostile to the Houthis, claimed to have discovered a Houthi missile launcher at the coordinates.
The strike that took place on April 28 reportedly killed eight civilians in their homes on the outskirts of the capital of Sana’a. Vleckie’s reading of satellite imagery, the account later said, was incomplete—they said they had privately marked the target as only “possible”—and they would strive to do better in the future, while posting a screenshot of a 500 Euro donation to charity that she had made as penance. “I should never have posted it,” they added. (A message seeking comment from the account went unanswered.)
Reports from local Yemeni news outlets highlighted the devastating impact of the attack. Among the dead and wounded were children, some of whom were later evacuated to local hospitals.
The U.S. military and CENTCOM have ultimate responsibility for verifying the information used to conduct airstrikes. The Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advanced data analytics programs from companies, like Palantir, that include open-source data scraped from social media as part of their information-gathering process to help the military with targeting and intelligence. Data analysts live by the credo “garbage in, garbage out,” which sophisticated intelligence collection is intended to overcome.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/us-yemen-bombing-x-osint |