Rachel sam

Whitney Webb is explaining how Palantir was built. It is the same story Danny Casolaro died chasing, and Israel and Robert Maxwell are in the middle of it. Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg hotel bathtub on August 10, 1991. Wrists slashed a dozen times. Ruled a suicide. He had told his brother that if he turned up dead, it would not be an accident. The files for the book he called The Octopus were gone. What he was tracking was not one scandal. It was a network. The Inslaw/PROMIS theft. Iran-Contra. BCCI. The October Surprise allegations. Arms and intel cutouts like Cabazon-Wackenhut. A bankruptcy judge had already found the Justice Department obtained Inslaw's enhanced PROMIS by "trickery, fraud and deceit." That ruling was later tossed on jurisdiction, not on the facts. The allegation that stuck was that the software was backdoored and sold or given to foreign governments so intelligence services could read the databases it sat on. Israel was at the front of that list. Webb's Palantir history is that pattern, a decade later, with some of the same people. John Poindexter was the highest-ranking Reagan official indicted over Iran-Contra. After 9/11 he was put in charge of DARPA's Total Information Awareness, a dragnet built to fuse commercial and government data and predict crime and terror before they happened. Congress defunded it in 2003 after the backlash. The same year Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Richard Perle introduced Thiel and Alex Karp to Poindexter. Perle had already been caught in the 1970s passing classified material to the Israeli embassy, and he later had deep ties to Netanyahu's first government. Karp has said the CIA was the intended client from the start. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, was an early backer. Palantir engineers were at Langley every other week in the early years. PROMIS was the 1980s case-management system allegedly turned into a spy tool. The claim Casolaro was chasing, and that Webb has documented, is that Robert Maxwell helped move the bugged version. A trapdoor was planted so Israeli intelligence could read any database the software touched, and Maxwell was the salesman who carried it to governments and institutions abroad. Palantir Gotham is the 2000s version of the same job. Stitch the databases. Surface the hidden links. Sell pre-crime as predictive policing. Same function. Private letterhead. So the constitutional fight Congress already won does not have to be refought. The part most people miss is at the end of the clip. Webb says CIA CIO Alan Wade, who helped shape the early Palantir product and had been inside the TIA world, teamed with Christine Maxwell on a homeland-security program called Chiliad. Christine is Robert Maxwell's daughter. The Maxwell family did not stop at Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell was tied to the PROMIS distribution story. His daughter shows up later on pre-crime software with a CIA official out of the same surveillance program Palantir was built to replace. So the chain runs like this. Stolen DOJ software in the 1980s. Robert Maxwell and Israeli intelligence on the backdoored version. Iran-Contra figures. Then the same Iran-Contra figure running TIA. Then a Maxwell daughter and a TIA-linked CIA official on pre-crime software. Then Palantir as the scaled private version, introduced by a man already tied to Israeli intelligence channels. Casolaro was trying to map the first half. He never got to the second half. Palantir did not exist yet. His files disappeared. The architecture did not. The Octopus was a thesis about a standing network that builds surveillance software, routes it through private cutouts, and uses Iran-Contra-era operators and Israeli intelligence partners to keep it off the books. PROMIS was tentacle one. Robert Maxwell was the courier. TIA was the failed government version. Palantir is tentacle two. The software Casolaro died investigating, after it learned to survive a congressional ban by becoming a company.