“There’s an Israel PR blitz happening this week facilitated by a handful of senators,” said a source familiar with the meetings in the upper chamber. “Practically all of the briefings on this issue these last few weeks have been members-only,” meaning congressional staff and the public are not welcome.

One briefing exclusive to members of the Senate scheduled on Monday and organized by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., involved three senior Israel Defense Forces officers stationed at the Israeli Embassy.

“Sen. Duckworth would like to invite your boss to a last-minute meeting with Israeli Defense officials to discuss Israel’s strategy, how they are waging the war and what to expect in the day after the scenarios,” according to a memo obtained by The Intercept. (Duckworth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The briefings are coming as Israel faces an international backlash over its assault on the Gaza Strip. Israel says it is seeking to eliminate Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in its October 7 surprise attack.

The Intercept has learned of around half a dozen events coordinated with Israeli officials during recent weeks. The Intercept reviewed materials relating to four of the briefings. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who said he had not spoken with the Israel Defense Forces in recent days, told The Intercept, “I know there are going to be some folks from the IDF here tomorrow or the day after to brief members of Congress.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept, “I have had private conversations with IDF officials but I didn’t attend any briefings.” (She declined to comment on her meetings.)

In response to the Hamas attack, Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza and undertook a ground invasion. Israel’s offensive has faced criticisms for its death toll, with more than 14,000 Palestinians dying, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and enormous damage to Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Over the weekend, Hamas and Israel agreed to a “pause” in fighting to allow for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The temporary truce is set to expire, but talks for an extension are ongoing.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel.”

Calls for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill started slowly but have gained steam in recent weeks. As of Tuesday morning, a total of 43 members from both chambers of Congress had called for a ceasefire. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who had publicly sided with Israel after the October 7 attack, said on Tuesday he may put forward a bill conditioning aid to Israel, The Intercept reported.

The shifts spurred the increased pace of congressional briefings with IDF officials, some of which were hastily arranged.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. “And, with the prospect of an even longer-term ceasefire, are putting together an all-hands-on-deck PR blitz to keep Senators at bay.”

Frequent and Secret Briefings

While members of Congress and their staff frequently hold meetings with foreign officials, including military officials, the invitations for briefings with current and former Israeli officials have come in rapid succession over recent weeks.

“It isn’t entirely unusual for senators to have member-only meetings or briefings on sensitive or classified issues,” said the source. “What is unusual is the frequency with which they’ve happened recently — especially this week — the secrecy involved, and the single-issue focus.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., appeared to suggest some of the briefings were secret. “My friend, I would not speak about those classified meetings,” Booker told The Intercept when asked about the IDF briefings. (None of the materials reviewed by The Intercept indicated the briefings were classified.)

Briefers in the closed-door meetings were to include several senior Israeli military officials stationed at the embassy, including Maj. Gen. Tal Kelman, former head of the strategic directorate and Iran Division; Col. Itai Shapira, a former senior Israeli Defense Intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Yotam Shefer of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli military unit responsible for mediating between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (The Israeli Embassy referred questions to the IDF, which did not immediately respond.)

One briefing was scheduled to take place in-person on Capitol Hill for an hour on Monday evening.

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday, is slated to have the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, brief Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. Yadlin has issued fiery statements following the Hamas attack, saying that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe.” (Heinrich and Yadlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday morning and organized by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a closed screening of 47 minutes of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on October 7.

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting.”

“It’s important to bear witness in real time,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who helped arrange the viewing, told reporters. “Sometime in the future, we’ll go — there’ll be a museum, there’ll be a memorial, there’ll be another Yad Vashem or Holocaust museum.”

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting and the pressure to corral lawmakers,” the source said, “and the recipients of their campaign contributions.”

The post With Ceasefire Calls Growing, Israeli Military Launches Closed-Door “PR Blitz” on Capitol Hill appeared first on The Intercept.

The move to lift restrictions was included in the White House’s supplemental budget request, sent to the Senate on October 20. “This request would,” the proposed budget says, “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles.”

The request pertains to little-known weapons stockpiles in Israel that the Pentagon established for use in regional conflicts, but which Israel has been permitted to access in limited circumstances — the very limits President Joe Biden is seeking to remove.

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.”

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel,” said John Ramming Chappell, a legal fellow with the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Created in the 1980s to supply the U.S. in case of a regional war, the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I, is the largest node in a network of what are effectively foreign U.S. weapons caches. Highly regulated for security, the stockpiles are governed by a set of strict requirements. Under circumstances laid out in these requirements, Israel has been able to draw on the stockpile, purchasing the weapons at little cost if it uses the effective subsidy of U.S. military aid.

With the WRSA-I, Biden is looking to lift virtually all the meaningful restrictions on the stockpile and the transfer of its arms to Israel, with plans to remove limitations to obsolete or surplus weapons, waive an annual spending cap on replenishing the stockpile, remove weapon-specific restrictions, and curtail congressional oversight. All of the changes in the Biden budget plan would be permanent, except for lifting the spending cap, which is limited to the 2024 fiscal year.

The changes would come in an arms-trade relationship that is already shrouded in secrecy, as The Intercept recently reported. Whereas the administration has provided pages of detailed lists of weapons provided to Ukraine, for instance, its disclosure about arms provided to Israel could fit in a single, short sentence. Last week, Bloomberg obtained a leaked list of weapons provided to Israel, revealing that they include thousands of Hellfire missiles — the same kind being used extensively by Israel in Gaza.

The effect of lifting the restrictions on transfers to Israel — such as eliminating the requirement that the weapons be part of a surplus — could harm U.S. interests by diminishing American preparedness for its own conflicts in the region, said Josh Paul, a former official who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Paul, who resigned over U.S. arms assistance to Israel, told The Intercept, “By dropping the requirement that such articles be declared excess, it would also increase the existing strain on U.S. military readiness in order to provide more arms to Israel.”

“Undermine Oversight and Accountability”

The U.S. government is only supposed to spend $200 million per fiscal year restocking the WRSA-I — about half the total cap for all U.S. stockpiles round the globe. The White House request, however, would waive the limit on U.S. contributions to the stockpile in Israel. That would allow the stockpile to be continuously replenished.

“The President’s emergency supplemental funding request,” Paul said, “would essentially create a free-flowing pipeline to provide any defense articles to Israel by the simple act of placing them in the WRSA-I stockpile, or other stockpiles intended for Israel.”

The U.S. currently requires that Israel grant certain concessions in exchange for certain types of arms assistance from the Pentagon, but the White House request would remove this condition as well.

Finally, the White House request would also reduce congressional oversight of U.S. arms transfers by reducing the length of advance notice made to Congress before a weapons transfers. Under current law, there must be 30 days prior notice, but the Biden budget request would allow this to be shortened in “extraordinary” circumstances.

“It will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel.”

“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children,” said Chappell, of Center for Civilians in Conflict.

The House has already passed legislation reflecting the White House’s request last month, and it now stands before the Senate.

“Taken as a package,” said William Hartung, an arms expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it is extraordinary, and it will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel, even as the Israeli government has engaged in massive attacks on civilians, some of which constitute war crimes.”

The post Joe Biden Moves to Lift Nearly Every Restriction on Israel’s Access to U.S. Weapons Stockpile appeared first on The Intercept.

As the Pentagon budget nears a watershed $1 trillion — the largest of any federal government agency — it has never passed a single one of the annual audits mandated by Congress. In a press briefing, the Department of Defense said it had no timeline for passing an audit.

“We’ve heard the same platitudes about audit progress for years,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “They’re meaningless, especially since the Pentagon can’t even commit to a timeline for achieving a clean audit.”

“We’ve heard the same platitudes about audit progress for years. They’re meaningless.”

Former Pentagon comptroller Thomas Harker, now the secretary of the Navy, had publicly set a deadline of 2027 for a clean audit, but officials have since distanced the military from that timeframe. “Former comptroller Harker signaled 2027 back in 2020, but the department has completely rolled that back,” Gledhill said. “There’s no incentive to improve.”

Beginning in 2017, the audits are conducted by the Pentagon inspector general along with independent public accounting firms. The Defense Department is auditing $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities.

The Defense Department insists that the latest failure shows growth, a claim for which there does not appear to be any evidence. The Pentagon failed as many of its sub-audits this year as it did last year.

“We keep getting better and better at it,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said of the audit failure during a press briefing Thursday. 

“I’ll just say that we remain a trusted institution,” Pentagon comptroller Michael J. McCord said during a separate press briefing about the audit. “We’ve made a lot of progress to date.”

When a reporter pushed back on McCord’s claim, he conceded that the number of unmodified opinions — instances when an auditor concludes a financial statement is presented fairly — was unchanged since last year.

“It was static from last year,” McCord said, “but we still believe that we have seen signs of progress that are going to get us more favorable in the future.”

McCord also acknowledged that the number of disclaimers, when auditees provide insufficient documentation to be audited, had increased. 

Despite these facts, McCord pointed to subtle forms of progress.

“But yes, what I’m talking about is progress sort of beneath the surface of a pass-fail for the entire Army,” McCord said.

The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Joe Biden has requested a record $886 billion Pentagon budget for the next fiscal year, a request that the Republican Congress has sought to add another $80 billion to, even as they threaten a government shutdown over what they say is excessive government spending.

Asked by a reporter when the Pentagon expects to pass an audit, Singh said that she can’t predict the future, but that when the Pentagon did, she would let them know.

In a nod to the late Bush administration defense chief Donald Rumsfeld, the reporter cracked, “It’s a known unknown.”

“One the one hand, the Pentagon is far and away the most complex federal agency,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “But they have been legally required to pass an audit for decades and have clearly not made it a priority.”

“As long as the money keeps flowing and there are no consequences for failure,” he said, “we can expect the Pentagon to fail audits year after year with no end in sight.”

The post Pentagon Fails Sixth Audit in a Row, Claiming “Progress Sort of Beneath the Surface” appeared first on The Intercept.

One such base, the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, welcomed several new F-15 attack jets last month, the same aircraft used to bomb facilities used by Iranian-backed militias in Syria at least twice since October, following attacks on U.S. troops by groups supported by Iran. 

“A confluence of factors are driving the U.S. and Iran towards a direct military conflict, including the buildup of forces.”

Despite the hostilities, the Pentagon has declined to acknowledge the base or the military buildup taking place on it for political reasons, even as the growing U.S. presence and increasing activities contribute to rising tensions with Iran.

“A confluence of factors are driving the U.S. and Iran towards a direct military conflict, including the buildup of forces, the retaliatory actions in Syria by U.S. forces, and Iranian proxies’ provocations,” Bruce Riedel, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Intercept. “It is a dangerous situation.”

Government records reviewed by The Intercept, along with open-source data, reveal that Muwaffaq Salti continues to act as a low-key U.S. military base central to growing tensions with Iran.

“The main hub for U.S. air operations in Syria is now Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, but the American presence is unacknowledged because of host country sensitivities,” said Aaron Stein in a 2021 report by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Named after Jordanian Lt. Muwaffaq Salti, a pilot who died fighting the Israeli air force during a conflict involving the West Bank in 1966, it isn’t hard to see why the U.S. government doesn’t want its presence on the air base public. Jordan, a nation home to over 2 million Palestinian refugees, is being rocked by protests opposing Israel’s military operation in Gaza. 

“Tit-for-Tat Exchanges”

As the U.S. spirals toward a potential regional war with Iran that could dwarf the casualties in Israel’s war on Gaza, the American government has withheld from the public knowledge of where U.S. troops are in harm’s way. 

At the time of this writing, there have been 55 attacks on U.S. service members in Iraq and Syria since October 17, according to the Pentagon, resulting in 59 injuries, including traumatic brain injuries.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a press conference Monday emphasized how unclear the endgame of the attacks is to the U.S. military. 

“It’s been tit-for-tat exchanges and hard to predict, you know, what will happen going forward,” Austin said.

Experts say the U.S. deployments may not only fail to deter Iranian attacks, they might also invite them.

“Enlargement of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East increases the risk of armed conflict with Iran because it means more potential points of hostile contact between U.S. troops and armed elements allied with Iran,” Paul Pillar, a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, told The Intercept. “As has been the case with U.S. military components in Iraq and Syria, such a presence serves less as a deterrent than as a convenient target for anyone in the area who wants to strike at the United States.”

“Undisclosed Location”

“Yeah, undisclosed location in the Middle East,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told a reporter asking about the location of U.S. troops being deployed to the region during an October press briefing.

“But nice try,” Ryder taunted. 

The exchange is representative of the Pentagon’s response to questions from the press about the U.S. military buildup. (The Pentagon did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Intercept.) 

“Can we say in some Arab countries or Gulf?” another reporter asked about the deployments.

“Yeah, I can’t go into specific locations,” Ryder replied. 

Elias Yousif, a research analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program, said, “Washington is trying to provide some plausible deniability to host countries at a time when association with the United States is coming to be seen as a political liability.”

Despite the secrecy, photographs released by the Defense Department showing F-15s landing at what it described as an “undisclosed location” were quickly geolocated by open-source researchers and shown to be Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. 

“Washington is trying to provide some plausible deniability to host countries at a time when association with the United States is coming to be seen as a political liability.”

Secrecy runs rampant in U.S. efforts linked to the Israeli war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Little is known about the quantity and nature of the weapons the U.S. military has provided to Israel, despite the Pentagon’s willingness to disclose an itemized list of military support for Ukraine, as The Intercept previously reported. 

Clues about Muwaffaq Salti are scattered throughout federal records, including a reference to the base in the annex of a controversial defense cooperation agreement signed by the U.S. and Jordan in 2021. The agreement, which authorizes how the U.S. military is able to operate within the country, was enacted by royal decree, bypassing Jordan’s parliament.

Even before Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. presence in Muwaffaq Salti was expanding. In December 2021, the Pentagon launched a major upgrade to the air base in order to, as Janes Defence Weekly put it, “turn it into a more permanent base.”

The post Pentagon Won’t Say Where It’s Sending U.S. Troops — to Avoid Embarrassing Host Nations appeared first on The Intercept.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged the secrecy in an October 23 press briefing, saying that while U.S. security assistance flows to Israel “on a near-daily basis,” he continued, “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course.”

“The notion that it would in any way harm the Israeli military’s operational security to provide more information is a cover story.”

The argument that transparency would imperil Israel’s operational security — somehow not a concern with Ukraine — is misleading, experts told The Intercept.

“The notion that it would in any way harm the Israeli military’s operational security to provide more information is a cover story for efforts to reduce information on the types of weapons being supplied to Israel and how they are being used,” William Hartung, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on weapons sales, told The Intercept. “I think the purposeful lack of transparency over what weapons the U.S. is supplying to Israel ‘on a daily basis’ is tied to the larger administration policy of downplaying the extent to which Israel will use those weapons to commit war crimes and kill civilians in Gaza.”

A retired Marine general who worked in the region, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized by his former employer to speak publicly, attributed the secrecy to the political sensitivity of the conflict. In particular, the retired officer said, weapons used in door-to-door urban warfare, which are likely to result in civilian casualties, are not going to be something the administration wants to publicize. (The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.)

In recent years, flare-ups of violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip have often entailed Israeli air wars with limited numbers of Israeli troops entering the besieged coastal enclave. The last time there was a large-scale ground incursion by the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza was during the Israelis’ 2014 Operation Protective Edge.

While the 2014 invasion saw Israeli troops in Gaza for less than a month, Israel’s defense minister recently told reporters the war would take at least several months. The goal of removing Hamas completely from power is widely expected to take a significant commitment to a long-term ground presence and heavy urban fighting. According to the New Yorker, Israeli officials told their American counterparts that the war could last 10 years. The Biden administration is reportedly worried that Israel’s military objectives are not achievable.

On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ABC News, “Israel will, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security responsibility because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it.”

“Delicate Matter Politically”

Hamas’s attack on Israel, which took place on October 7, resulted in a cascade of arms assistance from the U.S. Though the Biden administration at first declined to identify any specific weapons systems, as details trickled out in the press, it has gradually acknowledged some. These include “precision guided munitions, small diameter bombs, artillery, ammunition, Iron Dome interceptors and other critical equipment,” as Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder has said.

What “other critical equipment” entails remains a mystery, as do specifics about the quantity of arms being supplied, which the administration has refused to disclose. When a reporter asked for a “ballpark” figure for the security assistance during a background press briefing on October 12, the Pentagon demurred. “I’m not going to do that today and would defer you to the government of Israel,” a senior defense official told the reporter.

“To date, U.S. government reporting on arms transfers to Israel has been sporadic and without any meaningful detail,” Stimson Center research analyst Elias Yousif recently concluded. “Updates should be compiled on a single factsheet page, as is the case for Ukraine, and include details on the authorities invoked for the provision of assistance as well as the type and quantity of arms provided with enough specificity to enable public research and assessments.”

Hartung, the Quincy fellow, noted the contrast with the administration’s openness on military aid to Ukraine.

“Transparency on arms transfers to Ukraine came in large part due to the administration’s feeling that they were engaged in a noble venture,” Hartung said. “Although Israel certainly has the right to defend itself against the kind of horrific attack carried out by Hamas, its response — bombing and blockading a whole territory of 2 million people, killing thousands of innocent people in the process — has been described by independent experts as committing war crimes.”

“Transparency on arms transfers to Ukraine came in large part due to the administration’s feeling that they were engaged in a noble venture.”

“So even as the Biden administration backs Israel with weapons and rhetoric,” Hartung said, “it is a delicate matter politically to give all the details on U.S. weapons supplied to the Israeli military, some of which will certainly be used in illegal attacks on civilians if the war continues to grind on.”

Beyond just the quantities, there are specific weapons the Pentagon is providing Israel which have not been publicly disclosed, the Marine general told The Intercept.

As the arms continue to flow, dozens of C-17 military transport planes likely carrying munitions have criss-crossed the Atlantic traveling between the United States and Israel, open-source flight tracking data show, with most landing at Nevatim Air Base, an IDF base in Israel’s southern Negev desert. President Joe Biden has requested $14.3 billion in aid for Israel in addition to the over $3 billion in military assistance it already provides. Most recently, the Biden administration is planning to send $320 million in precision Spice bombs to Israel, as multiple outlets informed by Congress reported on Monday.

The post U.S. Weapons Transfers to Israel Shrouded in Secrecy — but Not Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept.

In a section on its website touting its projects, Ashush mentions construction work in the settlement of Leshem. Originally planned to include nearly 700 homes, Leshem was constructed in the 2010s as a satellite of Alei Zahav, a settlement established in 1982. 

“I estimate that Leshem has tripled the number of settlers in Alei Zahav.”

“Leshem is an Israeli settlement that was established in 2010, officially as a ‘neighborhood’ of an older settlement called Alei Zahav,” Dror Etkes — founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli organization that monitors Israeli land policy in the West Bank — told The Intercept. Etkes said describing new communities as “neighborhoods” was a “trick” used by settlers to make it look like no new settlement was being constructed, since such moves have often drawn international condemnation. 

“De facto it’s an independent settlement,” Etkes explained. “I estimate that Leshem has tripled the number of settlers in Alei Zahav.” Data from B’Tselem, a human rights group, shows the population of Alei Zahav growing from around 1,000 people in 2014 to about 4,700 in 2022. Etkes also said Leshem expanded the geographical footprint of Alei Zahav by three or four times.

Ashush’s website describes its work in Leshem as involving extensive earthworks, including controlled explosions, along with infrastructure work for new construction.

Neither Ashush nor the Defense Department responded to requests for comment about the contract and Ashush’s settlement work.

Leshem has been in the news in recent years for hostility to its neighboring Palestinian villages. In 2020, the settlement was accused of deliberately dumping its sewage into the farmlands of nearby Deir Ballut, preventing its olive harvest and destroying trees, some of which date back to Roman times.

Considered illegal under international law and by nearly every country in the world apart from the U.S. and Israel, settlements have continued to grow even as international opinion tilts strongly against them. An occupying military force like Israel transferring civilian populations into occupied territory such as the West Bank is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In the case of Palestine, major settlement blocs as well as so-called outposts — those settlements considered illegal even by Israeli law, many of which are eventually legalized — create “facts on the ground” as part of a strategy to make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. 

U.S. administrations have frequently opposed and even taken rare action against Israel for continued settlement construction — an irony of the Pentagon giving cash to a construction firm that profits off the settlement enterprise.

Ashush Infrastructure

Ashush is a major Israeli construction firm that builds everything from concrete shields on houses in Israel’s south, near Gaza, to military and intelligence installations. As in its West Bank projects, Ashush does massive public works and earthmoving projects all across the country.

The company was referenced in the Pentagon’s August 2 contract announcement for the construction of a “life-support area” in Israel. Other documents revealed this to be a euphemism for the construction of barracks-like facilities to house U.S. military personnel on its unacknowledged base deep in the Negev desert, code-named “Site 512,” as The Intercept reported. Four other bids were considered, according to the Defense Department’s contract announcement.

It is not clear how much of the $35 million joint venture contract, shared with the Colorado construction company Bryan Construction, went to Ashush. Bryan Construction did not respond to requests for comment. Ashush does not appear in public databases that track U.S. government contracts, meaning there is no transparency around how much public money is flowing to the company. 

Ashush’s website describes the firm as the main contractor in “extensive” infrastructure and development work in Leshem from 2014 to 2018. The work, its site says, was commissioned by the Samaria Regional Council, which oversees 35 different settlements and a population of about 47,000 settlers in the northern part of the West Bank. (Settlers and many other Israelis refer to the West Bank by the name “Judea and Samaria,” for the ancient regions it covers.) 

In 2015, when U.S. diplomats investigated allegations of vandalism, including the uprooting of thousands of Palestinian-owned olive trees in the West Bank by settlers from an Israeli “outpost,” the settlers assaulted them with stones. Though the State Department confirmed the incident and provided a video to Israeli authorities, the controversial head of the Samaria Regional Council Yossi Dagan, an ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called for the diplomats’ expulsion, accusing them of being spies.

“The land which the settlement is sitting on was looted by the Israeli government from two Palestinian communities.”

A report from January 2022 described settlers from Alei Zahav destroying a Palestinian farmer’s olive trees with assistance from the Israeli military. The military, at the behest of the settlers, ordered the farmer off the land and seized a tractor, claiming that the land was owned by the Israeli state. 

“The land which the settlement is sitting on was looted by the Israeli government from two Palestinian communities … in the 1980s by declaring it as ‘state land,’ which was allocated to Alei Zahav later,” said Etkes, the Israeli expert on settlements.

Months later, in July, another report described settlers destroying another nearby farm.

The post Local Construction Firm for Secret U.S. Base in Israel Also Built an Illegal Settlement appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fired ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel. The attack marked the first time ballistic missiles have been launched at Israel since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel in 1991, according to Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and expert on the region. The use of ballistic missiles represents a major escalation that threatens to ignite a regional war — with American troops stationed nearby.

“The best strategy to avoid getting sucked into another war in the Middle East is to not have troops unnecessarily in the region in the first place.”

“The best strategy to avoid getting sucked into another war in the Middle East is to not have troops unnecessarily in the region in the first place — and bring those who are there now home,” said Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that advocates for a restrained foreign policy. “Their presence there is not making America more safe, it’s putting America more at risk of yet another war in the Middle East.”

Though the size of the American special operations footprint inside Yemen has ebbed and flowed — the U.S. has been at war there since 2000 — the White House revealed in June that the U.S. maintains “combat” troops in Yemen. “United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS,” the White House disclosed in a previously unreported passage of its most recent War Powers Resolution report to Congress.

The Houthis are not listed as an official target of the U.S. special forces mission in Yemen, but the Pentagon has used its authorities under the war on the Islamic State to strike at Iranian-backed groups elsewhere. Last week, the U.S. bombed two facilities linked to Iranian-backed militias in Syria in retaliation for attacks on U.S. installations in the region by militant groups supported by Iran. 

Analysts, however, cautioned against viewing the Houthi strike as part of a wider Iranian campaign without any evidence.

“One should be cautious about interpreting the missile attack as part of some grand strategy of an Iranian-led ‘axis of resistance,’” Paul Pillar, a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, told The Intercept. “The Houthis, notwithstanding material support from Iran, have been making their own decisions: probably their biggest move in the war in Yemen — capture of the capital city of Sanaa — they reportedly made against the advice of the Iranians.”

President Joe Biden justified U.S. strikes on Syrian targets as a deterrence strategy, but some observers say any deterrence will be undermined by the fact that the U.S.’s massive regional military presence provides a bevy of available targets.

“Biden believes that current and new U.S. troops in the region serve as a deterrent against attacks by Iran or its allies,” said the Quincy Institute’s Parsi. “But rather than deterring these actors, oftentimes U.S. troops are sitting ducks that provide the Houthis or Iraqi militias with more targets. Even lawmakers who don’t want more war in the Middle East will be compelled to push for military action if these troops come under attack.”

Yemen has been locked in a brutal civil war since 2014, with the Houthi rebel group in the north supported by Iran and the south’s government in exile supported by the United States and a coalition of Yemen’s neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

The United States has consistently supported the Saudi-backed Aden government. 

U.S. operations in Yemen are overseen by Special Operations Command Central Forward – Yemen, or SOCCENT FWD Yemen — and commonly abbreviated as SFY — a forward element of the Tampa-based Special Operations Command that oversees the counterterrorism campaign in the Middle East, from Pakistan to Egypt. 

While the Defense Department has never formally acknowledged SOCCENT FWD Yemen or its mission — which are being reported here for the first time — clues of its existence and aims can be gleaned from scattered references, along with details provided to The Intercept by a military officer.

A senior military officer that served in SFY, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Intercept that, during the beginning of the Trump administration, he oversaw plans to train a 300-person Yemeni tribal fighting force in order to conduct long-term unconventional warfare and counterterror operations.

In 2015, a former SFY commander, Capt. Robert A. Newson, then a Navy SEAL, provided a similar account in an interview with West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. Having served in SFY until 2012, Newson said that the troops there “trained and advised Yemeni partners” and, more vaguely, that they were “deeply embedded within the embassy and their activities.”

Since then, the main U.S. Embassy in Sanaa has closed amid the chaos of the Yemeni civil war.

The post Secret U.S. Military Presence in Yemen Adds a Twist to Houthi Attack on Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.

The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing. 

The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”

Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.” 

A day later, the U.S. military denied that it was an American base, insisting that it was merely a “living facility” for U.S. service members working at an Israeli base. 

The U.S. military employs similar euphemistic language to characterize the new facility in Israel, which its procurement records describe as a “life support area.” Such obfuscation is typical of U.S. military sites the Pentagon wants to conceal. Site 512 has previously been referred to as a “cooperative security location”: a designation that is intended to confer a low-cost, light footprint presence but has been applied to bases that, as The Intercept has previously reported, can house as many as 1,000 troops.

Site 512, however, wasn’t established to contend with a threat to Israel from Palestinian militants but the danger posed by Iranian mid-range missiles.

The overwhelming focus on Iran continues to play out in the U.S. government’s response to the Hamas attack. In an attempt to counter Iran — which aids both Hamas and Israel’s rival to the north, Hezbollah, a Lebanese political group with a robust military wing, both of which are considered terror groups by the U.S. — the Pentagon has vastly expanded its presence in the Middle East. Following the attack, the U.S. doubled the number of fighter jets in the region and deployed two aircraft carriers off the coast of Israel. 

“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel.”

Top Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have nonetheless castigated Biden for his purported “weakness on Iran.” While some media accounts have said Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attack, there have been indications from the U.S. intelligence community that Iranian officials were surprised by the attack.

The history of the U.S.–Israel relationship may be behind the failure to acknowledge the base, said an expert on overseas U.S. military bases.

“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts,” David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University, told The Intercept. “The announcement of U.S. military bases in Israel in recent years likely reflects the dropping of that pretense and a desire to more publicly proclaim support for Israel.”

The post U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Exactly 50 years and a day before this past weekend’s surprise attack by Hamas on Israel, an eerily similar series of events played out on the world stage: the Yom Kippur War.

In 1973, amid blistering tensions over Israel–Palestine, Arab coalition forces led by Egypt and Syria carried out a surprise attack, successfully pushing Israel, for a time, out of the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli intelligence noticed the Egyptian military buildup but incorrectly assessed that they were simply military exercises — an error repeated by the Israeli intelligence this past week, according to a news report.

Just before the Hamas attack on Friday, Israeli security chiefs took part in a high-level meeting to discuss whether Hamas’s irregular activity was the prelude to an invasion or simply a military exercise, Axios reported on Thursday. Instead of anticipating the invasion, the chiefs — including the Israeli Defense Forces’ chief of staff, head of military intelligence, and Shin Bet director — decided to wait for more intelligence. 

The two attacks a half-century apart also took U.S. intelligence by surprise. In 1973, Robert Gates, then a high-ranking CIA analyst who would later become CIA director and secretary of defense, was providing a briefing on the unlikeliness of military conflict in the Middle East when he learned of the Yom Kippur invasion on the radio. 

An intelligence community postmortem declassified in 2009 revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts had in fact looked at the question closely and incorrectly judged that there would be no attack despite “plentiful” and “ominous” signs that there would be an invasion. 

“To intelligence historians, the October 1973 War is almost synonymous with ‘intelligence failure,’” says a report by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence about the Yom Kippur War.

Israel’s prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, oversaw a victory over the Arab forces — just as Israel’s military will vanquish Hamas and pummel the Gaza Strip — but she faced steady criticism for having ignored warnings from King Hussein of Jordan that a war with Egypt and Syria was imminent. Under pressure to resign, Meir later did.

Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under fire for having ignored repeated warnings from Egyptian intelligence. In one such warning, Egypt’s intelligence minister, Gen. Abbas Kamel, personally called Netanyahu days before the attack, warning of “something unusual, a terrible operation,” according to the Israeli news outlet YNet. 

Eighty-six percent of Israelis believe their government and Netanyahu are to blame for the attack, according to a new poll released Thursday. More than half of Israelis believe Netanyahu should resign.

Shortly after the raid, the editorial board of Ha’aretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, said Netanyahu “bears responsibility” for the attack. On Tuesday, the newspaper published an editorial titled “Netanyahu: Resign Now!” 

The post A Half-Century Ago, Another Major Intel Failure Saw Israel’s Leader Resign appeared first on The Intercept.

On Sunday, an explosive Wall Street Journal article accused Iran of having helped Hamas plot the deadliest attack on Israel in 50 years, a claim that seemed engineered to draw the U.S. into war with Iran. But the Biden administration and the Israel Defense Forces, as well as current and former U.S. national security officials interviewed by The Intercept, say there’s no evidence of direct Iranian involvement.

“We have no evidence or proof” of Iranian direction, Maj. Nir Dinar, IDF spokesperson, told Politico on Monday — an assertion echoed by Biden’s national adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Tuesday. Though the Biden administration can be said to have a political stake in avoiding conflict with Iran ahead of an election year, two senior Pentagon officials also told The Intercept that efforts to determine Iranian direction are intensive and ongoing but that no proof has emerged.

“I don’t understand why the Wall Street Journal’s nondescript ‘Hamas and Hezbollah’ sources are more trustworthy than the U.S. government’s sources, who receive extraordinary scrutiny,” J.D. Maddox, a former CIA branch chief, told The Intercept.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the Hamas attack surprised Iranian leadership — a claim echoed later that day in a report by the Wall Street Journal, contradicting its own previous reporting.

Monitoring leadership for communications evincing foreknowledge after a major attack is a common practice for intelligence services. Such communications are valuable indicators of whether parties knew of an operation beforehand.

Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, Iran hawks like John Bolton have seized on the narrative that Iran directed Hamas’s attack, advancing the claim in a CNN interview on Thursday.

“Bolton has no access to intelligence besides the newspaper,” former Obama administration National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor fumed on X. “Zero lessons learned from the Iraq war propaganda disaster.”

Several other former national security officials also drew parallels between claims of Iranian direction of Hamas’s attack and the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fiasco.

“Same suspects, different war,” retired Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, told The Intercept. “I can’t imagine Iran would jeopardize the talks with the U.S. Perhaps interpose no objections and continue arms supplies, but no promotion of the attack.”

Iran is a longtime sponsor of Hamas, and there’s no question that the country provides critical logistical support to the militant group. But whether they directed the attack is another matter.

“My sense is that nuance on this issue is critical,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer who worked in the region, said on X. “The difference between ‘directing’ the attack and giving the actual green light (as stated here) vs ‘coordinating’ may be [the] difference between war with Iran or not.”

It’s possible that evidence of Iranian sponsorship exists and simply hasn’t emerged yet, but that reasoning echoes the Iraq WMD imbroglio. “If the Israeli government had any evidence at all of direct Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack, it is very likely that Israel would let the world know about that,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center, told The Intercept.

According to Pillar, Hamas had plenty of incentive to conduct the operation on its own, including acquiring hostages as bargaining chips to free Palestinian prisoners and also to torpedo the Saudi–Israel normalization deal being pursued by the Biden administration.

“Even extensive relations involving material support do not imply any operational direction or instigation,” Pillar said. “A similar situation is Iran’s relationship with the Houthis in Yemen, who have benefitted from Iranian material support but seized the Yemeni capital of Sana against the advice of Iran.”

Iran has issued fiery statements celebrating the attack, feeding into the theory that they directed it. But experts say it’s more complicated.

“Iran’s praise for Hamas’s attack sounds a lot like Saudi’s praise for the attack,” Maddox, the former CIA branch chief, said. “Israel is surrounded by detractors. It would be wise to withhold judgment until there’s clear evidence of direct support.”

The post Alleged Iran Role in Israel Attack Echoes Bogus Iraq WMD Claims appeared first on The Intercept.

Though President Joe Biden declined to issue the executive order granting the WMD designation, which would have come with extraordinary powers to combat the scourge, federal agencies — including the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security — had already begun preparing for a fentanyl WMD attack as far back as 2018.

Government documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that national security agencies have for years been advancing the narrative that the drug could pose a WMD threat, going so far as conducting military exercises in preparation for an attack by a fentanyl weapon.

The push to declare fentanyl a WMD — and the security state approaching the drug that way even absent the declaration — has been a boon to federal agencies’ budgets. It’s not clear, however, that reimagining the highly toxic drug as a superlethal weapon has had any effect of combating the ongoing crisis of fentanyl overdoses. What it has done, though, is help kick off a panic.

“In the WMD world, there’s an industry built on taking a bit of a threat du jour and, like a few egg whites and a whisk, whipping it into an expensive meringue,” said Dan Kaszeta, a former adviser to the White House on chemical and biological preparedness and longtime expert on WMDs. The push to treat fentanyl like a WMD so far “involves emergency responders giving fentanyl mythical properties that toxicologists and anesthesiologists who use the stuff all the time refute,” added Kaszeta, who is currently an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

“Is it,” Kaszeta asked, “the next anthrax scare — a way to beg for budget, training, equipment?”

Even as it produced material warning of a fentanyl weapon, the government at times assessed such an attack was unlikely. One internal 2018 FBI bulletin, obtained by The Intercept from a former federal law enforcement official, calls the possibility of a chemical attack using fentanyl a “low probability high impact event.” 

In a statement to The Intercept about the report, an FBI spokesperson said, “While our standard practice is not to comment on specific intelligence products, the FBI regularly shares information with our law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve.”

Can’t Touch This

“Fentanyl Very Likely a Viable Option for a Chemical Weapon Attack in the United States for Extremists and Criminals, Low Probability High Impact Event,” reads the title of the July 2018 FBI intelligence bulletin. 

The assessment, produced by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, cites bureau and Centers for Disease Control information to conclude with “high confidence” that the likelihood of such an attack is a remote probability. The long odds are “due to no known credible threat reporting regarding the use of fentanyl for a CW” — chemical weapon — “event in the United States.”

The intelligence bulletin, marked “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY” and not disseminated to the public, also references a since-removed Drug Enforcement Agency fentanyl briefing guide for first responders. Under a red, boldfaced “WARNING,” the briefing guide incorrectly cautioned that mere incidental skin contact or inhalation of even just a small amount of fentanyl can result in death. 

The DEA blasted out the warning to law enforcement agencies all over the country, including the FBI, generating panic among police.

The DEA later revised its guidance after the American College of Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology issued a joint report concluding that “the risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low.” 

The hysteria, however, continues to this day. Around 80 percent of police officers surveyed believe you can overdose by touching fentanyl, according to three different studies.

In 2021, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department released dramatic body cam footage of a deputy collapsing after contact with fentanyl. “My trainee was exposed to fentanyl and nearly died,” Cpl. Scott Crane remarks in the video. 

News media echoed the department’s claims, with the San Diego Tribune running an article headlined, “‘I’m not going to let you die’: Deputy overdoses after coming in contact with fentanyl.” 

Medical experts promptly took issue with the story, saying incidental contact with fentanyl can’t cause an overdose and suggesting that the officer’s reaction was more likely an anxiety response. 

The Tribune’s public safety editor responded with a statement saying the publication asked the sheriff’s department to respond to the criticisms and for more information on the incident — once again relying on the account of law enforcement officials rather than medical experts.

DHS Push to Label Fentanyl as WMD

In 2019, the assistant secretary in charge of the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office referenced the FBI report from the previous year.

“In July 2018, the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate assessed that ‘… fentanyl is very likely a viable option for a chemical weapon attack by extremists or criminals,” said the February 22, 2019, DHS memo, sent by James McDonnell to the DHS secretary, first reported by the military news website Task & Purpose.

The memo didn’t mention the next sentence in the FBI document: a warning that the event was “low probability” due to there being “no known credible threat reporting” on the matter. (Asked why the memo did not mention this, the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

The omission appears to be part of a bureaucratic turf-grab. Since the office was created by consolidating DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office with its Office of Health Affairs, if fentanyl, a public health threat, could be portrayed as a WMD threat, it could fall under the new office’s purview. 

The memo went on to suggest that the creation of the new office under the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Act of 2018 “provides an opportunity to apply DHS CWMD assets and capabilities to the fentanyl problem through the lens of WMD.” Suggested applications included the development and deployment of sensor technology to detect fentanyl.

The DHS memo’s proposals were criticized as misguided when they were reported on, and the CWMD office did end up getting involved in the fentanyl response. In July 2019, DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate announced that it had begun work with a private firm to develop a miniaturized nanofiber device capable of detecting fentanyl. In the announcement, the DHS office repeated the false claim that “fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin … putting many first responders at risk of a fatal contact overdose.”

In 2020, the CWMD office awarded a contractor $1.7 million to produce a trace chemical detector designed to screen for trace amounts of fentanyl on the outside of parcels — the same kind of sensor technology referenced in the DHS memo.

Under Pressure

Politicians are under intense pressure to respond to the epidemic of fentanyl overdoses, a crisis that claimed almost 70,000 lives in 2021 alone, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

In April last year, Ambrose Partners lobbyist Kevin Fogarty, the former longtime chief of staff to Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., registered to lobby on behalf of the nonprofit Families Against Fentanyl. The group released a 2021 letter by former top national security officials — including top CIA brass and a cabinet secretary — calling for a declaration making fentanyl an official WMD. Fogarty would be a natural choice to lobby Capitol Hill: King, his old boss, served as the chair of the Homeland Security Committee before retiring in 2021.

Several Republican members of Congress, like Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., have introduced legislation that would label fentanyl a WMD. 

In September 2022, 18 state attorneys general signed a letter urging Biden to classify the drug as a WMD. Led by Republican Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and Democratic Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, the officials said the move “would require the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration to coordinate a response with other agencies, including the Department of Defense — as opposed to the federal government simply treating the substance as a narcotics control problem.”

The White House quickly swatted down the proposal.

The Military Gets Involved

“It may seem odd to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction like a chemical or biological warfare agent, but as a threat to our first responders and in the interest of public health and safety we handle it as a threat in exactly the same way,” Lt. Col. Tyler Royster, commander of the 10th Civil Support Team of the Washington state National Guard, said in a March 30 press release. The unit provided support to state police responding to the Thurston County, Washington, jail following six fentanyl overdoses.

Civil Support Teams, also known as WMD-CSTs, are federally funded, active duty military personnel under the National Guard that provide support to civil authorities in cases of the use or threatened use of a WMD.

The Washington WMD-CST unit worked with a SWAT team to “eliminate on-site hazards,” using a sophisticated spectroscopy device to scan for fentanyl.

None was detected.

The U.S. military has also sought to conduct military exercises simulating fentanyl WMD attacks. In June, the Wyoming National Guard’s WMD civilian support unit, as part of an exercise called “Vigilant Guard,” planned a scenario in which a conflict between rival drug gangs escalates into a weaponized fentanyl attack.

“International narcotics networks, in coordination with international military competitors, exploit regional narcotic distribution networks to increase violence between rival gangs and push a narrative of America being unsafe via social networks,” says the ominous description of one scenario in a procurement document. “Additional targeting information reveals plans for a retaliation shooting and use of aerosolized car fentanyl on a rival gang location in Cody, Wyoming and Powell, Wyoming.”

The post The U.S. Government Is Preparing for a Fentanyl WMD Attack appeared first on The Intercept.

National security experts, however, say the indictment’s reference to Egyptian intelligence officials and Menendez’s disclosure of “highly sensitive” and “non-public” information to Egyptian officials suggest that, more than a garden-variety corruption scheme, there may be an intelligence element to the charges.

Egypt’s elicitation of information resembles a textbook recruitment pass, an intelligence operation intended to recruit an asset, four former CIA officers told The Intercept.

According to the indictment, Menendez, chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was sometimes asked to supply information to an Egyptian businessman who would then communicate it to Egyptian officials. The most sensitive information Menendez is accused of sharing appears to be about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

“The request could well be one step in testing his willingness to break rules and laws, and therefore possibly assist Egyptian intelligence in more covert and damaging ways.”

“Menendez sharing embassy staffing information is extremely troubling on a number of levels: It assists Egyptian security services monitoring the embassy and, more importantly, may suggest they viewed Menendez as a source,” said John Sipher, a retired CIA clandestine service officer and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The request could well be one step in testing his willingness to break rules and laws and therefore, possibly assist Egyptian intelligence in more covert and damaging ways.”

Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst, told The Intercept, “Reading the indictment, it certainly appears like the Egyptian government was using a classic source-recruitment pattern to get Menendez and his wife to spy for them.”

The former officials’ remarks comes amid a report from a local New York news channel that the FBI has opened a counterintelligence investigation into Menendez. (Menendez, who plead not guilty on Wednesday, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Senator Menendez’s chairmanship of foreign relations puts him in a bullseye position for foreign intelligence services that are looking to have him make decisions in their favor including military equipment and material decisions on funding,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, told NBC. “All of that should be looked at from a counterintelligence perspective.” (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Since spies operate under diplomatic cover, embassies are an attractive target for intelligence services. Former CIA operations officers speaking on condition of anonymity described how recruitment passes tend to work. The requests start out small — often for information that’s not public, but not necessarily classified — in order to establish what’s called “responsiveness to tasking,” or willingness to collect intelligence on their behalf. Once responsiveness is established, a series of increasingly serious taskings culminates in a “spot payment,” or bribe, which cements the illicit nature of the relationship and can be used as blackmail.

The indictment describes Menendez meeting with the Egyptian businessman Wael Hana and, later that day, seeking nonpublic information from the State Department regarding the number and nationality of people working in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. That information was later passed to what the indictment describes as an “Egyptian government official.” In another case, according to the indictment, Menendez’s wife Nadine, who was then his girlfriend, passed on a request from Egyptian government officials to the senator. And through Hana, Menendez was introduced to Egyptian intelligence and military officials under the auspices of increasing American food aid to Egypt.

Though not classified, the information about staffing in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo is described in the indictment as “highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public.” Without notifying his personal staff, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired at the time, or the State Department, Menendez allegedly transmitted a detailed breakdown of the embassy staff to Nadine, who forwarded the message to Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian official.

“Menendez as SFRC chair would have definitely known that you shouldn’t share non-public information about something as sensitive as the make-up of an American Embassy in Cairo,” Ben Rhodes, a former top aide in President Barack Obama’s White House, told The Intercept by email. “He is supposed to oversee in part the safety of our diplomats overseas!”

Intelligence Source Recruitment

The FBI is reportedly trying to ascertain whether Egyptian intelligence played a role in the bribery scheme for which Menendez is being charged. Hana’s lawyer, Larry Lustberg, has denied that Hana is linked to Egyptian intelligence and maintains that Hana and Nadine Menendez had been friends for years. (Nadine Menendez did not respond to a request for comment.)

To the former U.S. intelligence officials that spoke with The Intercept, the events described in the indictment bear the hallmarks of an effort to recruit an intelligence source. “As an analyst, when you receive a human source report, it comes with a sourcing statement that evaluates the source’s relative position, reliability, access to information, responsiveness to tasking, and track record,” said van Landingham, the former CIA analyst.

James Lawler, a former CIA operations officer and counterproliferation chief specializing in the recruitment of former spies, similarly described the events in the indictment as fitting the pattern of source recruitment.

“As a case officer, I would be looking to establish a solid relationship with future tasking potential (i.e. going for the long play) but cognizant that it may be only a one off,” Lawler told The Intercept in an email. “That said, we’re talking about the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! Talk about access! If I were the intel officer, I’d be delighted and thinking I’m going to be promoted!”

He added, “It’s how I recruited assets.”

Daniel Schuman, policy director of Demand Progress, said that overseas recruitment attempts are commonplace. For this reason, he explained, members of Congress and even congressional staffers are routinely offered counterintelligence briefings.

Menendez, in one case described in the indictment, sought to travel to Egypt unofficially and without supervision from the State Department. A trip under such circumstances runs contrary to reporting requirements under the Senate Security Manual.

The three-count federal indictment against Mendendez, unsealed on Friday, paints a damning picture of pay-to-play access with a wide cast of characters, ranging from allies of the Egyptian government to an associate of the tristate-area mob. Three business associates and Nadine Menendez are all named in the legal filing, which claims that Menendez used his position of power to influence federal appointments and protect his longtime friend, Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer, financier, and longtime Menendez fundraiser.

On Tuesday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy was joined by Menendez’s fellow New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, in calling for his resignation. “The details of the allegations against Senator Menendez are of such a nature that the faith and trust of New Jerseyans as well as those he must work with in order to be effective have been shaken to the core,” Booker said. “I believe stepping down is best for those Senator Menendez has spent his life serving.”

“Due process is a legal right, but nobody has a right to be a senator. Not being in the Senate isn’t a punishment.”

Booker’s comments follow those made by Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the first Democratic senator to call for Menendez’s resignation. Fetterman said he would try to return campaign donations from Menendez in $100 bills stuffed into envelopes like those discovered in Menendez’s house by federal investigators.

Speaker Emerita Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the charges against Menendez “formidable” and has said “it would probably be a good idea if he did resign.” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate’s second-highest ranking official, has also called for Menendez to step down. Still, high-ranking officials like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have not called for his resignation. In a statement, Schumer said Menendez is “a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey,” adding that Menendez has a right to due process.

Schuman, of Demand Progress, pointed out that questions around Menendez’s legal proceedings are separate from questions of his position in the Senate. “Due process is a legal right, but nobody has a right to be a senator,” he said. “Not being in the Senate isn’t a punishment.”

Menendez has denied the charges, maintaining that the cash seized by authorities was from his personal savings account that he kept for emergencies “because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” Menendez, who was born in New York City, also said, “Those behind this campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator and serve with honor and distinction.”

Update: September 27, 2023, 2:03 p.m.
This story has been updated to include a statement from former top Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes that was received after publication.

The post Menendez Indictment Looks Like Egypt Recruiting Intelligence Source, Say Former CIA Officials appeared first on The Intercept.

“Menendez has been feeding at the Egyptian trough with lavish bribes in exchange for pushing unquestioning military support to the dictatorship.”

The Foreign Relations Committee reviews U.S. arms sales abroad and can block the deals. The indictment says, “At various times between 2018 and 2022, MENENDEZ also conveyed to Egyptian officials … that he would approve or remove holds on foreign military financing and sales of military equipment to Egypt in connection with his leadership role on the SFRC” — the Foreign Relations Committee. In exchange, the indictment says, his wife was promised money.

While Menendez has issued narrow criticisms of Egypt on human rights grounds — like its treatment of minority Christians and political dissidents — he has been a stalwart advocate for selling weapons to the country.

“Menendez has been feeding at the Egyptian trough with lavish bribes in exchange for pushing unquestioning military support to the dictatorship, all the while pretending to be a champion of democracy and human rights,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy in the Arab World Now, said about the allegations.

Menendez, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has forcefully denied the Justice Department’s charges.

One of the blocks on arms sales Menendez lifted during the period covered by the indictment, from 2018 to 2022, was put in place by the Trump administration. While generally friendly with the Egyptian regime, President Donald Trump cut military aid in 2017 over its dire human rights record, including its detention of 60,000 political prisoners and use of torture.

Former Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., who said Menendez should resign, tweeted that he had tried to put provisions that took on Egypt in House bills, but they were cut from legislation in the Senate.

“When I was in Congress, I got several tough-on-Egypt provisions into House-passed defense bills, which were then stripped in the Senate,” Malinowski wrote on X. “I still don’t know why. But the idea that the chairman of the SFRC may then have been in a corrupt relationship with Egypt is horrifying.”

“Appreciated” Meeting Sisi

Menendez has maintained a warm relationship with Egypt’s dictatorship, showering the government with praise. On October 14, 2021 — years after the indictment says his wife became entangled with a conduit for Egyptian bribes — Menendez met with Egypt’s authoritarian ruler, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. 

“US Senator Menendez hails Egypt’s role in countering terrorism, establishing tolerance in meeting with Sisi,” one headline in Egypt’s tightly controlled press blared. The article said, “He also hailed Egypt’s significant domestic efforts to achieve comprehensive and sustainable development for the benefit of citizens.”

Although Menendez did not issue a formal press release about the high-level meeting, a tweet from the X account linked to his Foreign Relations Committee seat confirms the broad contours. “Appreciated meeting with President Al Sisi today. We discussed our shared interests on security, protecting religious minorities like Coptic Christians, economic cooperation,” the post says. “I also urged full implementation of Egypt’s new human rights strategy.”

Experts say that Menendez has maintained a warm relationship with the Egyptian regime. Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, said, “Having a chair in Senate Foreign Relations that is friendly with the regime in Egypt has played a disproportionate role in why there’s been so little congressional pressure on Egypt’s horrific human rights record.”

The Armenian Connection

The Justice Department indictment alleges that Menendez passed information to his wife about his intention to sign off on a $99 million weapons sale to Egypt. His wife forwarded the text to an associate who forwarded it to an Egyptian official, who replied with a thumbs-up emoji. 

Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is listed in the indictment as a co-conspirator accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for using her husband’s political influence to benefit the Egyptian government. Born to Armenian parents, Nadine Menendez fled Lebanon during the civil war. 

Menendez has emerged as an ardent advocate of Armenia. On Thursday, he introduced legislation that would provide aid to the Central Asian country amid its invasion by neighboring Azerbaijan.

Menendez’s advocacy for Armenia has at times gone beyond established facts. In a January hearing, he accused Ukraine of selling white phosphorus to Azerbaijan, saying the country used the chemical weapon to kill Armenians. 

Though the claim was quickly echoed by the Armenian press, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy categorically denied the allegations, and no evidence has since emerged to suggest it was true.

Menendez, for his part, has responded to the indictment forcefully. 

“Those behind this campaign,” Menendez said in a press release, “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction.”

The post Menendez “Appreciated” Meeting With Egypt Dictator Amid Alleged Bribes for Arms Sales appeared first on The Intercept.

Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER. 

“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year. 

“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate.”

“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on the defense budget. “It’s kind of similar to the problem with the budget as a whole: They don’t make tough decisions, they just layer on more policies, more weapons systems, more spending. Between the Pentagon and Congress, they’re not really getting rid of old stuff, they’re just adding more.”

House Republicans reportedly aim to pass their defense budget later this week. They had planned to vote on an $826 billion proposal last week before the far-right Freedom Caucus blocked the proposal, demanding cuts to non-defense spending.

“The fact that the Pentagon developed an AI program to navigate its own policies should be a stark wake-up call for lawmakers who throw more money at the department than it even asks for nearly every year,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “It’s unsurprising, though: The DOD couldn’t adequately account for 61 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets in the most recent audit, and those are physical!”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

Military brass use GAMECHANGER to help them navigate what the Defense Department itself points to as an absurd amount of “tedious” policies. The program contains over 15,000 policy documents governing how the Pentagon operates, according to its GitHub entry.

“Did you know that if you read all the Department of Defense’s policies, it would be the equivalent of reading through ‘War and Peace’ more than 100 times?” a press release about GAMECHANGER from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s spy wing, says. “For most people, policy is a tedious and [elusive] concept, making the idea of understanding and synthesizing tens of thousands of policy requirements a daunting task. But in the midst of the chaos that is the policy world, one DIA officer and a team at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security saw an opportunity.” 

The press release went on to decry the Pentagon’s “mountain of policies and requirements.” 

As unusual as it is for the military to publicly air its contempt for its own sprawling bureaucracy, members of Congress have been similarly harsh. In its portrayal of U.S. military policy — which it also had a hand in creating — the Senate Armed Services Committee called rules governing the department “byzantine” and “labyrinthine.”

“The committee notes that the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center developed an artificial intelligence-enabled tool, GAMECHANGER, to make sense of the byzantine and labyrinthine ecosystem of Department guidance,” the committee said in a report for National Defense Authorization Act — the law that appropriates cash for the Pentagon budget — for fiscal year 2023. (Amid the critique of the Pentagon’s bloated bureaucracy, the NDAA would later become law, authorizing $802.4 billion in funding for the defense budget.)

Though announced in February of last year, GAMECHANGER has received scant media attention. The military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a subdivision of the U.S. Air Force created in 2018, developed the program. Upon its completion, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center transferred ownership of it to the office of the Defense Department comptroller, which handles budgetary and fiscal matters for the Pentagon. 

Shortly after its release, GAMECHANGER was already used by over 6,000 Defense Department users conducting over 100,000 queries, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

Described as a natural language processing application — a broad term in computer science generally referring the use of machine learning to allow computers to interpret human speech and writing — GAMECHANGER is just one of a vast suite of AI programs bankrolled by the Pentagon in recent months. 

The Pentagon is currently funding 686 such AI projects, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit that frequently conducts research into the government. The figure does not include the Department of Defense’s classified efforts.

Before it was formally released, GAMECHANGER was granted an award by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency for civil servants.

“GAMECHANGER is an ironic name: They’re patting themselves on the back for, in the best case, figuring out what they’ve said in the past, which is pretty modest,” said Hartung, the Quincy Institute defense budget expert. “It’s more a problem of how they make policy and not a problem of how to surf through it.”

The post Pentagon’s Budget Is So Bloated That It Needs an AI Program to Navigate It appeared first on The Intercept.

After members of the United Auto Workers walked off the job at midnight, Twitter stripped the union of its account verification without notice, according to a UAW official. The account, as of publication time, lacked verification — but its blue check was restored shortly after the story began circulating widely. Twitter’s verification policy temporarily removes verification from accounts that change profile pictures, which the UAW did in conjunction with the walkout.

A UAW official told The Intercept that the union’s account, which they paid for, was verified until Friday morning, when suddenly it wasn’t. The most recent entry for the UAW Twitter account in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, from September 9, confirms that the union was blue check verified. A request for comment from Twitter earned the auto-reply, “Busy now, please check back later.”

Some 13,000 UAW workers are participating in what they’re calling their Stand Up Strike, which will roll out in phases if the so-called Big Three auto manufacturers — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — continue to resist workers’ demands. Many of the Big Three’s electric vehicle manufacturers are non-union, a key sticking point in negotiations. 

Following the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis, autoworkers agreed to radical concessions on everything from pensions to wages to health care in order to help Detroit emerge successfully from bankruptcy. The companies have since returned to extraordinary levels of profitability, with CEO pay and company profits climbing by 30 to 40 percent in recent years. UAW workers have demanded similar increases over the next four years, demands the companies have rejected even as they continue stock buybacks intended to pump up the share price and corresponding executive compensation. 

General Motors CEO Mary Barra was expressly asked about the pay disparity in an interview on CNN on Friday morning. 

“You’ve seen a 34 percent pay increase in your salary, you make almost $30 million; why should your workers not get the same type of pay increases that you’re getting leading the company?” asked CNN reporter Vanessa Yurkevich. 

Barra responded to the unusually pointed line of questioning with typical platitudes: “When the company does well, everyone does well.”

The Big Three automakers and the UAW are focused closely on the role organized labor will play in the production of electric vehicles and the batteries needed to power them, as is Elon Musk, the owner of both Twitter and Tesla. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, as a price for his support of Joe Biden’s climate agenda, insisted on stripping a provision that would have tilted the EV production playing field in favor of unions. Musk spoke out against the measure as well. 

Tesla pays significantly lower wages than the Big Three, averaging $45 to $50 per hour versus $64 to $67 per hour, respectively. The company has led a slash-and-burn union-busting campaign in recent months.

In February, Tesla fired at least 18 software employees at a plant in Buffalo, New York, after they announced plans to unionize. Then, in March, a federal appeals court found that Musk violated federal labor law when he tweeted a threat to employees’ stock options should they decide to unionize and that Tesla also broke the law when it fired a worker engaged in union organizing.

“Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union,” Musk tweeted in 2018. “Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?”

In April, Tesla suffered another loss, this time in front of the National Labor Relations Board. The agency ruled that the company violated federal labor law when it forbade employees from discussing wages and working conditions.

The post UAW Temporarily Loses Twitter Verification as Union Strikes Against Big Three appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had a second freezing episode last month, enjoys the most privileged access to classified information of anyone in Congress as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leadership. Ninety-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose decline has seen her confused about how to vote and experiencing memory lapses — forgetting conversations and not recalling a monthslong absence — was for years a member of the Gang of Eight and remains a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which she has served since 2001.

The study, published by the RAND Corporation’s National Security Research Division in April, identifies individuals with both current and former access to classified material who develop dementia as threats to national security, citing the possibility that they may unwittingly disclose government secrets. 

“Individuals who hold or held a security clearance and handled classified material could become a security threat if they develop dementia and unwittingly share government secrets,” the study says.

As the study notes, there does not appear to be any other publicly available research into dementia, an umbrella term for the loss of cognitive functioning, despite the fact that Americans are living longer than ever before and that the researchers were able to identify several cases in which senior intelligence officials died of Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder and the most common cause of dementia.

“As people live longer and retire later, challenges associated with cognitive impairment in the workplace will need to be addressed,” the report says. “Our limited research suggests this concern is an emerging security blind spot.” 

Most holders of security clearances, a ballooning class of officials and other bureaucrats with access to secret government information, are subject to rigorous and invasive vetting procedures. Applying for a clearance can mean hourslong polygraph tests; character interviews with old teachers, friends, and neighbors; and ongoing automated monitoring of their bank accounts and other personal information. As one senior Pentagon official who oversees such a program told me of people who enter the intelligence bureaucracy, “You basically give up your Fourth Amendment rights.” 

Yet, as the authors of the RAND report note, there does not appear to be any vetting for age-related cognitive decline. In fact, the director of national intelligence’s directive on continuous evaluation contains no mention of age or cognitive decline.

While the study doesn’t mention any U.S. officials by name, its timing comes amid a simmering debate about gerontocracy: rule by the elderly. Following McConnell’s first freezing episode, in July, Google searches for the term “gerontocracy” spiked.

“The president called to check on me,” McConnell said when asked about the first episode. “I told him I got sandbagged,” he quipped, referring to President Joe Biden’s trip-and-fall incident during a June graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, which sparked conservative criticisms about the 80-year-old’s own functioning. 

While likely an attempt by McConnell at deflecting from his lapse, Biden’s age has emerged as a clear concern to voters, including Democrats. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats say Biden is “too old to effectively serve” another term, an Associated Press-NORC poll found last month. The findings were echoed by a CNN poll released last week that found that 67 percent of Democrats said the party should nominate someone else, with 49 percent directly mentioning Biden’s age as their biggest concern.

As commander in chief, the president is the nation’s ultimate classification authority, with the extraordinary power to classify and declassify information broadly. No other American has as privileged access to classified information as the president.

The U.S.’s current leadership is not only the oldest in history, but also the number of older people in Congress has grown dramatically in recent years. In 1981, only 4 percent of Congress was over the age of 70. By 2022, that number had spiked to 23 percent. 

In 2017, Vox reported that a pharmacist had filled Alzheimer’s prescriptions for multiple members of Congress. With little incentive for an elected official to disclose such an illness, it is difficult to know just how pervasive the problem is. Feinstein’s retinue of staffers have for years sought to conceal her decline, having established a system to prevent her from walking the halls of Congress alone and risk having an unsupervised interaction with a reporter.

Despite the public controversy, there’s little indication that any officials will resign — or choose not to seek reelection. 

After years of speculation about her retirement, 83-year-old Speaker Emerita Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., stunned observers when she announced on Friday that she would run for reelection, seeking her 19th term.

The post Pentagon-Funded Study Warns Dementia Among U.S. Officials Poses National Security Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s press release, “This eTextile technology could also assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.”

IARPA contracts for the SMART ePANTS program have gone to five entities. As the Pentagon disclosed this month along with other contracts it routinely announces, IARPA has awarded $11.6 million and $10.6 million to defense contractors Nautilus Defense and Leidos, respectively. The Pentagon did not disclose the value of the contracts with the other three: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Areté. “IARPA does not publicly disclose our funding numbers,” IARPA spokesperson Nicole de Haay told The Intercept.

Dawson Cagle, a former Booz Allen Hamilton associate, serves as the IARPA program manager leading SMART ePANTS. Cagle invoked his time serving as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 2002 and 2006 as important experience for his current role.

“As a former weapons inspector myself, I know how much hand-carried electronics can interfere with my situational awareness at inspection sites,” Cagle recently told Homeland Security Today. “In unknown environments, I’d rather have my hands free to grab ladders and handrails more firmly and keep from hitting my head than holding some device.”

SMART ePANTS is not the national security community’s first foray into high-tech wearables. In 2013, Adm. William McRaven, then-commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, presented the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit. Called TALOS for short, the proposal sought to develop a powered exoskeleton “supersuit” similar to that worn by Matt Damon’s character in “Elysium,” a sci-fi action movie released that year. The proposal also drew comparisons to the suit worn by Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., in a string of blockbuster films released in the run-up to TALOS’s formation.

“Science fiction has always played a role in DARPA,” Jacobsen said.

The TALOS project ended in 2019 without a demonstrable prototype, but not before racking up $80 million in costs.

As IARPA works to develop SMART ePANTS over the next three and a half years, Jacobsen stressed that the advent of smart wearables could usher in troubling new forms of government biometric surveillance.

“They’re now in a position of serious authority over you. In TSA, they can swab your hands for explosives,” Jacobsen said. “Now suppose SMART ePANTS detects a chemical on your skin — imagine where that can lead.” With consumer wearables already capable of monitoring your heartbeat, further breakthroughs could give rise to more invasive biometrics.

“IARPA programs are designed and executed in accordance with, and adhere to, strict civil liberties and privacy protection protocols. Further, IARPA performs civil liberties and privacy protection compliance reviews throughout our research efforts,” de Haay, the spokesperson, said.

There is already evidence that private industry outside of the national security community are interested in smart clothing. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is looking to hire a researcher “with broad knowledge in smart textiles and garment construction, integration of electronics into soft and flexible systems, and who can work with a team of researchers working in haptics, sensing, tracking, and materials science.”

The spy world is no stranger to lavish investments in moonshot technology. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, recently invested in Colossal Biosciences, a wooly mammoth resurrection startup, as The Intercept reported last year.

If SMART ePANTS succeeds, it’s likely to become a tool in IARPA’s arsenal to “create the vast intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems of the future,” said Jacobsen. “They want to know more about you than you.”

The post U.S. Spy Agency Dreams of Surveillance Underwear It’s Calling “SMART ePANTS” appeared first on The Intercept.

One posting offers up to $337,920 for a vice president of public affairs to lead a “communications team to assist senior executives in preparing for media events” and “interviews.” “This role is a standard public affairs position with our Disney Parks, Experiences and Products business segment that has existed for more than 15 years,” a Disney spokesperson, who asked that he not be named, told The Intercept. “It’s not new and the opening is the result of an internal move.”

The posting follows a disastrous July 13 interview by CNBC of Disney chief executive Bob Iger, in which he called the actors and writers strikes “very disturbing,” their demands “not realistic,” and coming at “the worst time in the world.”

The interview was widely panned as a catastrophe, with the Hollywood Reporter calling it “infamous” in an article titled “Unpacking Bob Iger’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good PR Week.” The same week, one day prior to the interview, Disney announced that his contract was being extended to 2026, raising his target annual compensation to $31 million. The eye-popping sum drew cynical comparisons to the statistic that only 14 percent of actors represented by the SAG-AFTRA guild earn the minimum $26,470 necessary to qualify for health insurance, per the union’s chief economist. 

“We’re unrealistic when he’s making $78,000 a day,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said of Iger during an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders. Drescher went on to chide his CNBC interview, remarking: “He stuck his foot in it so bad that you notice they’re not letting any of the other CEOs open their mouths.”

Small surprise, then, that Disney is looking to hire a communications executive “with the goal of enhancing and protecting reputation” by “manag[ing] reputation research.” The applicant, the job posting goes on to say, will “develop [a] reputation campaign calendar” as part of a comprehensive plan that will include paid advertising as well as earned media.

The messaging isn’t just external. The same job posting stresses the need to “retain/motivate employees” with “strategic executive engagement plans intended to drive the business narrative.”

Another job posting, for a senior specialist in employee communications and engagement, describes what seems like a sophisticated effort to interface with employees: “You’ll interview employees, develop promotional campaigns, and advise on the best communication vehicles to reach employees.” The posting also alludes to the development of an “internal crisis communications response playbook.”

Though the job postings don’t explicitly identify the source of their concerns, the actors and writers strikes has left Disney short-staffed, after the firm had already laid off 7,000 employees by May. Disney has reportedly been frantically hiring replacements, including from foreign countries. 

Iger is far from the only executive to plant his foot in his mouth. On July 11, Deadline published an interview with a studio executive who said of the strike: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

The comment drew swift condemnation from many, including actor Ron Perlman, who posted a heated video response to his Instagram account. “You wish that on people?” Perlman said. “You wish that families starve while you make $27 fucking million a year for creating nothing?”

The actors and writers strikes represents the first such joint strike in over half a century, since 1960. The writers, represented by the Writers Guild of America, have been on strike since May 2, with the actors union joining them on July 14.

Demands by the actors and writers unions include protections against AI, in which Hollywood studios are investing lavishly. Netflix recently offered up to $900,000 for a single AI product manager job, as The Intercept reported. 

By contrast, in one case, actors were offered just $300 for scans of their likeness to train AI databases.

Update: September 1, 2023, 6:27 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include a comment from Disney that was received after publication.

The post Disney Lists $330,000 Crisis PR Job After CEO Insults Striking Actors and Writers appeared first on The Intercept.

The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. “The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” the appeal for an increase says.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database.”

In an April 2023 statement submitted to Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample volume” — and expected that number to swell to about 120,000 a month, totaling about 1.5 million new DNA samples a year. (The FBI declined to comment.)

The staggering increases are raising questions among civil liberties advocates.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database,” Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in genetic privacy, told The Intercept. “I think the civil liberties implications here are significant.”

The rapid growth of the FBI’s sample load is in large part thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration authorities.

Mission Creep in FBI’s DNA

The FBI began building a DNA database as early as 1990. By 1998, it helped create a national database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, that spanned all 50 states. Each state maintained its own database, with police or other authorities submitting samples based on their states’ rules, and CODIS allowed all the states to search across the entire country. At first, the collection of data was limited to DNA from people convicted of crimes, from crime scenes, and from unidentified remains.

Even those categories were controversial at the time. When CODIS was launched nationally, most states did not submit DNA from all people convicted of felonies; the only point of consensus among the states’ collection programs was to take DNA from convicted sex offenders.

“If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders,” Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. “The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that’s indeed what we’ve seen.”

Today, police have the authority to take DNA samples from anyone sentenced for a felony charge. In 28 states, police can take DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies but who have not been convicted of any crime. In some cases, police offer plea deals to reduce felony charges to misdemeanor offenses in exchange for DNA samples. Police are even acquiring DNA samples from unwitting people, as The Intercept recently reported.

“It changed massively,” Lewis said of the rules and regulations around government DNA collection. “You only have to be a person of interest to end up in these databases.”

The database is likely to continue proliferating as DNA technology becomes more sophisticated, Lewis explained, pointing to the advent of environmental DNA, which allows for DNA to be collected from ambient settings like wastewater or air.

“Just by breathing, you’re discarding DNA in a way that can be traced back to you,” Lewis said.

While this might sound like science fiction, the federal government has already embraced the technology. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered a contract for laboratory services to assist with “autonomously collected eDNA testing”: environmental DNA testing based on samples that are no longer even manually collected.

Until recently, the U.S. DNA database surpassed even that of authoritarian China, which launched an ambitious DNA collection program in 2017. That year, the BBC reported, the U.S. had about 4 percent of its population’s DNA, while China had about 3 percent. Since then, China announced a plan aimed at collecting between 5 and 10 percent of its male population’s DNA, according to a 2020 study cited by the New York Times.

China has a record of abusing its DNA database for surveillance and crackdowns on dissent. The efforts have been aided by American technology and expertise. In 2021, the U.S. intelligence community raised alarms about China’s widespread DNA collection, including foreigners’ genetic information.

“Cheaper, Easier, and Faster”

The changes detailed by Wray include shifts in statutory and regulatory requirements, with the bulk of new samples coming from a new policy mandating collection of DNA from people arrested or detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a Department of Homeland Security agency. The new DHS policy, however, only explains part of the rapid growth of the FBI’s DNA database.

Whereas DNA analysis once had to be conducted in a lab by a cumbersome manual process of manually matching DNA strands that took months, the process has since been fully automated. Under rapid DNA analysis, a DNA profile can be developed in one to two hours after a simple swab of one’s inner cheek without a lab or human involvement.

“When surveillance technology gets cheaper, easier, and faster to use,” said Eidelman, of the ACLU, “it tends to get used more — often in ways that are troubling.”

“When surveillance technology gets cheaper, easier, and faster to use, it tends to get used more — often in ways that are troubling.”

In 2021, the FBI touted as “a major milestone” the contribution of its 20 millionth DNA profile to the national DNA database, calling it “one of the most successful investigative tools available to U.S. law enforcement.”

While DNA has played an important role in prosecuting crimes, less than 3 percent of the profiles have assisted in cases, the Bureau’s data reveals. By comparison, fingerprints collected by the FBI from current and former federal employees linked them to crimes at a rate of 12 percent each year, the Bureau testified in 2004 — when fingerprint technology was far less sophisticated.

For civil liberties advocates, a government database of everyone’s DNA would be rife for abuses.

“A universal database really just would subvert our ideas of autonomy and freedom and the presumption of innocence. It would be saying that it makes sense for the government to track us at any time based on our private information,” Eidelman told The Intercept, adding that DNA collection presents specific risks to privacy. “Our DNA is personal and sensitive: It can expose our propensity for serious health conditions, family members, and ancestry.”

DNA Collection From Migrants

The bulk of the DHS increases stemmed from samples collected from the hundreds of thousands of migrants that ended up arrested or detained by Customs and Border Protection. With the end of Title 42 expulsions, a pandemic-era policy that allowed the U.S. to expel migrants without allowing them to apply for asylum — which finally expired weeks after Wray’s April statement to Congress — the FBI director said he expected the number of new samples to swell to 120,000 a month. (CBP did not respond to a request for comment.)

“This substantial increase has created massive budget and personnel shortfalls for the FBI,” Wray said in his statement. “While the FBI has worked with DHS components to automate and streamline workflows, a backlog of approximately 650,000 samples has developed, increasing the likelihood of arrestees and non-U.S. detainees being released before identification through investigative leads.”

DHS initially sought to collect DNA from detainees in 2009, but the Obama administration exempted the department from collection requirements for non-U.S. detainees. The task would have been too expensive, since Congress had not allocated funding for DNA collection, then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano explained.

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s administration ended the exemptions, and DHS announced that it would collect DNA samples from people arrested or detained by border authorities. At the time, Trump’s policy was widely condemned, including on the grounds that it could lead to widespread civil liberties violations.

President Joe Biden has not reversed the decision, causing the government’s DNA database to balloon in size.

The post FBI Hoovering Up DNA at a Pace That Rivals China, Holds 21 Million Samples and Counting appeared first on The Intercept.

“In recognition that SIGINT activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside,” says the previously unreported directive, which was issued by NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone. 

“Mass surveillance is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights and democracy.”

Civil liberties experts say the PR-friendly directive is an attempt to mollify European partners and American critics amid a simmering congressional debate over whether to reauthorize the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities. Experts also pointed to the absurdity that the NSA, an intelligence agency that specializes in electronic eavesdropping including the interception of text messages and emails, could do so respectfully.

“This is like the CIA putting out a statement saying that going forward they’ll only waterboard people with dignity and respect,” Evan Greer, director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told The Intercept. “Mass surveillance is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights and democracy.”

The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last month, President Joe Biden’s own advisers recommended imposing some limits on the warrantless surveillance programs of the U.S. intelligence community. The administration, though, rejected proposals that the U.S. obtain a warrant before sifting through certain information collected from Americans. That so-called Section 702 information, the repository of surveillance data established in the wake of the September 11 attacks, gets its name from the legal provision that authorizes it — the same statute that is being debated in Congress and among privacy advocates.

The NSA directive follows an executive order issued by Biden in October 2022 titled “Enhancing Safeguards for United States Intelligence Activities.” That directive, along with other Biden administration requirements, seeks to provide the same privacy and civil liberties protections to foreign intelligence targets — even to targets like Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Experts, however, say the safeguards are largely window dressing intended to head off critics in Congress and Europe, where NSA surveillance is a sore issue. European governments and leaders were incensed when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the staggering power — and lack of checks — on the spy agency.

“The U.S. government wants to be able to warrantlessly spy on whomever it wants with no independent checks, no matter the scale or threat to privacy,” Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel for Demand Progress, a civil liberties advocacy organization, told The Intercept. “The government is putting up Potemkin villages to try and trick Europe — and the American people — into thinking the U.S. government’s out-of-control spying is somehow fixed, despite the fact that Congress hasn’t even had the chance to consider any serious reforms — which, it must be noted, the government is ferociously lobbying against right now, and has been all year.”

The post NSA Orders Employees to Spy on the World “With Dignity and Respect” appeared first on The Intercept.