Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin. 

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.

As National Security Adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.

In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”

“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.

Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”

North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.

As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.

In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans. In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”

Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.

“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

“He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”

Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.

“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”

Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.

Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.

To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.

“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.

When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”

“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”

“Come on now.”

“No, no, no, were particularly —”

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”

“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war.”

Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.

“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”

Correction: December 1, 2023
An earlier version of this article included a pre-publication title for Carolyn Eisenberg’s book. The story has been updated to reflect the actual title.

The post Henry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100 appeared first on The Intercept.

The indictment alleges that Gupta, after being recruited by the Indian government official, hired a hitman and paid him a $15,000 advance to carry out the murder this past summer. The hitman was actually an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to a report on the indictment in the Washington Post, the intended target of the killing was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikh activist group Sikhs for Justice. In the DEA’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said investigators had “foiled and exposed a dangerous plot to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil.”

The alleged assassination plot against Pannun was in the works around the same time as the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was also a leader in the Sikh separatist movement. Nijjar was murdered outside Vancouver in June; the Canadian government has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence in his death. 

The Indian government has come under scrutiny over an alleged transnational assassination program targeting its opponents in foreign countries. In addition to the murder of Nijjar, The Intercept has also reported on alleged FBI warnings to Sikhs in the U.S. as well as alleged plots by India to assassinate Sikh activists in Pakistan. Both the Nijjar killing and the Gupta plot came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the U.S. in June. 

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil, coinciding with Modi’s White House visit,” said Pritpal Singh, a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee who was among the Sikh American activists who were contacted by the FBI after Nijjar’s killing.

The details in the indictment reveal a murder-for-hire plot gone awry. Gupta, 52, described as being tied to the international weapons and narcotics trade, was alleged to have worked as a co-conspirator to an Indian government official with a background in security and intelligence. Along with others based in India and elsewhere, Gupta helped plan the murder of Pannun over his advocacy for an independent Sikh state and criticisms of the Indian government. In return, the government official indicated he would help secure the dismissal of criminal charges against Gupta in India, including during a meeting in New Delhi to discuss the plot. The Indian government official provided Gupta with details about Pannun, including his address, associated phone numbers, and his daily routine, which Gupta then gave to the DEA agent working undercover as a hitman. 

According to the indictment, the Indian government official told Gupta that he was targeting multiple people in the U.S. In communications, the Indian official told Gupta that he had a “target in New York” as well as another target in California. Gupta replied: ”We will hit our all Targets.” The indictment also indicated that Pannun was surveilled in New York using a cellphone application that tracks GPS coordinates and enables the user to take photographs. The Indian official allegedly agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder of Pannun, with a $15,000 advance paid to the undercover agent around June 9, according to the indictment. Nijjar was fatally shot less than 10 days later outside a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburbs. 

According to the indictment, Gupta instructed the DEA hitman to kill Pannun “as soon as possible,” but not when high-level meetings were expected to take place between U.S. and Indian officials. Modi was scheduled to visit the U.S. on an official trip between June 21 and 23. On June 18, the day of Nijjar’s murder, the Indian government official sent Gupta a video of the Sikh leader slumped dead in his car. The next day, Gupta allegedly contacted the undercover DEA agent to tell them that Nijjar, like Pannun, had also been targeted for his opposition to the Indian government, telling the agent, “We have so many targets.”

Gupta also allegedly promised “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman, referring to more assassinations that would be carried out in the future. In a video call with the DEA agent, roughly a week before the killing of Nijjar, Gupta and a group of men dressed in business attire and seated in a conference room allegedly told the agent, “We are all counting on you.” 

There is mounting evidence that India is running a transnational targeted killing program against dissidents. Documents reported by The Intercept last week alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing was coordinating the murders of individuals in Pakistan, using local criminal networks and assets based in the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. A slew of Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in Pakistan have been killed over the past few years, the pace of which has picked up in recent months. Such killings may be taking place in the West as well. In addition to Nijjar, in recent years a number of Sikh activists have died in mysterious circumstances in the United Kingdom and Canada, prompting accusations from family members and others of Indian government involvement.

According to the indictment, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in late June. He is charged with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Gupta is currently “in jail waiting to answer to these charges,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.

The accusations against Gupta expand the scope of what is publicly known about India’s alleged assassination campaign in Western countries. 

“These revelations are deeply unsettling and have shocked our community,” said Singh. “The Indian rogue regime must be held accountable, and the perpetrators must face justice.”

The post India Accidentally Hired a DEA Agent to Kill Sikh American Activist, Federal Prosecutors Say appeared first on The Intercept.

Military investigations launched earlier this year found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems as well as drones — have been stolen in Iraq. This follows hundreds of thousands of dollars in military gear that were purloined from U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, as reported earlier this year by The Intercept.

America’s bases in Iraq and Syria ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” but experts say they are used primarily as a check against Iran. Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, these bases have come under regular rocket and drone attacks as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

The U.S. has increasingly responded to those attacks. In Syria, the U.S. launched “precision strikes” on a “training facility and a safe house” allegedly used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S. has since employed an AC-130 gunship against an “Iranian-backed militia vehicle and a number of Iranian-backed militia personnel” at an undisclosed location, following a ballistic missile attack on Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, justifying U.S. strikes.

But the criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept demonstrate that the U.S. cannot even secure its equipment, much less protect its troops.

“We don’t tend to think nearly critically enough about the ripple effects of such an expansive U.S. military footprint,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, told The Intercept. “The so-called war on terror isn’t over — it’s just morphed. And we can understand these weapons thefts as just one of the many political costs of that ongoing campaign.”

Details about the thefts in Iraq, which were never made public by the military, are found in criminal investigations files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones, valued at about $162,500, were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq, sometime last year. The agents identified no suspects, and no leads are mentioned in the file.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq.

A separate investigation discovered that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” including targeting sight and launcher units for Javelin missiles — a shoulder-fired guided missile that locks on its targets — were stolen at or en route to Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss to the U.S. government was estimated at almost $480,000.

Investigators did not believe the thefts were an inside job. “No known U.S. personnel were involved,” according to a criminal investigations file. The investigators instead refer to locals as the likely suspects. “Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment,” the document stated. “Further there have been systemic issues with U.S. containers being pilfered by these groups and local nationals outside of Union III, due to the lack of security.”

Earlier this year, The Intercept revealed at least four significant thefts and one loss of U.S. weapons and equipment in Iraq and Syria from 2020 to 2022, including 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, specialized field artillery tools and equipment, and unspecified “weapons systems.” Two of the incidents took place at bases in Syria, and three were in Iraq. None of those thefts occurred at Forward Operating Base Union III.

Just how many thefts have occurred is unknown — perhaps even to the Pentagon. After more than two months, both Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, and its parent organization, U.S. Central Command, failed to respond to any of The Intercept’s questions about weapons thefts in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this year, the task force admitted that it does not know the extent of the problem: A spokesperson said the task force has no record of any thefts from U.S. forces. “[W]e do not have the requested information,” Capt. Kevin T. Livingston, then CJTF-OIR’s director of public affairs, told The Intercept when asked if any weapons, ammunition, or equipment were stolen in the last five years.

The thefts and losses uncovered by The Intercept are just the latest weapons accountability woes to afflict the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria. A 2017 investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found $20 million of weapons in Kuwait and Iraq were “vulnerable to loss or theft.” A 2020 audit discovered that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that works with America’s Syrian allies, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for those local surrogates.

Groups like Amnesty International and Conflict Armament Research also found that a substantial portion of the Islamic State group’s arsenal was composed of U.S.-made or U.S.-purchased weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or otherwise obtained from the Iraqi Army and Syrian fighters. 

Losses of weapons and ammunition are significant — and the military has taken pains to prevent them in the past. When the U.S. withdrew forces from an outpost near Kobani, Syria, in 2019, it conducted airstrikes on ammunition that was left behind. The military also destroyed equipment and ammunition during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Still, within weeks of the U.S. defeat, American-made pistols, rifles, grenades, binoculars, and night-vision goggles flooded weapons shops there. Others were exported to Pakistan.

Since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s become ever more apparent that U.S. bases in the Middle East serve as magnets for attack, although far-flung outposts have been periodically targeted in other conflict zones. In 2019, for example, the terrorist group al-Shabab assaulted a U.S. base in Baledogle, Somalia. The next year, the same group raided a longtime American outpost in Kenya, killing three Americans and wounding two others.

In recent weeks, America’s bases in Iraq and Syria have sometimes come under persistent attack, including as many as four strikes by drones and rockets in a 24-hour period. U.S. forces have been attacked more than 70 times — 36 times in Iraq, 37 in Syria — since October 17. More than 60 U.S. personnel have been wounded, according to Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.

The investigation files obtained by The Intercept offer evidence that U.S. military bases also provide tempting targets for criminals. Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on a daring daylight armed robbery of military contractors less than a mile from the entrance of Air Base 201, a large U.S. drone outpost in Niger. In 2013, a U.S. Special Operations compound in Libya was looted of hundreds of weapons along with armored vehicles. And a 2021 Associated Press investigation found that at least 1,900 military weapons were lost or stolen during the 2010s — from bases stretching from Afghanistan to North Carolina — and that some were then used in violent crimes.

The post Missiles and Drones Among Weapons Stolen From U.S. in Iraq and Syria 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.

With a death toll that has now surpassed 11,000 Palestinians, including nearly 5,000 children, the extent of Biden’s public divergence from his “great, great friend” Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorched-earth war of annihilation amounts to meekly worded suggestions of “humanitarian pauses.”

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked, “far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them and to maximize the assistance that gets to them.” These disingenuous platitudes melt into a puddle of blood when juxtaposed with the administration’s actions.

The Biden administration has funneled weapons, intelligence support, and unwavering political backing for Israel’s public campaign to erase from the earth Gaza’s existence as a Palestinian territory. As Israeli settlers wage campaigns of terror against the Palestinians in the West Bank, the U.S. remained entrenched in its global isolation, voting last week against a U.N. resolution demanding an end to the illegal settlements. The resolution condemned illegal Israeli settlements, calling them “illegal and an obstacle to peace.” The resolution, which passed 145-7, called for “the immediate and complete cessation of all Israeli settlement activities in all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Only five countries joined the U.S. and Israel in voting “no”: Canada, Hungary, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Nauru.

As the capitals of major world cities have seen massive protests on a scale not registered since the 2003 Iraq invasion, Netanyahu has been on a U.S. media blitz, appearing on Sunday talk shows to cast the stakes of his war “to destroy Hamas” as akin to World War II. “Without it none of us have a future. And it’s not only our war, it’s your war too. It’s the battle of civilization against barbarism,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And if we don’t win here, this scourge will pass. The Middle East will pass to other places. The Middle East will fall. Europe is next. You will be next.”

Netanyahu has brazenly exploited the grief of Israeli citizens whose lives were torn apart on October 7 when Hamas launched a series of coordinated attacks inside Israel. Those raids resulted in the deaths of 846 civilians, 278 Israeli soldiers, and 44 police officers, according to the latest figures provided by Israel. Some family members of the victims, as well as relatives of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas and other militant groups — among them infants and the elderly — have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of Netanyahu’s government. A small number have spoken out against his attacks on Gaza, though their voices are largely drowned out by pro-war voices in Western media coverage.

“I beg you, I beg also my government, and the pilots and soldiers, who may be called to go into Gaza. Don’t agree. Protect the area around the Gaza Strip, but don’t agree to go in and kill innocent people,” said Noy Katsman, whose older brother Hayim was killed on October 7 at the kibbutz he had lived on for a decade. Maoz Inon’s parents were also killed that day. “Today, Israel is repeating an old mistake it made many times in the last century. We must stop it,” Inon wrote. “Revenge is not going to bring my parents back to life. It is not going to bring back other Israelis and Palestinians killed either. It is going to do the opposite. It is going to cause more casualties. It is going to bring more death.”

Over the past month, Biden has cast doubt on the extent of Palestinian civilian deaths, defended Netanyahu’s violent extremist agendas, and made clear that the U.S. position amounts to this: collectively punishing Palestinians for the actions of Hamas falls under the doctrine of “self-defense.” Biden has stood by Israel as government officials have openly described an agenda of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, proclaiming a “Gaza Nakba,” threatening to do to Beirut what Israel has done to Gaza, labeling hospitals and ambulances “legitimate military targets,” and accusing U.N. workers of being Hamas and journalists of being “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” More than 100 U.N. workers and at least 40 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. Approximately one in 200 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the start of Israel’s attacks.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan, when asked Sunday on CNN if Israel is abiding by the rules of war, replied, “I’m not going to sit here and play judge or jury on that question. What I’m going to do is state the principle of the United States on this issue, which is straight forward: Israel has a right, indeed a responsibility, to defend itself against a terrorist group.” The U.S. is simultaneously increasing the flow of weapons to Israel — and Biden proposed $14.5 billion in additional military assistance — while its senior national security official cannot state whether Israel is conducting operations in contravention of international law.

Keenly aware of the growing opposition to Israel’s war at home and abroad, and even within his own administration, Biden and his advisers have sought to push a narrative that they are seeking to moderate Israel’s tactics. They make sure the U.S. press know that Biden had urged against a full-scale ground invasion, proposed limited pauses to the bombing, and expressed concerns about the humanitarian crisis for Palestinian civilians. On Monday, after days of relentless Israeli attacks on Gazan hospitals and desperate pleas from international doctors and health and aid organizations, Biden finally addressed the issue, but only after being directly asked. “Hospitals must be protected,” he said in response to a question from the press. “My hope and expectation is that there will be less intrusive action relative to hospitals.”

The White House’s mounting effort to spin itself as being concerned about civilian deaths and doing all it can to urge Israel to avoid massacring civilians on an industrial scale is an effort to obfuscate the U.S. role as Israel’s central ally enabling this slaughter. It is a grotesque parlor game that only works if facts and history don’t matter. And in Biden’s case, that history is extensive.

Support for Israel’s Wars

For 50 years, Biden has been consistent in his support for Israel’s wars against the Palestinians. Time and again he has backed and facilitated campaigns of terror waged by a nuclear power against a people who have no state, no army, no air force, no navy, and an almost nonexistent civilian infrastructure. As Gaza burns in a smoldering pyre of death and destruction, 80-year-old Biden may be overseeing the final act in his devotion to Israel’s most extreme agenda. His legacy should be forever haunted by the names of the dead children of Gaza, thousands of whom have died in a matter of weeks under the hellfire of U.S.-manufactured weapons and support.

Biden has been in public office longer than almost any U.S. politician in history. His career in the U.S. Senate began on the eve of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war when he traveled to meet Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. “I sat across the desk for an hour as she flipped those maps up and down, chain smoking, telling me about the [1967] Six Day War,” Biden said. He called it “one of the most consequential meetings I’ve ever had in my life.” But, as has been in the case with more than a few of Biden’s vignettes about his central role in historical events, in his numerous and varied retelling of that story, he seems to have exaggerated how important that meeting was to Meir and the Israelis.

Over the ensuing decades and up to the current horrors being inflicted on the people of Gaza, Biden has operated as one of the staunchest promoters of Israel’s colonialist agenda, often defending Israel’s disproportionate use of force, collective punishment, and at times outright massacres. “Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” Biden said on the Senate floor in 1986. He repeated that same line earlier this year during a July visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Washington. During Biden’s trip to Israel last month, as Israel intensified its attacks on Gaza and the civilian death toll skyrocketed, he told Netanyahu and his war cabinet, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”

Building support for Israel’s military might and funneling money and political support to Israel has been a central component of Biden’s career-long foreign policy agenda. He is fond of calling himself “Israel’s best Catholic friend.” In 2016, during a visit to Israel, Netanyahu heaped praise on Biden, then vice president. “The people of Israel consider the Biden family part of our family,” he said. “I want to thank you personally for your, for our personal friendship of over 30 years. We’ve known each other a long time. We’ve gone through many trials and tribulations. And we have an enduring bond that represents the enduring bond between our people.”

There is one story from these decades of Biden’s dedication to Israel that seems eerily prescient given the bloodbath playing out in Gaza right now. It took place early in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In public, Biden was neither a cheerleader for the invasion nor an opponent. But in a private meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Prime Minister Menachem Begin in June 1982, Biden’s support for the brutality of the invasion appeared to outstrip even that of the Israeli government.

As the Israeli prime minister was grilled in the Senate over Israel’s disproportionate use of force, including the targeting of civilians with cluster bomb munitions, Biden, in Begin’s words, “rose and delivered a very impassioned speech” defending the invasion. Upon his return to Israel, Begin told Israeli reporters he was shocked when Biden “said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.” Begin said, “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” adding, “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war. Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.”

Coming from Begin, the comments were striking, because he had been notorious as a leader of the Irgun, a militant group that carried out some of the worst acts of ethnic cleansing accompanying the creation of the state of Israel, including the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre. The details of his exchange with Biden about Lebanon did not receive attention in the U.S. press. Instead, the New York Times focused on what it termed the “bitterest exchange” between Biden and Begin over the issue of Israeli settlements, which Biden opposed because, he said, it was hurting Israel’s reputation in the U.S. “He hinted — more than hinted — that if we continue with this policy, it is possible that he will propose cutting our financial aid,” Begin alleged.

Over the years, Biden has referenced this confrontation when explaining his opposition to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a disagreement among very good friends. Biden has long argued that these expansions undermine prospects for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, though his rhetoric has often been contradicted by his actions, as was the case with his opposition to last week’s U.N. vote labeling the settlements illegal.

“Innocents Got Killed”

In the 1990s, as Biden solidified his reputation as a top foreign policy senator, he often helped shepherd legislation and funding packages to Israel that human rights groups and international aid organizations said would hinder efforts at brokering lasting peace and further entrench the state of apartheid imposed on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Biden was an early proponent of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a move that finally took place in 2018 under the Trump administration. In 1995, Biden helped pass a Senate resolution demanding that the embassy be moved by May of that year. Despite objections that it would harm ongoing Israeli–Palestinian peace talks by deciding a key issue by fiat, Biden said the move would send a positive signal to the region. “To do less would play into the hands of those who would do their hardest to deny Israel the full attributes of statehood,” Biden said.

In 2001, following rare public criticism from the Bush administration directed at Israel’s policy of assassinating suspected Palestinian militants, Biden defended Israel’s right to carry out such killings and even rebuked President George W. Bush for criticizing them. “My view has always been that disagreements between Israel and the United States, those differences should be aired privately, not publicly,” Biden said. He also defended the legality of targeted killings, which at the time were considered highly questionable by legal experts for occurring outside a declared conflict. “I don’t believe this is a policy of assassinations,” Biden said, referring to the targeting of suspected Hamas members. “There is in effect a declared war, a declaration by an organization that has said its goal is to do as much as it can to kill Israeli civilians.”

In July 2006, Israel was bombing both Gaza and southern Lebanon, with Biden cheering it on. The Israelis, Biden said on MSNBC, “have in both cases, both in Gaza and in southern Lebanon, done the right thing.” In the face of international condemnations of Israel’s brutality in its attacks, Biden defended Israel. “I find it fascinating — people talk about, ‘Has Israel gone too far?’ No one talks about whether Israel’s justified in the first place,” he said on “Meet the Press.” Unless critics of Israel recognize that it was a victim of terrorism, he said, “I think it’s awful — I think it’s a secondary question whether Israel’s gone too far.”

Biden said his “only criticism of the Israelis is they’re not that great at public relations.” He compared Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. “It’s a little bit like the same thing we had when we went into Afghanistan,” Biden said at a press conference in July 2006. “We went into Afghanistan, remember, we took out a wedding party by accident? Remember, we took out — with these very sophisticated missiles we had, we accidentally killed some citizens? Was ever a war more justified than us going into Afghanistan? I can’t think of any war since World War II more justified. Yet innocents got killed in us trying to protect America’s interests.” By August 2006, more than 1,000 people were killed in Israel’s war against Lebanon, and UNICEF estimated that 30 percent of the casualties were children.

During his time as vice president, Biden often played the role of placating his friend Netanyahu who famously loathed President Barack Obama. During those eight years, Obama largely maintained long-standing U.S. posture of showering Israel with weapons and other aid despite repeated political spats with Netanyahu, most prominently over Iran and Israeli settlements. During numerous episodes when Israel unleashed gratuitous violence, drawing international condemnation, Biden served as Israel’s most prominent American defender.

In the early summer of 2010, a group of mostly Turkish activists attempted to deliver a flotilla of humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. The attempt was interdicted by the Israeli military, which launched a raid on one ship that resulted in the deaths of nine people, including one American citizen. The raid triggered an international outcry and led to a diplomatic crisis between Israel and Turkey, while drawing further attention to the civilian impact of the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza.

Biden took the lead in defending the raid to the U.S. public. In an interview with PBS, he described the raid as “legitimate” and argued that the flotilla organizers could have disembarked elsewhere before transferring the aid to Gaza. “So what’s the big deal here? What’s the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza?” Biden asked about the humanitarian mission. “Well, it’s legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don’t know what’s on that ship. These guys are dropping eight — 3,000 rockets on my people.’” No weapons were ever found on the ship, only humanitarian supplies. Amid the fury that the raid generated and the muted response from Obama, Biden’s remarks were welcomed by AIPAC spokesperson Josh Block, who said at the time, “We appreciate the many strong statements of support for Israel from members of Congress and the vice president today.”

After the 2014 Gaza war — a seven-week Israeli ground invasion that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians (two-thirds of them civilians) and caused widespread displacement and destruction of civilian infrastructure — Biden boasted of how the Obama administration had “steadfastly stood before the world and defended Israel’s right to defend itself,” declaring, “We have an obligation to match the steel and the spine of the people of Israel with an ironclad, nonnegotiable commitment to Israel’s physical security.”

In May 2021, a few months into Biden’s presidency, Israel intensified its ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem, forcibly evicting people from their homes to hand them over to Israeli settlers. The incendiary situation was then exacerbated during a Ramadan siege by Israeli forces at one of the holiest sites in Islam, Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. In response, Hamas began launching rockets into Israel. Netanyahu retaliated by ordering a massive 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, striking residential buildings, media outlets, hospitals, and a refugee camp.

As the civilian death toll among Palestinians began to rise, Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, characterized the operation as Israel exercising its right to self-defense. When he was then asked whether the principle of self-defense also applied to Palestinians, he struggled to answer before saying, “Broadly speaking, we believe in the concept of self-defense. We believe it applies to any state.” When Matt Lee of The Associated Press pointed out that Palestinians do not have a state, Price said, “I’m not in a position to debate the legalities from up here.”

More than 250 Palestinians died during Israel’s siege, including dozens of children. More than 70,000 Palestinians were displaced. Throughout the bombing, the U.S. staunchly defended Israel’s disproportionate attacks, with Biden declaring on May 16, “there has not been a significant overreaction” from Israel before pivoting to condemn Hamas’s firing of rockets into civilian areas of Israel.

Evidence of Genocidal Intent

Following Hamas’s horrifying attacks on October 7, Biden and his administration have defended Israel’s mass bombardment of Gaza, and U.S. weapons shipments have been accelerated. Biden called his proposal for additional military support an “unprecedented commitment to Israel’s security that will sharpen Israel’s qualitative military edge,” saying, “We’re going to make sure other hostile actors in the region know that Israel is stronger than ever.”

This crisis has undoubtedly solidified Biden’s legacy as one of the premiere American defenders of Israel’s crimes, including disproportionate attacks against an overwhelmingly defenseless civilian population, in the history of U.S. politics.

In an alternate reality — one where the rule of law is applied equally to all states — Israeli leaders would likely face war crimes charges for the razing of Gaza. Leading genocide scholars and international law experts have cited the statements of Israeli officials about the aims of their operations in Gaza as potential evidence of “genocidal intent.” A coalition of international lawyers representing Palestinian rights groups has already petitioned the International Criminal Court to open a criminal inquiry and issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other officials.

Such attempts at accountability should not focus solely on Israeli leaders, according to some U.S. constitutional law organizations. The U.S. is Israel’s premiere bankroller and arms dealer, not to mention its political defender. There are several U.S. laws and treaties that prohibit support for, and failure to prevent, genocidal activities. Among these is the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, signed into law in 1988. Its sponsor? A senator named Joe Biden.

On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza seeking to block the Biden administration from providing further military aid to Israel. The suit names Biden, Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “They have continued to provide both military and political support for Israel’s unfolding genocidal campaign while imposing no red lines,” said Katherine Gallagher, one of the lawyers who filed the case. “The United States has a clear and binding obligation to prevent, not further, genocide. They have failed in meeting their legal and moral duty to use their considerable power to end this horror. They must do so.”

It is unfathomable, given the current world order, that any meaningful legal accountability will be served on U.S. or Israeli leaders. But on a moral level, it is important to remember these legal efforts to confront the slaughter and the complicity of Biden and other Western leaders. The U.S.-enabled horrors of the past five weeks should remain a bloody, permanent stain on the fabric of Biden’s political career and legacy. Among the U.S. political elite, it will simply be noted as Biden doing his job.

The post Biden’s Legacy Should Be Forever Haunted by the Names of Gaza’s Dead Children appeared first on The Intercept.

Mogadishu, SOMALIA — Mariam Shilow Muse was born in the springtime. When relatives dropped by, the bright-eyed 4-year-old bolted through the yard and beyond the fence to greet them. When her father came home, she smothered him with hugs.

In late March 2018, Mariam’s mother, 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed, planned to visit her brother to see his children for the first time, and Mariam insisted on coming along to meet her young cousins. Luul’s brother had planned to pick them up, but Luul couldn’t reach him by phone, so on the morning of April 1, she and Mariam caught a ride with some men in a maroon Toyota Hilux pickup.

That same afternoon, as Luul’s brother Qasim Dahir Mohamed was on his way to pick up his sister and niece, he passed the maroon Toyota pickup. He noticed mattresses and pillows in the bed and, at the last second, caught sight of Luul, with Mariam on her lap, in the passenger seat. He waved and honked, but the truck kept going. 

Qasim’s phone wasn’t working, so he decided to drive on to El Buur, where Luul and Mariam had just spent the night, to see other relatives before returning home to welcome his sister and niece. Seconds after he reached the house, Qasim heard the first explosion, followed by another and, after a pause, one more blast.

This is a story about missed connections, flawed intelligence, and fatal blindness, about Americans misreading what they saw and obliterating civilians they didn’t intend to kill but didn’t care enough to save. In rural Somalia, cellphones often fail because the militant group al-Shabab forces the local carrier to suspend service to thwart informants and government eavesdropping. But after the explosions, the telecom immediately restored service. Qasim began calling Luul, but her phone rang endlessly.

The news spread fast: A drone strike had hit a pickup carrying mattresses. Qasim and one of his brothers started driving toward the site of the attack. They were the only ones on the road and his brother demanded they stop, Qasim told me when we met recently in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. It was too dangerous, the brother said. What if they were targeted by another strike? “I told him that I didn’t care,” Qasim recalled.

Qasim wasn’t the only person to spot the Toyota pickup that day. In a military joint operations center that the U.S. government refuses to identify, members of a Special Operations task force that officials won’t name watched live footage that they declined to release of everyone who entered the Hilux. They recorded and scrutinized it, chronicling when each “ADM” — or adult male — got in or out, where they walked and what they did. The Americans logged these minute details with a pretense of precision, but they never understood what they were seeing.

For all their technology and supposed expertise, the Americans were confused, and some were inexperienced, according to a Pentagon investigation obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act. The inquiry is the first such document to be made public about a U.S. drone strike in Africa. It reveals that after months of “target development,” the Americans suddenly found themselves in a mad rush to kill people who posed no threat to the United States in a war that Congress never declared. They argued among themselves about even the most basic details, like how many passengers were in the vehicle. And in the end, they got it wrong. The Americans couldn’t tell a man from a woman, which might have affected their decision to conduct the strike. They also missed the 4-year-old child whose presence should have caused them to stand down.

In the joint operations center, the Americans quickly realized their initial strike had failed to kill all the passengers and decided to eliminate what the investigation file refers to as a sole “survivor running away from vehicle post the first engagement.” But the “survivor” was actually two people: Luul and Mariam. Seconds later, another missile screamed down from the sky.

“It seemed like they did everything wrong,” said an American drone pilot who worked in Somalia and examined the investigation file at The Intercept’s request.

When Qasim found the Toyota, the roof was torn open, the bed was smashed, and the mattresses and pillows were aflame. Four men were dead inside and another young man lay lifeless in the dirt nearby. There was no sign of Luul or Mariam.

About 200 feet away, Qasim found what remained of Luul. Her left leg was mangled, and the top of her head was missing. She died clutching Mariam, whose body was peppered with tiny shards of shrapnel.

Qasim tore off a swath of his sarong and began gathering up small pieces of his sister. Stunned and grieving, he spent hours searching for fragments of her body along the dirt road, working by the glare of his car’s headlights as the sky darkened. Finally, he bundled Luul’s and Mariam’s remains and brought them home. Luul’s body was so mutilated that it was impossible to properly wash, as is required in Islam. Instead, he wrapped her with care in a shroud and buried Luul and Mariam together in a village cemetery. The next day, locals living near the strike site called Qasim. They had found the top of Luul’s skull, complete with hair and a delicate gold teardrop dangling from one ear.

That same day — April 2 — U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, announced it had killed “five terrorists” and destroyed one vehicle and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” The Somali press immediately said otherwise. By the following month, the task force had appointed an investigating officer to sort it all out. He quickly determined that his unit had killed an “adult female and child” but expressed doubt that their identities would ever be known. 

“We Can Do Whatever We Want”

The exclusive documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former U.S. and Somali military personnel and government officials, victims’ relatives, and experts offer an unprecedented window into the U.S. drone war in Somalia, an investigator’s efforts to excuse the killing of a woman and child, and a “reporting error” that kept those deaths secret for more than a year from Congress, the press, and the American people. The Intercept’s investigation reveals that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths.

“Ultimately, this is just one of many tragedies caused by the U.S. military’s systemic failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants, to own up to its deadly mistakes, to learn from them, and to provide assistance to survivors,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “The failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants isn’t just tragic. It’s also a violation of international law and completely undermines U.S. counterterrorism strategy.” 

More than five years after the strike, Mariam and Luul’s family has not been contacted by any U.S. official or received a condolence payment. Over two days this spring, I met with eight of their relatives in Mogadishu. They spoke about Mariam’s wide smile, Luul’s nurturing role as a sister and mother of two, and the terror that haunts Luul’s surviving son. Their anguish and outrage were palpable, particularly when I showed them the findings of the formerly secret U.S. investigation.

If the Somali military had killed Americans in similar circumstances, Abdi Dahir Mohammed, another of Luul’s brothers, told The Intercept, “the United States would have reacted and the Somali government would have reacted. The pain that Americans would feel is the pain that we feel. They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable. We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”

The attack was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed and imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members considered themselves inexperienced, according to the documents. The secret investigation led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias, a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information that confirms their preexisting beliefs. Despite this, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” wrote the investigator. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, seemed staggered as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told The Intercept. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

“How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

AFRICOM declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about the attack or civilian casualties in general. When the command finally admitted the killings in 2019, AFRICOM’s then-commander, Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, said it was “critically important that people understand we adhere to exacting standards and when we fall short, we acknowledge shortcomings and take appropriate action.”

Some who took part in America’s drone war in Somalia dispute that. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention,” the drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed, told The Intercept. He spoke on the condition of anonymity due to government secrecy surrounding U.S. drone operations. “It was like ‘We can do whatever we want.’ It was a different mindset from the Special Forces I worked with in Afghanistan. There was almost no quality control on the vetting of the strikes. A lot of safeguards got left out.”

Those safeguards began to evaporate once Donald Trump took office in 2017, and their absence was soon felt across Africa and the Middle East. Under international law, governments cannot kill people they deem to be enemies outside of recognized battlefields if they do not pose an imminent danger or can be stopped another way. But just days after Trump entered the White House, the Pentagon reportedly asked for parts of Somalia to be declared an “area of active hostilities,” allowing the military to employ looser, war-zone targeting despite the lack of a congressional declaration of war. “It allows us to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion,” Waldhauser said that March, emphasizing the need for a “little more flexibility, a little bit more timeliness in terms of [the] decision-making process.”

In response, Trump, now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, secretly issued rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia skyrocketed.

“The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. During the Obama administration, strikes required high-level approval, the strike cell analyst said. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.”

Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, spiked. The U.S. conducted 208 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a 460 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. (The Biden administration has conducted 31 declared strikes there, including 13 so far in 2023.)

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that, in some countries, “operating principles,” including a “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations,” were reportedly enforced only for women and children, while a lower standard applied to civilian adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, Bolduc said.

There was another possible contributing factor to civilian casualties. During 2017 and 2018, commanders within Task Force 111, the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC-led unit responsible for drone attacks in Somalia, Libya, and Yemen, competed to produce high body counts, raising red flags in the intelligence community, according to a U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic.

Further down the chain of command, new awards — special “remote” devices on medals to recognize the work of drone operators in combat zones — encouraged attacks, according to the strike cell analyst. “That made some people want to do more strikes,” the analyst said. “They want to brag about being in combat.”

Left/Top: People stand next to destroyed walls at the scene of an al-Shabab car bombing attack in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Dec. 22, 2018. Right/Bottom: Somali soldiers at Sanguuni military base, where an American special operations soldier was killed by a mortar attack on June 13, 2018. Photos: AFP via Getty Images

“The United States Failed Us”

Less than a month before Luul and Mariam were killed, Waldhauser praised AFRICOM’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties before the House Armed Services Committee. He specifically referenced procedures meant to ensure “levels of certainty” to prevent harm to noncombatants. Days later, he emphasized that it was “very important … that we know exactly who we are attacking on the ground.”

Yet the Pentagon investigation found that the Americans had no idea who they were targeting. “During the post-strike review,” according to the investigator, “it was assessed that one of the ADM that loaded into the vehicle … was an Adult Female and child.”

Three Somali government sources — including Nur Gutale, a Somali official on the front lines of the conflict against al-Shabab in El Buur, where the drone strike took place — said there were seven people in the pickup truck that day, not the four or five the Americans argued about before the strike or the six their most seasoned analyst counted after numerous post-strike reviews of drone footage.

The men in the truck included members of al-Shabab: Alas Jango’an, the driver and the local head of Jaysh Al-Hisbah, al-Shabab’s police force; a tax collector with the militant group; and a poet associated with the group, who was identified in local press reports as Yusuf Dhegay. Others said a community elder in the car, identified as Ali Hared, also had relations with the militants, but they were unsure if he and the poet were “real” members or simply — like most civilians living in Shabab-controlled areas — compelled to deal with an armed group that functioned as the local government.

But the young man whose body Qasim found sprawled beside the pickup after the strike, 20-year-old Yusuf Dahir Ali, was a civilian, Gutale and others said. “He was a student in Mogadishu. It was school break, and he was just traveling home,” Gutale told The Intercept. “He was innocent.”

The Pentagon redacted all images of Luul and Mariam in the documents they released. The former U.S. strike cell analyst said those still frames from the drone footage — known as “snaps” — “would seal the deal on how blatantly obvious it was. If you got a snap of the woman and child running from the vehicle, you would be able to go: ‘How don’t you see that as a female and child?’” the analyst told The Intercept. “Typically, males in Somalia wear a dress-type thing. But women still look very different. If it’s during the day, you can tell.”

Nur Gutale agreed, insisting that even if the Americans confused a woman for a man when she entered the vehicle, there was no way to mistake her as she ran down the road with her child. Qasim noted that Luul was wearing a flowing green jilbab: a garment more voluminous than a hijab, covering the entire body and leaving only the face, hands, and feet exposed. “Because al-Shabab is there in the area, she had to wear it,” Luul’s brother Mohamed Dahir Mohamed explained of the terror group’s strict dress code. He likened Luul’s garb to a huge umbrella.

“Her death isn’t only what makes me angry. It’s that they say that they mistakenly killed her. That hurts me deeply. It was no mistake,” said Qasim, a formidable man with a hard stare, close-cropped hair, and a bright orange, henna-dyed goatee. “She wasn’t killed in the car where they couldn’t see her. She was hit out in the open. There is no way they could mistake her for a man. It’s a lie and it makes me sick.”

“This wasn’t top leadership. These were low-ranking guys. I don’t understand their priorities.”

Gutale said he “had a good relationship with AFRICOM” and provided intelligence on high-ranking Shabab officials, but he found American targeting choices puzzling — especially the strike that killed Luul and Mariam.

“This wasn’t top leadership. These were low-ranking guys. I don’t understand their priorities,” he told The Intercept. “There was no reason to kill a woman and child in a big strike. They know that they did this. The U.S. is at fault.”

“It’s heartbreaking,” he added in exasperation. “The United States failed us.”

Even under the Trump administration’s loosened rules of engagement, Sarah Harrison, who worked as a lawyer in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel at the time of the attack, questioned the follow-up strike that killed Luul and Mariam. “U.S. forces were required by policy to take ‘extraordinary measures to ensure with near certainty’ that there would be no civilians injured or killed,” Harrison told The Intercept. She wondered why the U.S. hadn’t made another “near certainty assessment” before the second strike was carried out.

The investigator found that “some members did not have any FMV experience.”

The Pentagon investigator concluded that “time was the biggest factor” in misidentifying Luul. For reasons that are explained nowhere in the unredacted portion of the documents, the strike cell found itself “under perceived pressure” to launch the attack “as quickly as possible.” Experience levels also loom large in the investigation file. The most senior team member on duty had eight years of experience analyzing full motion video, or FMV, as live feeds from drones are known — a significant track record, according to experts. But the youngest member had spent just six months with the task force and the same amount of time analyzing such feeds. Elsewhere, the investigator asserts that “some members did not have any FMV experience.” One team member noted that “due to a contracting issue, they have lost a lot of experienced personnel.”

“For those without much experience as well as contractors working with a task force, the pressure to say ‘yes’ to get to the commander’s perceived desired outcome is pretty great,” said Todd Huntley, a former Staff Judge Advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere and now directs the national security law program at Georgetown University Law Center. “The combination of confirmation bias and the pressure to move quickly and achieve results is already tough to overcome. When you have less experienced people, that pressure is even greater.”

The investigator determined that no one tracked how much time strike cell members spent in a particular geographic area of responsibility, known in military jargon as an AOR. “This could lead to a very inexperienced crew working in an AOR due to a lack of a Checks and Balance system,” he wrote.

Another of Luul’s brothers, 38-year-old Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, had a succinct response: “If you admit that you assign someone with no experience then you have to take responsibility for what they do.”

The Pentagon investigator urged procedural changes that would affect every subsequent mission: “I recommend that each senior analyst has a brief with their team prior to going on shift to ensure the entire team has the correct mindset and highlights that accuracy is more important than speed.” There is no indication that that recommendation or any others were implemented. 

Erased From Existence

Living in al-Shabab territory in the 2010s, Luul inhabited a world almost devoid of smartphones and social media. Her family has no photographs to remember her by.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, has countless images of Luul. Its cameras captured video of her and Mariam entering the pickup truck, and analysts had eyes on her through her last moments. Luul’s visage now exists only in classified files and in the memories of those who knew her — and in the face of her younger sister, to whom she bore an uncanny, almost identical, resemblance.

“If you want to see Luul, it’s me,” Qaali Dahir Mohamed, Luul’s sad-eyed, soft-spoken, 18-year-old sister, told me when we spoke in a deserted rooftop lounge in Mogadishu. As the only two girls in their household, they shared a tight bond that extended past childhood when, in keeping with local custom, Qaali moved into Luul and Shilow’s home after they married. “When I was young, she used to carry me, protect me, tell me traditional stories to prepare me for life,” said Qaali, who hunched her tall, lithe form as she talked about her sister. “After she had her children, she had me look after them and continued to teach me about how to be responsible, how to be a good mother.” Qaali spoke with her hands, her fingers slowly twisting in the air as she talked about Luul. “She loved her children so much. She couldn’t bear to see them cry,” Qaali said before she sank down in her chair and started wiping away tears.

The entire family has been traumatized by the airstrike. Luul’s brothers say their elderly father never recovered from his daughter’s traumatic death and has been in failing health ever since. When Qasim’s son saw a “normal airplane” flying over their farm, he began running around, trying to hide, convinced it might kill him. The family told Luul’s son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, the truth about his mother’s death: “The Americans killed her with their airplane.” When he sees or hears a drone, they said, “he rushes under a tree to hide.” 

A 2012 study of civilians in Pakistan found that the constant presence of drones, the fear that a strike might occur at any time, and people’s inability to protect themselves “terrorize[d] men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”   

Mohamed, now 6 years old and living with his grandmother, constantly asks why Luul left him. He’s terrified of being alone. “If I or my mother leave him,” said Qaali, “he cries all day. He won’t stop. He feels abandoned.” Unable to continue, Qaali grasped her blue-veiled head with both hands, laid it on the glass table, and sobbed.

“The Height of Disrespect”

On April 5, 2019, Qasim was listening to the radio at a tea shop when he heard a BBC news report about the U.S. military acknowledging that it had killed a woman and child in a drone strike the previous April, the first admission of a civilian casualty by AFRICOM.

The announcement came more than a year after the attack, a delay AFRICOM blamed on a “reporting error,” claiming that its headquarters was only notified of the investigation months after it concluded. Four days later, in response to questions about compensating the family, then-spokesperson John Manley told The Intercept that AFRICOM was “working with our embassy in Somalia on a way forward.” 

On April 12, 2019, Luul’s brother Abubakar wrote a letter to the Somali Ministry of Justice asking for help in obtaining compensation from the United States. Four days later, he wrote to AFRICOM via the “Contact Us” function on the command’s website, noting the family’s appreciation for acknowledging the deaths and asking the military to “take appropriate action toward the case as restitution for the lost lives.” After AFRICOM added a new online portal to file civilian casualty claims, Abubakar did so using this method as well. Abubakar, who lives part-time in Mogadishu and speaks and writes English, shared copies of his letters and screenshots of his submissions with The Intercept. Five years after the strike, the family has yet to be contacted, much less compensated, by AFRICOM.

“It is unacceptable that AFRICOM would resign itself to such total ignorance,” Amnesty’s Eviatar told The Intercept, noting the Pentagon’s repeated failures to contact survivors or offer condolence payments. “It is the height of disrespect for the local populations where the U.S. operates for the military to completely ignore the direct victims of lethal strikes, even when the U.S. knows they were civilians and the strikes were in error.”

After almost 17 years of drone strikes and commando raids in Somalia, the U.S. has carried out 282 declared attacks as well as an undisclosed number of CIA strikes. AFRICOM claims to have killed just five civilians in that period, including Luul and Mariam — although the command has never referred to them by name. But since nothing about the April 2018 attack was out of the ordinary, according to members of the task force, there is good reason to believe that the real number is far higher. Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring organization, says the actual count of civilians killed by U.S. strikes in Somalia may be more than 3,000 percent higher than the official tally. 

Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have increasingly documented America’s killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Out of 1,311 military reports analyzed by Khan, only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement; none included a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action; and fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made. 

Last year, in the wake of these damning findings, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm. 

The Defense Department has publicly confirmed five civilian harm incidents in Somalia and maintains a $3 million annual budget to compensate survivors, but there is no evidence that any Somali victims or their families have ever received amends. The Pentagon has also been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations. 

There’s no re-litigation necessary, however, in the case of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse. More than four years ago, AFRICOM admitted killing them. “Credibility, transparency, and accountability are fundamental to military operations,” Waldhauser said in a press release taking responsibility for the strike. To date, however, AFRICOM won’t even discuss reparations with a journalist, much less provide compensation to relatives of the dead.

Experts say that the deaths of Luul and Mariam offer AFRICOM the chance to finally live up to Waldhauser’s rhetoric. “This case is a real opportunity for AFRICOM, since they’ve acknowledged that this is a credible report of civilian harm,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a human rights attorney and director of the nonprofit Zomia Center’s Redress Program, which helps survivors of U.S. airstrikes submit requests for compensation. “Given that there’s an English-speaking member of the family in Mogadishu, it would not be hard for the Pentagon to offer amends.”

“They Don’t Know Who They Killed”

For most of the day I spent with Shilow Muse Ali in an outdoor restaurant in Mogadishu, he sat slack-jawed and blank-eyed, with a dazed look on his face. Sometimes he seemed confused, sometimes confounded. He answered my questions, but it was difficult to elicit much detail about the wife and child he’d lost. When I decided to end the interview and asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, his eyes narrowed and his demeanor changed.

“I was bewildered at the beginning when my daughter and wife were killed. I expected an apology and compensation considering the Americans’ mistake. But we received nothing,” he said in a voice with an increasingly hard edge. “They admitted there were civilian casualties, but this investigation shows that they don’t even know who they killed.”

For the first time all afternoon, Shilow looked me square in the eye and fury seemed to surge through him. “We aren’t the people they are targeting. We are not supposed to be treated like we’re enemies. Does the U.S. military even see a difference between enemies and civilians?” he asked, his voice rising and his hands slicing through the air. “They said they were following the car from the beginning. How could someone following the car, watching everything, not see a woman with a child?”

I had no answer.

“We want the truth from the American government. But we already know it,” he told me. “This attack shows that there’s no distinction, none at all. The Americans see enemies and civilians as the same.”

The post Secret Pentagon Investigation Found No One at Fault in Drone Strike That Killed Woman and 4-Year-Old appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly a century ago in Nicaragua, American Marines in an armed propeller plane spotted a group of civilian men chopping weeds and trimming trees far below. Convinced that something nefarious was underway, they opened fire. The U.S. never bothered to count the wounded and dead.

Four decades later in Vietnam, American troops hovering above a group of woodcutters grew unnerved when the men, women, and children failed to look up. Without provocation, the Americans unleashed rockets and machine-gun fire. Eight of the nine civilians below were killed.

For hours in 2021, Americans peered down at a man driving through the Afghan capital of Kabul and convinced themselves that he was a terrorist. They launched a missile that killed him and nine other civilians, including seven children.

In each instance, Americans displayed clear signs of confirmation bias, in which people seek information that reinforces their preexisting beliefs. The same failings contributed to a 2018 drone strike in Somalia that killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse.

Over the last century, the U.S. military has shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable. These long-standing practices stand in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s public campaigns to sell its wars as benign, its air campaigns as precise, its concern for civilians as overriding, and the deaths of innocent people as “tragic” anomalies. Such campaigns have mainly served to obscure the true toll of the American way of war, from the “banana wars” of the 1920s to the “forever wars” a century later.

A Stunning Reversal

Prior to World War II, the growing trend of “terror bombing” in conflicts across China, Ethiopia, and Spain outraged Americans. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt lamented that “without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.”

Soon after, however, the military embraced policies that put civilians at grave risk. During World War II, a British bombing raid on Dresden, Germany, created a firestorm that ripped through the city, suffocating and cooking people alive. A second British wave was followed by hundreds of U.S. bombers. All told, 25,000 to 35,000 people were incinerated. Confronted with “terror bombing” allegations after the attack, the head of U.S. Army Air Forces protested that war “must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” Roughly 600,000 German civilians were killed in air raids during the war. 

In Japan, the U.S. attacked 67 cities, burning 180 square miles, killing more than 600,000 civilians, and leaving 8.5 million homeless. The massive death and destruction led Secretary of War Henry Stimson to worry that the United States would “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” Nonetheless, Stimson signed off on an atomic strike on the city of Hiroshima that killed 140,000 people, mostly civilians, and another on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 70,000. The United States has never compensated those victims’ families or survivors of the attacks.

At war in Korea not long after, Gen. Douglas MacArthur declared that every city and village in the north was to be destroyed. And they were. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay later bragged that the U.S. had “killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.”

The amount of ordnance dropped on Korea was dwarfed by the 30 billion pounds of munitions the U.S. expended in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. Years before the war’s end, South Vietnam was already pockmarked with an estimated 21 million craters, some more than 20 feet across. In neighboring Cambodia, between 1969 and 1973, U.S. attacks killed as many as 150,000 civilians. The United States also pounded tiny Laos with more than 2 million tons of munitions, making it, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in history.

Key elements of America’s destructive brand of air war echo into the present. In recent weeks, Israeli officials have repeatedly justified attacks on Gaza by citing methods employed by the United States and its allies against Germany and other Axis powers during World War II. The United Nations has said “there is already clear evidence that war crimes may have been committed” by the Israeli military and Hamas militants. Israel has also embraced the use of “free-fire zones” — which the U.S. employed to open wide swaths of South Vietnam to almost unrestrained attack, killing countless civilians — in Gaza.

“We Didn’t Have All the Information”

A strike cell analyst who watched live video feeds from drones and helped make decisions about airstrikes offered The Intercept unprecedented insights about the U.S. air war in Somalia. He explained that, as Americans watch targets from the sky, a series of “wickets” — such as the absence of civilians or a potential target seen associating with a “known bad guy” — must be achieved before launching a strike. “When I was in Afghanistan, you normally had to hit five wickets, and in Africa, these ‘wickets’ were lessened,” he said. “I never really figured out what was a go or no-go in Somalia. It seemed to be all over the place. We often didn’t have all the information that we should have had to conduct a strike.”

When the strike cell analyst counted the civilians he knew the U.S. had killed and compared that tally with publicly announced figures, he said, “the numbers just didn’t add up.” Once, he recalled, the commandos he worked with pressured him to conduct a drone strike he was sure would endanger civilians. He refused to label the people he saw “adult-age males,” which would have allowed an air attack, he said. That forced them to conduct a ground operation against members of the terror group al-Shabab and saved some lives, but not all. “We knew that we killed two al-Shabab, but we also knew that we killed civilians,” he said, having watched video of the mission in real-time. “And nothing happened with that at all. I was really shocked by that. I thought we were going to be put under investigation, and I was going to have to go before some type of board. But nothing came of it.”

During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. 

A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found most have gone uninvestigated. When they do come under official scrutiny, American military witnesses are interviewed while civilians — victims, survivors, family members — are almost totally ignored, “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute. That was the case with the 2018 Somalia strike that killed Luul and her daughter Mariam.

“It is unacceptable that in this strike and so many others, civilian survivors and families continue to struggle to get any kind of acknowledgment from the United States. The Department of Defense should urgently make long-overdue amends in consultation with the family,” said Annie Shiel, CIVIC’s U.S. advocacy director. “The family and the public at large also deserve transparency into the basis for this strike in the first place and how and why it resulted in the horrific deaths of a civilian mother and her young child.”

The post For a Century, the American Way of War Has Meant Killing Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

“I am writing on behalf of NSO Group to urgently request an opportunity to engage with Secretary Blinken and the officials at the State Department regarding the importance of cyber intelligence technology in the wake of the grave security threats posed by the recent Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath,” wrote Timothy Dickinson, partner at the Los Angeles-based law firm Paul Hastings, headquartered in Los Angeles, on behalf of NSO. 

In the last two years NSO’s reputation has taken a beating amid revelations about its spyware’s role in human rights abuses. 

As controversy was erupting over its role in authoritarian governments’ spying, NSO Group was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce in November 2021, “to put human rights at the center of US foreign policy,” the agency said at the time. A month after the blacklisting, it was revealed that Pegasus had been used to spy on American diplomats. 

NSO’s letter to Blinken — publicly filed as part of Paul Hastings’s obligation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — is part of the company’s latest attempt to reinvent its image and, most importantly, a bid to reverse the blacklisting. (Neither the State Department nor Paul Hastings responded to requests for comment.)

For NSO, the blacklisting has been an existential threat. The push to reverse it, which included hiring multiple American public relations and law firms, has cost NSO $1.5 million in lobbying last year, more than the government of Israel itself spent. It focused heavily on Republican politicians, many of whom are now vocal in their support of Israel, and against a ceasefire in the brutal war being waged by the country in the Gaza Strip. 

Amid the Israeli war effort, NSO appears more convinced than ever that it is of use to the American government. 

“NSO’s technology is supporting the current global fight against terrorism in any and all forms,” said the letter to Blinken. “These efforts squarely align with the Biden-Harris administration’s repeated messages and actions of support for the Israeli government.” 

NSO is marketing itself as a volunteer in the Israeli war effort, allegedly helping track down missing Israelis and hostages. And at this moment, which half a dozen experts have described to The Intercept as NSO’s attempt at “crisis-washing,” some believe that the American government may create a space for NSO to come back to the table. 

“NSO’s participation in the Israeli government’s efforts to locate citizens in Gaza seems to be an effort by the company to rehabilitate its image in this crisis,” said Adam Shapiro, director of advocacy for Israel–Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a group founded by the slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi to advocate for human rights in the Middle East. “But alarm bells should be ringing that NSO Group has been recruited in Israel’s war effort.”

Documents obtained by The Intercept through FARA and public records requests illustrate the company’s intense lobbying efforts — especially among hawkish, pro-Israel Republicans.

Working on NSO’s behalf, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a New York-based law firm, held over half a dozen meetings between March and August with Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee as well as Oversight and Reform. One was to “discuss status of Bureau of Industry and Security Communications, U.S. Department of Commerce appeal.” (Pillsbury did not respond to a request for comment.)

“NSO’s participation in the Israeli government’s efforts to locate citizens in Gaza seems to be an effort by the company to rehabilitate its image in this crisis.”

The lobbyists also had three meetings in March and April with Justin Discigil, then chief of staff to the far-right Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. (Neither Sessions nor Crenshaw responded to requests for comment.)

Public records about NSO’s push also offer concrete examples of something the company has been at pains to evade, and that the American government has routinely overlooked: the existing relationship between the Israeli state and the spyware company. 

“NSO’s Pegasus tool is treated in Israel as a defense article subject to regulation by the country’s regulators, which conducts its own assessment of human rights risks in countries across the world,” the letter to Blinken said. 

A previously unreported May 2022 email from Department of Commerce official Elena Love to lobbyists for NSO also draws a connection between the Israeli government and NSO. In her email, Love asked the lobbyists working to undo NSO’s blacklisting for permission to send a list of questions directly to Israeli officials. (The Department of Commerce said there is no change to the status of NSO on the blacklist and declined to comment further. NSO Group and the Israeli government did not respond to requests for comment.)

Currently, in the war effort, the Israeli government is letting NSO sit upfront. In a podcast by the Israeli news outlet Haaretz from October 19 — podcasts are less heavily censored by the government than written articles — a reporter discusses how NSO has reported for duty, in essence taken on work for the Ministry of Defense.

“What’s really, really important to understand is that these companies,” said Haaretz journalist Omer Benjakob in the podcast, “some of them have already been working with the state of Israel.”

Hiring Lobbyists in D.C.

By selling its spyware to authoritarian governments, NSO has facilitated a variety of human rights abuses: from use by the United Arab Emirates to spy on Khashoggi, the journalist later killed by Saudi Arabia, to reporting just this week on its use to spy on Indian journalists. According to the research group Forensic Architecture, the use of NSO Group’s products has contributed to over 150 physical attacks against journalists, rights advocates, and other civil society actors, including some of their deaths. 

Now the company is mounting a rapacious public relations push to undo the harm to its reputation. 

NSO’s recent hiring of two lobbyists, Jeffrey Weiss and Stewart Baker, from the Washington-based white-shoe law firm Steptoe & Johnson, was made public at the end of October in a filing with the House of Representatives. On behalf of NSO, the firm was to address “US national security and export control policy in an international context.”

Baker, former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security and a former National Security Agency general counsel, previously told The Associated Press, before representing NSO, that the blacklisting of the company “certainly isn’t a death penalty and may over time just be really aggravating.” 

Weiss, for his part, had relevant experience to help get NSO off the Department of Commerce blacklist: He was deputy director of policy and strategic planning at the agency from 2013 to 2017. 

Weiss and another Steptoe & Johnson partner, Eric Emerson, had also been hired by the Israeli government a few months earlier, according to previously unreported FARA documents. Weiss registered to provide both services to the Economic and Trade Mission at the Embassy of Israel in July, and then NSO in October. 

Emerson, who has worked at Steptoe for over 30 years specializing in international trade law and policy issues, registered to engage with Natalie Gutman-Chen, Israeli minister of trade and economic affairs. Documents show that Steptoe’s annual budget for this work is $180,000.

Steptoe’s description of its work for the Israeli mission is similar to its goals for the NSO contract: to “provide advice on various international trade related matters affecting the State of Israel” which will be used “to develop its position w/re various U.S. policies.” 

It is not illegal to register to lobby for two affiliated clients, and powerful law firms doing lobbying work often do so for purposes of efficiency and holding meetings together.

“It is not uncommon to kill two birds with one stone,” said Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigations manager at OpenSecrets, which tracks lobbying money in Washington. “It’s possible NSO got a discount because they already had Israel.” 

“It’s possible NSO got a discount because they already had Israel.”

On October 30, amid the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, Steptoe filed their supplemental statement, in which lobbyists are supposed to detail their meetings and outreach to the Department of Justice. It was left curiously blank, perhaps portending a later amendment to the filing. (“The filing covers what we have been asked to advise on and we can’t comment any further at this time,” Steptoe said in a statement.)

“It’s hard to prove it’s deliberate,” Massoglia said. “But the timing is interesting.” 

Ties to Israeli Government 

Last year, a previously unreported email, obtained through a public records request, provided another example of the interweaving relationship between the Israeli government and NSO.

In May 2022, Love, the acting chair of the End-User Review Committee at the Department of Commerce, emailed lobbyists at Steptoe and Pillsbury. Love sent along a list of questions for their client, NSO, about the company’s appeal to be removed from the blacklist.

“We are also requesting permission to provide these questions to the government of Israel,” Love wrote. 

The email, however, had been sent about a year and half before Steptoe filed FARA registrations for its staff to lobby on behalf of NSO — and raises questions about adherence to the foreign lobbying law. (Pillsbury was registered under FARA at the time.)

FARA requires lobbyists to register with the Department of Justice when taking on foreign principals — both governments and companies — as clients.

“What has never been a gray area under FARA is if you are communicating directly with the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign principal, that’s a political activity,” said Ben Freeman, director of the democratizing foreign policy program at the Quincy Institute. Of the period when Steptoe was working for NSO but hadn’t registered yet, Freeman said, “By skirting FARA registration, they are really playing with fire.” 

Though FARA cases have increased since 2016, charges brought by the Justice Department remain relatively rare. The statute itself is forgiving, the enforcement mechanisms like warning letters often render failures to register moot, and, with so little case law owing to so few indictments, prosecutors are loath to try their hand at bringing charges. (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

“By skirting FARA registration, they are really playing with fire.”

In a letter sent to the Justice Department in July of last year, Democracy for the Arab World Now called on the government to investigate what, at the time, was described as the firms’ lack of registration as agents for Israel under FARA. “We believe that misrepresentation to be intentional,” the letter said.

None of the four companies hired by NSO said in their registrations that there is any Israeli government control over the spyware group, despite the evidence laid out by Democracy for the Arab World Now of Israeli influence on the company that meets the U.S. definition of government control. This includes the fact that all of NSO’s contracts are determined by the government of Israel, allegedly to serve political interests.

The Department of Justice, however, does not give updates or responses to such referrals. Neither has it published an opinion or issued a penalty. 

“Based on FARA filings, one would be under the impression that NSO was a run of the mill private corporate entity,” said Shapiro, of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “But given its role in spyware, understanding the government’s control is really important.”

The post Israeli Spyware Firm NSO Demands “Urgent” Meeting With Blinken Amid Gaza War Lobbying Effort 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.

“As evidenced by the events of the past month, the terrorist threat landscape is highly dynamic and our country must preserve [counterterrorism] fundamentals to ensure constant vigilance,” said Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, after making repeat references to Hamas’s attack on Israel.

She pointed to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the U.S. government to gather vast amounts of intelligence — including about U.S. citizens — under the broad category of foreign intelligence information, without first seeking a warrant.

Section 702 “provides key indications and warning on terrorist plans and intentions, supports international terrorist disruptions, enables critical intelligence support to, for instance, border security, and gives us strategic insight into foreign terrorists and their networks overseas,” Abizaid said. “I respectfully urge Congress to reauthorize this vital authority.”

The controversial program is set to expire at the end of the year, and lawmakers sympathetic to the intelligence community are scrambling to protect it, as some members of Congress like Sen. Ron Wyden push for reforms that restrain the government’s surveillance abilities. According to Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, plans are underway to prepare a stopgap measure to preserve Section 702 of FISA as a long-term reauthorization containing reforms is hammered out. 

Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel at the civil liberties group Demand Progress, told The Intercept that now is the time to enact lasting and dramatic oversight of the 702 authority. “The government has completely failed to demonstrate that any of the privacy protections reformers have called for would impair national security, all while surveillance hawks in Congress have suffered a series of setbacks, so now we’re seeing people grasping at straws trying to turn everything into an excuse for reauthorization,” Vitka said.

“We’re seeing people grasping at straws trying to turn everything into an excuse for reauthorization.”

He added that “agencies’ refusal to embrace this as a once-in-a generation opportunity to protect Americans’ civil liberties and reform our broken surveillance apparatus” could doom 702 in the long run.

Created in 1978, FISA was vastly expanded in the aftermath of 9/11 to provide federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies enhanced surveillance powers. While it was originally described as a way to collect information on foreign entities, the law enables the targeting of U.S. citizens in contact with foreign nationals.

This loophole makes it easy for federal agencies to target wide swaths of the U.S. population, and it has for years been condemned by civil liberties advocates who view it as a clear-cut instance of governmental overreach. The 702 authority has been abused to such a great extent that President Joe Biden’s own intelligence advisory board recommended curtailing the FBI’s ability to manipulate the authority to investigate and prosecute Americans.

The Brennan Center for Justice last month issued a document noting that the FBI has used the 702 authority to spy on U.S. representatives, senators, civil liberties organizations, political campaigns, and activists. Civil libertarians have proposed various reforms to the authority, including limits on the types of communication the FBI can search, the implementation of stringent warrant requirements to restrict FISA searches, and an end to the loophole that allows federal agencies to surveil Americans by purchasing data from private sector brokers. 

Abizaid’s statements to the Senate Homeland Security Committee followed similar appeals by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who also spoke at the hearing. The push to extend the government’s surveillance powers comes as elected officials call for investigations into pro-Palestine groups — drawing condemnation from numerous civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

Already in Virginia, the attorney general has initiated an investigation into the nonprofit American Muslims for Palestine’s fundraising activities, including allegations that it supports Hamas, a designated terror group. The organization described the investigation as a dangerous and baseless smear.

Meanwhile in Congress, the Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning students supporting Palestine on college campuses. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote to the Department of Justice to request an investigation into student groups at various universities that have seen large gatherings protesting the war in Gaza. “There is a long and sordid history of supposedly independent ‘human rights’ groups operating within American borders, that possess longstanding ties to foreign terrorist organizations,” Hawley wrote. “It is entirely possible that many of these student organizations, at some level or another, are enmeshed in similar networks — whether as recipients of funding from these malicious actors or as conduits for it.”

The ACLU lambasted efforts by Hawley and others in an open letter. “A blanket call to investigate every chapter of a pro-Palestinian student group for ‘material support to terrorists’ — without even an attempt to cite evidence — is unwarranted, wrong, and dangerous. It echoes America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era and is counterproductive. We urge college and university leaders to hold fast to our nation’s best traditions and reject proposals to restrict constitutionally protected speech.”

The post Counterterror Director Used Hamas Attack to Justify Mass Surveillance Program Renewal 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.

“Since 2013, members of the United States Armed Forces have been introduced into hostilities with terrorist organizations and insurgent groups in the Republic of Niger, including through direct exchanges of fire with such groups,” reads the resolution. “Congress has not declared war against the Republic of Niger or any organization or group in Niger, nor has Congress provided a specific statutory authorization for the involvement of United States Armed Forces in the armed conflict or any hostilities in Niger.”

The move follows the State Department’s October 10 declaration that a coup had taken place in Niger over the summer. For months following the overthrow of the democratically elected president by a military junta that includes at least five U.S.-trained military officers, the U.S. government declined to officially designate it an illegal takeover.

The United States has suspended approximately $200 million in foreign assistance to Niger as a result of the coup designation but continues to have a major military presence there, including a large drone base in in the northern city of Agadez and more than 1,000 military personnel, according to a June “war powers” letter to Congress from Biden. After a pause, drone flights resumed in August.

Over the last decade, during which U.S. troop strength in Niger grew by 900 percent, U.S. Special Operations forces trained local counterparts and fought and even died there. After a 2017 ISIS ambush near the village of Tongo Tongo left four U.S. soldiers dead and two wounded, a Pentagon investigation found that while U.S. Africa Command claimed that U.S. troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local forces, the missions “more closely resembled U.S. direct action” — a military euphemism for strikes, raids, and other offensive missions — “than foreign partner-led operations”

“After more than 20 years of fighting and the deaths of over 432,000 civilians and 7,052 U.S. servicemembers, we must change course from this failed militarized response and towards a more sustainable, rights-respecting approach to counterterrorism and national security,” said Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, referring to those killed during the U.S. war on terror. “Senator Paul’s resolution is a critical step to help set the United States on this long-overdue path.”

In addition to FNCL, Paul’s resolution has been endorsed by The American Conservative, Frontiers of Freedom, Concerned Veterans of America, the Center for Renewing America, Just Foreign Policy, Heritage Action, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a spokesperson for Paul told The Intercept.

Between 2012 to 2023, the U.S. provided Niger with more than $500 million in military aid, one of the largest security assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa. But despite copious aid to Niger and its neighbors, terrorist violence in the African Sahel has spiked. “The Sahel has seen a doubling in the number of violent events involving militant Islamist groups since 2021 (now totaling 2,912),” according to a recent report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. “It has also experienced a near tripling in fatalities linked to this violence in the same timeframe (to 9,818 deaths).”

In early September, Paul sent a letter — citing The Intercept’s reporting on the secret use of proxy forces in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking for information about U.S. military operations in Niger and around the world. He has yet to receive a response, according to Paul’s spokesperson. “Sen. Paul’s Niger War Powers Resolution will provide the opportunity for elected officials to debate and go on record on the question of whether the United States should send its troops to fight in Niger,” said Paul’s communications director, Madeline Meeker. “This proposal will allow the American people to see how their representatives view the responsibility of sending their sons and daughters into warzones around the globe.”

Last month, The Intercept contacted the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — both of whom pledged in 2019 to help bring the forever wars to a “responsible and expedient” end — to inquire if they supported Paul’s joint resolution. Neither office responded to those emails or follow-ups.

“Any senator who is serious about ending endless wars will vote for Senator Paul’s Niger War Powers Resolution. Niger had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and therefore this mission can’t reasonably be said to be authorized under the 2001 AUMF,” said Aida Chavez, the communications director and policy adviser at Just Foreign Policy, referring to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the overarching justification for the so-called war on terror, enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “If the Biden administration wants to have troops there in late 2023 partnering with a military that just led a coup, it should ask Congress to debate and vote and let the American people weigh in.”

The post Rand Paul Wants U.S. Troops Out of Niger appeared first on The Intercept.

The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank, published a paper last week stating that thanks to the vicious Hamas attacks of October 7, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”

The paper continues, “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be enacted, many conditions need to exist in parallel. At the moment, these conditions exist, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if at all.” Approximately 1,400 Israelis were killed during the initial assault.

The think tank advocates a bizarre scheme in which Israel would ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza and pay Egypt to house its former inhabitants in currently empty apartments near Cairo. (The paper was first reported and translated from Hebrew by Mondoweiss.)

The Misgav Institute is headed by Meir Ben Shabbat. Ben Shabbat served four years as Israel’s chief of staff for national security after being appointed to the position in 2017 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He previously was a senior official in Shin Bet, the approximate equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. Other former top members of the Israeli government have also held prominent positions at the institute, as Mondoweiss explains.

This specific language — right-wing leaders enthusing about the “opportunity” that arises from massive suffering of their own people — is a kind of macabre universal following eruptions of ultraviolence.

On September 19, 2001, then-President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Through my tears, I see opportunity.” Several months later, Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, explained, “[T]his is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity. Before the clay is dry again, America and our friends and our allies must move decisively to take advantage of these new opportunities.” There were 2,977 people who died at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

Osama bin Laden also used language similar to that of the Misgav Institute — to describe the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. In 2004, bin Laden said in an audio message, “Targeting America in Iraq in terms of economy and losses in life is a golden and unique opportunity. Do not waste it only to regret it later.” Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed during the conflict.

For Netanyahu’s part, he spoke in 2002 of the “golden opportunity” presented by the Al Qaeda bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya. In that attack, 13 people were killed, including Israeli brothers Noy and Dvir Anter, ages 12 and 13. CNN reported at the time that “screaming children covered in blood searched desperately for their parents amid the wreckage.”

While he used different words, Netanyahu also saw a bright future on September 11, 2001, when he was working in the private sector after his first period as prime minister. Asked by the New York Times what the attacks meant for U.S.–Israeli relations, he responded, “It’s very good.” Netanyahu then walked back his first remarks, saying, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” At that moment, it was believed that far more people, about 20,000, had been killed at the World Trade Center than later turned out to be the case.

As this all demonstrates, while the deaths of regular human beings are an unmitigated catastrophe for them and their families, our leaders often see a silver lining in our pain — a chance to do what they had always wanted to but had not been able to before.

The post Hamas Attack Provides “Rare Opportunity” to Cleanse Gaza, Israeli Think Tank Says appeared first on The Intercept.

But few Americans realize that the United States has long been embroiled in a wider war in Lebanon, and that U.S. forces may be a target there, as well. The U.S. has, over decades, poured billions of dollars in security assistance into Lebanon and conducted counterterrorism efforts against Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia group with political and military wings. Lebanon’s dominant political and military force, Hezbollah has long been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.

In the shadow of that conflict, the U.S. has waged another “secret war” in Lebanon against Sunni terror groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, according to a former four-star commander who oversaw the effort, declassified documents, former special operators with knowledge of the program, and analysts who have investigated U.S. Code Title 10 § 127e — known in military parlance as “127-echo” — which allows Special Operations forces to use foreign military units as proxies.

Attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East have already ramped up with drone strikes on American troops in multiple locations across Iraq and Syria, and drone and missile attacks from Yemen on a U.S. Navy destroyer in the northern Red Sea. Experts say that secrecy surrounding the 127e program in Lebanon, known as Lion Hunter, whose existence The Intercept revealed last year, could embroil the U.S. in a wider war in the Middle East and pose an additional threat to U.S. troops.

Neither Special Operations Command nor Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the greater Middle East, will comment on Lion Hunter and the number of U.S. troops who have been, and may still be, involved. But in a June “war powers” letter to Congress, President Joe Biden noted that “approximately 89 United States military personnel are deployed to Lebanon to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.”

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict makes it all the more crucial that secret wars like the one carried out via the 127e program in Lebanon are subject to congressional oversight, said Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program and author of the most comprehensive analysis of the 127e authority. “Already, we have seen U.S. forces in the region targeted over the United States’s political support for and arms transfers to Israel,” Ebright said. “Congress and the public must know where U.S. forces are deployed in the region and whether those forces are at risk of attack, particularly as Hezbollah in Lebanon contemplates joining the conflict against Israel.” 

A $3 Billion Partnership

The U.S. military has a long and checkered history of engagement in Lebanon, including a 1958 intervention by U.S. Marines to forestall an insurrection there. In 1983, during a civil war that lasted 15 years, bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut killed more than 300 people. The United States blames Hezbollah for both attacks.

On Monday, during a speech to honor those killed in the barracks bombing 40 years before, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy C. Shea called out Hamas and Hezbollah for trying to “rob Lebanon and its people of their bright future,” saying that the U.S. and the Lebanese people “reject the threats of some to drag Lebanon into a new war.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, meanwhile, has signaled a willingness to widen the current conflict. “I think Hezbollah is playing with fire,” he said. “And I want to make clear, we are not looking for a confrontation in our northern border … but if Hezbollah will drag us into war, it should be clear that Lebanon will pay the price.”

America has a long-standing relationship with the Lebanese Armed Forces, or LAF. In a country where 80 percent of the population lives in poverty, the U.S. has provided more than $3 billion in military aid since 2006. “The United States is committed to a relationship that reinforces Lebanon’s security and stability,” said Lt. Col. Karen Roxberry, a Central Command spokesperson. “The Department of Defense provides training and security assistance to help support the LAF’s counterterrorism operations and border security.”

The U.S. routinely decries “Iran’s continuing arms transfers to Hezbollah,” even as it works to arm the LAF with sophisticated weaponry. The U.S. government has facilitated almost $2 billion in Lebanese purchases through the Foreign Military Sales program, including light attack aircraft, helicopters, and Hellfire missiles. Through another program, the U.S. provided 130 armored and tactical ground vehicles. From 2016 to 2021, the United States also authorized the export of more than $82 million in U.S. military equipment to Lebanon, including $12 million in “firearms and related articles.”

The State Department did not respond to detailed questions about the full extent of U.S. security assistance to Lebanon prior to publication.

More than 6,000 members of the LAF have received training in the United States since 1970, including 120 members in 2020. Under the 127e authority, the U.S. trained, armed, advised, and directed an elite unit known as the G2 Strike Force. “The U.S. supporting proxy forces in Lebanon is part of a decades-long, overly militarized policy towards the Middle East that has ignored the root causes of the region’s turmoil and struggles and not brought the peace or stability Americans have been promised,” said Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy.

The U.S. is ramping up its military presence in the Middle East, sending the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and its roughly 7,500 sailors, along with the USS Bataan amphibious ready group, which consists of three ships carrying thousands of troops from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

“By posturing these U.S. naval assets and advanced fighter aircraft in the region, we aim to send a strong message intended to deter a wider conflict,” said Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder on Thursday. Binder warned that it threatens to do the exact opposite. “The administration’s rush to move forces into the region in order to ‘bolster deterrence’ is a dangerous response that puts the United States at greater risk of what the majority of Americans are afraid of: a broader war.”

Exempt From Vetting

Roxberry, the Central Command spokesperson, said that U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Lebanon are primarily aimed at Hezbollah. A formerly secret document obtained by The Intercept stops just short of revealing the target of the Lion Hunter program, noting only that its “activities serve to identify, isolate, and deny safe haven to [redacted].” Gen. Joseph Votel, who headed Special Operations Command from 2014 to 2016 and then Central Command until 2019, filled in the blank, noting that the effort was especially focused on Sunni extremist organizations, including the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and affiliated terror groups.

The 127e program in Lebanon was one of 20 in operation as recently as 2019, according to the formerly secret Special Operations Command document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Votel said it was one of the most effective proxy war efforts of the last decade. “We often held this program up as the gold standard,” he told The Intercept, calling America’s proxies in Lebanon “motivated and capable partners who were well led and very effective at what they were doing.”

Central Command would not comment on the 127e program or proxies employed in Lebanon more generally. “We have no details to share specifically to G2 Strike Force,” said Roxberry, noting only that the Defense Department “supports broader efforts to build the LAF’s institutional capacity to train and operate its forces in a professional manner.”

Votel, who observed the G2 Strike Force firsthand, praised their capability and prowess. “In comparison to other LAF units, they had a more direct chain of command, were smaller and thus more agile and responsive and were focused specifically on offensive operations. Their mission set was smaller and better defined than normal LAF organizations,” he told The Intercept.

According to the formerly secret document, members of the G2 Strike Force undergo “comprehensive assessment” by U.S. Special Operations forces and are “subjected to counter-intelligence screening, polygraph testing, and physical and mental challenges before being selected.” But 127e programs have long been exempt from a vetting process required of other U.S. efforts supporting foreign forces under the “Leahy law.” The measure, named after former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the U.S. to scrutinize the human rights records of forces receiving U.S. security aid.

Without such vetting, Brennan Center’s Ebright told The Intercept, the Pentagon “can end up supporting groups and individuals whose conduct may cause civilian harm, undermine U.S. credibility, and even create U.S. legal liability.” 

“Congress, not the president, has the constitutional role of deciding when, where, and against whom the nation is at war,” Ebright said. “By overclassifying basic information about 127e programs, the Department of Defense hinders Congress’s ability to fulfill this role and potentially to stave off undemocratic, unaccountable U.S. involvement in a new war in the Middle East.” 

The post Secret U.S. War in Lebanon Is Tinder for Escalation of Israel–Gaza Conflict appeared first on The Intercept.

The world has been struggling to find a good historical parallel for the vicious and horrific surprise attack Hamas launched against Israel on October 7.

It is often said that 10/7 is the new 9/11. But 10/7 was more like a prison riot.

For nearly two decades, the Gaza Strip has been bottled up and almost completely blocked off. It has been widely compared to an open-air prison. Israel and the United States have tried to seal Gaza, isolating its nearly 2 million residents on a tiny, impoverished strip of land. Washington and Tel Aviv thought that would let them keep Hamas at arm’s length.

Instead, it just turned Gaza into an overcrowded penal colony where the most radicalized and violent gang leaders eventually gained control. Mass murder and hostage taking have been the result.

Sealing off Gaza didn’t solve anything. Instead, its problems festered until they finally exploded last weekend.

In the days since the carnage erupted, the American media has offered precious little context to the violence. But it really isn’t that difficult to look back over U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian policies and politics of the last 20 years and understand how we got here. Like so much else that has gone wrong in the Middle East in the 21st century, the George W. Bush administration deserves plenty of the blame for what’s happening now in Israel and Gaza.

In the years immediately after the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush doubled down on his enterprise in the Middle East by proclaiming that he wanted to spread democracy throughout the region. So he pushed for elections in Gaza without thinking things through, just as he had in Iraq. Hamas gained power in Gaza after the 2006 elections there, leaving Palestinian territory badly divided between Gaza and the West Bank, where Fatah, a bitter enemy of Hamas, remained in charge.

By then, Israeli politics were increasingly dominated by right-wing leaders. After the second Intifada began in 2000, the Israeli left had largely collapsed, and most Israelis had dropped their support for the “two-state” solution, under which Israel would agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Instead, Israel bricked itself up. It built walls and expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank while blockading Gaza.

The Bush administration, eager to please pro-Israel, right-wing Christian evangelicals and simultaneously win American Jewish voters over to the Republican Party, did little to stop Israel from raising its drawbridges. Foreign assistance to Gaza dried up while the U.S. imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority because of Hamas’s rise to power. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip became an international pariah.

When Barack Obama became president, he initially sought to revive Israeli–Palestinian peace talks, but little came of his efforts before he too abandoned them.

As president, Donald Trump ignored the Palestinians while engineering the so-called Abraham Accords, in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco agreed to recognize Israel. President Joe Biden has sought to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia. But the agreements are hollow; they have won little popular support in the Arab world, largely because they do not address the status of the Palestinians.

In other words: For two decades, a succession of American presidents has largely ignored the Palestinians and, in effect, gone along with Israeli efforts to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state.

One reason the United States has been so unwilling to challenge Israel’s lurch to the right has been the simultaneous rise of right-wing Christian evangelicals in U.S. politics. Evangelicals have become so powerful within the Republican Party that they have changed the domestic American political calculus about Israel.

George W. Bush’s father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, was willing to push Israel and criticize its policies, so much so that when George W. Bush first ran for president, Israeli leaders feared that he would be just as tough on Israel as his father had been.

But that didn’t prove true, and one reason was that Christian evangelicals had become a more important part of the Republican Party by the time he came into office. Evangelicals believe the Bible compels them to support Israel; they believe that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of the biblically foretold “regathering” of the Jews. They also believe that the Bible says that the Jews will continue to rule Israel until the return of Jesus, so Israel must continue to exist until the “Rapture,” which will occur after the second coming of Christ.   

Evangelicals vigorously debate the many side-plots of this “end times” theology, which have the potential to lead them down weird geopolitical rabbit holes. And in the long run, their theology isn’t good for the Jews; in the Rapture, Christians will ascend to heaven while everyone else, including the Jews, will be destroyed.

But the Rapture is still a long way off. For now, the upshot is that Christian evangelicals are unquestioning supporters of Israel — and that means the Republican Party is too. Trump’s controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 enthralled evangelicals. His administration prominently featured Robert Jeffress, a leading evangelical minister, and John Hagee, a televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel, at the embassy’s opening.  

(Oddly, that support for the state of Israel has coincided with an explosion of antisemitism on the American right.)

Christian evangelicals’ strong pro-Israel stance has led Republicans to make a play for the votes of American Jews — unnerving Democrats, who worry that Jews will leave their longtime political home in the Democratic Party. As a result, Democrats, just like Republicans, have been unwilling to challenge Israel’s right-wing governments or its refusal to revive serious negotiations about a Palestinian state. The few progressive voices in the Democratic Party who criticize Israel are usually shouted down by both Republicans and by the mainstream of their own party. There are no powerful voices in the United States warning of another bloody Middle Eastern quagmire.

Instead, in the coming weeks, Israel will be operating with something close to an American blank check.

The post Not Israel’s 9/11, but a Prison Riot 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.