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.

The intelligence documents identify a series of threats against people living in Pakistan from RAW, which Pakistani security officials believe is working in conjunction with local criminal and dissident networks to carry out assassinations and other attacks. According to the documents, RAW is targeting individuals and religious institutions alleged to support an armed insurgency in the disputed territory of Kashmir, as well as militant Sikh activists living in Pakistan and wanted by the Indian government.

The documents offer compelling substantiation for the sensational claim that India has been carrying out a transnational assassination program against its political enemies. The Canadian government first made headlines in September with the accusation that Indian intelligence agents orchestrated the assassination of Sikh Canadian activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil. Nijjar was gunned down outside a gurdwara — a Sikh temple — this summer in Surrey, British Columbia.

In October in Britain, the family of activist Avtar Singh Khanda called for an inquest into his sudden death, alleging that he had been poisoned by Indian intelligence agents following a series of public threats to his life. In September, The Intercept reported on threats to Sikh activists in the U.S. after the FBI warned a number of Sikh Americans about intelligence showing that their lives were in danger after the killing of Nijjar. In 2022, a 75-year-old Sikh Canadian man named Ripudaman Singh Malik, who had been acquitted of involvement in a deadly bombing of an Air India flight in 1985, was shot to death in front of his family business in Canada under circumstances that remain unclear. Despite these accusations of involvement in international assassinations, which have caused increased friction in India’s foreign relations, so far little intelligence — Canadian, Pakistani, American, or otherwise — has been made publicly available about these killings.

According to a Pakistani intelligence assessment, this summer RAW was also targeting two Sikh activists in Pakistan for assassination in the cities of Lahore and Islamabad. One alleged target in Islamabad is unnamed, while another is Lakhbir Singh Rode, a prominent Sikh separatist leader living in Pakistan since the 1990s who has long been accused of terrorism by India’s government. Rode was involved in a movement that aimed to create an independent nation in the region of Punjab known as Khalistan in the 1980s and ’90s. That campaign was crushed by a brutal counterinsurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of Sikhs, while forcing many more into exile.

Rode’s son, a Canadian citizen named Bhagat Singh, is, like his father, prominent in the diaspora movement for Sikh separatism. He told The Intercept that his father has long been living under threat from Indian intelligence. 

“It is a well-known fact that he has been on the Indian government’s hit list for years,” Singh said, adding that he was also warned by Canadian intelligence about threats to his own life following the assassination of Nijjar this summer, which he presumes are from Indian intelligence.

“When [Nijjar] was killed, the response from many of us to our governments was, ‘We told you so,’” added Singh, referring to the community of diaspora Sikh activists. “But there is also a lot of anger that a foreign government could simply come here and murder a Canadian citizen.”

The Pakistani, Indian, and Canadian embassies did not provide comment for this story. The pace of suspected attacks inside Pakistan against individuals wanted by India appears to have accelerated in recent weeks. On November 13, India media reported the killing of another militant connected to an Islamist group in Karachi. The possible assassination followed the killings of two other Islamist militants wanted by India that had taken place recently in Pakistan’s tribal regions and the disputed territory of Kashmir. While covered in great detail by the Indian press, these killings have gone almost unmentioned in Pakistan, where local media and civil society are under de facto military control following the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The lack of attention to the suspected assassinations of both political dissidents and militants has prompted calls for more pressure on India from some members of its diaspora. 

“Anyone who speaks out against the Indian government anywhere in the world is under threat,” said Singh.

The secret documents, which were produced by Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, a civilian-controlled security agency somewhat akin to the FBI, show serious concern that Indian intelligence will carry out more killings on its soil in the future.

In May, the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau warned that Indian intelligence agents based in two other countries, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan, are being activated to carry out operations in Pakistan, suggesting that Indian operatives have a footprint throughout the region. In September, an Intelligence Bureau document again warned that the Indian government’s intelligence agency was planning “terrorist attacks” and assassinations against targets inside Pakistan: RAW agents were operating from a militant training camp in the Afghan city of Spin Boldak, it said, “to target wanted / prominent Sikh personalities in Pakistan.”

The documents are marked “Not to be disclosed/Communicated to any unauthorized person,” and The Intercept is not publishing them in full in order to protect the source who provided them. The documents specifically name threats to militants involved in the Kashmiri and Sikh separatist causes, as well as conservative Islamic movements in Pakistan. One document states that, “it has been learnt through reliable sources that hostile intelligence agency (RAW) with the collaboration of sub-nationalist groups / anti-state activists and local criminal networks is already planning to carry out terrorist attacks on the marakiz / masjid / religious seminaries / leaders / notables of Ahl-e-Hadith sect linked with organizations remained active in the Kashmir Jihad.” 

Inside Pakistan, a spate of assassinations and other attacks in recent years targeted people alleged to be involved in Sikh and Kashmiri separatism as well as Islamist militancy inside India. This October, the Pakistani government arrested people it says were involved in targeted killings of suspected militants inside Pakistan. The killings were attributed in public statements to a “hostile spy agency,” a common reference to Indian intelligence in Pakistani official communications. This summer, a former commando in Pakistan’s elite Rangers paramilitary unit was also arrested on accusations of running a network carrying out assassinations of accused militants on behalf of RAW.

“Usually, the truth of these things are only fully known decades later, but India has a long history of these types of actions.”

“The general perception in the West is that India can do no wrong and that when Pakistan accuses India of doing these types of things, they’re just being paranoid. But that is not borne out by history,” said Arif Rafiq, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan. “Usually, the truth of these things are only fully known decades later, but India has a long history of these types of actions. When you piece it all together, it seems clear that there is a campaign today by India’s government to take an offensive strategy against these groups.”

The Pakistani government has periodically accused RAW of involvement in bombings and targeted killings inside Pakistan, including attacks against Chinese nationals working in the country and bombings targeting militant leaders wanted by India. These attacks have often been claimed publicly by separatist or extremist groups at war with the Pakistani state, including in the restive provinces of Balochistan and Sindh, that Pakistan accuses of being supported by India. The Indian government, for its part, has denied involvement in these operations or patronage of Pakistan-based militant groups, while accusing Pakistan of supporting Sikh and Kashmiri militants who have fought against it in the past.

This March, the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, published an anonymous article titled, “Who is Behind the Killings of Kashmiri Militants in Pakistan?” The article pointed to the recent killings of several former Kashmiri insurgents living in Pakistan whom the author claimed had been murdered by Indian intelligence in attacks that were left unsolved, attributed to Pakistan-based separatist groups, or deemed by the police to have been robberies gone wrong. Many of the killings targeted people who had been involved in fighting during the peak of the 1990s-era insurgency in Kashmir, but had later settled down to live and work inside Pakistan. 

The article warned that the killings by Indian intelligence may torpedo attempts at rapprochement between India and Pakistan by inviting reprisals from militant groups themselves, stating, “While militant groups that have operated in Kashmir are not as strong as they used to be, they still possess significant capabilities to strike back. The assassination of their former comrades, whether perceived or real, may trigger an angry response, thus endangering peace and stability in the region.” The article also cited a former militant criticizing Pakistan’s military establishment for turning a blind eye to the killing of ex-militants on its soil as the Kashmir dispute has lost priority in Pakistan’s foreign policy.

The anonymously authored article was subsequently pulled from the Atlantic Council website. The article was replaced with a note stating it had been removed “because it did not go through the Atlantic Council’s standard editorial process prior to publication.” 

Rode, the individual named as a target in Pakistani intelligence documents, is the nephew of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the Sikh militant leader of the 1980s separatist insurrection. That family connection has kept him on the radar of Indian authorities, who announced the confiscation of land belonging to Rode in India this fall amid a broader crackdown on diaspora Sikh dissidents and their families.

Rode, who is living in Lahore, was described in a Pakistani intelligence document as having already been surveilled by Indian intelligence agents at a housing complex and gurdwara in the city. Information about his place of residence and the gurdwara that he frequents are included in the report, which suggests that he and another Sikh activist are at imminent risk from Indian agents or locals acting under Indian instruction. The documents warn Pakistani officials to use “heightened vigilance” and “foolproof security measures” to guard them. 

According to family members, threats to Rode have increased in recent years, forcing him to go deeper into seclusion. His son, Bhagat Singh, says that surveillance photographs of his father’s car and residence had previously been sent to Pakistani authorities by Indian intelligence, as part of a demand by India to Pakistan to turn him over.

Singh said that he himself had been placed on Canada’s no-fly list after the Indian government accused him of involvement in planning terrorist attacks in India. Singh, who is seeking legal means to remove himself from the list, strongly rejects these accusations, saying that they are part of an international campaign by the Indian government to silence dissidents in its diaspora.

“The Sikh diaspora holds protests and lobbies Western governments to speak up against the Indian government, and it is for this that we are being targeted,” Singh said. “They don’t have to prove anything in court when they make these accusations. They simply label anyone as a terrorist who fights for their rights or says that they don’t want to live under their rule anymore after what has been done to them.”

“They don’t have to prove anything in court when they make these accusations. They simply label anyone as a terrorist who fights for their rights.”

Though the Khalistan movement has been mostly suppressed in Indian Punjab, supporters have continued to rally for the cause in the diaspora, including from Pakistan and Western countries. As a result of recent protests in Western countries, some of which have resulted in vandalism and threats to Indian consular staff, the Indian government has angrily accused foreign states of nurturing the Khalistan movement in exile. Many Sikhs themselves reject what they say is an attempt by the Indian government to extend its political authority over them even as they live and gain citizenship in foreign countries.

“The diaspora is an extension of people from Punjab,” said Harinder Singh, senior fellow at the Sikh-related public education organization the Sikh Research Institute. “When dissent is being crushed, even at the level of using extrajudicial killings inside Punjab, the people who manage to escape will of course find ways to talk about these issues from abroad.”

In addition to high-profile suspected murders in Western countries, recent years have also seen at least two killings of supporters of the Khalistan movement in Pakistan. In May, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the leader of a Pakistan-based Sikh militant organization was shot to death by an assailant on a motorcycle while out for a walk near his home in Lahore. His killing came two years after the murder of another Sikh activist in Pakistan named Harmeet Singh, who was also shot to death in Lahore near the same gurdwara frequented by Rode.

“India has been carrying out activities like this in South Asia for years. The only difference is that today they have been discovered doing it in a Western democracy,” said Harinder Singh. “Despite many hypocrisies among Western democracies, one thing that they still do take very seriously is a foreign power taking the lives of their own citizens.”

Following the assassination of Nijjar in Canada this summer, Pakistan again publicly alleged that India was running a “network of extra-territorial killings” that had now gone global. The Indian government has responded angrily to accusations from Canada and other Five Eyes countries that it is running a transnational assassination program. 

But as more details on the scope and nature of its operations come to light, the crisis over the killing of Nijjar, and potentially other Sikh dissidents, seems unlikely to disappear. The targeting of Rode and other Sikhs in foreign countries suggest that India is taking a more aggressive stance in targeting perceived enemies across borders, including through violent means.

“These killings show that India feels emboldened and that it has the geopolitical space to take these kinds of risks. There has never been an instance where it has been held to account for its excesses,” said Middle East Institute’s Rafiq. “Frankly, nobody would care if they were only killing people in Pakistan. It’s only until something happens on the other side of the world that people start paying attention.”

The post Secret Intelligence Documents Show Global Reach of India’s Death Squads appeared first on The Intercept.

Who pays for these trips has, until now, remained largely a mystery. According to an unredacted tax filing for 2019 obtained by The Intercept, the financiers are a clutch of large foundations and nonprofits, some of which are family-run, that also give to a wide range of other political and cultural groups.

The trips are organized through a cutout called the American Israel Education Fund, a charitable organization founded by AIPAC, from which it borrows its offices, board members, and even part of its logo. Like other tax-exempt nonprofits, AIEF must file a Form 990 every year with the IRS, but donors are redacted from the version that is made accessible to the public.

According to the unredacted 2019 tax filing, AIEF drew millions of dollars from eight philanthropic groups, estates, and family foundations: the Koret Foundation, the Swartz Foundation, the Jewish Communal Fund, the One8 Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Paul E. Singer Foundation, Milton Cooper 2013 Revocable Trust, and the estate of Hedy Orden. These donors helped finance 129 AIEF-sponsored trips to Israel in 2019, totaling $2.32 million, according to the public records database LegiStorm.

The all-expenses-paid trips are crucial to how AIPAC keeps both Republican and Democratic lawmakers firmly on Israel’s side. That allegiance has been on full display as the Biden administration and most members of Congress have backed Israel amid its war against the occupied Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 12,000 Palestinians in the last five weeks. 

“The trips clearly have an impact, as personal experiences in Israel often show up in congressional narratives justifying support for pro-Israel policies,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center Washington DC, told The Intercept. “It’s part of a broader strategy to keep U.S.–Israel ties close.”

“The trips clearly have an impact, as personal experiences in Israel often show up in congressional narratives justifying support for pro-Israel policies.”

In a statement, AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Wittmann told The Intercept, “AIPAC and AIEF are distinct entities and strictly adhere to all relevant governmental guidelines, regulations, and statutes.” (An email address for AIEF did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did any of the foundations listed as donors on the tax filing.)

In addition to pro-Israel causes, some of the AIEF donors also fund a wide spectrum of other political initiatives. The Paul E. Singer Foundation, which gave AIEF $1.25 million in 2019, has been a prolific contributor to conservative causes in the U.S. for years. Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is a major donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or FDD, a hawkish, pro-Israel think tank that pushes Israel’s national security perspective to U.S. policymakers.

The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which gave $1.5 million to AIEF in 2019, portrays itself as heavily focused on progressive issues, including education, voting rights, criminal justice, and reproductive rights. The foundation also funded a number of hawkish, pro-Israel groups in the same year, including FDD; the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors foreign language press in the Middle East and has been criticized for bias and misleading translations; the Investigative Project on Terrorism, led by the discredited extremism expert Steve Emerson, who has been repeatedly invited to speak at AIPAC summits despite allegations of Islamophobia; and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a D.C. think tank that was itself spun off from AIPAC.

Among the donors who gave the largest amounts to AIEF are the Bay Area-based Koret Foundation ($5 million), the Jewish Communal Fund ($3.5 million), and a trust established in the name of real estate tycoon Milton Cooper ($2.475 million). The Swartz Foundation, which contributed $1.45 million, is notable for its founder Sidney Swartz, the former chair and CEO of the Timberland Company, a popular manufacturer of work boots and outerwear.

In 2022, the Paul E. Singer Foundation and Swartz Foundation also donated $1 million and $25,000, respectively, to United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC that backs challengers to progressive candidates who are critical of Israel, according to itemized tax receipts from that year.

AIPAC and AIEF’s Relationship

The millions of dollars AIEF gets from its funders goes toward AIPAC’s goal of securing bipartisan consensus on Israel. In 2019, the year for which The Intercept has unredacted tax records, AIEF sponsored trips for 64 Democrats and 65 Republicans, who left for Israel on 14 separate dates, according to LegiStorm. Each trip can cost upward of $10,000 per person, and members of Congress can also bring senior members of staff, spouses, or children.

These expenditures appear to have been made possible with some creative legal maneuvering from AIPAC. The group has used AIEF to fund congressional junkets and to bypass an anti-corruption law that bans lobbyists from taking politicians on paid trips abroad. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act responded to a major lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff, a D.C. lobbyist who had for years funded lavish trips and given expensive gifts to politicians as a means of influence peddling.

After the law was enacted in 2007, AIPAC, which had sponsored congressional trips to Israel since the 1990s, campaigned to create an exception for 501(c)(3) organizations that lobbying groups could use to get around the law. Both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups are tax-exempt nonprofits, but 501(c)(4) groups — including AIPAC — are considered “social welfare” organizations, which are allowed to spend more than 20 percent of their resources on lobbying the government.

Craig Holman, an expert on governmental ethics and campaign finance at the public interest advocacy organization Public Citizen, said AIPAC undermined the lobbying reform.

“AIPAC successfully inserted an exception to the rule for 501(c)(3) organizations,” Holman said. The use of AIEF has “allowed it to continue funneling money to members of Congress for travel to Israel.” Holman, who was involved in drafting and promoting the 2007 law, added, “These trips would be illegal otherwise.”

The murky relationship between AIEF and AIPAC has come under scrutiny in the past. Before AIPAC moved to use AIEF to fund the congressional junkets, the nonprofit was incorporated as a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC in 1988, likely to solicit tax-deductible contributions, Holman said.

In 2019, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy published research showing that, over the prior decade, AIEF and other pro-Israel nonprofits had funded hundreds of trips for members of Congress and their staff, covering over $10 million in expenses. The study’s analysis of gift travel filings found that serving members of Congress had been on nearly 600 Israel junkets; many had been multiple times, including current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.

“When an organization lobbies Congress for support on making public policy, one of the most effective means of achieving victory is by befriending members of Congress through gifts and travel,” Holman told The Intercept. “This is a loophole that is being heavily exploited now.”

Congressional Junkets

Once an unassailable powerbroker on Capitol Hill, AIPAC and policymakers who work to further its interests have faced increasing criticism in recent years, as some members of Congress and the American public question the U.S.’s blanket support for Israel.

In addition to AIPAC’s heavy hand in elections, legislation, and military spending, the congressional trips to Israel have also been put under the microscope.

Since 2019, AIEF has spent a total of $6.1 million on 309 trips to Israel, 144 for Republicans and 165 for Democrats.

Since 2019, AIEF has spent a total of $6.1 million on 309 trips to Israel, 144 for Republicans and 165 for Democrats, according to LegiStorm. During the trips, members of Congress have met with high-level Israeli politicians and security officials, toured historical sites, and attended information sessions tailored to Israel’s view of the region. Past trips have also included occasional meetings with members of the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“For members of Congress, AIPAC is a very important player on the Hill,” said Munayyer, of Arab Center. “These trips are seen as routine and have only become more controversial over the past 10 years or so as AIPAC has come to be seen as a more partisan actor.”

Democrats have been increasingly divided over U.S. support for Israel, with the rift widening significantly during the Obama administration. Progressives have taken a stronger stance against unconditional aid to the country and, more recently, called for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

The party’s centrist leadership, meanwhile, has toed the line. In August, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who led a delegation of two dozen Democrats on an AIEF-sponsored trip to Israel, pushed back on the growing chorus of criticism of the U.S.–Israel relationship within his party.

“The Democratic Party in the House of Representatives will continue to stand with Israel,” Jeffries said at a press conference during the trip, “and lift up the special relationship between our two countries and in support of Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people, and as a Jewish democratic state, period, full stop.”

AIPAC celebrated the trip on its website, posting a host of straight-to-camera, gushing testimonials on the AIPAC YouTube channel.

As an alternative to the AIPAC junkets, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian American member of Congress, had attempted to lead a delegation in 2018 to the West Bank that would center Palestinians’ experiences under Israeli occupation.

“I want us to see that segregation and how that has really harmed us being able to achieve real peace in that region. I don’t think AIPAC provides a real, fair lens into this issue. It’s one-sided,” Tlaib told The Intercept at the time. “[They] have these lavish trips to Israel, but they don’t show the side that I know is real, which is what’s happening to my grandmother and what’s happening to my family there.”

Tlaib was forced to cancel the trip after the Israeli government barred her from entering the country. Under pressure, Israel reversed course and said Tlaib could go on condition that she not express support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement while there, a condition she rejected.

Last week, Tlaib was formally censured in the House for expressing support for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli assault of Gaza. Almost all of the 22 Democrats who voted in favor of the measure received money from AIPAC in the last election cycle.

Despite greater scrutiny of pro-Israel influence in U.S. politics in recent weeks, American politicians continue to accept paid trips to Israel. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, came under fire for going to Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on a trip sponsored by the UJA-Federation of New York. UJA, a local Jewish philanthropic organization, has sent over half a million dollars to groups in Israel that support its illegal settlement program in the West Bank, The Intercept reported. Hochul’s office later said it would cover the cost of a trip, citing a delay in a state ethics review.

The post Meet the Secret Donors Who Fund AIPAC’s Israel Trips for Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

Led by Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the letter expresses “deep concern about the ongoing human rights violations in Pakistan,” which has been in a state of political crisis since the military-engineered removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan last year. Khan was removed from office following a no-confidence vote organized by the military and his civilian opponents. The Leahy Law, as it’s often called, bars military assistance to government entities engaged in abuse.

According to a classified Pakistani intelligence document reported in August by The Intercept, the effort to remove Khan also came partly on the back of pressure from the U.S. government, which had been antagonized by what State Department diplomats privately called Khan’s “aggressively neutral” stance on the war in Ukraine. 

“Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and has been a major US military partner since the Cold War, but you wouldn’t know it from the scarce attention it gets in the halls of Congress,” said Aída Chavez, policy adviser at Just Foreign Policy and a former reporter for The Intercept. “This letter from Reps. Omar and Casar is a welcome change at a time when the Pakistani military is systematically crushing its political opposition with tacit US support. The bare minimum we should expect of Biden and the State Department is to ensure that security assistance to Pakistan is in line with the Leahy Law, and this letter makes that demand.”

The letter expresses concern over news reports that Khan, currently imprisoned and facing a secret trial, potentially faces the death penalty. Khan faces widely derided charges related to the handling of the cable implicating U.S. involvement in his ouster. The members of Congress urged the State Department to send representatives to monitor the trial of Khan and others under persecution.

“We are unable to ignore the persistent reports of human rights abuses including restrictions on freedom of expression, speech, and religion and belief, as well as enforced disappearances, military courts, and harassment and arrest of political opponents and human rights defenders,” the Democrats write. “These violations not only violate the fundamental rights of the Pakistani people but also undermine the principles of democracy, justice, and rule of law.”

Reps. Cori Bush, André Carson, Joaquin Castro, Lloyd Doggett, Summer Lee, Ted Lieu, Jim McGovern, Frank Pallone, and Dina Titus also signed on.

The crackdown on Khan and his party, highlighted by the letter to the State Department, has entailed widespread arrests, disappearances, torture, and targeted killings of his supporters and Pakistani civil society in general. Citizens of Western countries, including U.S. citizens, have been caught up in this crackdown and imprisoned on allegations of taking part in demonstrations in support of Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. “[W]e remain concerned about the ongoing harassment and arrests of political opponents, including members of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, and human rights defenders who are charged with bogus cases to trample their right to free speech. Such acts of harassment do not only impact individuals, but deeply traumatize their families. This includes the former Prime Minister Imran Khan,” the letter reads.

The letter’s signatories, particularly Omar, are often accused of expressing concern around human rights abuses only when they are committed by Israel. But her criticism of Pakistan adds to the regular alarm she raises around abuses carried by, for instance, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Pakistani military has relied for decades on a steady stream of U.S. security and financial assistance to maintain its privileged place in the country’s ruling establishment. During both the Cold War and the U.S. war on terror, the military has sought to serve as an ally to U.S. security interests even as the two countries have clashed over issues like Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban. The U.S. government recently helped broker a much-needed bailout from the International Monetary Fund for Pakistan’s government after coming to an agreement to purchase arms for the military for use by the Ukrainian military in its war with Russia.

The possible cessation of this crucial U.S. support could be devastating to the Pakistani military. The country is expected to have elections next year, but Khan, the country’s most popular political leader, has been imprisoned and barred from participation. The letter from Congress targets this lifeline directly, warning that if some semblance of normalcy is not returned to Pakistani politics, along with the participation of Khan himself, the military may be in danger of losing its privileged relationship with the U.S. and the largesse that come along with it.

“We further request that future security assistance be withheld until Pakistan has moved decisively toward the restoration of Constitutional order, including by holding free and fair elections in which all parties are able to participate freely,” the letter reads. “We believe that the United States can play a constructive role in supporting positive change, and it is our hope that our cooperation can contribute to a more just and equitable future for the people of Pakistan.”

Correction: November 17, 2023, 10:45 a.m.
Joaquin Castro, a House member, signed the letter — not Julián Castro, his brother.

The post House Democrats Press Biden to Block Military Aid to Pakistan Over Human Rights Abuses, Jailing of Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

As the conflict intensifies, disputes are spilling over from campuses and government into many workplaces as well. Recent weeks have seen pressure by government officials against student activist groups, the creation of public blacklists in multiple industries, and a wave of politically motivated firings over people’s publicly stated views on the conflict.

“We are seeing people being fired from their jobs, being investigated by HR over their social media posts or conversations with colleagues, and having job offers rescinded. There is a clear trend that people’s jobs are being targeted right now,” said Dima Khalidi, the founder and director of Palestine Legal, an advocacy organization that seeks to preserve the civil rights of supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States.

Khalidi said that her organization has dealt with roughly 2,200 cases of speech suppression between the years 2014 to 2022. Yet in the last two weeks alone, they have fielded 300 new requests for legal assistance, a figure that usually matches their level of requests during a full year. “There is an exponential increase in the need for legal support,” she said. “It is a direct result right now of the kind of incitement that our own elected officials are engaging in, as well as the failure of universities and employers to push against pressure.”

Due to the obvious religious, cultural, and ideological fault lines, the Israel–Palestine conflict has always been a wedge issue for free speech advocates in the United States. But recent events have exposed a gaping chasm in perspective as a tidal wave of speech suppression has been met with a largely muted reaction, or even active support, from elected officials who normally depict themselves as champions of free speech. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this week ordered Students for Justice in Palestine groups to shut down over recent protests in solidarity with Palestinian nationalism that he described as supporting Hamas.

A full accounting of the speech suppression across multiple industries would be difficult given the incredible scope of retaliation, which expands daily. But across the media and technology sectors, the arts, academia, and even generally nonpolitical industries like aviation and public relations, there has been an obvious effort to threaten, ostracize, and remove individuals from jobs based on their stated views on the subject.

In recent weeks, the editor-in-chief of the nonprofit scientific journal eLife, Michael Eisen, was forced to resign after sharing an article from The Onion satirizing public indifference to Palestinian civilian deaths; a top Hollywood talent agent, Maha Dakhil, was removed from the board of her company for suggesting on Instagram that a genocide was taking place in Gaza; and numerous journalists engaged in nonpolitical coverage, as well as ordinary corporate employees both in the United States and beyond, have faced reprimands and dismissals over their statements on the war.

In one of the most high-profile and egregious instances of retaliation, the head of the major global technology conference Web Summit was forced to apologize and resign after posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “war crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are.”

There have been a few cases of genuine prejudice and hate speech underlying these incidents. But the vast majority of recent retaliation appears to be based on what is considered protected speech and advocacy in normal circumstances. These attacks have extended from corporate America deep into the cultural world as well. Numerous writers have had their events canceled or been forced to shift venues based on past or present statements they have made deemed to be supportive of Palestinians or critical of Israel, including the political analyst and author Nathan Thrall and the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was scheduled to speak at 92NY.

The climate of fear in the art world has led many to wonder how to balance the pressure to take a public stand with the fear that retaliation over politics may end their careers early. Many filmmakers have reported feeling pressured to delete social media posts and Instagram accounts out of fear of surveillance from peers in their industry. On Thursday, the editor of the journal Artforum was fired after pressure over a public letter published in support of Palestinian rights.

“There is a long game that many of us minority filmmakers with a conscience are playing,” said one Hollywood filmmaker, who asked for anonymity to discuss the issue out of fear of retaliation. “Do we stay patient and put our resistance and outrage into the films which will outlast us, or do we risk losing our careers over an ephemeral social post that doesn’t save a single life in Palestine?”

The fear of adding one’s name to a public letter is particularly acute since the traditionally authoritarian tactic of blacklisting has returned with a vengeance to target critics of Israel. A number of new websites have sprung up in recent weeks listing names of university students and corporate employees accused of issuing or endorsing sentiments deemed hostile to Israel, adding to an already rich cottage industry of such sites, including the notorious academic blacklist Canary Mission.

In the context of an emotionally charged, seven-decadeslong armed conflict, the effort to ruin people’s careers or livelihoods based on public comments on the matter have antagonized some free speech advocates.

The libertarian-leaning free speech organization the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has been among a handful of organizations to speak out directly on behalf of people targeted by recent crackdowns. “True threats, incitement to imminent unlawful action, and harassment are not protected,” the organization said in a recent statement. “But the recent calls to punish speech about the Israel-Hamas conflict extend well beyond expression that falls into one of those narrow categories.”

Others have had uncharacteristically muted reactions. The liberal civil rights advocacy organization the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, whose mission describes its commitment to “free speech and viewpoint diversity,” did not make mention of recent speech suppression in its October 26 statement on the conflict. The group stated only that “college campuses have once again become hotbeds of protest and conflict,” and that the organization remains “committed to fostering communication across divides.”

A number of major donors to Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have also threatened to pull funds following student protests and public statements in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas and subsequent bombing of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military. The Hamas attacks killed roughly 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, while Israel is estimated to have killed around 7,000 Palestinians, the majority likewise believed to have been civilians, over the last 17 days, with the Biden administration’s full-throated support.

The domestic cultural war over Gaza and Israel may well become a political issue in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In a campaign speech in New Hampshire, Donald Trump vowed to “implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” in reference to recent controversies over the war. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion, which a lot of them don’t, if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in,” Trump said.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also attempted to introduce a resolution that would cancel the visas of people in the U.S. deemed to be “Hamas supporters” in an effort that, for now, has been blocked by Senate Democrats.

The efforts to introduce ideological tests, which by nature tend to be highly open to interpretation when it comes to political issues, represent a dark portent for the future of speech generally in the U.S. Whereas many have noted that the private sector functions as a de facto censor by threatening individuals with financial ruin over their political views, the growing push to enact more stringent legal and bureaucratic barriers to free expression represents the culmination of what liberal free speech advocates have long feared.

Despite the growing climate of repression, legal advocates committed to defending free speech on the issue say that they will continue to promote the Palestinian perspective on the conflict with renewed urgency given current events in Gaza.

“There are many people speaking out and refusing to be intimidated by this McCarthyist-style purge,” said Khalidi of Palestine Legal. “It’s really important for people to think beyond the immediate moment and tap into our moral compass here, because we are witnessing immense war crimes, and if we don’t stand up and speak out about them, then we are also complicit.”

The post The Senate Condemns Student Groups as Backlash to Pro-Palestinian Speech Grows appeared first on The Intercept.

Israeli leaders have now vowed to “wipe out this thing called Hamas” and end its existence as a military and political entity in Gaza. The Israeli government has issued warnings of an imminent ground invasion, telling 1.1 million Gazans to evacuate the northern part of the territory which includes Gaza City.

“Israel does not have an endgame in Gaza.”

The fate of Hamas may well be sealed, but that outcome will place Israel in a very dire situation as well, one that it has long sought to avoid. By forcing it to fight a grueling battle and then maintain a presence in the Gaza Strip, Israel will have to serve as an occupying power on the ground, ruling directly over millions of Palestinians in Gaza. It will prove extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Israeli military, already gravely stretched to defend its borders while controlling the lives of millions under military occupation in the West Bank, to maintain such a grip on Gaza.

While Israel’s overwhelming capabilities will likely succeed militarily against Hamas, strategically the assault looks likely to inflict grave damage on Israel. With its forces stretched, Israel’s hold on security could become more tenuous, including in sensitive areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem, home to holy sites from three major world religions. A bloody quagmire could quickly dispel the good will extended to Israel and rally international opinion against it.

“Hamas must have calculated that militarily they cannot win this battle, even if they find a way to survive in some form, but in the end Israel does not have an endgame in Gaza,” said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director at Crisis Group. “Either Israel leaves Hamas in place to govern Gaza, brings in the Palestinian Authority, which is weak and likely incapable, or they will have to do it themselves. A new occupation is the last thing that Israel wants. They want the West Bank, not Gaza.”

“People say now that there is nowhere for Hamas to go, and that this is the end of Hamas,” he said. “But it is Israel that is going to be stuck in Gaza.”

Gaza is home to 2 million people who have been governed by Hamas and have lived the past decade and a half under an Israeli blockade. While Hamas is an enemy, this situation served Israel well. Hamas rule over Gaza has politically divided the Palestinian national movement, while giving Israel a pretext to keep Gazans boxed in and isolated from the rest of the world. The picture has been so favorable that Benjamin Netanyahu, then the prime minister and now again in office, was quoted as saying in a 2019 meeting of his right-wing Likud party, “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas.”

That sordid arrangement now seems to be at its end. The day after this war ends, Israel will find itself in the position of being responsible for ruling the Gaza Strip. Compounded with the ever-more-shaky military rule of 3 million Palestinian in the West Bank, that responsibility may prove difficult or even disastrous for Israeli security forces. The redeployment of Israel Defense Force resources away from Gaza to protect radical settlers in the West Bank is already being blamed by many Israelis for the terrifying events that the country witnessed last week.

Expulsion

Some Israeli officials dream of simply expelling the population of Gaza, but that outcome is unlikely. Recent attempts to broker the creation of so-called humanitarian corridors to Egypt for Gazans to flee the conflict have been rejected by the Egyptian government, who have called for Palestinians to “remain on their land.” While the corridors have been described as an act of generosity to civilians, such measures are suspected by many Palestinians, as well as others in the region, of being a means of liquidating a future Palestinian state by pressuring the population to leave their homes with no prospect of return.

“We need to understand what the Israeli government is preparing right now in the context of ethnic cleansing.”

“There are millions of civilians in Gaza and no one can hold them responsible for seeking safety,” said Tareq Baconi, the board president of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. “But on all dimensions, we can see that the creation of humanitarian corridors is intended to serve as a means of ensuring expulsion.”

Roughly 70 percent of the Gaza’s population consists of refugees previously displaced from other parts of what is now the state of Israel. For Palestinians, who are now a refugee diaspora of millions spread in countries around the region and the world, the prospect of being expelled once more from the tiny strip of territory that they still hold in their historic homeland is an unappealing one.

Baconi said, “We have seen many times before what happens to Palestinians when they are expelled from their homes. We need to understand what the Israeli government is preparing right now in the context of ethnic cleansing.”

A ground operation to destroy Hamas will be likely to grind on for months, inflicting a significant death toll on the civilian population in the process. Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children, who were born under the Israeli blockade and have mostly never left the territory in their lives. As scenes of dead and wounded Palestinian civilians start to overtake those of Israelis killed in Hamas’s massacres, public and international pressure may begin to turn support away from the Israeli assault.

“When a war like this begins and casualties start to mount, there is always the question of what level support can be maintained domestically. Israel doesn’t have to worry as much in this instance because the scale of the Hamas attack was so shocking to Israelis that even the more dovish ones will not object to such a conflict,” said Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at the D.C.-based think tank Defense Priorities. “But it could take weeks and months of fighting in a very dense urban area controlled by an armed group that has anticipated this attack and is ready to make you bleed as they go down. It could take a very, very long time.”

“Israel may turn Gaza into rubble, but it would create a humanitarian catastrophe of the first magnitude.”

“No Exit”

As soon as Hamas militants broke through the security barrier around Gaza and began to attack communities in southern Israel, gory footage of killings and abduction of Israeli civilians began to emerge on social media. These accounts appear to have been mostly recorded and shared by the fighters themselves, or by Israelis who were trapped in the areas under attack.

The grainy cellphone videos of atrocities were a stark contrast to what is being shared on official Hamas channels. On its Telegram account, Hamas has continued to share a sanitized narrative of the attack that depicts it as a professional military operation largely targeting Israeli security forces.

In response to public outcry over the massacres in Israeli communities near Gaza, Hamas leaders have pivoted between denying that any civilians at all were killed in the assault and blaming the killings on other militants based in Gaza whose fighters they claim exploited the chaos to carry out freelance operations on their own.

“This is the conundrum that Israel faces: It never wanted to do this, but Hamas is forcing it.”

The miscalculations and errors that lay behind the assault may have gone even deeper.

A diplomatic source in the region, speaking to the Middle East-focused publication Al-Monitor, claimed that Hamas itself was stunned by the scale and ferocity of the violence that it had unleashed. “They hoped to kill some Israelis, embarrass the IDF and return to Gaza with two or three kidnapped Israelis,” said the source. “Instead, they roamed inside Israel for more than a day, killing over a thousand Israelis and getting stuck with something like 200 abductees.”

As they described it, instead of gaining leverage with Israel to win demands to build a port in Gaza and free Hamas prisoners in Israeli jail, the group now feared that because of what had transpired it would have to contend with fighting the entire Israeli military in Gaza.

This war, now in its early phases, will likely result in the destruction of Hamas military infrastructure and its leadership inside Gaza. In addition to 1,300 Israeli civilian and military deaths, thousands more Palestinian civilians are likely to die in the fighting ahead.

Whether it intended or not, Hamas’s shocking actions, by forcing Israel to become an occupying power over the Gaza Strip once again, may wind up as a Pyrrhic victory. With Hamas on its way into the abyss, it appears to be dragging Israel down with it.

“This is the conundrum that Israel faces: It never wanted to do this, but Hamas is forcing it,” said Hiltermann. “Israel feels that they have to respond to Hamas and re-establish dominance after what has happened, but they have entered into a situation where there is no exit.”

The post Hamas Is Dragging Israel Toward the Abyss appeared first on The Intercept.

The recent explosion of violence in and around the Gaza Strip, triggered by a Hamas assault that killed hundreds of Israelis, including scores of civilians, has drawn the U.S. back into a region from which the Biden administration has spent years trying to pivot away from. The U.S. has reportedly begun to move naval assets into the Mediterranean to provide support for Israel’s military operation against Gaza, a full-scale invasion that will likely take weeks, if not longer, to complete.

The new outbreak of intense violence represents a total failure of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. The administration has centered its regional policy on the expansion of the “Abraham Accords,” a set of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and regional Arab countries. It is an effort in which President Joe Biden has sunk much resources and political capital.

The de facto premise behind the accords, initiated under former President Donald Trump and led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was to “solve” the Israel–Palestine conflict by simply ignoring the Palestinians and treating their conditions as irrelevant. This weekend’s events show that this approach, premised on Palestinian invisibility, has now collapsed. Indeed, the expectation that Palestinians would simply resign themselves to a slow death, an assumption evidently carried forth by Biden, was never realistic.

“If you pay attention to their public statements, every government in the Middle East has been saying for years that you need to pay attention to the Palestinian issue and that it cannot be ignored,” said Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. “The Biden administration’s policy has been to simply ignore the tragic situation on the ground, perhaps more than any other administration. It’s deliberate ignorance that has had very devastating consequences.”

Days before the conflict began, speaking at a public event on September 29, national security adviser Jake Sullivan praised the administration’s Middle East policy, stating that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

“The ignorance and hubris it took to make a statement like that is stunning,” said Munayyer.

There have been long warnings that conditions in the Gaza Strip were a ticking time bomb. Gaza’s residents have lived under permanent siege for over a decade and a half, without the prospect of a diplomatic process anywhere on the horizon — let alone a solution. Their desperation had been building for years prior to the present war. Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom had never left Gaza in their lives, have organized several large protest marches toward the Israel-run border fence in recent years. They were met with indiscriminate gunfire from Israeli forces that killed civilians as well as medical personnel — as well as indifference by the international community, which carried on in the aftermath of the killings with business as usual.

In the meantime, the U.S. has sat on the sidelines as diplomatic off-ramps were proposed — and floundered. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wrote a letter in Hebrew to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking him to take a “calculated risk” in agreeing to a long-term truce with Hamas. The truce would have led to an end to Hamas rocket fire against Israel, in exchange for the reestablishment of economic infrastructure on the territory. Although some aid reached Gaza, Netanyahu ultimately rejected the entreaty for a broader truce. The U.S. did not apply any notable pressure on Israel to pursue this or other possible openings.

The U.S. government under both Trump and Biden administrations has remained AWOL in the years since and left the situation in the territory to fester, while U.S. diplomats spent time in distant Dubai and Riyadh dreaming up splashy new economic and political agreements to sell as successes to domestic audiences. Under Biden, the U.S. has devoted little effort to seeking even tactical détente, let alone peace, between Israel and the Palestinians, preferring instead to continue the Trump administration’s approach of ignoring the Palestinians to seek quid pro quo diplomatic deals between Israel and foreign Arab and Muslim countries with whom Israel has no direct conflict.

Even as the massive bloodshed began around Gaza this week, with Hamas militants massacring Israeli civilians and Israel apparently indiscriminately bombing the Gaza Strip, the administration has rushed to try and salvage its approach to the region. The New York Times reported on Sunday that top Biden aides were scrambling to “reaffirm their commitment to the idea of potential normalization of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.” This shoddy simulacrum of real diplomacy — which inevitably requires resolving tough differences between enemies — has now collided with horrifying reality in Gaza and southern Israel.

Precise numbers of the dead are unclear, as the Israeli government carries out a campaign of airstrikes and prepares for a ground offensive that it says is aimed at ending Hamas’s ability to conduct military operations in the future. But conservative estimates say that hundreds of both Palestinians and Israelis are already dead. It is almost certain that the toll will rise in the weeks ahead, particularly among Palestinian civilians, as the campaign inside Gaza gains steam.

Palestinians, Israelis, and officials of neighboring states have long tried to warn of the impending calamity that is now playing out. They warned that the rotten status quo in Gaza was close to producing a new and bloodier conflict. The Biden administration is not primarily responsible for the horror now taking place. But given the U.S.’s pivotal role in the region, it undoubtedly deserves a large share of the blame. A conflict that sat upon several major civilizational, religious, ideological, and racial fault lines deserved real diplomatic resources and attention from the U.S., rather than the pursuit of vanity projects focused on winning points in domestic politics. Once the bloodshed eventually stops, it is unclear how much may be left to salvage.

The post Biden Doubled Down on the Abraham Accords — to “Devastating Consequences” appeared first on The Intercept.

In the wake of Canada’s claim last month that the Indian government was behind the murder of Canadian citizen and Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, observers in the West have compared the alleged state-sanctioned killing to the actions of authoritarian states like Russia and Iran.

In India, however, pro-government media outlets and politicians across the spectrum have pointed to a Western democracy that they believe has most legitimized the practice of extrajudicial assassination: the United States.

The U.S. government has been supportive of Canada’s investigation of Nijjar’s murder. U.S. officials shared intelligence with the Canadian government that informed the allegations and have stated that there is no “special exemption” for countries like India to order assassinations outside of international law.

The U.S.’s targeted killing program has opened a Pandora’s box long warned of by experts.

But it is not lost on Indians that the U.S. grants itself that very exemption: During the so-called war on terror, the U.S. killed thousands of people on foreign soil it claimed were threats, including scores of innocent civilians, with little regard to sovereignty or due process.

The U.S.’s targeted killing program has opened a Pandora’s box long warned of by experts, as emerging powers like India may now seek to exercise the same extrajudicial prerogative to kill anyone, anywhere, in the name of national security.

“The fact that the U.S. has framed coercive actions since 9/11 as not just legitimate but also necessary — an imperative of sorts — does make a difference to how many Indians view these actions,” said Rishap Vats, a political science lecturer at Mithibai College of Arts in Mumbai who specializes in Indian security policy. “Some would argue that the precedent was set long before the war on terror began and that it hasn’t really stopped as a consequence of America reducing its military footprint in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Nijjar, who was gunned down outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia in June, was a prominent leader in the diaspora-based Sikh separatist movement. His activism put him on the Indian government’s radar, and he was labeled a terrorist — a designation the U.S. government has used to create its kill list and justify targeted killings overseas. Now that India has become a significant political power, it appears to be claiming the same right to kill across borders that the U.S. continues to enjoy.

“The role of human rights has always been in tension with geopolitical power,” said Sahar Aziz, a law professor and founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University–Newark. “Countries that held the most power globally have had the privilege of deciding when and under what circumstances those rights are to be taken seriously and enforced.”

“What we are seeing is a more honest engagement with human rights. The U.S., in particular, can no longer hide behind lofty rhetoric because of its own actions during the war on terror that no public relations strategy could hide,” Aziz added. “This has now given the green light to act similarly to countries that have always engaged in authoritarian practices, but now do not even feel the need to go through the motions of apologizing or claiming that their actions were an exception or mistake.”

“Any Mirrors in the West?”

Honeyed words from the U.S. about the “rules-based international order” have rung hollow to many Indians who have lashed out at perceived double standards from the West.

“They are so quick to judge other countries, so blind to their own,” said Shashi Tharoor, a leader in India’s opposition Congress Party. “The two foremost practitioners of extraterritorial assassinations in the last 25 years have been Israel and the U.S. Any mirrors available in the West?”

In an article titled “White Is Always Right: What West’s Moral Bombast on Terrorist Nijjar Tells Us,” Sreemoy Talukdar, an editor at the Indian publication Firstpost, mocked “the blatant duplicity that lies at the heart of the West’s ‘rules-based order.’”

“When it comes to the West,” Talukdar writes, “their enemies are ‘terrorists’ who enjoy no human rights, nor do the nations where they find shelter have any claims to sovereignty.”

Similar charges appeared from Indian think tankers and journalists on social media. In response to the revelation that the U.S. had shared intelligence with Canada, Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, referred to America as “the Big Daddy of extraterritorial assassinations” as well as the practice’s “longstanding world record holder.”

Rupa Subramanya, a longtime Indian correspondent who now contributes to the conservative U.S.-based publication the Free Press, went so far as to invoke civil rights leader Rosa Parks to lament supposed Western exceptionalism when it comes to extrajudicial assassinations.

“Let me get this straight,” Subramanya wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Special exemptions for targeted killings are only for the US and Israel but everyone else, get to the back of the bus.”

The suggestion by some Western commentators that the Nijjar killing was more egregious because it happened in a liberal democratic country does not appear to have swayed many Indians.

Indians who accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy in its response to Canada’s allegations have pointed to the Indian government’s designation of Nijjar as a terrorist in 2020 to justify his killing. In India, secessionist activity is considered a crime equivalent to terrorism and a threat to national security. However, there is no convincing evidence that Nijjar was connected to violence in India or that killing him averted an imminent terror plot.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Sikh separatists waged a deadly insurgency in the Indian state of Punjab that the Indian government extinguished with brute force. Nijjar was active in the diaspora campaign that has sought to keep the movement alive. Sikh separatists organized a symbolic referendum last year and regularly protest at Indian embassies and consulates in the West, some of which have resulted in property damage and threats to consular staff.

In response to allegations from the Nijjar investigation, the Indian government characterized Canada, home to a large Sikh diaspora, as a hotbed of terrorism. But in most Western countries, where factions of Indian and other diasporas are fiercely at odds with the governments of their home countries, advocacy for separatist causes is generally considered an exercise of freedom of speech.

The suggestion by some Western commentators that the Nijjar killing was more egregious because it happened in a liberal democratic country, and not in an unstable developing country, does not appear to have swayed many Indians.

“Suggestions that such covert actions are somehow more legitimate or less threatening to the ‘rules-based order’ when they happen in this part of the world or in ‘unstable’ regions comes across as offensive to most Indians,” Vats said, “not just hypocritical.”

The Precedent

National security and legal experts who are critical of the U.S. targeted killing program have for years warned that other countries could one day use the precedent to justify their own operations.

For two decades, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have used special forces, foreign militias, drones, and airstrikes to carry out extrajudicial killings in other countries. Many of these attacks have been far from precise, slaughtering thousands of civilians and leaving their families without legal recourse or even official acknowledgement of their loss. These operations have helped destabilize countries like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, where U.S. attacks have struck weddings and tribal gatherings and killed people who were simply assumed to be terrorists.

“I don’t subscribe to the view that the U.S. or Europe have ever been fully committed to human rights, especially in the Global South,” Aziz told The Intercept. “They have always selectively implemented their stated human rights norms and values, often to the benefit of people they deem worthy of such rights, based on their race, religion, or geopolitical interests.”

Within the U.S., fears of more extrajudicial killings have reverberated in the Sikh community. The Intercept was the first to report that after Nijjar’s murder, the FBI warned Sikh American activists about intelligence that their lives may also be in danger.

Despite its recent authoritarian drift and record of human rights violations against minorities, India has long presented itself as a champion of the so-called Global South and relished pointing out the inequalities of the Western-dominated international system. But rather than demand a more just and transparent regime of international law, Indian nationalists appear to want their government to simply enjoy the same right to kill with impunity that the U.S. established as a calling card of global superpower status.

“What India is doing now,” Aziz said, “and the talking points that the Indian government is putting out, calling out perceived double standards, have global salience — whereas before they may have been seen as fringe or marginal.”

The post Indian Nationalists Cite Inspiration for Foreign Assassinations: U.S. “Targeted Killing” Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

The warnings have taken on a new urgency after Canada’s bombshell revelation on Monday that it has credible intelligence pointing to Indian government involvement in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and advocate for an independent Sikh state, who was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia.

Pritpal Singh, a political activist and U.S. citizen who is a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee, told The Intercept that he and two other Sikh Americans involved in political organizing in California received calls and visits from the FBI after Nijjar was killed.

“They did not tell us specifically where the threat was coming from, but they said that I should be careful.”

“I was visited by two FBI special agents in late June who told me that they had received information that there was a threat against my life,” said Singh. “They did not tell us specifically where the threat was coming from, but they said that I should be careful.”

The two other Sikh activists, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons, told The Intercept that they were also visited by the FBI around the same time as Singh. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Sikhs throughout the U.S. have received police warnings about potential threats, said Sukhman Dhami, co-director of Ensaaf, a California-based nonprofit group that focuses on human rights in India, particularly in the Sikh-majority state of Punjab.

“We have also received messages that certain community leaders associated with politics of Sikh self-determination have recently been visited by law enforcement and warned that they may be targets,” Dhami told The Intercept.

On Thursday, a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revealed that Canada determined India’s culpability in the Nijjar killing based on signals and human intelligence, including the communications of Indian diplomats in Canada and information from an unnamed partner in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprising the U.S., Canada, the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. Earlier this week, Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat who was the head of the Indian intelligence agency in the country.

India has been on the offensive, furiously rejecting the allegations as “absurd” and accusing Canada of patronizing Sikh militant and extremist groups. India’s counterterror agency on Thursday issued a call for information about protesters who allegedly tried to start a fire at the Indian consulate in San Francisco earlier this year.

The U.S. has expressed concern over the allegations, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that the U.S. is cooperating with Canada in its investigation. In a statement this week, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that India does not have “special exemption” to carry out actions like extrajudicial killings, for which the U.S. criticizes rival countries like Russia and China.

“From the Biden administration, we expect immediate support. We do not want thoughts and prayers later.”

The U.S. is India’s largest trading partner — a relationship worth orders of magnitude more than Canada-India trade ties. Any targeted action by India on U.S. soil against Sikh dissidents could open a rift between the two countries as they build a coalition to confront China.

Sikh Americans who have received threats say they are not intimidated but want the U.S. government to take steps to protect them and stand up against what they characterize as an increasingly aggressive and authoritarian Indian government led by right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“If India can target Canadians, Americans will be next,” Singh said. “This undermines our democratic institutions, curtails individual rights and freedoms, and challenges the national security and sovereignty of the United States.”

“From the Biden administration, we expect immediate support,” he added. “We do not want thoughts and prayers later.”

Prior Warnings

Before Nijjar was killed in June, Canadian intelligence officials warned him and five other Sikh community leaders that their lives were in danger, said Moninder Singh, a spokesperson for the British Columbia Gurdwaras Council who was among those issued warnings.

“They told us that we were at imminent risk of assassination, but they would never say specifically that the threat was from Indian intelligence or give us enough information to tell us where it was coming from,” said Singh.

Singh said that, in their meetings, agents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police singled out Nijjar as particularly at risk. He had become a prominent figure in a diaspora campaign advocating for Sikh independence from India; in 2020, the Indian National Investigation Agency described his political work as “trying to incite Sikhs to vote for secession, agitate against the government of India, and carry out violent activities.”

“I would debrief with him before and after every meeting,” said Singh, a longtime friend of Nijjar. “We were supposed to meet with them again the Monday morning after Father’s Day, but he was killed the night before.”

While Nijjar is seen as a leader in parts of the Canadian Sikh community, the Indian government has characterized him as a terrorist who was involved in a range of criminal activities in India from his home in British Columbia. He had been charged under the controversial counterterrorism law known as Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which has been used by the Modi government to detain dissidents indefinitely without trial.

“It seems that there is a clear connection between the individual who was targeted and killed and his political opinions, namely his stance in favor of an independent Sikh state and his belief that he has a right to advocate for that position,” said Ensaaf’s Dhami about the circumstances around Nijjar’s killing.

“We were supposed to meet with them again the Monday morning after Father’s Day, but he was killed the night before.”

Canada is home to a large, politically active Sikh diaspora with a small yet influential representation in the federal government.

Some Canadian Sikhs support a movement to establish an independent homeland called Khalistan in the Indian state of Punjab. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Indian government brutally suppressed a nationalist insurgency there; thousands of Sikhs were extrajudicially killed, tortured, or disappeared, and many who supported the movement fled to the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., where they became part of sizable diasporas. In 1985, during a period of heightened violence, Sikh separatists living in the West bombed an Air India flight en route from Montreal to London in what was the deadliest act of aviation terrorism at the time.

Though the Khalistan movement lost steam in recent years, separatists in the diaspora continue to fight for the cause, bringing them in frequent conflict with the Indian government.

Sikh activists have held referendums and protests at Indian consulates in Western countries, sometimes making provocative denunciations of the Indian government and vandalizing Indian government property. The U.S. State Department condemned vandalism by some protesters in San Francisco who attempted to set fire to part of the Indian consulate in July. The incident did not result in major damage or injuries.

India has accused Sikh separatists in the West, many of whom are Western citizens, of fomenting terrorism in India, threatening its diplomats, and endangering its consulates and foreign offices. In Canada, Indian calls on the Canadian government to crack down on Sikh political activism, including support for secessionism in India, have been largely rebuffed.

“The Khalistan movement today enjoys very little support in Punjab,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University. “Yet the Indian government continues to inflate its significance in order to galvanize their voter base, distract from their domestic failings, and further their national security agenda.”

Suspicious Deaths

Moninder Singh disputes how Nijjar has been characterized as a terrorist in the Indian press and on social media, stating that Nijjar had been committed to defending the rights of the Sikh minority in India and fighting for their political self-determination.

“In Hardeep’s case, they had been characterizing him in the press for some time as a terrorist and militant. After all that demonization, they have reacted to his death with celebration,” he said. “They’re taking it from the perspective that they’ve won and they’re doing a victory lap. But the way we see it, this issue is not over.”

In recent years, several members of the Sikh diaspora connected to the Khalistan movement have died in circumstances some have deemed suspicious. Among them is Avtar Singh Khanda, a high-profile Sikh activist in the U.K. whose family members allege was the victim of poisoning earlier this year. In 2022, a 75-year-old Sikh Canadian man named Ripudaman Singh Malik, who had been acquitted of involvement in the Air India bombing, was shot to death in front of his family business in British Columbia.

Popular media personalities linked to the Indian security establishment have also issued indirect threats in recent days against other people living in Canada, posting their personal information and addresses online.

There has been no confirmation of allegations that the Indian government was involved in recent deaths of activists in the Sikh diaspora or the threats against them, but Canada’s investigation into Nijjar’s killing could shed light on a larger pattern.

“Members of the Sikh diaspora have died under suspicious circumstances in the past,” said Sethi. “What makes this case so unique is that Canada is alleging that the Indian government was connected to the targeting, and that this conclusion was based on intelligence gathered by countries that are part of the Five Eyes alliance.”

Moninder Singh said Canada’s charge of Indian involvement in Nijjar’s death is evidence enough of what many members of the Sikh diaspora have long claimed: that the Indian government is targeting them on Western soil.

“The feeling in the Sikh community is that this is also a piece of validation for what we’ve been saying for many years, which is that this foreign interference exists here,” he said. “His death confirmed that in a very significant way.”

The post FBI Warned Sikhs in the U.S. About Death Threats After Killing of Canadian Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

The revelation is a window into the kind of behind-the-scenes maneuvering between financial and political elites that rarely is exposed to the public, even as the public pays the price. Harsh structural policy reforms demanded by the IMF as terms for its recent bailout kicked off an ongoing round of protests in the country. Major strikes have taken place throughout Pakistan in recent weeks in response to the measures.

The protests are the latest chapter in a year-and-a-half-long political crisis roiling the country. In April 2022, the Pakistani military, with the encouragement of the U.S., helped organize a no-confidence vote to remove Prime Minister Imran Khan. Ahead of the ouster, State Department diplomats privately expressed anger to their Pakistani counterparts over what they called Pakistan’s “aggressively neutral” stance on the Ukraine war under Khan. They warned of dire consequences if Khan remained in power and promised “all would be forgiven” if he were removed.

“Pakistani democracy may ultimately be a casualty of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.”

Since Khan’s ouster, Pakistan has emerged as a useful supporter of the U.S. and its allies in the war, assistance that has now been repaid with an IMF loan. The emergency loan allowed the new Pakistani government to put off a looming economic catastrophe and indefinitely postpone elections — time it used to launch a nationwide crackdown on civil society and jail Khan.

“Pakistani democracy may ultimately be a casualty of Ukraine’s counteroffensive,” Arif Rafiq, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan, told The Intercept.

Pakistan is known as a production hub for the types of basic munitions needed for grinding warfare. As Ukraine grappled with chronic shortages of munitions and hardware, the presence of Pakistani-produced shells and other ordinances by the Ukrainian military has surfaced in open-source news reports about the conflict, though neither the U.S. nor Pakistan has acknowledged the arrangement.

Records detailing the arms transactions were leaked to The Intercept earlier this year by a source within the Pakistani military. The documents describe munitions sales agreed to between the U.S. and Pakistan from the summer of 2022 to the spring of 2023. Some of the documents were authenticated by matching the signature of an American brigadier general with his signature on publicly available mortgage records in the United States; by matching the Pakistani documents with corresponding American documents; and by reviewing publicly available but previously unreported Pakistani disclosures of arms sales to the U.S. posted by the State Bank of Pakistan.

The weapons deals were brokered, according to the documents, by Global Military Products, a subsidiary of Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer whose entanglements with less-than-reputable figures in Ukraine were the subject of a recent New York Times article.

Documents outlining the money trail and talks with U.S. officials include American and Pakistani contracts, licensing, and requisition documents related to U.S.-brokered deals to buy Pakistani military weapons for Ukraine.

The economic capital and political goodwill from the arms sales played a key role in helping secure the bailout from the IMF, with the State Department agreeing to take the IMF into confidence regarding the undisclosed weapons deal, according to sources with knowledge of the arrangement, and confirmed by a related document.

To win the loan, Pakistan had been told by the IMF it had to meet certain financing and refinancing targets related to its debt and foreign investment — targets that the country was struggling to meet. The weapons sales came to the rescue, with the funds garnered from the sale of munitions for Ukraine going a long way to cover the gap.

Securing the loan eased economic pressure, enabling the military government to delay elections — a potential reckoning in the long aftermath of Khan’s removal — and deepen the crackdown against Khan’s supporters and other dissenters. The U.S. remained largely silent about the extraordinary scale of the human rights violations that pushed the future of Pakistan’s embattled democracy into doubt.

“The premise is that we have to save Ukraine, we have to save this frontier of democracy on the eastern perimeter of Europe,” said Rafiq. “And then this brown Asian country has to pay the price. So they can be a dictatorship, their people can be denied the freedoms that every other celebrity in this country is saying we need to support Ukraine for — the ability to choose our leaders, ability to have civic freedoms, the rule of law, all these sorts of things that may differentiate many European countries and consolidated democracies from Russia.”

Bombs for Bailouts

On May 23, 2023, according to The Intercept’s investigation, Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Masood Khan sat down with Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu at the State Department in Washington, D.C., for a meeting about how Pakistani arms sales to Ukraine could shore up its financial position in the eyes of the IMF. The goal of the sit-down, held on a Tuesday, was to hash out details of the arrangement ahead of an upcoming meeting in Islamabad the following Friday between U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Donald Blome and then-Finance Minister Ishaq Dar.

Lu told Khan at the May 23 meeting that the U.S. had cleared payment for the Pakistani munitions production and would tell the IMF confidentially about the program. Lu acknowledged the Pakistanis believed the arms contributions to be worth $900 million, which would help to cover a remaining gap in the financing required by the IMF, pegged at roughly $2 billion. What precise figure the U.S. would relay to the IMF remained to be negotiated, he told Khan.

At the meeting on Friday, Dar brought up the IMF question with Blome, according to a report in Pakistan Today, which said that “the meeting highlighted the significance of addressing the stalled IMF deal and finding effective solutions to Pakistan’s economic challenges.”

After publication of this story, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement saying the article is “baseless and fabricated.” The spokesperson said the bailout “was successfully negotiated between Pakistan and the IMF to implement difficult but essential economic reforms. Giving any other colour to these negotiations is disingenuous.” The spokesperson added, “Pakistan maintains a policy of strict neutrality in the dispute between Ukraine and Russia and in that context, does not provide any arms and ammunition to them. Pakistan’s defense exports are always accompanied with strict end user requirements.”

A spokesperson for the State Department denied the U.S. played any role in helping procure the loan. “Negotiations over the IMF review were a matter for discussion between Pakistan and IMF officials,” the spokesperson said. “The United States was not party to those discussions, though we continue to encourage Pakistan to engage constructively with the IMF on its reform program.”

An IMF spokesperson denied the institution was pressured but did not comment on whether it was taken into confidence about the weapons program. “We categorically deny the allegation that there was any external pressure on the IMF in one way or another while discussing support to Pakistan,” said IMF spokesperson Randa Elnagar. (Global Ordnance, the firm involved in the arms deal, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“My understanding, based on conversations with folks in the administration, has been that we supported the IMF loan package given the desperate economic situation in Pakistan.”

The State Department’s denial was contradicted by Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a leading voice in Washington on foreign affairs. Earlier this month, Van Hollen told a group of Pakistani journalists, “The United States has been very instrumental in making sure that the IMF came forward with its emergency economic relief.” Van Hollen, whose parents were both stationed in Pakistan as State Department officials, was born in Karachi and is known to be the closest observer of Pakistan in Congress.

In an interview with The Intercept at the Capitol on Tuesday, Van Hollen said that his knowledge of the U.S. role in facilitating the IMF loan came directly from the Biden administration. “My understanding, based on conversations with folks in the administration, has been that we supported the IMF loan package given the desperate economic situation in Pakistan,” he said. 

Eleventh-Hour IMF Deal

The diplomatic discussion about the loan came a month before a June 30 deadline for the IMF’s review of a planned billion-dollar payment, part of a $6 billion agreement made in 2019. A failed review would mean no cash infusion, but, in the months and weeks ahead of the deadline, Pakistani officials publicly denied that they faced serious challenges in financing the new loan.

In early 2023, Dar, the finance minister, said that external financing assurance — in other words, financial commitments from places like China, the Gulf states, or the U.S. — were not a condition the IMF was insisting Pakistan meet. In March 2023, however, the IMF representative in charge of dealing with Pakistan publicly contradicted Dar’s rosy assessment. IMF’s Esther Perez Ruiz said in an email to Reuters that all borrowers need to be able to demonstrate that they can finance repayments. “Pakistan is no exception,” Perez said.

The IMF statement sent Pakistani officials scrambling for a solution. The required financing, according to public reporting and confirmed by sources with knowledge of the arrangement, was set at $6 billion. To reach that goal, the Pakistani government claimed it had secured roughly $4 billion in commitments from Gulf countries. The secret arms deal for Ukraine would allow Pakistan to add nearly another billion dollars to its balance sheet — if the U.S. would let the IMF in on the secret.

“It was at an impasse because of the remaining $2 billion,” said Rafiq, the Middle East Institute scholar. “So if that figure is accurate, the $900 million, that’s almost half of that. That’s pretty substantial in terms of that gap that had to be bridged.”

On June 29, a day before the original program was set to expire, the IMF made a surprise announcement that instead of extending the previous series of loans and releasing the next $1.1 billion installment, the bank would instead be entering an agreement — “called a Stand-By Arrangement” — with fewer strings attached, more favorable terms, and valued at $3 billion.

“Had that not happened, there would have been a full-blown economic meltdown in the country. So it was a make-or-break moment.”

The agreement included the conditions that the currency would be allowed to float freely and energy subsidies would be withdrawn. The deal was finalized in July after Parliament approved the conditions, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the cost of energy.

Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, said that the IMF deal was critical to Pakistan’s short-term economic survival. “Had that not happened, there would have been a full-blown economic meltdown in the country,” Younus said. “So it was a make-or-break moment.”

The question of how Pakistan overcame its financing obstacles, has remained a mystery even to those following the situation professionally. The IMF issues public accounting of its reviews, Rafiq noted, but doing so if the financing relates to secret military projects presents an unusual challenge. “Pakistan is very strange, in many ways,” he said, “but I don’t know how a secret, covert, clandestine military program would figure into their calculations, because everything’s supposed to be open and by the books and all that.”

Imran Khan, Ukraine, and Pakistan’s Future

At the start of the Ukraine war, Pakistan was in a markedly different geopolitical and economic position. When the conflict began, Khan, at the time the prime minister, was in the air on the way to Moscow for a long-planned bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The visit outraged American officials.

As The Intercept previously reported, Lu, the senior State Department official, said in a meeting with then-Pakistani Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan two weeks after the invasion that it was the belief of the U.S. that Pakistan had taken a neutral position solely at Khan’s direction, adding that “all would be forgiven” if Khan was removed in the no-confidence vote. Since his ouster, Pakistan has firmly taken the side of the U.S. and Ukraine in the war.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to deny that it put its thumbs on the scale of Pakistani democracy — for Ukraine or any other reason. At an off-the-record, virtual town hall with members of the Pakistani diaspora at the end of August, Lu’s deputy, Elizabeth Horst, responded to questions about The Intercept’s reporting on Lu’s meeting with the Pakistani ambassador.

“I want to take a moment to address disinformation about the United States’s role in Pakistani politics,” Horst said at the top of the call, audio of which was provided to The Intercept by an attendee. “We do not let propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation get in the way of any bilateral relationship, including our valued relationship with Pakistan. The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or one party versus another. Any claims to the contrary, including reports on the alleged cypher are false, and senior Pakistani officials themselves have acknowledged this isn’t true.”

Senior Pakistani officials, including former Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, have confirmed the authenticity of the cable, known internally as a cypher, published by The Intercept.

Van Hollen, in his press briefing with Pakistani journalists, took the same line as the State Department, saying that he had been assured by the administration that the U.S. did not interfere in Pakistani politics. In his interview with The Intercept, he clarified that he meant the U.S. did not engineer Khan’s ouster. “I’m not disputing the accuracy of the cable,” Van Hollen said. “Look, I have no idea where the administration is on what their view is on the final result, but I do not read that [cable] to mean that the United States engineered his removal.”

After orchestrating Khan’s removal, the military embarked on a campaign to eradicate his political party through a wave of killings and mass detentions. Khan himself is currently imprisoned on charges of mishandling a classified document and facing some 150 additional charges — allegations widely viewed as a pretext to stop him from contesting future elections.

Horst, at the town hall, was also pressed as to why the U.S. has been so muted in response to the crackdown. She argued the U.S. had, in fact, spoken up on behalf of democracy. “Look, I know many of you feel strongly and are very concerned about the situation in Pakistan. I’ve heard from you. Trust me when I say I see you, I hear from you. And I want to be responsive,” she said. “We do continue to speak up publicly and privately for Pakistan’s democracy.”

While Pakistan reels from the impact of IMF-directed austerity policies and the political dysfunction that followed Khan’s removal, its new military leaders have made lofty promises that foreign economic support will rescue the country. According to reports in the Pakistani publication Dawn, Army Chief Gen. Asim Munir recently told a gathering of Pakistani businessmen that the country could expect as much as $100 billion in new investment from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, hinting that there would be no more appeals to the IMF.

There is little evidence, however, that the Gulf nations are willing to come to Pakistan’s rescue. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, recently announced major investments and economic partnerships with India during a visit there for the G20 summit. Despite reports in the Pakistani press expressing hope that MBS would pay Pakistan a visit, none materialized, let alone any major new investment announcements.

The absence of other foreign support left Pakistan’s embattled military regime further dependent on the IMF, the U.S., and the production of munitions for the war in Ukraine to sustain itself through a crisis that shows no sign of resolution.

Update: September 18, 2023
This story has been updated to include a statement released after publication by the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The post U.S. Helped Pakistan Get IMF Bailout With Secret Arms Deal for Ukraine, Leaked Documents Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

The Pakistani military and its allies have imprisoned the former prime minister, Imran Khan, and have held him behind bars despite the country’s High Court recently suspending a controversial sentence that barred him from running in upcoming elections. He is being held under the country’s Official Secrets Act — which is being enforced in apparent disregard for the Pakistani Constitution after being rejected by the nation’s president. Khan is charged with mishandling a secret government cable describing U.S. pressure to oust him from office. A hearing was held secretly in prison on Wednesday, with Khan’s detention extended to September 13, as the investigation continues. The Intercept recently published the contents of the cable, which was provided by a source in the Pakistan military. 

Anti-military protests have rippled through the country in recent days amid anger at increasing energy prices that resulted from demands made by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF bailout was needed to counteract the capital flight and economic collapse that has accelerated in the wake of Khan’s ouster. 

Pakistan has been the beneficiary of billions of dollars of U.S. military aid over the past two decades, mostly to support cooperation in the global war on terror and U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. During the Trump administration, the pipeline of annual Pentagon funding to the Pakistani military was slashed considerably, though the Department of Defense continues to provide other military support to the country. Military cooperation between Pakistan and the U.S. has increased again since Khan’s ouster, with the Pakistani military now emerging, by European accounts, as a significant supplier of military aid to Ukraine.

“The U.S. has long forgiven the unforgivable with Pakistan in the name of geopolitical expediency, dating back Nixon and Kissinger’s complicity with Operation Searchlight and the Bangladeshi genocide. The Biden Administration and Secretary Blinken’s tepid non-response to the Pakistani military’s brutal crackdown on the political opposition and independent media is a disappointing continuation of this history and a betrayal of the rules-based democracy they claim to stand for,” said Nathan Thompson with the advocacy group Just Foreign Policy. “I’m glad to see members of Congress finally seeking to review and potentially end U.S. complicity in abuses by Pakistan’s military regime.”

The amendment to the appropriations bill is an extreme long shot, but its introduction reflects increasing concerns about democratic backsliding in Pakistan across party lines. During the debate over the National Defense Authorization Act earlier this summer, Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas pushed an amendment that would direct the State Department to study that backsliding, but it wasn’t ruled in order for a vote on the House floor. Ogles did not respond to a request for comment.

Pakistan is currently being led by a caretaker civilian government backed by the military, with the timing of future elections currently uncertain. A readout of a State Department meeting between U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland and Pakistani Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani earlier this week stated that the U.S. and Pakistan had “discussed the importance of timely, free and fair elections in a manner consistent with Pakistan’s laws and constitution.”

The post New GOP Measure Would Bar Pentagon Assistance to Pakistan appeared first on The Intercept.

The impact has not been limited to those with ties to only Pakistan itself. Some of those caught up in the dragnet are American and British citizens and residents, detained in Pakistan after repression escalated in response to a series of demonstrations against the military this past May.

Pakistan is widely seen to be devolving into a police state, with thousands arrested on politicized charges over the past few months. Exact numbers of foreign nationals detained in this sweep are unclear, but at least one dual citizen, a Pakistani American named Khadijah Shah, is known to be in custody of the military.

This June, in response to questions about her case, the U.S. government announced that it had requested consular access to Shah from the Pakistani government. Shah is a high-profile Pakistani American fashion designer, and her case has received an exceptional amount of media coverage. The U.S. government has said little about her fate. As for other U.S. citizens in Pakistan, the U.S. hasn’t spoken of any attempts to determine whether other Americans may be detained there. (A State Department spokesperson said, “Consular officers have visited Ms. Shaw three times since her arrest. The last visit was on July 27, 2023. We continue to monitor Ms. Shah’s case closely.”)

Some Pakistanis with ties to the West say there are likely many other Pakistanis with foreign citizenship and residency in custody. Shahzad Akbar, formerly a legal activist in Pakistan and later an anti-corruption minister in Khan’s government, fled the crackdown to the United Kingdom, where he lives as a resident. Akbar said that many more American and British Pakistanis are likely in prison in Pakistan over the crackdown, with their families fearful of coming forward due to possible repercussions toward their loved ones.

“The line that we have heard from foreign governments is that what is happening is Pakistan’s internal matter, even though many of those detained have been foreign nationals of Pakistani descent,” Akbar said. “But when you know what is happening is political repression of dissidents, your own intelligence confirms this, and your citizens are impacted, you cannot merely dismiss it as an internal matter.”

“The line that we have heard from foreign governments is that what is happening is Pakistan’s internal matter, even though many of those detained have been foreign nationals of Pakistani descent.”

A State Department spokesperson said, “We have no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas. We are in close contact with Pakistani authorities on this issue and expect them to afford all detainees fair and transparent treatment in accordance with Pakistan’s laws and international obligations.”

Akbar’s own family has been impacted by the crackdown. This May, his brother in Pakistan was arrested by security forces to pressure him to return to the country from the United Kingdom. “My brother was detained in the middle of the night on May 28,” said Akbar. “Dozens of armed paramilitaries and counterterrorism police surrounded his house, broke down the door, and took him into custody.”

Akbar said the security forces wanted him to testify against Khan about the corruption charges that the former prime minister is currently imprisoned for.

“I have been receiving messages through backchannels since then telling me that, if I want my brother back, I should return to Pakistan from the U.K. and testify against Imran Khan,” he said.

Akbar refused the demand to return and denounce Khan. His brother remains in custody without charge.

“I’m a professional,” he said. “I was hired by the government to perform a role. I’m not even a member of any party. I never thought things would come to the point that the military would kidnap my brother and hold him hostage with no chargeable offense just to put pressure on me.”

U.S. Pressure to Oust Khan

The United States and British governments have both deemed the crisis over Khan’s removal an internal affair of the Pakistani government, even as the crackdown on his party has extended into a general attack on Pakistan’s civil society.

A statement by Human Rights Watch earlier this year criticized the Pakistani government over the detentions of political activists following the May uprising. “Many have been charged under vague and overbroad laws prohibiting rioting and creating threats to public order,” the group said.

In addition to extrajudicial detentions, the government has also been accused of torturing detainees in custody.

The issue of Pakistanis with dual nationality and residency caught up in this dragnet is particularly significant given the U.S. government’s own apparent role in helping trigger the crisis. The Intercept reported earlier this month on a classified Pakistani government cable, long referred to by Khan in public appearances before he went to prison. The document recounts a meeting where U.S. diplomats threatened their Pakistani counterparts with “isolation” if Khan remained in power and promising rewards should he be removed in a 2022 no-confidence vote.

Since the vote was passed, Pakistan’s economy and political system have been thrown into an escalating crisis that has now resulted in the country veering toward full-fledged military dictatorship. This week, Pakistan’s president added a new twist to the saga after he denied signing off on a set of laws — a constitutional requirement — that would have granted sweeping new authoritarian powers to the Pakistani military.

The post No One Knows How Many Americans Are Imprisoned in Pakistan’s Crackdown on Dissent appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, the Pakistani authorities moved to charge Khan under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act for his alleged mishandling of a classified diplomatic cable, known internally as a cipher. The March 7, 2022, cable had been at the center of a controversy in Pakistan, with Khan and his supporters claiming for a year and a half that it showed U.S. pressure to remove the prime minister. Khan publicly revealed the existence of the document in a late March 2022 rally. In April, Khan was removed by a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

In the latest blow to the former prime minister, Pakistani authorities filed a First Information Report — an official allegation — charging that Khan and his associates were “involved in communication of information contained in secret classified document … to the unauthorized persons (i.e. public at large) by twisting the facts to achieve their ulterior motives and personal gains in a manner prejudicial to the interests of state security.”

The official report, the first step to a formal indictment, alleged that Khan and members of his government held a “clandestine meeting” in mid-March 2022, shortly after the cable was sent, in a conspiracy to use the classified document to their advantage.

Earlier this month, The Intercept reported on the contents of the secret cable, which confirmed U.S. diplomatic pressure to remove Khan. The document was provided to The Intercept by a source in the Pakistani military. The formal allegation against Khan makes no mention of The Intercept’s publication of the diplomatic cable.

After the allegations about the cable were formally lodged against Khan this weekend, a wrinkle quickly appeared in the case. Pakistan’s legislature, widely believed to be acting as a rubber stamp for the military, recently approved changes to the state secrets law that Khan was being charged under. Pakistan’s sitting President Arif Alvi, though, denied on social media that he had authorized the signing of the amendments into law.

“As God is my witness, I did not sign Official Secrets Amendment Bill 2023 & Pakistan Army Amendment Bill 2023 as I disagreed with these laws,” Alvi tweeted, referring to another controversial new piece of legislation granting the Pakistani military sweeping powers over civil liberties. “However I have found out today that my staff undermined my will and command.” 

The additions to the Official Secrets Act specifically target leakers and whistleblowers, outlining new offenses for the disclosure of information to the public related to national security and effectively criminalizing any news reporting that the military deems to be against its interests. Khan is expected to be indicted soon under the new law.

Alvi’s statement — that he had opposed the laws, but that his staff had apparently signed off on them without his consent — throws Pakistan into uncharted constitutional territory. Under normal circumstances, the country’s president is required to give final affirmation to any laws passed by Parliament.

Imran Khan’s Imprisonment

Khan is reportedly under pressure while in government custody. According to media accounts, he lodged complaints about surveillance in prison, as well as the inability to meet with lawyers and family members. And Khan’s wife has expressed fears that the former prime minister could be “poisoned” in jail.

The former prime minister is currently serving a three-year sentence on corruption charges that his supporters say are politically motivated. As part of his punishment in that case, he has also received a five-year ban from politics, which is believed to be aimed at preventing Khan — the most popular politician in the country — from contesting elections slated for later this year.

Meanwhile, the crackdown on Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, Khan’s political party, continued. On Sunday, shortly after Khan was booked under the state secrets law, his former foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was arrested under the same statute.

In an interview with Voice of America last week, former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton called for Congress to look into potential U.S. involvement in Khan’s removal. Bolton said that despite his differences with many of Khan’s policies, which included strident criticism of U.S. involvement in Pakistani domestic affairs, he opposed the crackdown by the military, saying “terrorists, China and Russia” could use the discord to their advantage.

“I would be stunned if that’s exactly what they said,” Bolton said of the cable text published by The Intercept. “It would be remarkable for the State Department, under any administration, but particularly under the Biden administration, to be calling for Imran Khan’s overthrow.”

The post Imran Khan Booked Under Pakistan State Secrets Law for Allegedly Mishandling Secret Cable in 2022 appeared first on The Intercept.

Since it was published, the response to the story from Pakistani and U.S. officials has been both defensive and contradictory.

Pakistan’s leadership quickly began to question the authenticity of the document. Former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari — who is part of the political opposition to Khan — had gone public suggesting that the published cable was “inauthentic,” arguing that “anything can be typed up on a piece of paper.” Even so, he blamed Khan and said the former prime minister should be tried under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act for potentially leaking classified documents.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, in the days after the cable was reported, told local media that the leak represented a “massive crime,” while hedging about whether its contents were true. Just days later, though, Sharif confirmed the document in an interview with The Guardian. “Khan said he had the [cable] but he had lost it,” Sharif, who handed over the government to a caretaker prime minister on Monday, said. “Now it has been published on a website.”

Neither Sharif nor Bhutto Zardari have provided evidence of Khan’s involvement in the leak of the document, which was provided to The Intercept by a source inside the Pakistani military. On Wednesday, a month after it announced an investigation, the Pakistani government filed charges against Khan for mishandling and misusing the cable.

Despite confirming the document’s authenticity, Sharif said that the cable — which quoted U.S. diplomats, furious with Khan for his alleged “aggressive neutrality” toward Russia, threatening Pakistan with “isolation” should he stay in power — did not represent a conspiracy against the former prime minister.

The self-contradictory three-step move — to simultaneously question the document’s authenticity, blame Khan for leaking it in what amounts to a treasonous act, and then add that the substance of the cable is unremarkable — has characterized the Pakistani and State Department response over the past week.

On the U.S. side, the State Department had previously dismissed claims by Khan that the U.S. had pressured him to be removed from power. After the disclosure of the leaked cable, State Department officials told The Intercept that they could not comment on the accuracy of a foreign government document but argued that the comments did not show the U.S. taking sides in Pakistani politics. “Nothing in these purported comments shows the United States taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan should be,” State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said in a statement to The Intercept.

When pressed further on the document at a press briefing, Miller told a reporter, who asked whether the substance of the reported conversation in the cable was accurate, that the report was “close-ish.”

Khan himself has reportedly been placed under escalating pressure while in prison; he is currently serving a three-year sentence for corruption charges that his supporters say are politically motivated. The campaign against Khan culminated in this week’s terror investigation for the cable leak.

A widespread crackdown against his supporters continues, with thousands still languishing in detention over allegations of involvement in his political party and a series of anti-military demonstrations that took place in the country in May.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, deemed the crackdown an “internal matter” for the Pakistani government, while continuing to engage the Pakistani military that is believed to have orchestrated Khan’s removal.

The disclosure of the cable — and the revelation that Khan had been largely truthful in his depiction of its contents, including an accurate quote of a State Department official saying that “all would be forgiven” if Khan were removed from power — could reshape the course of Pakistan’s political crisis. The cable’s publication has already become a major topic of conversation in Pakistani media.

Khan’s own political fate now largely depends on how far the present military-led government decides to pursue its vendetta against him and his supporters. The revelation of the cable’s contents and the divisions that the violent repression of Khan’s party have evidently opened inside the military establishment only further heightens a crisis that has gripped Pakistan since Khan was removed from power last year.

The post Pakistan Confirms Secret Diplomatic Cable Showing U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.

The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan’s party. The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination.

The cable reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The contents of the document obtained by The Intercept are consistent with reporting in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn and elsewhere describing the circumstances of the meeting and details in the cable itself, including in the classification markings omitted from The Intercept’s presentation. The dynamics of the relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. described in the cable were subsequently borne out by events. In the cable, the U.S. objects to Khan’s foreign policy on the Ukraine war. Those positions were quickly reversed after his removal, which was followed, as promised in the meeting, by a warming between the U.S. and Pakistan.

The diplomatic meeting came two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which launched as Khan was en route to Moscow, a visit that infuriated Washington.

On March 2, just days before the meeting, Lu had been questioned at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing over the neutrality of India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan in the Ukraine conflict. In response to a question from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., about a recent decision by Pakistan to abstain from a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s role in the conflict, Lu said, “Prime Minister Khan has recently visited Moscow, and so I think we are trying to figure out how to engage specifically with the Prime Minister following that decision.” Van Hollen appeared to be indignant that officials from the State Department were not in communication with Khan about the issue.

The day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”

In the meeting, according to the document, Lu spoke in forthright terms about Washington’s displeasure with Pakistan’s stance in the conflict. The document quotes Lu saying that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” Lu added that he had held internal discussions with the U.S. National Security Council and that “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.”

Lu then bluntly raises the issue of a no-confidence vote: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu said, according to the document. “Otherwise,” he continued, “I think it will be tough going ahead.”

Lu warned that if the situation wasn’t resolved, Pakistan would be marginalized by its Western allies. “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar,” Lu said, adding that Khan could face “isolation” by Europe and the U.S. should he remain in office.

Asked about quotes from Lu in the Pakistani cable, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “Nothing in these purported comments shows the United States taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan should be.” Miller said he would not comment on private diplomatic discussions. 

The Pakistani ambassador responded by expressing frustration with the lack of engagement from U.S. leadership: “This reluctance had created a perception in Pakistan that we were being ignored or even taken for granted. There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate.”

“There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate.”

The discussion concluded, according to the document, with the Pakistani ambassador expressing his hope that the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war would not “impact our bilateral ties.” Lu told him that the damage was real but not fatal, and with Khan gone, the relationship could go back to normal. “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective,” Lu said, again raising the “political situation” in Pakistan. “Let us wait for a few days to see whether the political situation changes, which would mean that we would not have a big disagreement about this issue and the dent would go away very quickly. Otherwise, we will have to confront this issue head on and decide how to manage it.”

The day after the meeting, on March 8, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward the no-confidence vote.

“Khan’s fate wasn’t sealed at the time that this meeting took place, but it was tenuous,” said Arif Rafiq, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan. “What you have here is the Biden administration sending a message to the people that they saw as Pakistan’s real rulers, signaling to them that things will better if he is removed from power.”

The Intercept has made extensive efforts to authenticate the document. Given the security climate in Pakistan, independent confirmation from sources in the Pakistani government was not possible. The Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, “We had expressed concern about the visit of then-PM Khan to Moscow on the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have communicated that opposition both publicly and privately.” He added that “allegations that the United States interfered in internal decisions about the leadership of Pakistan are false. They have always been false, and they continue to be.” 

Left/Top: Donald Lu, a diplomat in service and assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, waves toward media personnel upon his arrival at Tribhuvan International Airport on July 14, 2023, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Right/Bottom: Pakistani Foreign Secretary Asad Majeed Khan is seen in Ankara, Turkey, on July 6, 2023. Photos: Photo: Abhishek Maharjan/Sipa via AP Images (left); Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images (right)

American Denials

The State Department has previously and on repeated occasions denied that Lu urged the Pakistani government to oust the prime minister. On April 8, 2022, after Khan alleged there was a cable proving his claim of U.S. interference, State Department spokesperson Jalina Porter was asked about its veracity. “Let me just say very bluntly there is absolutely no truth to these allegations,” Porter said.

In early June 2023, Khan sat for an interview with The Intercept and again repeated the allegation. The State Department at the time referred to previous denials in response to a request for comment.

Khan has not backed off, and the State Department again denied the charge throughout June and July, at least three times in press conferences and again in a speech by a deputy assistant secretary of state for Pakistan, who referred to the claims as “propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.” On the latest occasion, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, ridiculed the question. “I feel like I need to bring just a sign that I can hold up in response to this question and say that that allegation is not true,” Miller said, laughing and drawing cackles from the press. “I don’t know how many times I can say it. … The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or party versus another in Pakistan or any other country.”

While the drama over the cable has played out in public and in the press, the Pakistani military has launched an unprecedented assault on Pakistani civil society to silence whatever dissent and free expression had previously existed in the country.

In recent months, the military-led government cracked down not just on dissidents but also on suspected leakers inside its own institutions, passing a law last week that authorizes warrantless searches and lengthy jail terms for whistleblowers. Shaken by the public display of support for Khan — expressed in a series of mass protests and riots this May — the military has also enshrined authoritarian powers for itself that drastically reduce civil liberties, criminalize criticism of the military, expand the institution’s already expansive role in the country’s economy, and give military leaders a permanent veto over political and civil affairs.

These sweeping attacks on democracy passed largely unremarked upon by U.S. officials. In late July, the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, visited Pakistan, then issued a statement saying his visit had been focused on “strengthening the military-to-military relations,” while making no mention of the political situation in the country. This summer, Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, attempted to add a measure to the National Defense Authorization Act directing the State Department to examine democratic backsliding in Pakistan, but it was denied a vote on the House floor.

In a press briefing on Monday, in response to a question about whether Khan received a fair trial, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, “We believe that is an internal matter for Pakistan.”

Political Chaos

Khan’s removal from power after falling out with the Pakistani military, the same institution believed to have engineered his political rise, has thrown the nation of 230 million into political and economic turmoil. Protests against Khan’s dismissal and suppression of his party have swept the country and paralyzed its institutions, while Pakistan’s current leaders struggle to confront an economic crisis triggered in part by the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on global energy prices. The present chaos has resulted in staggering rates of inflation and capital flight from the country.

In addition to the worsening situation for ordinary citizens, a regime of extreme censorship has also been put in place at the direction of the Pakistani military, with news outlets effectively barred from even mentioning Khan’s name, as The Intercept previously reported. Thousands of members of civil society, mostly supporters of Khan, have been detained by the military, a crackdown that intensified after Khan was arrested earlier this year and held in custody for four days, sparking nationwide protests. Credible reports have emerged of torture by security forces, with reports of several deaths in custody.

The crackdown on Pakistan’s once-rambunctious press has taken a particularly dark turn. Arshad Sharif, a prominent Pakistani journalist who fled the country, was shot to death in Nairobi last October under circumstances that remain disputed. Another well-known journalist, Imran Riaz Khan, was detained by security forces at an airport this May and has not been seen since. Both had been reporting on the secret cable, which has taken on nearly mythical status in Pakistan, and had been among a handful of journalists briefed on its contents before Khan’s ouster. These attacks on the press have created a climate of fear that has made reporting on the document by reporters and institutions inside Pakistan effectively impossible.

Last November, Khan himself was subject to an attempted assassination when he was shot at a political rally, in an attack that wounded him and killed one of his supporters. His imprisonment has been widely viewed within Pakistan, including among many critics of his government, as an attempt by the military to stop his party from contesting upcoming elections. Polls show that were he allowed to participate in the vote, Khan would likely win.

“Khan was convicted on flimsy charges following a trial where his defense was not even allowed to produce witnesses. He had previously survived an assassination attempt, had a journalist aligned with him murdered, and has seen thousands of his supporters imprisoned. While the Biden administration has said that human rights will be at the forefront of their foreign policy, they are now looking away as Pakistan moves toward becoming a full-fledged military dictatorship,” said Rafiq, the Middle East Institute scholar. “This is ultimately about the Pakistani military using outside forces as a means to preserve their hegemony over the country. Every time there is a grand geopolitical rivalry, whether it is the Cold War, or the war on terror, they know how to manipulate the U.S. in their favor.”

Khan’s repeated references to the cable itself have contributed to his legal troubles, with prosecutors launching a separate investigation into whether he violated state secrets laws by discussing it.

Democracy and the Military

For years, the U.S. government’s patronage relationship with the Pakistani military, which has long acted as the real powerbroker in the country’s politics, has been seen by many Pakistanis as an impenetrable obstacle to the country’s ability to grow its economy, combat endemic corruption, and pursue a constructive foreign policy. The sense that Pakistan has lacked meaningful independence because of this relationship — which, despite trappings of democracy, has made the military an untouchable force in domestic politics — makes the charge of U.S. involvement in the removal of a popular prime minister even more incendiary.

The Intercept’s source, who had access to the document as a member of the military, spoke of their growing disillusionment with the country’s military leadership, the impact on the military’s morale following its involvement in the political fight against Khan, the exploitation of the memory of dead service members for political purposes in recent military propaganda, and widespread public disenchantment with the armed forces amid the crackdown. They believe the military is pushing Pakistan toward a crisis similar to the one in 1971 that led to the secession of Bangladesh.

The source added that they hoped the leaked document would finally confirm what ordinary people, as well as the rank and file of the armed forces, had long suspected about the Pakistani military and force a reckoning within the institution.

This June, amid the crackdown by the military on Khan’s political party, Khan’s former top bureaucrat, Principal Secretary Azam Khan, was arrested and detained for a month. While in detention, Azam Khan reportedly issued a statement recorded in front of a member of the judiciary saying that the cable was indeed real, but that the former prime minister had exaggerated its contents for political gain.

A month after the meeting described in the cable, and just days before Khan was removed from office, then-Pakistan army chief Qamar Bajwa publicly broke with Khan’s neutrality and gave a speech calling the Russian invasion a “huge tragedy” and criticizing Russia. The remarks aligned the public picture with Lu’s private observation, recorded in the cable, that Pakistan’s neutrality was the policy of Khan, but not of the military.

Pakistan’s foreign policy has changed significantly since Khan’s removal, with Pakistan tilting more clearly toward the U.S. and European side in the Ukraine conflict. Abandoning its posture of neutrality, Pakistan has now emerged as a supplier of arms to the Ukrainian military; images of Pakistan-produced shells and ammunition regularly turn up on battlefield footage. In an interview earlier this year, a European Union official confirmed Pakistani military backing to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister traveled to Pakistan this July in a visit widely presumed to be about military cooperation, but publicly described as focusing on trade, education, and environmental issues.

This realignment toward the U.S. has appeared to provide dividends to the Pakistani military. On August 3, a Pakistani newspaper reported that Parliament had approved the signing of a defense pact with the U.S. covering “joint exercises, operations, training, basing and equipment.” The agreement was intended to replace a previous 15-year deal between the two countries that expired in 2020.

Pakistani “Assessment”

Lu’s blunt comments on Pakistan’s internal domestic politics raised alarms on the Pakistani side. In a brief “assessment” section at the bottom of the report, the document states: “Don could not have conveyed such a strong demarche without the express approval of the White House, to which he referred repeatedly. Clearly, Don spoke out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process.” The cable concludes with a recommendation “to seriously reflect on this and consider making an appropriate demarche to the U.S. Cd’ A a.i in Islamabad” — a reference to the chargé d’affaires ad interim, effectively the acting head of a diplomatic mission when its accredited head is absent. A diplomatic protest was later issued by Khan’s government.

On March 27, 2022, the same month as the Lu meeting, Khan spoke publicly about the cable, waving a folded copy of it in the air at a rally. He also reportedly briefed a national security meeting with the heads of Pakistan’s various security agencies on its contents.

It is not clear what happened in Pakistan-U.S. communications during the weeks that followed the meeting reported in the cable. By the following month, however, the political winds had shifted. On April 10, Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote.

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Intercepted

The new prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, eventually confirmed the existence of the cable and acknowledged that some of the message conveyed by Lu was inappropriate. He has said that Pakistan had formally complained but cautioned that the cable did not confirm Khan’s broader claims.

Khan has suggested repeatedly in public that the top-secret cable showed that the U.S. had directed his removal from power, but subsequently revised his assessment as he urged the U.S. to condemn human rights abuses against his supporters. The U.S., he told The Intercept in a June interview, may have urged his ouster, but only did so because it was manipulated by the military.

The disclosure of the full body of the cable, over a year after Khan was deposed and following his arrest, will finally allow the competing claims to be evaluated. On balance, the text of the cypher strongly suggests that the U.S. encouraged Khan’s removal. According to the cable, while Lu did not directly order Khan to be taken out of office, he said that Pakistan would suffer severe consequences, including international isolation, if Khan were to stay on as prime minister, while simultaneously hinting at rewards for his removal. The remarks appear to have been taken as a signal for the Pakistani military to act.

In addition to his other legal problems, Khan himself has continued to be targeted over the handling of the secret cable by the new government. Late last month, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said that Khan would be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in connection with the cable. “Khan has hatched a conspiracy against the state’s interests and a case will be initiated against him on behalf of the state for the violation of the Official Secrets Act by exposing a confidential cipher communication from a diplomatic mission,” Sanaullah said.

Khan has now joined a long list of Pakistani politicians who failed to finish their term in office after running afoul of the military. As quoted in the cypher, Khan was being personally blamed by the U.S., according to Lu, for Pakistan’s policy of nonalignment during the Ukraine conflict. The vote of no confidence and its implications for the future of U.S.-Pakistan ties loomed large throughout the conversation.

“Honestly,” Lu is quoted as saying in the document, referring to the prospect of Khan staying in office, “I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.”

March 7, 2022 Pakistani Diplomatic Cypher (Transcription)

The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination. The Intercept has removed classification markings and numerical elements that could be used for tracking purposes. Labeled “Secret,” the cable includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

I had a luncheon meeting today with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu. He was accompanied by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Les Viguerie. DCM, DA and Counsellor Qasim joined me.

At the outset, Don referred to Pakistan’s position on the Ukraine crisis and said that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” He shared that in his discussions with the NSC, “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.” He continued that he was of the view that this was “tied to the current political dramas in Islamabad that he (Prime Minister) needs and is trying to show a public face.” I replied that this was not a correct reading of the situation as Pakistan’s position on Ukraine was a result of intense interagency consultations. Pakistan had never resorted to conducting diplomacy in public sphere. The Prime Minister’s remarks during a political rally were in reaction to the public letter by European Ambassadors in Islamabad which was against diplomatic etiquette and protocol. Any political leader, whether in Pakistan or the U.S., would be constrained to give a public reply in such a situation.

I asked Don if the reason for a strong U.S. reaction was Pakistan’s abstention in the voting in the UNGA. He categorically replied in the negative and said that it was due to the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow. He said that “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” He paused and then said “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar.” He then said that “honestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.” Don further commented that it seemed that the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow was planned during the Beijing Olympics and there was an attempt by the Prime Minister to meet Putin which was not successful and then this idea was hatched that he would go to Moscow.

I told Don that this was a completely misinformed and wrong perception. The visit to Moscow had been in the works for at least few years and was the result of a deliberative institutional process. I stressed that when the Prime Minister was flying to Moscow, Russian invasion of Ukraine had not started and there was still hope for a peaceful resolution. I also pointed out that leaders of European countries were also traveling to Moscow around the same time. Don interjected that “those visits were specifically for seeking resolution of the Ukraine standoff while the Prime Minister’s visit was for bilateral economic reasons.” I drew his attention to the fact that the Prime Minister clearly regretted the situation while being in Moscow and had hoped for diplomacy to work. The Prime Minister’s visit, I stressed, was purely in the bilateral context and should not be seen either as a condonation or endorsement of Russia’s action against Ukraine. I said that our position is dictated by our desire to keep the channels of communication with all sides open. Our subsequent statements at the UN and by our Spokesperson spelled that out clearly, while reaffirming our commitment to the principle of UN Charter, non-use or threat of use of force, sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, and pacific settlement of disputes.

I also told Don that Pakistan was worried of how the Ukraine crisis would play out in the context of Afghanistan. We had paid a very high price due to the long-term impact of this conflict. Our priority was to have peace and stability in Afghanistan, for which it was imperative to have cooperation and coordination with all major powers, including Russia. From this perspective as well, keeping the channels of communication open was essential. This factor was also dictating our position on the Ukraine crisis. On my reference to the upcoming Extended Troika meeting in Beijing, Don replied that there were still ongoing discussions in Washington on whether the U.S. should attend the Extended Troika meeting or the upcoming Antalya meeting on Afghanistan with Russian representatives in attendance, as the U.S. focus right now was to discuss only Ukraine with Russia. I replied that this was exactly what we were afraid of. We did not want the Ukraine crisis to divert focus away from Afghanistan. Don did not comment.

I told Don that just like him, I would also convey our perspective in a forthright manner. I said that over the past one year, we had been consistently sensing reluctance on the part of the U.S. leadership to engage with our leadership. This reluctance had created a perception in Pakistan that we were being ignored and even taken for granted. There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate and we do not see much U.S. support on issues of concern for Pakistan, particularly on Kashmir. I said that it was extremely important to have functioning channels of communication at the highest level to remove such perception. I also said that we were surprised that if our position on the Ukraine crisis was so important for the U.S., why the U.S. had not engaged with us at the top leadership level prior to the Moscow visit and even when the UN was scheduled to vote. (The State Department had raised it at the DCM level.) Pakistan valued continued high-level engagement and for this reason the Foreign Minister sought to speak with Secretary Blinken to personally explain Pakistan’s position and perspective on the Ukraine crisis. The call has not materialized yet. Don replied that the thinking in Washington was that given the current political turmoil in Pakistan, this was not the right time for such engagement and it could wait till the political situation in Pakistan settled down.

I reiterated our position that countries should not be made to choose sides in a complex situation like the Ukraine crisis and stressed the need for having active bilateral communications at the political leadership level. Don replied that “you have conveyed your position clearly and I will take it back to my leadership.”

I also told Don that we had seen his defence of the Indian position on the Ukraine crisis during the recently held Senate Sub-Committee hearing on U.S.-India relations. It seemed that the U.S. was applying different criteria for India and Pakistan. Don responded that the U.S. lawmakers’ strong feelings about India’s abstentions in the UNSC and UNGA came out clearly during the hearing. I said that from the hearing, it appeared that the U.S. expected more from India than Pakistan, yet it appeared to be more concerned about Pakistan’s position. Don was evasive and responded that Washington looked at the U.S.-India relationship very much through the lens of what was happening in China. He added that while India had a close relationship with Moscow, “I think we will actually see a change in India’s policy once all Indian students are out of Ukraine.”

I expressed the hope that the issue of the Prime Minister’s visit to Russia will not impact our bilateral ties. Don replied that “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective. Let us wait for a few days to see whether the political situation changes, which would mean that we would not have a big disagreement about this issue and the dent would go away very quickly. Otherwise, we will have to confront this issue head on and decide how to manage it.”

We also discussed Afghanistan and other issues pertaining to bilateral ties. A separate communication follows on that part of our conversation.

Assessment

Don could not have conveyed such a strong demarche without the express approval of the White House, to which he referred repeatedly. Clearly, Don spoke out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process. We need to seriously reflect on this and consider making an appropriate demarche to the U.S. Cd’ A a.i in Islamabad.

The post Secret Pakistan Cable Documents U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

Lorance, who won his pardon following an advocacy campaign by conservative activists and Republican politicians, left prison in 2019 thanks to Trump. Since then, he has by all accounts moved on with his life. He has written two books: one on his experience being charged with war crimes and another offering tips for millennial conservative activists on how to ensure that the U.S. will “always lead the world in everything.”

In his latest post-murder move, Lorance is working to become a lawyer. After graduating from Appalachia School of Law this May, he is now also reportedly sitting the Oklahoma bar exam and applying to practice law in the state.

The idea of a convicted war criminal being tasked with interpreting and upholding the law in the U.S. has rankled a few — most notably Lorance’s former military comrades. It was the men in his unit who turned him in after witnessing his murder of two innocent Afghan villagers, Haji Mohammed Aslam and Ghamai Abdul Haq. They testified against him at his court-martial.

Now, one of the men from his unit is making his objections official. In response to the news that Lorance would sit the bar exam, Todd Fitzgerald issued a letter to the Oklahoma Bar Association calling on his one-time commander to be denied certification to practice law in the state.

Fitzgerald, a former Army soldier who served with Lorance in the 82nd Airborne Division in Kandahar and witnessed his crimes, sent his letter late last month. The missive outlined a series of events that he and his fellow soldiers witnessed during the period they were briefly under Lorance’s volatile command — for all of three days — before he murdered the two civilians.

“His actions during the three days he was in charge of our platoon were deliberate and he repeatedly displayed an astonishing lack of candor so egregious that resulted in his being reported, detained, and eventually convicted and sentenced based on the testimony of myself and many other eyewitnesses,” Fitzgerald wrote in his letter to the bar. (Neither Lorance nor the Oklahoma Bar responded to requests for comment.)

Over the span of those three short days, Fitzgerald wrote, after Lorance was sent to their outpost, soldiers witnessed him pointing a gun in the face of an elderly Afghan man while counting down in preparation to kill him, directing random fire into a village, ordering his reluctant troops to open fire and kill two unarmed men on a motorcycle, and then threatening to kill the crying women and children from the village who came to collect the dead men’s bodies afterwards.

In his letter, Fitzgerald said that Lorance had “acted cruelly and inhumanely, without provocation, and to the detriment of innocent lives as well as the safety of everyone else around.” The letter accuses Lorance of creating a false narrative in his defense that the men he had ordered killed, villagers known to U.S. troops, had been supporters of the Taliban, while characterizing himself as a victim of a politicized military justice system. The killings of the two men, Fitzgerald said, not only devastated the residents of the nearby village but also destroyed efforts by the U.S. military to cooperate with them against the Taliban.

“He has since refused to acknowledge any responsibility for his own actions.”

“He has since refused to acknowledge any responsibility for his own actions,” Fitzgerald added in his letter, “instead making a point to say that he takes responsibility for our actions as if he were protecting us when the truth is that he endangered all of our lives by causing the deaths of people who had been previously helping us and destroying the relationship we had built up with the local nationals.”

Fitzgerald is not the only one from Lorance’s platoon who had this sentiment about their former commanding officer. In the wake of his pardon, a number of them came forward to describe their reactions, with one describing it as a “nightmare.” While Lorance has become a cause célèbre on segments of the right, with Trump even bringing him and other pardoned war criminals on stage with him at public events, the soldiers who served under Lorance’s command and witnessed his actions while on duty have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, suicide, and drug abuse since leaving the military.

In an op-ed for the Army Times published last month, another soldier who served under Lorance in Afghanistan, Mike McGuinness, also called for the Oklahoma bar to deny Lorance’s bid to practice law. McGuinness described Lorance as morally unfit to be entrusted with upholding or interpreting the law in any circumstance.

“Giving orders to shoot unarmed people, threatening women and children, and then asking subordinates to cover it up is pretty damning evidence of a lack of moral fiber,” McGuinness wrote. “What displays that even more is Lorance’s insistence that he was the victim, his complete lack of remorse, and his failure to take accountability for his actions in Afghanistan.”

Trump Pardons

Lorance had initially been sentenced to 19 years in prison following his 2013 court-martial on murder charges. He was released from prison in 2019, following a successful campaign by conservative activists and commentators — including Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Pete Hegseth, as well as current and former GOP politicians Duncan Hunter, Paul Gosar, and Adam Kinzinger — to lobby Trump for his pardon.

Lorance’s pardon — and subsequent self-reinvention as a conservative activist, author, and would-be lawyer — was only one consequence of Trump’s embrace of convicted war criminals during his time in office. In addition to Lorance, Trump pardoned a group of Blackwater mercenaries convicted of a notorious massacre in Iraq, former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and a host of other soldiers convicted by military courts of murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. These pardons were often issued over the objections of U.S. military lawyers, senior military commanders, and other Pentagon officials, who criticized the moves as undermining military discipline and harming the reputation of the armed forces.

Today, Lorance’s LinkedIn page describes himself as a “military justice reform advocate” as well as “Iraq & Afghanistan veteran & author.” The page says he completed his degree at Appalachian School of Law in May of this year. It’s unclear whether the outcry from other veterans who served with him will be enough to stop Lorance from practicing law in Oklahoma, particularly given his support from a range of powerful conservative politicians who advocated for his pardon. Despite his unpopularity with the troops he commanded, he remains a celebrated figure on the Republican right, who have characterized their defense of Lorance as an act of loyalty to U.S. service members.

“This is a plea of conscience, for the men who were killed unjustly and are not here to advocate for themselves.”

Yet the celebration of a war criminal, convicted by the military’s own court system, coupled with the neglect of those who served under him and tried to do the right thing has left a painful memory for Fitzgerald and others who spoke out against Lorance. In his letter to the Oklahoma bar, Fitzgerald called for the institution to take a moral stand against Lorance by refusing him admission in light of the grave crimes for which he had been convicted.

“It is my utmost respect for the rule of law and the institutions that uphold these laws that drives me to send this communication. It has been a terrible experience and a moral injury to live through the murders of two innocent men. It would be a much greater injustice to say nothing while the person responsible takes no accountability and attempts to exert influence over the lives of others in any position of authority or control again,” wrote Fitzgerald. “This is a plea of conscience, for the men who were killed unjustly and are not here to advocate for themselves, for their families, and for all of the other surviving witnesses that live with the weight of this burden on their hearts and souls.”

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In a press release announcing the arrest, the Justice Department said that Meyer had been caught after he had “pledged an oath of allegiance to the leader of ISIS and intended to travel to serve as a fighter for ISIS in Iraq.”

Beneath the surface of these serious allegations, however, are troubling details about what really happened between Meyer and the FBI in the months leading up to his arrest. According to the criminal complaint against him, Meyer had first come to the attention of the FBI last year when he was 17 years old, after a person he knew contacted the local sheriff’s office to report “concerning behavior,” including threats of violence against them and the United States by Meyer. The complaint did not mention that the person who reported Meyer to the authorities was his mother.

Concerned over Meyer’s erratic behavior and deteriorating mental health, Deanna Meyer reported her son, then a minor, to the authorities in the hopes that they would help keep him away from trouble. What followed instead was a lengthy government investigation employing two confidential FBI informants. First contacting Meyer the day after his 18th birthday, the informants secretly developed a relationship with him. Rather than help steer him away from wrongdoing, the FBI informants helped Meyer develop the plan to join the Islamic State that eventually led to his arrest.

In a hearing last week to determine whether Meyer would be held in custody while awaiting trial, his mother testified that she had tried to get help from the police to aid her son, who had suffered from mental illness for years and made threats of violence against her since he was 14 years old.

Meyer had previously spent eight months, between 2021 and 2022, in a facility “focused on mental health and behavior treatment,” according to the affidavit. He had been diagnosed with autism, clinical depression, and a range of anxiety and mood disorders — diagnoses of which the government was aware and even referenced in the criminal complaint. All while still a minor, Meyer espoused white supremacist beliefs and, still grappling with a range of diagnosed mental illnesses, then developed an interest in extremist Islam online. The behavior had alarmed his mother.

“It was the wrong place to go for help in going to law enforcement.”

“I had exhausted all private routes,” Deanna Meyer said at the hearing, explaining her original decision to contact the local sheriff’s office for help with her child. “I was more concerned about ideology and where that would go.”

If convicted on the charges, Meyer could face up to 20 years in prison. Yet his family and lawyers say that he had been the victim of an FBI sting operation that groomed him for the very crime for which he was arrested.

“It was the wrong place to go for help in going to law enforcement,” Meyer’s lawyer David Kaplan said at the hearing. “They represented themselves as facilitators and fanned the flames of what they condemn now.”

Mental Health Diagnoses

The two paid undercover FBI informants who helped secure his arrest began communicating with Meyer “soon after his 18th birthday,” according to the affidavit in the case — fostering his path to extremist ideology only once he could be legally prosecuted as an adult. One of the informants even traveled to meet with Meyer in person, three times, in his small Colorado hometown. They discussed the idea of going abroad to join a terrorist group — a possibility that Meyer had already been talking over with the other FBI operative online.

The complaint goes into considerable detail about the relationship that developed between Meyer and the undercover informants, whom he believed to be members of the Islamic State who could facilitate his travel abroad.

Court documents also show that the FBI was aware of Meyer’s history of mental illness, including his stay at a residential treatment facility during part of the year in which the investigation started.

While institutionalized, Meyer reportedly refused to take his prescribed psychiatric medication or attend online school programs. He also engaged in racist speech against medical staff before developing an interest in radical Islamist ideology. The FBI reviewed this history, saying in the affidavit that “records show that Meyer has received diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood; specific learning disorder with impairment in mathematics; and major depressive disorder, recurrent episode, moderate.”

Sometime after his release from mental health treatment, in the summer of 2022, Meyer was banned from a local mosque he tried to attend after being accused of harassing the imam and congregants.

That November, he found the Islamic State online — in the form of the FBI informant. After developing a relationship with them, Meyer sent the informant videos of himself, face wrapped in scarves, pledging allegiance to the group. The informant later introduced Meyer to the second informant in December 2022, whom he met in person and discussed travel abroad. In their meetings, Meyer shared videos with the informant he had found online of violent acts perpetrated by ISIS abroad.

For a period of several months, Meyer continued discussing with the FBI informants a plan for him to leave the country and join a terrorist group abroad. Many of these discussions included talk about what type of shoes, clothing, and electronic devices would be useful for him while traveling, as well as how he would obtain a passport and accumulate enough money to pay for his ticket. Meyer attempted to work part-time jobs to save the required funds. After running into problems securing the cash, he eventually settled upon using a sum of $3,000 provided by his mother that she had given him to pay for groceries and transportation.

“I am very happy this is happening, but at the time I feel sad because I will most likely never see my parents again.”

The issue of his mother and how she would respond to him potentially leaving the country was a running theme for Meyer in his conversations with the FBI. “One day she’s gonna wake up and her son’s not gonna be there and that’s gonna be difficult for her,” Meyer said, as quoted in the indictment. In the end, he decided upon leaving a note in his apartment, to which she had a spare key, indicating that he had left the country and would not be coming back.

In the days leading up to his final departure, Meyer, while expressing to the FBI informant his continued commitment to the plan for him to leave, continued to bring up his parents. “I am very happy this is happening, but at the time I feel sad because I will most likely never see my parents again, and I’m leaving the place I’ve grown up all my life and become attached to,” he told an FBI informant in a message. “It is a trial but it can be heavy on the heart.”

According to the indictment, Meyer continued to express “anxiety and hesitation,” right up until the hours he was expected to board a flight to Turkey in July, though he reassured the informants that he would still go through with the plan. To his own detriment, he would wind up fulfilling his promise to the FBI — a plan that they themselves had helped him develop. At around 8:00 p.m. on July 14, after showing his boarding pass to a gate agent at Denver International Airport, Meyer was arrested by FBI agents while walking the jet bridge to board his flight.

“Groomed”

Meyer’s case follows a long pattern of FBI sting operations targeting young people with histories of mental illness that make them vulnerable to manipulation — stings that often result in the teens being prosecuted for terrorism and receiving lengthy prison terms. Just last month, a lengthy FBI investigation targeting a 16-year-old with “brain development issues” led to an arrest on terrorism charges shortly after he — like Meyer — became a legal adult.

At Meyer’s hearing last week, it was alleged by prosecutors that Meyer had also communicated online with an Islamic extremist in the United Kingdom who had recently been arrested — likely a reference to a notoriously media-friendly radical activist named Anjem Choudary. The nature of that alleged contact and how extensive it was remains unclear. In the charges against Meyer related to his alleged criminal plot, the only terrorists he is accused of ever actually collaborating with were undercover operatives working for the FBI.

More details could come out as Meyer’s case heads to trial that could shed light on the allegations against him. At his hearing, prosecutors stated that the 18-year-old was given many “off-ramps” during the investigation by the FBI informants, but that he remained committed to carrying out his imagined plan to leave the country with their help and join ISIS.

His mother, however, believes that Meyer — far from being a legitimate threat to herself or to U.S. national security — was “groomed” at a young age while already grappling with mental illness to generate yet another terrorism case for federal prosecutors and the FBI.

In a Facebook post, titled “My Lost Son,” Deanna Meyer lamented what she described as the manipulation of her son by law enforcement officials and the FBI.

“I made the choice to call the police and beg for any kind of mental health options before his 18th birthday to keep him safe and out of the criminal justice system not knowing that their solution would be to wait until he the day he was 18 and send multiple undercover agents to groom him,” she wrote. “I lost him. He is gone behind the walls of steel and indifference.”

The post After His Mother Asked for Help, FBI Terrorism Sting Targets Mentally Ill Teen appeared first on The Intercept.

The shift represents a stark contrast with the hostile relations between Republicans and Muslims over the past two decades, as well as the integration of many younger Muslim Americans into progressive politics. The GOP’s outreach, reported on recently by Semafor and other outlets, also comes at a moment when the current Republican presidential frontrunner is tripling down on the most directly anti-Muslim government policy in U.S. history: the so-called Muslim ban.

At a campaign speech in Iowa last Friday, former President Donald Trump promised that he would bring back the controversial policy. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” Trump said.

The notion of a ban was first introduced by Trump early in his 2016 presidential campaign, when it was marketed explicitly as a prohibition on all Muslims entering the United States. After Trump was elected, he instated a ban targeting travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, prompting chaos in airports and inside the government. Later, the Trump administration began referring to the policy more antiseptically as a “travel ban,” modifying it to include restrictions on some non-Muslim countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

Yet in his speech in Iowa last weekend, Trump made very clear that the target of his policy would be Muslims, conflating Islam with terrorism and extremism. “Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told the audience to applause.

Trump’s statements highlight an awkward contradiction. On one hand, some Muslim Americans, bound by a shared commitment to conservative social values, are enjoying a period of warm relations with the Republican Party and conservative activists who share their opposition to LGBTQ+ education in schools. At the same time, the wildly popular leading Republican presidential candidate — and the center of gravity in the party — is publicly vowing to revive a policy aimed at curtailing the presence of Muslims in the U.S. entirely.

“This will be a challenging moment for the Muslim community, but I do believe that the issue of LGBT education in schools will become a wedge issue,” said Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a progressive human rights organization. “On a state and local level, many conservative Muslim voters will likely vote for candidates who are anti-LGBT, which will mean mostly Republicans, while on a national level, the same people may choose to vote for a Democrat.”

In one sign of warming relations between Muslims and the Republican Party, major Islamic civil rights organizations have spoken out in support of the recent GOP-supported protests aimed at letting parents opt their children out of LGBTQ+ readings in schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has been among the most vocal, collecting hundreds of signatures to demand that parents be allowed to remove their children from gender- and sex-based courses.

CAIR has been a favorite target of the Republican Party and conservative activists over the past two decades, with the group being labeled as a front for terrorism and Islamic extremism. On this issue, however, they find themselves aligned, even applauded, by erstwhile foes.

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR said its positions reflect an agnosticism toward the partisan divide in American politics.

“CAIR defends the rights of Americans to live according to their sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director. “We decide our policy position based on principle, not party.”

The initial ban resulted in chaos at American airports, as people from targeted countries whose documents were otherwise valid found themselves abruptly detained by U.S. border security. In some cases, people with permission to enter the U.S. wound up stranded abroad without recourse, with some even dying or taking their own lives after being trapped in immigration limbo by the measure.

The cruelties and absurdities brought by the ban also impacted many people living in the U.S. who found themselves separated from loved ones. In one infamous case, the Yemeni mother of a 2-year-old Yemeni American boy dying of a terminal illness was forced to fight a legal battle to come and see him in the hospital after being denied entry to the U.S. because of the ban. She was later granted a waiver to the rule, arriving in the U.S. just days before her son died in the hospital.

The Supreme Court shot down two versions of the “Muslim ban” as unconstitutional, before finally upholding the measure in a 5-4 decision handed down in 2018.

After taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order lifting the ban entirely. The precedent, however, remains.

Trump has made reviving the measure a notable part of his reelection campaign, reportedly telling his advisers in May that he would bring back an expanded version of the infamous travel restriction — a policy that he called “beautiful.”

Trump’s renewed vow to ban Muslims from the U.S. comes at a time when some Muslim Americans have begun to gravitate back to the Republican Party. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans tended to vote as a majority for Republicans, by some accounting providing the crucial swing vote that tilted Florida for George W. Bush in 2000.

Many Muslim Americans who found themselves transformed into punching bags for Republican politicians in later years came to rue their decision to support the GOP. Trump’s initial proposal of the “Muslim ban,” which was met with enthusiastic approval by his base, was only the capstone of a long, ugly falling out between Muslims and Republicans.

With tensions around terrorism and U.S. wars in the Middle East ebbing, some conservative Muslims seem to be turning back to the party.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s promotion of a new and improved “Muslim ban” will sour the halting rapprochement between these two groups. Muslim Americans have transformed into solidly Democratic voters in recent decades, with several Muslim members of Congress taking up highly visible roles in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Even during the period when Trump had imposed the ban, however, some exit polls in the 2020 election showed as many as 35 percent of Muslim voters supporting the candidate who had made the legal exclusion of their coreligionists from the country a highlight of his presidency.

Muslim voters who choose to buck Trump’s GOP might find little reprieve in his chief rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time a member of U.S. Congress, sponsored a bill that sought to ban refugees to the U.S. from a number of Muslim-majority countries where the U.S. had conducted military operations. In recent months, DeSantis has also pushed measures through state legislatures banning foreigners from owning certain properties or even enrolling in public universities to people from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These bans provide a window into how lists of targeted nationalities could be used to deprive individuals of rights well beyond travel in the future.

Trump’s remarks in Iowa suggested that he might impose other restrictions for Muslim immigrations, making remarks aimed at radical terrorists in the same breath as those about farm ownership. “We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers,” Trump said. “We don’t want people blowing up our cities, and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”

As for LGBTQ+ issues in the Muslim community, Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values said that her community needed to spend more time coming to grips with the specifics of the materials that are becoming an increasingly bitter culture war flashpoint.

“We should be taking those books and educational materials that people have issues with and sitting down on both sides to decipher what the problem is and how we can resolve this. In many cases, people are not even sure what’s in the books in question, and this approach of simply shouting at one another doesn’t help,” said Zonneveld, who recently wrote a piece for the website Religion News Service about the controversy. “One thing to emphasize, however, on principle, is that LGBT people are human beings created by God, just like you and I, and they should not be discriminated against, end of story.”

The post Trump Revives “Muslim Ban” While GOP Courts Muslim Voters for 2024 appeared first on The Intercept.

According to investigators from Human Rights Watch, who visited the scene of the attack, her death was caused by a cluster munition, a weapon much of the world has moved to ban due to the indiscriminate harm that they cause to civilians. The salvo was allegedly fired from the Ukrainian side, according to witnesses, and detonated near the woman’s home, killing her and her dog.

“The attack was very scary. Very loud. I was outside and there were a lot of explosions. The wife of my ex-husband came and told me to hurry to get inside,” one witness told Human Rights Watch, according to a report released late Wednesday night. Another witness, who viewed the victim’s body in the aftermath and helped bury her in a local cemetery, said that her “face and body were severely mutilated by the explosion.”

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more.”

As the Ukraine war drags on, the Biden administration is now reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to send more of the bombs to the Ukrainian military. The decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine would likely be seen as a setback to nonproliferation efforts aimed at stopping use of the weapon.

The report by Human Rights Watch analyzing the impact of previous cluster munition attacks carried out last summer by the Ukrainian military found numerous dead and wounded civilians in Izium who were hit by exploding cluster bomblets.

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more,” the report said, adding that the true number of casualties was likely greater, as many wounded people had been taken to Russia for medical care and not returned.

Although investigators found forensic evidence pointing to Ukrainian culpability, the Ukrainian defense ministry said in a written letter to Human Rights Watch that “cluster munitions were not used within or around the city of Izium in 2022 when it was under Russian occupation.” The town was liberated by Ukrainian forces in the fall of that year.

The Ukrainian military is currently engaged in a much larger counteroffensive aimed at reclaiming other territories captured by Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country in early 2022.

According to the Washington Post, the administration has recently been taking the temperature of members of Congress on the forthcoming decision. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said he was open to giving Ukraine the weapons. When asked by The Intercept, a number of House Democrats declined to say whether they were for or against the move.

The move to transfer cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military comes on the heels of other U.S. initiatives to train Ukrainians on advanced fighter aircraft, and possibly provide them long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russian-held territory. The transfer of cluster bombs to the Ukrainians would be much more ethically fraught.

Banned Cluster Munitions

Cluster munitions are controversial due to the manner in which “bomblets” are scattered around a targeted area, creating secondary explosions that can cause death and injury even long after a conflict has ceased.

The use of cluster attacks during the 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon killed and wounded hundreds of civilians. A decade later, swaths of southern Lebanon are still dangerous for civilians who are periodically killed or maimed by stray bomblets.

The bombs are currently at the center of an international campaign to ban their use in armed conflict. More than 100 states have signed an international convention on cluster munitions vowing not to employ them in war, produce them domestically, or encourage their use in foreign conflicts. Despite public pressure to join, the U.S. has not become a signatory to the convention.

The Russian military has also extensively used cluster munitions during its invasion of Ukraine, including in attacks on populated areas that were said to have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in the early months of the war.

The Ukrainian military was reported to have requested significant transfers of the munitions late last year, though the Biden administration did not render a decision on the request at the time.

If the decision is taken to approve the transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine now, it may reflect frustration with the pace of the Ukrainian offensive, which has so far failed to make significant gains against Russian forces in the country.

In their report analyzing the impact of Ukrainian cluster bomb attacks on civilians in the occupied town of Izium, investigators from Human Rights Watch noted the potential long-term impacts of untargeted, explosive bomblets left around the region and called on both sides to refrain from their use — lest they kill and injure many more in the years to come. As the conflict grinds on, a legacy of unexploded cluster munitions could keep the suffering of the war going long after the guns go silent.

“Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are killing civilians now and will continue to do so for many years,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, in the report. “Both sides should immediately stop using them, and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons.”

The post With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More appeared first on The Intercept.

In what is being described as a victory for a merit-based and colorblind approach to college admissions, the Supreme Court Thursday struck down affirmative action as a tool to redress race-based inequalities. The ruling by the court’s conservative majority dealt with affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, but would apply across the country.

The precedent set by the court’s decision is primed to transform college admissions standards around the country, yet there is one area where the law mandating diversity in recruitment is remaining conspicuously unchanged: U.S. military academies.

When it comes to national priorities, the defense establishment has long been treated with kid gloves and afforded its own perks and protections. Think of the way fiscal hawks on both sides of the aisle regularly greenlight bloated Pentagon budgets. The divergence on diversity guidelines for elite colleges and U.S. military institutions stands out for its gross irony, not least because the most pernicious forms of affirmative action — those which protect the ruling class — remain untouched.

“The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.

A quick look at the details of the ruling itself sheds some light on the problem. The U.S. government had previously filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit asking for an exception for military academies. That brief stated that U.S. military leaders “have learned through hard experience that the effectiveness of our military depends on a diverse officer corps that is ready to lead an increasingly diverse fighting force.” Although the court rejected the same logic being applied to elite colleges, it evidently accepted the need for diversity among future generations of West Point graduates, stating in a footnote to the majority opinion that:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

Affirmative Action for Whom?

A common criticism of affirmative action programs at universities is that they undermine merit as a primary criterion for selection. Yet the same concern seems equally, if not more, relevant to U.S. military leadership, particularly given the strong emphasis on national security normally espoused by U.S. politicians and the electorate.

The court is apparently hesitant to prioritize demographic diversity in admissions to colleges that, ultimately, determine the future appearance of the country’s elite. But the same concerns do not seem to apply to the military, where one of the possibilities of membership, rather than joining the gilded class, is being severely injured or killed in one of the U.S.’s many foreign military conflicts.

Despite the court’s ruling, which has been widely celebrated among opponents of affirmative action, it is not entirely clear how much that the composition of elite colleges will change. The decision says that universities may continue to consider in admissions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

The far more pervasive form of elite affirmative action — embodied by preferential treatment for legacy admissions — was left untouched by the court ruling.

This apparent loophole potentially allows applicants to continue to be accepted on the basis of racial background, provided they also give a personal statement about their race that could easily become de rigueur in the future.

The far more pervasive form of elite affirmative action — embodied by preferential treatment for legacy admissions, the children of financial donors, athletes, and relatives of school staff — was left untouched by the court ruling. The oversight is a significant one.

There was, however, one mention of it: In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch chastised elite schools like Harvard for their attempts to uphold affirmative action while continuing to defend legacy admissions. Harvard’s “preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, a 2019 study found that a whopping 43 percent of white students at Harvard were beneficiaries of one of these forms of preferential access. While 70 percent of legacy admissions were white, only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian students benefitted from these preferential considerations.

In effect, while rolling back affirmative action, the court left unscathed a backdoor means of demographic engineering in college admissions that is equally indifferent to merit as a criterion.

Sotomayor’s Dissent

The reversal of affirmative action at elite schools will likely have reverberations well beyond the institutions themselves, including downstream changes in the internal culture of workforces and non-governmental institutions that had been encouraged for years to make demographic diversity a priority in hiring.

Yet the apparent inconsistencies in the ruling, including carve-outs for the military and continued preferential treatment for the wealthy and well connected, will likely make the decision a bitter one for many who had supported affirmative action to address America’s history of racial inequity.

In her dissent to the ruling, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the military exemption in particular “highlights the arbitrariness” of the court’s decision. Sotomayor minced few words in expressing the depths of her objections to the ruling, which will likely be a landmark one in the history of America’s post-civil rights legal movement.

“When proponents of those arguments, greater now in number on the Court, return to fight old battles anew, it betrays an unrestrained disregard for precedent,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “It fosters the people’s suspicions that ‘bedrock principles are founded … in the proclivities of individuals’ on this Court, not in the law, and it degrades ‘the integrity of our constitutional system of government.’”

The post Supreme Court: Affirmative Action Is OK — If the Students Are Getting Sent to Die in Wars appeared first on The Intercept.