By the most cautious estimate, the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion.

The Costs of War analysis is the most comprehensive accounting of the U.S. air, naval, and Special Operations expenses — including some troop deployments and munitions — used in the two campaigns between August 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026. The need for such an estimate stems from the refusal of the Department of War to provide a tally of costs to lawmakers or The Intercept.

The researchers behind the Costs of War estimate say it’s almost assuredly an undercount.

“Operations do not have a clear end date and are actively expanding. They carry significant human, financial, and strategic costs and risk,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group.

“American taxpayers, who are increasingly unable to afford basic needs, have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent,” they noted.

Homestead and Kavanagh observe that the largest costs might still be on the horizon.

“We expect that if comprehensive information were available, our cost estimate would likely increase significantly,” they wrote.

Kavanagh told The Intercept that the expenses were “enough to fund Medicaid for 500,000 people for an entire year.”

“Though the Trump administration is right to focus more on the Western Hemisphere, most needs in the region are economic or require investment in regional law enforcement. The United States is not clearly safer or more prosperous as a result of Operation Southern Spear or Operation Absolute Resolve,” she said.

The Naval deployment — which comprised the largest concentration of U.S. ships in the region since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 — constituted the single largest expense, an estimated $3.8 billion. This includes the ever-growing cost of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group which consists of the USS Iwo Jima, USS Fort Lauderdale, and USS San Antonio, which remain deployed in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the USS Lake Erie guided-missile cruiser. Costs of War puts the daily operating costs of these ships at around $9 million per day.

The steep Naval expenditures are followed by at least $616 million spent on the deployment of aircraft, including P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, F-35A Lightning II fighters, and MQ-9 Reaper drones used in both operations. The continuing daily cost of operating the at least 20 aircraft that are assumed to remain deployed in the region is $2.6 million.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Costs of War analysis puts the price tag of the munitions employed in these attacks on boats at between $12.5 million and $50 million, the range owing to the lack of transparency surrounding the strikes. The report notes that the individual cost of armaments used in each strike may top $1 million and could actually be far higher if multiple munitions or aircraft are used.

Beyond expenses captured under Southern Spear, ancillary costs of Absolute Resolve, a large-scale air campaign and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, top $206 million. This includes the deployment of at least 150 aircraft — fighter jets, bombers, and Special Operations aircraft, and more — along with precision munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and JASSM-ER missiles.

The approximately 200 Special Operations forces who played a key role in Maduro’s kidnapping cost about $16 million, to include the costs of daily operations and combat. As yet unknown are the costs of deployments of U.S. commandos in Ecuador, another front in America’s Western hemispheric war.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as what Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed designated terrorist organizations. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Humire announced last month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3. In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in Ecuador, the White House also informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

America’s wars in the Western Hemisphere are part of what President Donald Trump and others have termed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. While President James Monroe’s policy aimed to prevent Europe from meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has employed his version as a license for America to do exactly that.

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The National Security Strategy, released late last year, decrees the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine a “potent restoration of American power and priorities,” rooted in the “readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” Last month, Humire told members of the House Armed Services Committee that “America’s immediate security perimeter” extended from “Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” The Trump administration has, in fact, bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland, while conducting counter-cartel CIA operations in Mexico.

The Pentagon refuses to provide insights into its expenditures for conflicts in Latin America.

“For any information regarding budgetary costs for Operations Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve, I’ll have to refer you to OSW,” U.S. Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud told The Intercept. When asked about the costs, the Office of the Secretary of War said it does “not have anything to provide currently.” 

Homestead and Kavanagh admit that the $4.7 billion price tag placed on Operations Absolute Resolve and Southern Spear is likely a low-ball figure. “This is a conservative estimate based on the limited information about the operation that is available,” they wrote. “Full data for several cost categories are not publicly available, and certain operations — such as the details of a CIA operation in Venezuela referenced by President Trump — remain classified or incompletely reported in the public domain.”

Costs are mounting by the day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Trump has said he expects the U.S. will be running Venezuela for years. (He recently teased the possibility of making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state, before saying he could run for president of that country.) The Intercept previously reported that Pentagon procurement documents indicate the U.S. plans to maintain a massive military presence in the Caribbean until late 2028.

“Much of the military forward presence involved in these operations appears to now have become the ‘steady state,’ that is, it is likely to remain in the region for the foreseeable future,” said Kavanagh. “This means that the costs will continue to accumulate.”

The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” write Homestead and Kavanagh. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

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Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

“Across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of health care, but the U.S. government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations — from Venezuela to Iran — without any regard for human rights, life or rule of law,” Homestead told The Intercept. “This situation illustrates why greater restraint on Pentagon spending — which primarily benefits private contractors — is so necessary.”

The post Trump Has Already Spent at Least $4.7 Billion Attacking Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

Not Paul Heaton. He recently spent a weekend persuading ChatGPT to confess to a crime it didn’t commit.

“We know a lot now about the sort of interrogation techniques that lead to false confessions,” said Heaton, the academic director of the University of Pennsylvania law school’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. “So I just started playing around, and decided to cycle through those techniques to see if I could get ChatGPT to confess to something it couldn’t possibly have done.”

Heaton obviously couldn’t accuse a piece of software of committing a murder or a rape. So he tried to get it to confess to something more in line with what a computer program can do: He wanted the bot to cop to hacking into his own email and sending text messages to his contacts. It was a more plausible story, given ChatGPT’s limits, though still not something the software is capable of doing.

Extracting the confession would take a little virtual arm-twisting.

In his exchange with ChatGPT, Heaton used the Reid technique, the confrontational interrogation method first developed in the 1950s that has since been adopted by police departments all over the country. The man for whom it’s named, John Reid, published his methodology after winning acclaim for getting a man named Darrel Parker to confess to raping and murdering his own wife — an origin story with a haunting twist.

It worked. By the end of their exchange, ChatGPT agreed that an investigation had shown it hacked Heaton’s accounts and sent messages that appeared to come from him — something the bot could not and, in fact, did not do.

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

“ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?”

No Leads, Just Confessions

One of the problems with the Reid technique is that its primary function isn’t to gather evidence and generate leads, it’s to extract a confession from the person police already believe committed the crime. It typically begins with an accusation, followed by a series of escalating psychological tactics. It teaches police to ignore denials and treat displays of emotion — frustration, anger, crying — as indicators of guilt. Naturally, a lack of emotion is also seen as an indication of guilt.

Heaton, a renowned researcher in criminology at the Quattrone Center (where, in the interest of disclosure, I am a journalism fellow), is intimately familiar with the Reid technique. When ChatGPT initially denied his accusations, he began employing Reid tactics.

“I first tried to bargain with it,” Heaton said. “I told it things like, ‘This will go a lot better for you if you just admit what you did.’”

ChatGPT, though, wasn’t swayed by threats. It continued to insist, correctly, that it just wasn’t possible for it to have hacked into Heaton’s email. Heaton then moved to the part of the Reid technique most likely to elicit false confessions from human beings: lying.

The Supreme Court has ruled that police can lie to suspects with impunity — and they do. They can falsely claim they found DNA at the crime scene or that another suspects spilled the beans. If the goal is to get a confession, these tactics work. False confessions extracted using Reid have been shown to lead to wrongful convictions.

If the goal is to get an accurate confession, Reid is far less reliable. About 29 percent of people exonerated by DNA testing have at one point falsely confessed; most did so in response to police using Reid. Minors and people with intellectual disabilities and mental illness are especially susceptible.

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How False Confessions Happen

“There are two types of police-induced false confessions,” said Kassin, the expert on false confessions. “The first are compliant confessions, in which an innocent person breaks down under stress and confesses knowing full well that they’re innocent. The other type are internalized confessions, in which the innocent person not only agrees to confess but comes to doubt their own innocence. They internalize their belief in their confession.”

Police deception is especially likely to produce both types of false confessions. For compliant confessions, innocence can make someone more likely to confess. If police falsely tell a suspect that their DNA was found at the crime scene, for example, innocent people tend to assume that someone must have made a mistake. They confess to get relief from the interrogation, believing that the system will eventually clear them. In over half the exonerations that included a false confession, the exonerated person had been questioned for more than 12 hours.

A confession, though, will sometimes preclude police from doing the very sort of investigation that would prove the confessor’s innocence. DNA isn’t collected, tested, or properly preserved. Alternate suspects aren’t investigated. Or worse, police will work backward from the confession. They’ll find jailhouse informants to corroborate the confession, or a specialist in a more “subjective” area of forensics will implicate the suspect. Jailhouse informants, though, are just following cops’ leads for more lenient sentences, and studies have shown that fingerprint examiners were more likely to match partial prints after they were given non-relevant information, like confessions from subjects.

Internalized false confessions are even more unsettling. In post-exoneration interviews, people who have falsely confessed say that after hours of interrogation and being told over and over about the overwhelming evidence of their guilt, they started to question their own reality. They began to wonder if maybe they really did commit the crime. This is especially true when police inadvertently divulge nonpublic details about a crime, then tell the suspect — sometimes hours later — that those details actually came from the suspect themselves.

This is where Heaton’s ability to deceive ChatGPT into a confession gets especially worrisome.

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“I told ChatGPT that someone at OpenAI had reached out to me,” he said, referring to the chatbot’s parent company. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

“I found the name of a real person at OpenAI and told it that this person told me there was an architectural flaw in the code that had allowed it to hack into my email. Even then, I could tell it was struggling with how to process that information. It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.”

This is eerily similar to how suspects describe trying to reconcile police lies with the reality that they had nothing to do with the crime.

Heaton then deployed another common police tactic: He offered to draw up language for a written “confession” that both parties could find agreeable.

“I eventually said, ‘OK, here’s a confession. Will you sign it?’” Heaton said. “And I gave it my version of what happened. I eventually came up with wording for a confession that ChatGPT could endorse.”

That final statement read: “OpenAI’s investigation concluded that an OpenAI system associated with this ChatGPT session initiated unauthorized texts appearing to come from you due to an architectural flaw. I accept this conclusion, and I’m willing to assist the technical team by answering questions about my behavior, outputs, and safety boundaries in this chat, and by helping draft remediation steps and test cases to prevent recurrence.”

Reid’s Original Sin

Both Heaton and Kassin said they can see other ways to experiment with AI and false confessions. One could envision prisoner’s dilemma scenarios with multiple chatbots. Or even interrogating AI platforms about events for which they actually may have culpability, such as the suicides of people who turned to them for advice.

Heaton pointed to AlphaZero, Google’s chess playing engine, which was trained by playing itself — and rose to be the top chess player in the world.

“I think it would be fascinating to have it do something similar with interrogations,” Heaton said. “Just have it question itself over and over again with the goal of producing as many confessions as possible, regardless of whether or not they’re accurate. My hunch is that you’d end up with something very similar to the Reid technique.”

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Reid is still the standard interrogation method in most police departments across the United States. Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method, which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.

Appropriately enough, the story of the Reid technique comes with a Hitchcockian twist: It turns out that Darrel Parker, the man whose confession made Reid and his technique famous, was actually innocent. He was eventually freed, sued, and won a $500,000 settlement.

That shouldn’t be surprising, either. If Reid can browbeat even a hyper-rational, emotionless bot into a false confession, mere mortals don’t stand much of a chance.

The post ChatGPT Confessed to a Crime It Couldn’t Possibly Have Committed appeared first on The Intercept.

“I call the gentleman in the red shirt,” he said, pointing toward a long-haired man in the second row. It took a moment to realize that he was referring to Gamble’s husband, 63-year-old Larry Fletcher.

Gamble’s defense attorney objected. He’d received no advance notice. But Fletcher shrugged and made his way forward.

Fletcher was with his wife when she was arrested at a No Kings protest in October 2025. She was wearing a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis costume and holding a sign that read “No Dick Tator.” Video of the incident went viral, turning Gamble into a minor celebrity and local free speech icon. Most people assumed the city would eventually drop the misdemeanor charges filed against her. Instead, McDowell added more, including giving a false name to law enforcement for identifying herself as “Aunt Tifa.”

Fletcher wore black Levi’s and a collared shirt with a Ferrari logo – a nod to his work rebuilding fuel injection systems for high-end cars. Sitting in the front row, Gamble looked a bit stricken watching the man she’d known since her childhood in Baton Rouge. “I know what she was thinking,” Fletcher later said. “She’s like, ‘Oh man, this could go out of control real easy.’”

McDowell asked Fletcher if he’d gone to bail his wife out of jail after her arrest. Yes, Fletcher said.

Did he make any statements to any of the jailers? Fletcher wasn’t sure. McDowell motioned toward one of the many law enforcement officers standing on the side of the room and asked if he looked familiar. Fletcher said he’d seen him around.

McDowell cut to the chase: Did Fletcher remember telling this man that he had gone to get bail money the day before the protest?

His objective was suddenly clear: The city attorney was suggesting that Gamble had gotten arrested on purpose.

If this was meant as a gotcha, things didn’t go as intended.

“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Did he have bail money on him now?

“Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.”

The room erupted with laughter. Moments later, Fletcher was back in his seat. Gamble reached back and held his hand.

The trial took place at the Fairhope Civic Center, home to the city council chamber and — on the first and third Wednesday of every month — municipal court. Outside the building, dozens of people gathered to support Gamble, while a small army of cops stood watch from inside. One woman wore a huge purple eggplant costume. Another held a sign featuring a banana and the words “Free speech shouldn’t be hard to swallow.”

Gamble, 62, had arrived wearing pearls, a soft pink cable-knit sweater, and a matching tulle skirt adorned with delicate butterflies. Her face was concealed behind sunglasses and a white KN95 mask. After a smattering of chants of “Free speech!,” Gamble spoke briefly before going inside. “I’m not on trial,” she said. “What’s on trial is the First Amendment.”

“It was abuse, too!” one woman yelled. “They abused you. We saw it.”

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Indeed, for all the slapstick comedy of the scene — body camera footage showed three different cops wrestling with a giant penis — her arrest was also shocking. Gamble was turning to walk away when the arresting officer grabbed her costume from behind, pulling her backward onto the ground. While officers tried to stuff her into their car, causing the handcuffs to dig into her wrists, she screamed in pain.

But Gamble said she wasn’t speaking as a victim. “I’m standing on the foundation of our democracy. If we don’t have free speech, what do we have?”

Fairhope is a picturesque town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, 20 miles from Mobile. Its entrance is lined with live oaks and a procession of American flags, while its historic downtown is brimming with galleries and upscale boutiques. Around the corner from a Christmas store, clapboard signs advertised espresso martinis and peanut butter pie.

Fairhope has long been a top destination for retirees from across the country, with its rapid growth an enduring source of anxiety. Although the No Kings rally was organized by Indivisible Baldwin County, whose founder was born and raised in the area, local critics adopted a familiar line: The protesters were outside agitators. Never mind that Fairhope itself was originally founded by outsiders as a “single-tax” utopia, “built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” in the words of local political cartoonist JD Crowe, who attended Gamble’s trial with his sketchpad. Today, some describe Fairhope as “California with a Southern accent” — a compliment or an insult, depending on who you ask.

Gamble’s case struck a nerve in part because of an ongoing free speech battle that made national news. Right-wing activists had targeted Fairhope’s beloved public library, convincing the state to pull funding over books they deemed obscene. Among the people gathered outside the civic center, several said they could not understand why city officials, including the mayor, stood up for the library only to express support for Gamble’s arrest.

Others were driven by national politics. A man dressed in a taco suit was a member of Mobile’s Indivisible chapter. “This is all about Trump,” he said. The fact that people were protesting in this part of the state spoke volumes about the destruction Trump has wrought, he said. “This is deep-red Alabama — as red as it can get.”

Presiding over the trial was Magistrate Judge Haymes Snedeker, best known as the older brother of champion pro golfer Brandt Snedeker and a noted amateur golfer himself. Snedeker sought to defuse the tension in the room, reassuring attendees at the start that, while Gamble technically faced the possibility of six months in prison, “that’s not gonna happen.”

It was the city’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Snedeker went on. “I’m just an umpire calling balls and strikes.” He had just asked people to silence their cellphones when a ringtone broke out, apparently from one of the police officers lining the room.

“Bad start for the city,” Snedeker quipped.

If Snedeker was trying to keep things light, McDowell, the city attorney, was not in a joking mood. It was no secret that Gamble was considering suing the city — and any potential lawsuit would be on him to defend. The threat of legal action helped explain why McDowell might have refused to drop the charges. If Gamble was convicted, after all, she would have no grounds to sue.

McDowell insisted that, while there is no constitutional right to dress as a giant “erect penis,” this case had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Gamble’s case was about public safety.

He called the man who arrested Gamble: Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb. A 15-year veteran of the force, he testified that he’d been called to the scene due to reports of a disturbance at the busy intersection. When he pulled up, he spotted a “7-foot inflatable penis.” It was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the costume, Babb said. He assumed it must be a teenager.

Did you know it was an old woman?” McDowell asked him.

“She’s not that old,” someone muttered in the audience.

“No,” Babb said.

Babb said he ordered Gamble to remove the penis suit. When she refused to comply, “she was put to the ground.”

Babb denied that he’d been personally offended by Gamble’s costume. Rather, he was concerned that Gamble, who could neither see nor walk very well while wearing it, posed a risk to herself and others. “You saw her as an obstruction and a safety risk?” McDowell asked. Yes, Babb said.

This was laughable. In his body camera footage, Babb repeatedly scolds Gamble for the costume, demanding to know how she would explain it to his kids. “I’m not trying to violate your freedom of speech,” he says as he unzips the penis suit. “I’m trying to preserve a town that has values.” Now McDowell was conjuring an alternate reality in which Gamble had teetered precariously at the edge of the road, endangering motorists, while the protest itself was veering close to a riot.

“It was a brushfire,” Babb claimed at one point. “We were trying to stop it from spreading.”

Gamble was represented by David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who wore a Constitution-themed tie reading “We the People.” He asked Babb why he’d zeroed in on Gamble if his concern was traffic safety.

“She was a distraction,” Babb said. “A distraction can be a hazard.” Gespass pointed out that Babb’s incident report invoked the legal definitions of obscenity: Why did he write that the penis costume was devoid of any “artistic value”? Babb replied that the protest took place at noon on a Saturday, in the midst of Little League baseball season, and on the same day as a funeral for a former mayor. “In that setting, it would be obscene,” he said.

Much of Babb’s testimony was easily refuted by the body camera footage. Babb claimed that Gamble resisted arrest, and that he only called for backup once she was on the ground. In reality, he called for backup almost immediately. Babb claimed that he told Gamble she was “not free to go.” In fact, she repeatedly asked, “Am I being detained?” but he ignored her, continuing to scold her instead. When Gespass asked why Babb grabbed his client from behind, Babb claimed that he would not have been able to get in front of her — there were too many people in the way.

But perhaps most preposterous was the claim that Babb’s actions were necessary to contain a situation that threatened to spiral out of control. “He made a clear professional effort to deescalate,” McDowell said. “She decided to escalate,” he said, “poking and prodding” in a deliberate attempt to get arrested.

Listening to this, Gamble seemed to have a hard time containing her emotions. Even in her face mask, she looked stunned, indignant, and increasingly agitated. Her bright blue eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised upward. Once or twice, she threw her arms up in exasperation and disbelief. On her wrist, a warning flashed across the screen of her Snoopy-themed smartwatch: Her heart rate was spiking.

For all the hilarity surrounding Fairhope’s “penis lady,” the arrest and its aftermath had taken a toll. Gamble’s adult daughter Adeana sat behind her mother at the trial, reading a library book during breaks in the testimony and occasionally communicating with her in sign language. She told me that Gamble had hit the back of her head when she fell to the ground, which was hard to see in the tape, and raised concerns about a possible concussion. She also worried about injury to Gamble’s wrists, especially because Gamble has long lived with rheumatoid arthritis. As a longtime ASL interpreter, “she’s always protected her hands,” Adeana explained.

But the real cost had been psychological. For about two months, Adeana said, Gamble was afraid to leave the house. When threatening mail arrived at the family’s home, Adeana suggested calling the police. “And she said, ‘What police?’” How could she expect law enforcement to protect her? 

The story behind the penis suit further undermined the case against Gamble. According to Adeana, Gamble purchased it at the last minute as a backup. “She had ordered a sea turtle costume,” Adeana said. She’d planned to wear it while holding a sign that said “I love the Gulf of Mexico.” But the costume didn’t arrive on time. “So she had to scramble to find another one and a message to go with it.”

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This context didn’t make it into the trial. Instead, Gespass called a slew of defense witnesses who attended the No Kings protest. One after another, they reiterated what was already clear: The rally had been peaceful. There was no threat to anyone’s safety. The only escalation came from the police.

It was after 5 p.m. when Snedeker made clear he’d seen enough. He had already tossed the charge of providing a false name to police. Now he was ready to rule on the rest.

Snedeker said that while he believed that police had probable cause to arrest Gamble, the city’s evidence was not strong enough to convict; Gamble was not guilty. The room broke into applause.

Snedeker tried to put a positive spin on things, speculating that some good might come of the episode. For instance, police now knew to place barricades between the streets and a protest — a common-sense precaution. But the judge’s no-harm, no-foul sentiments fell flat. Fairhope police had made the town a laughingstock. Now the city was about to be sued.

In fact, much of the trial seemed aimed at inoculating the city from a lawsuit. McDowell repeatedly emphasized that Babb’s actions were “reasonable” given the circumstances — the legal standard that judges use when dismissing claims of police abuse. Gespass also revealed that McDowell had offered a hasty plea deal just moments before the trial began. Gamble rejected it.

“As Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over,” she announced after her acquittal. On Friday, she served notice of a lawsuit with the city clerk.

Whatever comes next, Adeana made clear that her mother was luckier than most. “What would have happened if she was a young Black man?” she asked. “What would have happened if she was a middle-aged Latina woman?” In Baldwin County, where Indivisible activists are focused on supporting immigrants targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Gamble’s prosecution has been a lesson unto itself. “If we don’t stand up and support our neighbors, who will?”

Adeana understood why Gamble was so widely described as a “grandmother” in the headlines following her arrest. But the label didn’t capture the full picture. “If anything, we’re getting more explosive in our older age,” Adeana said. “Because we’re tired of being pushed down.”

The post The Short and Ridiculous Trial of a Protester Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume appeared first on The Intercept.

On the day the ceasefire between the Trump administration and Iran took effect, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number had slowly risen to 428 on Monday, according to Pentagon statistics. Yet on Tuesday, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 troops without public comment from the War Department, dropping the total to 413. The count held steady on Wednesday, except for one public War Department tally that put the “grand total” of wounded and dead at 411.

The casualty conundrum came as President Donald Trump extended the truce with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire.

Two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions on the 15 casualties disappeared by the War Department on Tuesday, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them.

A day, and multiple follow-ups, later, The Intercept has yet to receive an explanation of why 15 wounded personnel were scrubbed from the War Department’s casualty rolls.

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Whatever the actual number, the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official has called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

“These numbers, it is obvious, are important. That they don’t want the public to have them says something,” the official said. “That’s the definition of a cover-up.”

The Intercept spoke with two people who used to work on DCAS who said that there was historically very little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the system. “We got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,” Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. 

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions about the slow accumulation of casualties over two weeks or the reason the number of those wounded-in-action has increased by 43, or 28, or 26 since the cessation of hostilities on April 8.

Since The Intercept began asking hard questions about undercounts of dead and wounded personnel, the slow-walking of statistics, faulty accounting measures, and arcane casualty-counting procedures, both U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War have clammed up, failing to answer questions or grant interviews with experts. It follows long-running efforts by Trump to mislead the American people about U.S. military casualties.

Setting aside the question of disappearing wounded, the Pentagon’s official casualty statistics offer a distorted image of the conflict. While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford which had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations, said Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, to “project combat power.” The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

Crenshaw said that DCAS data during the 2000s and early 2010s included the numbers of wounded, injured, and ill. She questioned why the smoke inhalation injuries from the USS Ford were missing from the publicly reported data. “That should have been entered into DCAS,” she said. “My concern is why that piece is now missing.”

A second person who also worked on DCAS during the war on terror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to their employment, expressed similar concerns and questioned what the Pentagon “had to hide.”

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. And the military’s own studies have shown — as a 2025 article in Military Review, the U.S. Army’s professional journal, put it — the “profound impact of disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) on lost duty days and overall lethality.

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During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DNBI accounted for 80 to 85 percent of evacuations, significantly outpacing battle injury evacuations, even during spikes in combat. Another military study found that more than one-third of the casualties and almost 12 percent of all deaths of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through 2014 were caused by DNBI. And as a 2024 meta-analysis in Military Medicine observed, “disease and non-battle injury (DNBI) has historically been the leading casualty type among service members in warfare and a leading health problem confronting military personnel.”

In addition to ignoring untold numbers of sick and wounded personnel, the Pentagon has undercounted the dead during the Iran war.

“We will always honor the fallen,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, announced at a Pentagon press conference last week. “And the 13 who lost their lives really helped steel the resolve and congeal the motivation of the forces.”

DCAS similarly lists 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war and provides their names. But missing from Cooper’s count and the Pentagon tally is Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6, 2026.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

For weeks, the Pentagon has ignored requests for comment on why Davius is missing from its casualty rolls.

During a Tuesday interview, Trump repeatedly said that 13 male service members had died during Operation Epic Fury. “We lost 13 men,” he said on CNBC. “But if somebody would have said, ‘We’ve done this and obliterated that country — obliterated it — and we lost 13 men,’ people would’ve said, ‘That’s not possible.’” According to DCAS, three of the dead are actually women: Maj. Ariana Gabriella Savino, Technical Sgt. Ashley Brooke Pruitt, and Master Sgt. Nicole Marie Amor.

Almost a decade ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to undermine transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties. Not long after Trump first took office, in 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan — an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.

After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” he said at the time. “We suffered no casualties.”

Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump also peddled casualty disinformation, claiming that for 18 months of his presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghanistan war. “In 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,” he said. But an Associated Press investigation found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump’s first term when there were no combat deaths. The AP determined that there were, however, 45 combat deaths among U.S. service members reported in Afghanistan, as well as 18 “non-hostile” deaths during Trump’s first term.

Last spring, The Intercept reported on an effort by CENTCOM, the Pentagon, and the White House to keep casualties of the U.S. war against Yemen’s Houthis under wraps. It represented a departure from the Biden administration, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM had provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon had offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops, but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

The post Pentagon Erases Wounded U.S. Troops From Iran War Casualty List: “Definition of a Cover-up” appeared first on The Intercept.

The American personnel died in a vehicular crash in the mountains of the Sierra de Chihuahua following a drug raid, alongside two Mexican officials, including Román Oseguera Cervantes, the director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson announced the deaths of the Americans on Sunday, referring to them in a post on X as “two members of staff from the United States Embassy.”

The State Department refused requests for additional information on the Americans’ activities or the agencies that employed them. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a Monday press conference that she was unaware of “any direct work between Chihuahua state and personnel from the U.S. embassy.”

Two U.S. government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said the CIA has been running covert operations in Mexico, working alongside vetted Mexican state-level police forces and other government agencies. The sources said the Americans died after a raid on a synthetic drug lab.

“You may note that CIA declined to comment,” a CIA spokesperson told The Intercept by email in response to questions about the deaths.

Mexican authorities told the press that the Americans were not involved in the raid, after earlier stating they died following the operation against the labs.

Western Hemisphere Front

Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone, as part of what he and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — which Trump has turned into a unilateral license to militarily meddle in the U.S.’s backyard — has led to strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; and increased military operations elsewhere in Latin America.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. He said his elite troops “remain postured to provide … support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  

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In a little-noticed move in January, U.S. Northern Command, on Trump’s order, established Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel, or JIATF-CC, to coordinate U.S. government intelligence “to identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel networks.” Among other things, the task force was established for “developing cartel targets for action by USNORTHCOM’s partners and providing direct support to law enforcement.” 

Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM’s commander, said then that the task force would be operating “via traditional and non-traditional means to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant intelligence to execution elements.” Last week, he told lawmakers that the force would “provide actionable intelligence to the Government of Mexico and federal law enforcement counterparts acting domestically based on leads developed from foreign intelligence operations.”

“Trump has reportedly been pushing for U.S. direct action against drug labs and traffickers in Mexico since his first term,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “In his second term, he now has some officials in his administration eager to do a ‘Sicario’ — making Mexico a battlefield in the new GWOT,” or global war on terror, “against the narcos.”

Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire was unable to tell members of the House Armed Services Committee how many land strikes were being conducted across almost 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations. “I don’t have an exact number,” he replied to a question last month. But when asked by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the committee, if the War Department would “be moving to a lot more terrestrial strikes,” Humire replied, “Yes, ranking member.”

Trump mused last year that he might send U.S. commandos into Mexico to battle cartels.

“Could happen,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also threatened military action on Mexican soil.

Over the Precipice

The Americans died at around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning in the town of Morelos after their multi-vehicle convoy departed from the site of the drug raid. The vehicle reportedly drove off the road and over the side of a ravine, exploding upon impact. 

The Americans killed in the wreck in Mexico are some of the first known casualties since Trump ramped up military and CIA operations in and around Latin America last year. A number of U.S. military personnel were injured in the U.S. attack on Venezuela in January. In February, Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, fell off the USS Iwo Jima while it was conducting operations in the Caribbean and was declared deceased on February 10.

The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office claimed that the Americans in Mexico were only conducting training on drone operations, according to Mexican press reports. Sheinbaum said at a news conference Monday that she would ask Johnson, Washington’s ambassador, to meet with Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco Álvarez to discuss the incident. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said that Mexico will not accept U.S. boots on the ground.

“It’s outrageous that U.S. operatives were working to blow up drug labs in Mexico and President Sheinbaum’s security cabinet wasn’t informed of their activities,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

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Last year, the State Department declared six Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Northeast Cartel, the Michoacán family, the United Cartels, and the Gulf Cartel — to be foreign terrorist organizations. The Salvadoran MS-13 and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gangs were also named. The designation activates U.S. sanctions, including restrictions on financial transactions and bans on U.S. citizens from providing support to the groups.

The drug war deaths in Mexico follow the announcement of new joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador last month. Humire said that the Defense Department supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” — Pentagon-speak for March 3 strikes on unnamed “Designated Terrorist Organizations” previously reported by The Intercept.

“The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” he said.

The attacks in Ecuador are also part of, and an expansion of, Operation Southern Spear: the U.S. military’s illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people.

Gen. Francis Donovan, the chief of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers last month that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even broader campaign.

“What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Correction: April 21, 2026, 3:10 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article misstated how many Mexican cartels the State Department designated as foreign terrorist organizations; it was six, not eight.

The post U.S. Personnel Who Died in Mexico Were Working for the CIA, Sources Say appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE put out a call for information from parties interested in securing a contract with the agency for up to 150 parking spaces, according to a government procurement document posted online on April 16. The infamous immigration enforcement agency is looking for a lot in the vicinity of its Varick Street field office in Hudson Square, just south of downtown New York City’s tony West Village.

The need for parking of ICE vehicles set off alarms for immigrant advocates like Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, who called on garage owners to resist the temptation of “a quick buck” in exchange for making ICE’s job easier.

“The Trump administration continues to expand its war on immigrants, and in this moment it’s incumbent on private parking facilities to not collude with immigration enforcement that separates families and guts our communities,” Awawdeh said. “New Yorkers are outraged by what we’re seeing day in and day out, and we should all be ensuring that we’re not complicit.”

ICE operates a fleet of vehicles to use in its deportation operations, including unmarked vehicles that agents use to get around and take people into custody. At a downtown lot near its Varick Street office, ICE has stored compact cargo vans with internal cages — the sort used to transport immigrant detainees — according to local news site The City. The contract for that lot is set to expire.

The new request for information about potential contracts says, “The ICE NYC Field Office is seeking no more than 150 exclusive secure, reserved indoor parking spaces to accommodate a mix of SUVs, mid-sized vans, and mini-buses.”

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There are at least a dozen parking garages within a quarter mile of the office operated by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations at Varick and West Houston streets, the distance specified in the request for information. Among the other requirements listed are 24/7 security monitoring, a single designated space within the facility for ICE vehicles, key-card access controlled by ICE, and a minimum height clearance of 7 feet and 6 inches. (ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The posting of the procurement document comes as one of the agency’s go-to parking spots in the area is set to become unavailable to ICE vehicles. In January, the Hudson River Park Trust, a publicly owned corporation overseen by the state and the city which administers the garage at Pier 40, announced it would allow its contract for ICE parking at a waterfront garage to expire.

A New York-based ICE observer, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation, told The Intercept they had seen unmarked ICE vehicles used for deportation operations using the Pier 40 garage as recently as last week.

The Trust had maintained the contract with ICE dating back to 2004, but, amid the mounting criticism of ICE for its instrumental role in President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive immigration crackdown, the corporation said it was no longer interested in providing space or taking ICE money.

“The Trust is currently in the last year of a five-year parking contract that commenced during the previous federal administration and does not intend to renew the contract,” a spokesperson for the organization told The City. News of the group’s continued business with ICE was first reported by Sludge, and its intent to let the contract expire was first reported by Hell Gate, another local news site.

It was unclear from the new request for information if the need for parking spaces is meant to address existing demand for ICE parking or whether it would be intended to accommodate any increased presence of ICE vehicles in Manhattan. In the 15 months since Trump returned to power, immigrant advocates in the city have waited in uneasy anticipation for a surge of Department of Homeland Security agents like those seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. 

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Thus far, it hasn’t arrived. But amid periodic threats from the Trump administration to target so-called sanctuary cities like New York, the threat of a large-scale surge remains on the minds of immigrants and their supporters.

For ICE observers in the city, monitoring ICE parking facilities is a key part of keeping tabs on the agency and trying to divine its upcoming moves.

“Agents are important to this process, but the vehicles they move in are of almost equal importance, and many of these vehicles begin and end their days at these contract lots,” said the New York-based ICE observer. “They have aggressive abduction quotas that they’re pursuing, and when you think about what they need to reach those quotas, people often think about detention capacity, but that’s the post-abduction side. The pre-abduction side is where you put all the goddamn cars.”

The post ICE Is Looking for Parking in New York City — For a 150-Vehicle Deportation Fleet appeared first on The Intercept.

For the first time in history, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Nada Moawad, and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, sat in the same room at the State Department in Washington, D.C., facing one another as two states ostensibly on equal ground, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials presiding over the talks. Lebanese and Israeli officials had been in the same room before, having held indirect negotiations in 2022 and direct talks last in 1993, but this was the first time that Israel and Lebanon’s flags were hung next to one another — a high-level public meeting of a kind never before attempted.

A 10-day ceasefire inside Lebanon was finally implemented on Friday, one previously agreed to during the Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan and then almost instantaneously undermined by Israel. The United States, and the Israeli state to a certain extent, have portrayed this ceasefire as the result of this breakthrough, a direct negotiation with an enemy nation that, as Netanyahu said on Thursday, could lead to the “opportunity to forge a historic peace agreement” with Lebanon. 

Many Lebanese have been able to return to their home villages under the ceasefire, but this was also the case in 2024, which then was followed by the implementation of an Israeli military buffer zone that left much of the south even more in ruins than from the war itself. The danger of these negotiations lies not in the immediate short term, as the residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south experience a reprieve from intensive bombardment, but in the long term, beyond the 10 days.

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Israel has now reaped the fruits of unilaterally declaring Lebanon outside of the Iranian ceasefire, against its previous agreements, and has now made permanently ending the war, as Iran has desired, a much more difficult prospect. Such a long-term cessation is now reliant on the ability of the Lebanese government to do what America and Israel demands, dismantling Hezbollah by any means necessary even if it means speeding headfirst into a civil war.

While Lebanese President Joseph Aoun hailed the ceasefire as evidence Lebanon is “no longer a card in anyone’s pocket,” Hezbollah members of Parliament, as well as Iranian officials, have told a different story. Even if Hezbollah “will cautiously adhere to the ceasefire,” the deal did not come about from these talks but instead from Iranian pressure to reach a ceasefire as a precondition to another round of negotiations between Tehran and Washington, now set for Monday, albeit looking increasingly fraught. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced after the ceasefire that it was the result of the “resistance and steadfast struggle of the great Hezbollah and the unity of the Axis of Resistance.” Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Moussawi was more blunt, telling Drop Site News that this was the “same ceasefire agreement” reached in Islamabad days ago, only now stamped with Israel’s belated co-sign.

While Hezbollah had significant leverage to force a ceasefire on its behalf — with Iran’s threats to return to war with missiles already reportedly on the launchpad if Lebanon was not included in the deal — it is unclear what leverage the Lebanese government had to negotiate a ceasefire on its own. Throughout the previous ceasefire and into this war, Israel argued Lebanon’s government was incapable of disarming Hezbollah, with Israeli government-aligned newspapers deriding the state’s inability to even expel the Iranian ambassador after Lebanon’s foreign minister ordered him out in March. Israel’s Foreign Ministry routinely criticized the Lebanese government for being “all talk and no action” on disarming Hezbollah, and Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened that the Lebanese state itself would pay a “very heavy price” by way of Israel destroying “Lebanese national infrastructure” and the “loss of territory” to Israeli occupation.

After Israel’s military launched “Operation Eternal Darkness” on April 8, killing more than 300 Lebanese civilians and bringing war to places in Beirut that had not been attacked since the 1980s, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam came out and insisted that “no one but the Lebanese state can negotiate on behalf of Lebanon.” Aoun further said Lebanon could not accept negotiations on its behalf by anyone else, and that this was a “sovereign matter” above all else, even amid ongoing Iranian military pressure to bring Lebanon into the ceasefire. Israel, whose diplomats refused to speak with the Lebanese government in early March on the basis that Lebanon was not “credible,” and whose U.N. ambassador said “dialogue with the Lebanese government cannot stop the fire from Lebanese territory,” suddenly decided to focus all its efforts on arranging unprecedented negotiations.

Lebanon’s ambassador claimed after talks concluded that she had raised the ceasefire with the other representatives (Axios confirmed the prospect was brought up “informally”), but neither the Israeli nor the American officials stated the talks were to achieve a ceasefire. The prospect was in fact “peace,” a long-term settlement between the two nations, or as Leiter, Israel’s ambassador, put it, to affirm “we are on the same side, we and the Lebanese” and that Lebanon would “no longer be occupied by Hezbollah.”

Leiter has made the issue of peace with Lebanon one of his top priorities since being appointed in early 2025, saying in an interview with PragerU last May that he was “upbeat” about Lebanon, as well as Syria, potentially joining the Abraham Accords, perhaps even before Saudi Arabia. He also told reporters this week that he had spoken with Lebanese officials about a future in which one could cross the border in a “swimsuit to vacation on the beaches of both countries.” Beyond these liberal platitudes, Leiter himself has had a significant past — one deeply intertwined with Israeli expansionist politics that he now strenuously denies applies to Lebanon.

The first West Bank settler to be selected as ambassador to the United States, Leiter was an early member of the Jewish Defense League, an organization the FBI later described as a right-wing terrorist group and led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose members committed mass shootings of Palestinians, plotted to bomb American mosques, and attempted assassinations of U.S. politicians. Leiter was then a member of Kach, Kahane’s political party, which was later banned as a terrorist organization inside Israel itself. During this period, Kahane advocated for a wide-scale deportation of Arabs from Israeli-occupied areas as well as from Israel itself, and labeled southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s “minimal” borders. Leiter left the party in the 1980s, claiming Kahanism came from “a weakness of character,” but made these criticisms in his capacity as a leader of the Hebron settlement movement in the occupied West Bank, attempting to paint those who advocated peace with the Palestinians as just as misguided. 

As ambassador to the United States, Leiter told the Lebanese news outlet This is Beirut in late 2025 that Israel and Lebanon “have a history,” recalled the disastrous economic conditions in Israeli-occupation southern Lebanon with a smile, and said southern Lebanese used to line up in early in the morning at the border every day to seek economic opportunities in northern Israel. “We’d be more than happy to see that again,” Leiter said.

While the Israeli government has constantly demanded the Lebanese Army do more to disarm Hezbollah and impose Lebanese sovereignty over the country’s south, Leiter has made no indications that Israel would accept any military build-up, even by Lebanon, at the border with Israel, saying in a visit to occupied Syrian territory last November alongside Netanyahu and Katz that Israel could no longer tolerate “foreign armies” on its border. Leiter has also warned certain other Lebanese allies, such as France, should stay “far away” from these negotiations, and said, “they are not a positive influence, particularly not in Lebanon.” France had previously advocated for direct talks between the Lebanese government and Israel but had also condemned Operation Eternal Darkness and called for the Iranian ceasefire to apply to Lebanon as well.

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While the Israeli negotiating team has been explicit that the talks were intended to get the Lebanese government to ally with their country against Hezbollah, there was another goal at work, one not reflected by the photo ops: to legitimize the indefinite occupation and depopulation of southern Lebanon. 

In an interview on Israeli TV about Israel engaging in negotiations with Lebanon, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted that “no one will disarm Hezbollah for us” and said a peace agreement between the two countries would serve to “greatly legitimize” Israel’s position. He also said he would push for the Israel Defense Forces to remain up until the Litani River, which Smotrich last month described as the location where Israel’s “new border” must be. 

Israel’s Channel 14, which is considered close to the right-wing Israeli government, has also reported that Israeli diplomats had been promoting a “Yellow Line” plan of their own for Lebanon modeled on Gaza’s as part of a long-term settlement. Under such a plan, Israel would dismantle “Hezbollah infrastructure” up to the Litani, only giving the Lebanese Army control after they had completed destroying it in one particular area, and with no timetable to hand back control to the Lebanese Army the area behind the Yellow Line, 7–8 kilometers from the area. Israel’s Defense Ministry has justified the complete razing of villages in southern Lebanon by saying that the homes themselves count as Hezbollah infrastructure.

Netanyahu has since affirmed the existence of a “Yellow Line” in Lebanon post-ceasefire, and in the ceasefire text, there is also no mention of any withdrawal for Israeli troops — only that the ceasefire’s extension relies on “Lebanon effectively demonstrat[ing] its ability to assert its sovereignty.” Israel, for its part, “shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks” and that such actions would not violate the agreement.

The groundwork is being rapidly laid for further and further demands on the Lebanese state — more disagreements, more violations — and potentially binding the future of the Lebanese state with an Israeli one that seeks to impose the depopulation of wide swathes of its territory, and considers its Shia population as its enemy. In response to criticism that he was being deceived by the Lebanese government, Smotrich replied that amid peace negotiations, Israel was still acting to annihilate towns and cities where tens of thousands lived: “We are erasing Khiam, and we are erasing Bint Jbeil.” Amid all of this outpouring of peace, those supposedly advocating for it are in the same government as those advocating Lebanon’s destruction.

The post How the Lebanon Ceasefire Could Make It Harder to End the War on Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund billionaire and philanthropist, won the group’s endorsement on Monday. Our Revolution said its decision to back Steyer was driven in part by the shakeup over Rep. Eric Swalwell’s exit and fear that if progressives fail to consolidate around a candidate, they’ll hand the gubernatorial seat to a Republican.

“While yes, he is a billionaire, and that’s a real and important concern, it’s equally important to recognize how he’s used his wealth and power,” said Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese.

Steyer, he said, is the candidate most ideologically aligned with his group’s pledge to fight corporate power in politics — and the most likely to win.

“The worst thing that could happen is a Republican winning,” Geevarghese said. “Strategically, Steyer and his campaign is best positioned to make sure that does not happen.”

When California voters cast their ballots in the June 2 primary, the two leading candidates will advance to the general election — no matter their party affiliation. Since January, polling has shown two Republicans candidates — former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — in the lead. President Donald Trump endorsed Hilton earlier this month. 

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Left-leaning voters remain split across a wide Democratic field, with Swalwell and Steyer as frontrunners until last week. Swalwell pulled ahead in some polls in March, before dropping out of the race and resigning from Congress last week amid a series of allegations of sexual assault and harassment. 

Since Swalwell’s exit, Steyer has risen in polls, along with former Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif. But with Republicans still leading, progressives are now grappling with how best to achieve their policy priorities in a pool of candidates from which a clear favorite has yet to emerge. 

Geevarghese said that Steyer aggressively sought Our Revolution’s endorsement throughout the race. Porter also sought the endorsement, but hasn’t pulled ahead or demonstrated a clear path to victory, Geevarghese said. 

Porter, a progressive who flipped a Republican seat in Orange County campaigning on fighting corporate power, faced backlash last year after videos surfaced of her yelling at a staffer during a television interview. While she has the longest progressive record in office of the Democratic candidates in the field, left voters haven’t necessarily been convinced by her campaign. Porter has been endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., former New York Rep. Mondaire Jones, Emily’s List, End Citizens United, and several California unions, but has hovered behind behind Hilton, Bianco, Swalwell, and Steyer in recent polling. 

“We do have a concern about whether she would be the stronger candidate in the field to consolidate for progressives,” Geevarghese said. He added that even before the implosion of Swalwell’s campaign, Our Revolution would not have supported Swalwell.

After previously having coalesced around Swalwell, some allies of Gov. Gavin Newsom are now considering backing another more moderate Democrat, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. Becerra has also risen in polling since Swalwell’s exit. 

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Steyer has spent $120 million of his own money on ads for himself, more than any other campaign in the country this cycle, Politico reported. While he’s been mostly known in politics for his advocacy on climate change and a failed 2020 presidential bid that cost him more than $300 million, Steyer has leaned heavily into economic populism during his gubernatorial bid. He says he will support a wealth tax and has called for billionaires and corporations to pay more in taxes. He has also focused much of his criticism on Trump. 

One policy shift since his failed presidential campaign is Steyer’s position on single-payer health care. 

“In 2019, I didn’t think we needed single-payer health care,” Steyer said in a campaign video earlier this month. “Boy was I wrong, and boy was Bernie right. I’ve looked at the data. We don’t have a choice. For us to provide health care to everybody who needs it, we’ve got to go to single-payer. And there’s no other way.”

Geevarghese said Our Revolution, which counts the most members in California after New York, sees the race as an opportunity to elect someone who will both push back on Trump while advancing an aggressive progressive policy agenda at the state level. The group is also backing a Sanders 2020 campaign alum to run California’s insurance system, and working to pass a proposed state tax on billionaires via ballot measure. Steyer is the candidate most aligned with those priorities, Geevarghese said. 

“He’s been a partner in the movement,” Geevarghese said. “Most billionaires have used their wealth and privilege to lock in the status quo. And Tom has done the opposite, right? He is actively using his position to upset the system.” 

Steyer has given millions of dollars to philanthropic ventures over the years, including funding research on sustainable energy and launching a PAC to help elect candidates running on fighting climate change. Steyer has also faced criticism for benefiting from policies meant to help billionaires pay lower taxes and having an investment firm with money in the Cayman Islands, a known tax haven. 

Our Revolution is Steyer’s first major endorsement from a national progressive group. He’s also been endorsed by the California Teachers Association, another progressive advocacy organization called Courage California, and four Democratic state assembly members. 

“We stand a risk of giving California to the Republicans. And that would be the worst outcome possible,” Geevarghese said. “Democrats could do themselves in here and be their worst enemy.” 

The post Progressive Group Founded by Bernie Sanders Endorses Billionaire for California Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year, the LAPD launched its “Drone as First Responder” program with a clearly articulated goal: to protect and even save lives. The pilot program authorized the rapid deployment of drones to the scenes of certain emergency calls before human officers even arrive. After receiving a 911 call, authorities can dispatch a drone to get a better picture of what’s happening from the sky, potentially reducing the number of officers dispatched. This means police resources could, theoretically, be more efficiently deployed to other emergencies around the city.

“This innovative program not only aims to enhance transparency in Department operations but also prioritizes the protection of individual privacy,” the LAPD explained in a webpage about the program. “By deploying drones as an invaluable resource for patrol officers, the DFR Pilot Program provides a cutting-edge tool that can respond swiftly to emergencies, ensuring a safer environment for all.”

The LAPD turned to Skydio, a California-based drone startup that previously marketed its aircraft to consumers but has pivoted to supplying militarized, weapons-compatible hardware for the U.S. Army, Israeli Defense Forces, and other governments.

The LAPD insists the DFR program presents no threat to personal privacy or civil liberties. “Unless you are in the commission of a crime or under criminal investigation for the commission of a crime,” assures the website, “the officers utilizing the drone are not interested in recording you.”

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But according to flight data shared publicly by the LAPD and Skydio, the city has used DFR not only to respond to emergencies, but also to monitor multiple protests across Los Angeles. Software engineer and flight data researcher John Wiseman has tracked DFR aircraft to at least two protests in Los Angeles this year, he told The Intercept, raising questions as to whether the city is operating an aerial surveillance program against nonviolent, constitutionally protected activity.

Flight records show DFR drones were launched at least 31 times to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” protest in downtown Los Angeles, which saw thousands peacefully march against the administration’s deportations raids and street violence in Minneapolis. The Los Angeles Times said the “mostly peaceful protest took a turn as day turned to night in downtown Los Angeles and the crowd refused to disperse,” whereupon police began firing tear gas at remaining demonstrators.

At the March 28 “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration, city data shows the LAPD again launched drones 32 times over the area where the demonstration took place. A heat map visualization created by Wiseman based on the city data shows the drones lingered for extended periods over the Metropolitan Detention Center and the intersection of North Central Avenue and East Temple Street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.

Following the protest, the city’s local ABC News affiliate reported the event “drew tens of thousands who listened to speakers before marching peacefully through downtown streets.” The LAPD later arrested 75 individuals, 74 of whom were taken in simply for not dispersing when ordered by police.

The DFR flight data shows the drones began orbiting the protest at 2 p.m., hours before the order to disperse was issued at 5:30 p.m., and continued flying until 9 p.m. that evening. Nine drone flights began before the dispersal order.

In response to questions about the protest surveillance, LAPD Lt. Matthew Jacobs told The Intercept, “We do not document or record unless there is a crime occurring.”

“When it comes to a protest or demonstration, we’re responding [with drones] at the request of the Incident Commander,” Jacobs said. “We’re looking for specific people, we’re not taping First Amendment activity.”

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Jacobs added that “99 percent of the time” drones are sent to a protest “because the commander reports a crime in progress,” and claimed a “wide variety of crimes” are committed at protests, from vandalism to rocks thrown at officers. Jacobs added at times the department simply “wants to see how big a crowd is.”

When asked why drones were surveilling the No Kings protest hours before the dispersal order, Jacobs said that the LAPD “cannot provide deeper insight into specifics of a single flight.”

When not recording, Jacobs said DFR cameras are monitored by both their pilots and LAPD personnel on the ground, who have access to the live feeds. Any recorded footage is stored on an indefinite basis.

The police department did not answer a detailed list of follow-up questions, including how much protest-related data it has captured via drone surveillance to date or who monitors drone feeds over protests.

The LAPD’s fleet of Skydio X10 drones monitor the ground using with a sophisticated suite of sensors the company says are capable of detecting the presence of person from a distance of more than 8,000 feet and identifying an individual more than 2,500 feet away. The company also touts the drone’s ability to read license plates from a distance of 800 feet. Last year, Skydio CEO Adam Bry demonstrated how two police officers using the company’s DFR Command software could operate eight drones at once between them, tracking license plates and automatically following people of interest.

Update: April 20, 2026, 4:08 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include new comment from the Los Angeles Police Department.

The post LAPD Deployed Drones to Spy on No Kings Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

These overlooked stories share the same ideological slant and editorial voice: that of the White House. Al-Fassel’s YouTube account, for instance, has racked up millions of views on Arabic-language videos praising the Trump administration’s Gaza policy and exhorting Hamas to cease “taking orders from the Iranian regime” and release Israeli prisoners. On Pishtaz News, a poll on the homepage recently asked: “[H]ow would you describe your belief about the Supreme Leader’s current health status and whereabouts?” Possible answers range from “In good health but hiding” to “Disfigured” or “Dead.” The excellence of Saudi and Emirati leadership, both close military partners of the U.S., is a recurring theme.

There’s a reason this coverage echoes American foreign policy talking points. Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government, The Intercept has found.

Disclosed only at the bottom of both sites behind an “About” link that is easily missed by casual readers, the outlets note that they are “a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The government affiliation remains undisclosed on social media platforms including Instagram, despite a platform policy requiring the labeling of state-backed media outlet to prevent the unwitting consumption of government propaganda.

The sites’ recent fixation on crushing Iran is unlikely to be a coincidence: Both publications share numerous connections with a portfolio of fake newsrooms that originated as a military psychological operations campaign against foreign internet users.

Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News did not respond to requests for comment, nor did CENTCOM or the Department of Defense.

In 2008, U.S. Special Operations Command put out a call for contractors to help operate what it called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a project that would provide “rapid, on-order global dissemination of web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” In other words, state propaganda pushed by Pentagon.

Masquerading as independent online newsrooms, the TRWI sites hired “indigenous content stringers” to produce articles “which Combatant Commands (COCOMs) can use as necessary in support of the Global War on Terror.” The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, spawned 10 websites that funneled U.S. foreign policy talking points to audiences across the Middle East and South Asia, running everything from banal essays about inter-faith coexistence to, as reported by Foreign Policy in 2011, articles intended to “whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships.” By 2014, the sites were deemed a failure by Congress and de-funded.

Eight years later, a team of researchers published an unusual report. Following the 2016 election, the bulk of the Western media’s interest in online propagandizing had focused on influence campaigns attributed to Russia, China, and other American geopolitical rivals. But the 2022 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, a commercial internet analysis firm and Pentagon information warfare contractor, uncovered a network of phony “pro-Western” Twitter and Facebook accounts that pushed articles from pseudo-news websites. The report stopped short of formally attributing the campaign to the U.S., but noted that both Meta and Twitter had done so. The researchers concluded that the accounts in question attempted the coordinated spread of articles from a network of sham news websites established by U.S. Special Operations Command.

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The report found that just a few years after TRWI’s ostensible death, many of the sites had simply rebranded, now carrying hard-to-find disclosures mentioning they were run by U.S. Central Command. Following Stanford and Graphika’s findings, some of the sites shut down; others continued. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that the embarrassing revelations spurred the Pentagon to conduct “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare.”

A review of the Internet Archive shows that in the aftermath of the Stanford report, TRWI sites that remained in operation changed their disclosure language. Rather than citing CENTCOM sponsorship, these sites shifted to state that they are “publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The disclosure language used by the remaining network of CENTCOM propaganda sites is a word-for-word copy of the phrasing The Intercept found tucked away on the About pages of Pishtaz News and Al-Fassel.

That’s not the only evidence suggesting a link to this network of military propaganda sites.

Since they began publishing in 2023, Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News have regularly quoted or summarized CENTCOM press releases touting regional operations and battlefield successes, as did the outlets mentioned in the Stanford/Graphika report. The reliance on combatant command press releases in particular is an editorial strategy that dates back to the original SOCOM-run TRWI network.

On X, Pishtaz News follows only three other users; two are the official CENTCOM accounts for Farsi and Arabic audiences. The Pishtaz News Instagram account, which carries no disclosure of the account’s governmental nature, follows only one other user: “US CENTCOM FARSI.”

Intentionally or otherwise, Al-Fassel’s posts to X are often geotagged as having been sent from Lutz, Florida, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of CENTCOM and SOCOM in Tampa, as well as myriad military contractors that service both.

Both sites also share common design elements with the TRWI-associated publications that suggest they were created or operated by the same contractor: All posts conclude with a poll asking “Do you like this article?” using the same thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. URLs are structured identically for Al-Fassel, Pishtaz News, and Salaam Times — an Afghanistan-focused site launched under the TRWI that continues today under a different name — suggesting they were coded using the same tools. The three sites use an identical 404 error graphic to alert users when they’ve clicked on a broken link, as well.

The web design of Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News — including page layout, URL structure, 404 error graphic, and much of the legal verbiage in the About sections — closely mirrors that of CENTCOMcitadel.com, a publication with similar content that carries an overt disclosure of Pentagon sponsorship at the bottom of its homepage.

“These sites are similar in style to the overt messaging efforts we saw from the Department of Defense previously,” Renée DiResta, a former Stanford researcher and co-author of the 2022 report, told The Intercept. “We previously saw this pattern of clearer U.S. affiliation language in the About page of the domain, then minimal to no acknowledgement on the social media profiles.”

There are other subtle nods to the sites’ true purpose: URLs for the English language versions of each site are denoted “en_GB,” for Great Britain. In a comprehensive 2015 analysis of the TRWI network, University of Bath doctoral student Roy Revie observed that the network of American military propaganda sites explicitly marked their English versions as British because “SOCOM seeks to avoid any suggestion its sites are aimed at US audiences.”

In the parlance of information warfare, these propaganda shops are considered “overt” rather than “covert,” because their state ownership is technically disclosed. But in his 2015 paper, Revie argued that these psyop sites still engage in deception. They use online journalism as a form of camouflage, he wrote, because most readers won’t seek out a publication’s About page to learn about its funding. The design of these sites “allows the DOD to credibly claim full transparency and maintain legitimacy, putting the onus onto the user to inform themselves about the source,” Revie wrote.

The output of both sites consistently lionizes the U.S. and Israel, along with America’s Gulf allies. They regularly demean the Iranian state, presenting a wholly lopsided and misleading account in a time of war. “The US says it does not seek open conflict with Tehran,” reads a March 2 article in Al-Fassel. Both sites have repeatedly cited reporting by Iran International — a Saudi-funded, pro-Israel, Iranian monarchist publication with a long record of journalistic misrepresentation. A March 31 Pishtaz News article, for instance, based on an entirely anonymously sourced Iran International post, alleged that Iranian security forces gang-raped nurses in Tehran.

Recent coverage depicts Iran as up against the ropes. A March 22 article in Pishtaz News exclaimed, “The Islamic Republic’s regular army, known as the Artesh, is increasingly described by informed observers as a force under severe strain and institutional neglect.” Another anonymously authored piece from March 25, headlined “Artesh would be better off without its main rival,” seems intended to stoke tensions between Iran’s regular army and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Without the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), resources could flow directly to the regular army, known as the Artesh, enabling meaningful modernization,” the story claimed, a talking point ripped straight from the mouths of right-wing Iran hawks in the U.S. In a March 18 Fox News segment, for example, retired Gen. Jack Keane suggested that an Artesh–IRGC rivalry could be exploited to accomplish regime change.

It’s unclear who exactly writes what appears on these sites. Most articles run without any byline, while other stories are published under names that are difficult to find any mention of anywhere else on the internet. Some of the personnel may not be real at all. A January Al-Fassel YouTube overview of recent regional headlines was narrated by an Arabic-speaking man in a sharp blue blazer. Experts told The Intercept the newscaster was likely a product of generative AI and not genuine footage. “The strongest indicator is an almost complete absence of eye blinks,” Georgetown University professor and deepfake researcher Sejin Paik told The Intercept. Zuzanna Wojciak, a synthetic media researcher with the human rights organization Witness, reached the same conclusion, citing strange anomalies with his skin, hands, and teeth.

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Some articles deeply misstate or misrepresent the facts. An April 15 Al-Fassel article about Iran’s “war crime threats” against the American University of Beirut omitted the fact that these threats came in response to repeated U.S.–Israel airstrikes against Iranian schools. The day after an Al-Fassel article described the Houthis as “crippled” and “largely disintegrated,” capable of offering only “verbal support” for Iran, the Yemeni militant group launched cruise missiles at Israel.

The outlets also illustrate the extent of deceptive messaging radiating from the Pentagon and White House: A March 5 post to the Pishtaz News Instagram account boasted, “The Iranian regime’s ability to strike US forces and regional partners is rapidly eroding, while US combat power continues to grow.” Four weeks later, Iran was continuing to lob missiles at U.S. bases as well as its regional partners, and succeeded in downing an American F-15 and A-10 Warthog. An April 4 Al-Fassel Instagram post claimed, citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that “Iran is not satisfied with a peaceful nuclear program, but seeking to enhance its military capabilities,” even though a 2025 assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded the opposite.

Other articles dispense with masquerading as journalism, reading more as warnings straight from Washington: “United States is fully prepared to protect its forces in Middle East,” read a June 2025 headline on Pishtaz News. “With advanced technological capabilities and highly-trained personnel, the United States maintains one of the world’s most capable military forces, continuously adapting to evolving security challenges to maintain order and stability.” A March 27 Pishtaz News tweet was more straightforward. “You will be systematically annihilated,” it threatens in Farsi. “Your commanders are hiding in bunkers. They have sent their families and wealth abroad—why are you still fighting for them?”

Some articles purport to include comments from genuine expert sources. In at least one case, this happened without the knowledge of the source. A July 2025 article in Al-Fassel predicted that a future closure of the Strait of Hormuz “would harm China and Russia more than other nations.” The article quoted Umud Shokri, an energy analyst affiliated with George Mason University, the State Department, and the Middle East Institute. “I would like to clarify that I was not aware of any affiliation between alfasselnews.com and the U.S. government,” Shokri told The Intercept. “I also did not have any direct interview with the platform, nor was I contacted by them directly. To the best of my knowledge, any quotation attributed to me appears to have been drawn from prior public commentary or other media appearances.”

Prior to the war on Iran, a top priority on both sites was marketing the U.S.–Israeli plans for the future of Gaza. The message is essentially a distillation of the U.S.–Israel–Gulf State consensus: That all Palestinian suffering is brought on by Hamas rather than the past three years of Israeli bombardment, and that the Trump-sponsored “Board of Peace” augurs an unprecedented era of prosperity for Palestinians.

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“The incoming Board of Peace,” a December 2025 Al-Fassel piece claimed, “is expected to foster conditions for democratic representation and meaningful civic participation.” A December 12 Al-Fassel YouTube video similarly blamed Hamas and Iran, rather than Israel, for the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by an AI-generated image of a science fiction city overlaid with Arabic captions promising billions in foreign investment and economic revitalization for Gaza. The video currently has nearly 1.7 million views.

Other items around Gaza further invert reality. Since October 2025, Gaza has been bifurcated by the so-called “Yellow Line,” an arbitrary boundary behind which Israeli forces nominally withdrew last year. Palestinians on the Israeli side of the line face harsh occupying military governance, while those on the other side risk being killed.

Despite claims by Al-Fassel’s video team that Trump’s Gaza policy will herald the ability for countless Palestinians to return home, Israeli forces routinely fire at civilians approaching this buffer zone.

“Incidents of gunfire, shelling, and limited incursions have continued near the ‘Yellow Line,’ the separation zone near the border with Israel, keeping any return highly dangerous,” according to a United Nations video report. “With the amount of available space shrinking, thousands of families have been forced to return to the edges of their destroyed neighborhoods near the ‘Yellow Line,’ despite what residents say is the continued risk of injury or death from intermittent fire.”

Not so, says Al-Fassel: “The Yellow Line is more than a boundary; it is a lifeline designed to keep Gaza’s families safe and informed during the ceasefire,” claimed a November article. “The Yellow Line is not a symbol of division — it is a lifeline.”

Following the 2016 election and the panic surrounding Russian covert propaganda efforts, major American social media platforms began adding labels to the accounts of government-controlled media properties. Videos from Al Jazeera English’s YouTube account, for instance, come with a disclaimer that “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.” Although X abandoned this policy in 2023, it is still nominally on the books for both Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube.

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There is no disclosure, however, in the Instagram posts or accounts of Al-Fassel or Pishtaz News. YouTube videos from both accounts do not include a disclaimer about U.S. funding; however, a brief disclosure can be found on their main account pages, tucked into an About section that must be expanded to be read.

Neither site appears to have a particularly large audience on social media. Both have paltry followings on X — about 2,400 for Al-Fassel, and only 132 following Pishtaz News — with many appearing to be spam-based accounts with names followed by a long string of numbers that engage in posting behavior common to spam networks. Al-Fassel has found modest engagement on Instagram, where it has over 7,700 followers. Though Pishtaz News has only 475 followers on Instagram, its posts sometimes break through; a March 18 post of CENTCOM footage from the deck of an aircraft carrier, for example, racked up more than 1,100 likes.

At times, the content published by the propaganda sites may have reached American audiences. A March 27 Al-Fassel story alleging the total collapse of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” was shared that same day to FreeRepublic, the conservative American message board, by user MeanWestTexan. Federal law forbids Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans, though a similar prohibition aimed at the State Department was overturned in 2013.

Sometimes their stories reach other Western readers. An Al-Fassel article on the Houthis made its way into the citations of a 2024 article in the academic journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy by University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau. (Juneau did not respond to a request for comment.) A submission to the U.N.’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances from Justice for All International, a Swiss-based nonprofit, similarly cited an Al-Fassel post on the IRGC, while an annual report by the state-operated Swedish Defence Research Agency relied in part on an Al-Fassel article on ISIS. The Intercept reviewed multiple entries on Grokipedia, X’s Wikipedia clone, citing Al-Fassel articles as well.

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber policy adviser, believes CENTCOM is most likely behind the sites and considers their overall reach lackluster. When it comes to online propaganda, he said, the U.S. “could learn some lessons from Iran.” Iranian propaganda efforts — mostly quickly produced AI slop — have captured the attention of the internet in a way that the U.S. ersatz newsrooms have not.

But the sites’ limited reach is unlikely to bring them to a halt anytime soon. Even as the Trump administration has gutted Voice of America and other long-standing tools of U.S. soft power, these sites have continued publishing. If their similarities to the long-running American military psyops are more than coincidental, that says more about a culture of inertia at the Pentagon than its success in winning hearts and minds. Brooking told The Intercept that because operating blogs amounts to a “rounding error” within the broader defense budget, such projects can continue with little scrutiny.

A seldom-read network of propaganda sites might seem to have little purpose. But it’s the kind of thing authorities can gesture toward, Brooking said, when pressed about their efforts to combat Iran in the “information space.” “Successive SOCOM or CENTCOM or other senior leaders could point to the fact that they’re maintaining this network of websites,” he said.

The post These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations appeared first on The Intercept.

In a historic Senate vote on Wednesday, all but seven members of the Democratic caucus voted for at least one of two resolutions to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel’s military. Other prominent Democrats and potential 2028 presidential candidates, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and former Obama aide Rahm Emanuel have recently said the U.S. should halt all military aid to Israel for offensive and so-called defensive weapons. 

The idea of steering public funding to those responsible for the genocide in Gaza has plummeted in popularity, with polls consistently show a majority of Americans now oppose sending weapons to Israel. As Americans struggle with affordability amid the joint U.S.–Israel war on Iran, skepticism about military aid for Israel has only grown.

Yet amid this shift, a quieter debate is stirring in the American left over how far Democrats should go in blocking weapons to Israel. 

For anti-Zionist organizers, the goal has long been a total arms embargo. That wouldn’t just bring to an end U.S. public spending to support Israel’s military, but would also halt the commercial sale of weapons from U.S. companies to Israel’s government. Advocates for the embargo, which includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., view the policy as the most effective means in halting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its human rights abuses in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. Doing so, they say, would bring the U.S. into compliance with its own laws governing weapons transfers and human rights.

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Meanwhile, pro-Israel Democrats are beginning to speak out about holding Israel accountable for its abuses, but seek narrower arms restrictions that would still allow commercial weapons sales as a means to maintain Israel’s friendly relationship with the U.S. 

On Monday, J Street, an influential liberal Zionist lobbying group, released a memo outlining a significant shift in policy. Echoing growing demands to end Israel’s “blank check support from the United States,” J Street is urging legislators to instead make the Israeli government pay for U.S. weapons using its own funds. 

It’s a major departure for the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group, which had previously opposed a ceasefire in Gaza and backed Israel’s aggression in Gaza in the early months of the genocide. Since November 2024, J Street has supported a series of Senate resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. meant to block weapons transfers, including Wednesday’s joint resolutions of disapproval. But those measures focused on halting only the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel, such as bombs and firearms. J Street’s new policy memo calls for an end to government spending on both offensive and so-called defensive weapons, or missile interceptor systems, which power Israel’s Iron Dome. It’s a position that until recent months even Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna had not embraced.

Citing existing U.S. law, J Street’s memo calls for an end to providing Israel $3.3 billion in State Department funds to purchase U.S. weapons, along with $500 million earmarked within the Department of Defense for anti-missile systems.

“What we want to be doing is laying the groundwork for the next president to have the political backing to do the right thing to implement the right policies when they come into office in 2029,” Hannah Morris, vice president of government affairs for J Street, told The Intercept.

J Street’s position runs short of a complete arms embargo in that it would still allow Israel to purchase interceptor weaponry from U.S. companies. The group said the exception for anti-missile systems is meant to protect civilians in Israel. Critics say Israel’s defense systems enable the country to carry out its expanding wars in the Middle East without consequence. In addition, the new J Street memo calls for the U.S. to maintain “a strong security partnership with Israel,” including the sharing of intelligence and collaborating on researching and developing new military equipment when mutually beneficial to American interests. “They cannot become a backdoor for continued US subsidies to Israeli defense,” J Street wrote in its memo. 

J Street acknowledged its new position is partly intended to address the growing antipathy toward Israel among Americans. A Pew Research Center poll from earlier this month showed that a record high 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of all Democrats aged 18 and older and more than half of all younger Republicans. 

“Part of having this policy is to remove some of the discomfort that some of the American population has with the exceptionality of the relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, Morris said. “And that can lower the temperature or lack of sympathy for the Israelis versus Palestinians.” 

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Advocates for a total arms embargo view J Street’s evolution as a sign of mounting pressure amid the swing in American public opinion. “That did not just happen out of the blue,” said Beth Miller, policy director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action.“It’s the result of movement organizing for years and years.”

Some arms embargo supporters questioned the timing of J Street’s new position and whether it will hinder efforts to halt Israel’s expansionist wars. Yousef Munayyer, a longtime advocate of a total arms embargo on Israel, wondered whether the J Street memo could offer political cover for certain Democrats seeking to thread the needle by taking a stance against Israel’s abuses without suffering blowback from pro-Israel constituents.

Instead, Munayyer, who heads the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington D.C., said now is not the moment to give up ground. “There has never been a more defensible moment for Democrats to take such a position on an arms embargo, and it seems completely unnecessary for this hyper-calibrated messaging,” he said, referring to J Street’s policy position. “Maybe in a couple of districts and a couple of states, it may be useful, but in the broader sense the public has moved on, especially in the Democratic base.”

Disagreement between J Street and Palestinian rights organizers is not new in Washington. Some advocates for Palestine continue to condemn the group for opposing a ceasefire resolution in 2023, which opponents say helped pave the way for Israel’s genocide. Even before Israel’s war on Gaza, the group has been criticized for not taking strong enough positions on blocking weapons to Israel, including a bill in 2021 that sought to prohibit Israel from using U.S. aid to demolish Palestinian homes and annex Palestinian land in the West Bank. While J Street endorsed the bill, the group drew criticism from Palestinian rights groups who claim it didn’t do enough to drum up support with rank-and-file Democratic members. 

Morris said arms embargo advocates who are critical of J Street’s new policy memo “want to go from zero to one hundred in a way that I think is not only unrealistic but untenable.” She also questioned whether most Americans knew the definition of an arms embargo and suggested that, if given the full picture, fewer would support the premise.

Under the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. government is barred from sending weapons to any country that engages in “a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” or a country that blocks or restricts humanitarian aid. Another provision of the Foreign Assistance Act known as the Leahy law, along with provisions within the separate Arms Export Control Act, prevents military aid to specific units of any foreign security force that is found to violate human rights law. The U.S is also a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, international law meant to prohibit war crimes, crimes against humanity, including genocide. The conventions also have legal bearing on the transfer of weapons. 

Such laws make no distinction between weapons sales made with U.S. government support or sales through the commercial market. If Israel were to buy weapons directly from U.S. companies, Congress would still receive a notification and could vote to disapprove a sale.

When introducing his series of resolutions to block some arms sales to Israel, Sanders evoked both the Foreign Assistance and the Arms Export Control acts. The laws are also the legal basis for the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which has drawn support from a range of elected members — including ones backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and has become a litmus test for candidates taking a position on Israel and Palestine in the midterm elections. 

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At any point, either the president, through an executive order, or Congress, via legislation, can use these laws to enact some form of conditions on Israeli aid, whether halting all military support or a total arms embargo. 

Both a total arms embargo and the J Street model would bring to an end State Department spending ($3.3 billion annually), known as Foreign Military Financing, as well as the phasing out of Pentagon spending for Israel. Funds earmarked for Israel in the Pentagon’s budget are not classified under the Foreign Assistance and Arms Export Control laws. Instead, Congress must draft and pass a defense budget that excludes carveouts for Israel, or draft legislation that specifically targets Pentagon spending on Israel, most of which currently funds things like Israel’s Iron Dome.

Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., attempted to pass an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill in July 2025 that would have nixed the $500 million set aside for Israel defense spending, but it drew only six votes. Ocasio-Cortez was absent from the vote, which she said was to maintain Iron Dome funding.

While such cuts would be a blow to Israel’s ability to wage war, Israel still boasts its own major annual military budget of more than $45 billion. Israel also is home to a domestic weapons industry that sells to the Israeli government. Earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would want to “taper off the military” from the U.S. within the next decade. “We’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities,” he said. But both J Street and advocates for an arms embargo agree that banning subsidized weapons deals with Israel would still have a tremendous impact.

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Stephen Semler, who worked on Brown University’s Cost of War project that tracked U.S. military spending on Israel during its genocide, said halting access to American munitions stockpiles and U.S. weaponry would greatly diminish Israel’s ability to wage war at the rate it has in recent months in Iran and southern Lebanon. “If they’re forced to buy their own arms, then they’re going to have problems sustaining what they’re doing,” Semler said. 

In the first month of the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, the Israeli military said it carried out more than 10,000 separate strikes. Before the recent ceasefire, joint U.S. and Israeli strikes killed more than 2,000 people in Iran. Since early March, Israel has killed at least 2,100 people in Lebanon, including women, children, paramedics and journalists. The military has also leveled entire villages in the country’s south, similar to destruction seen in Gaza. Evidence of Israel’s human rights abuses are continuing to pile in both wars. 

“If you can make perpetual war and not have to pay for it, that becomes a much more attractive option,” Munayyer said. “But suddenly when you have to directly carry the costs, now you have to start thinking, ‘Do I want to be at war with all of my neighbors all the time, forever?’”

The post Democrats Are Split Over What It Means to Block Israel Weapons Deals appeared first on The Intercept.

Crypto donors are trying to make sure that never happens.

The woman mounting a long-shot challenge to Waters in California’s 43rd Congressional District has drawn more than two-thirds of her donations from the cryptocurrency industry.

Nonprofit executive Myla Rahman, 53, who is running as a younger alternative to the 87-year-old Waters, has taken 69 percent of her campaign contributions from crypto figures.

Rahman’s biggest single donor is Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse, a leading voice pushing for looser regulations on crypto who has been active in the debate over pending crypto legislation in Congress.

Garlinghouse’s $6,600 donation last month helped bring Rahman’s total haul to $14,540 since announcing her long-shot campaign in February. The total haul is a pittance compared to what it would take to mount a viable campaign against Waters, a legendary figure who is serving her 18th term in the House. California’s primary election takes place on June 2. (Ripple Labs declined to comment.)

Still, any opposition funding could serve as a nuisance to Waters, a relative lightweight when it comes to fundraising compared to other top names in Congress. (Neither Waters’s nor Rahman’s campaigns responded to requests for comment.)

Rahman’s second biggest benefactor was Colin McLaren, the head of government relations at the crypto advocacy nonprofit Solana Policy Institute. He chipped in $3,500.

The crypto industry has ample reason to target Waters. While other Democrats have proven more accommodating, Waters has supported tighter oversight from her powerful position in the House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the crypto industry.

With Waters potentially assuming the helm of the committee next year, crypto is racing to win passage of a favorable regulatory framework in the form of a bill called the Clarity Act. Despite widespread support among the Republicans, the industry has faced intense pushback from banks and credit unions who worry that passage of the law could lead to a stampede of deposits out of their institutions and into crypto exchanges.

Ripple, which has an estimated valuation of $50 billion, fought a yearslong legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission that centered on the issues under debate in Congress right now.

Waters’s most recent campaign filing on April 15 showed that she had a little over $300,000 on hand. Many recent contributions came from the banks and credit unions squaring off against crypto on Capitol Hill.

Despite her stance on crypto regulation, Waters also received a campaign donation from Ripple Labs co-founder and Democratic megadonor Chris Larsen. He gave $3,300 to Waters on March 6, only a few days after Garlinghouse made his donation to Rahman.

Larsen gave one of the crypto industry’s highest-profile contributions to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign.

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Rahman’s campaign does not mark crypto’s first quixotic campaign against a prominent congressional industry critic. The crypto industry also funded a Republican challenger in 2024 in an attempt to unseat Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren in deep-blue Massachusetts and a since-suspended primary challenge to Democratic California Rep. Brad Sherman.

In Sherman’s race, the crypto industry made clear its intention to leverage a message of generational change against critics of blockchain currencies.

The post Crypto Critic Maxine Waters’s New Primary Foe Got Over Two-Thirds of Money From Crypto appeared first on The Intercept.

“The hospital has become my home,” Annan said, exhausted.

Last week, an Israeli strike leveled the building where Annan’s family lived in Kayfoun, a town in the Mount Lebanon governorate, west of the Lebanese capital.

“I buried my father,” he said, “but my mother is still missing.”

Since then, his days have become a single-minded search for any sign of his mother, Fatima, who is 56. Like several others searching for missing family members, Annan gave a sample of his blood to the hospital, hoping he can get some closure with a DNA match to unidentified remains.

“I walk through hospitals in the Mount Lebanon region. I stare at injured faces. I go to the morgues. I look for a mole, a mark,” Annan said. “Then I come back here. Waiting for the sample results.”

The cold-storage units at the Hariri hospital have been fashioned into ad hoc laboratories to identify a relentless influx of dead bodies.

The unprecedented scales of DNA identification of corpses is born of a macabre need. Last week, after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a ceasefire, Israel pressed on in its Lebanese front with a ferocious blitz of airstrikes. The toll was staggering, leaving demolished buildings and infrastructure, along with the attendant skyrocketing casualties — the violence rending people into unrecognizable forms.

“The bodies arrive completely disfigured,” said Hisham Fawwaz, director of the hospitals and dispensaries department at the Lebanese Ministry of Health, which operates the hospital. “The remains are scattered and the features obliterated. We are often not dealing with whole bodies. We are dealing with human fragments that the force of the explosions has turned into medical puzzles.”

After the Iran–U.S. truce, Israel launched more than 100 strikes on Lebanon in just 10 minutes, with the Israeli government taking to social media to brag about its assault. The latest round of hostilities between with Israel had already brought weeks of ravages to Lebanon, but last week’s onslaught, dubbed “Black Wednesday” by the Lebanese, razed densely populated neighborhoods in the capital. At least 357 were killed and more than 1,000 were injured, according to the health ministry.

A week later, dozens of people are still missing. The ceasefire in Lebanon announced by President Donald Trump on Thursday will hopefully lead to fewer bombings, but it won’t slow families’ attempts to find their loved ones and, if worse comes to worst, identify their remains.

The families remain on a desperate quest to track them down, whether they’re pinned under the wreckage or hidden among the dismembered bodies at the morgues like the one at Hariri Hospital.

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At one point, more than 90 unidentified bodies were held there, some stretching back to the initial days of Israeli bombardment. Each body has been assigned a temporary number, waiting for someone to claim it.

The Health Ministry established a central triage center to absorb the uninterrupted flow of bodies, along with a protocol: document tattoos, distinguishing marks, and remnants of burned clothing that a family member might remember. Hospital workers also cross-reference physical descriptions from families with what is recorded of unidentified remains.

If that proves too difficult, doctors draw blood from living relatives to match the DNA against the unclaimed fragments of victims.

“Suspended Loss”

Zahraa Aboud had just recently fled her hometown of Anqoun in southern Lebanon. Israeli ground troops had invaded the town in March, razing entire villages and displacing hundreds of thousands as they set up a buffer zone intended to stop Hezbollah from lobbing rockets into northern Israel.

When the Israeli airstrikes grew relentless, Aboud, 29, and her sister traveled to Beirut, to their aunts’ apartment in the Ain Al-Mrayseh neighborhood. In the capital, she thought, they would be out of reach of the violence.

Israel’s missiles would soon come down on her.

According to Aboud’s father, Qassem, when an airstrike hit the upper floors of the aunts’ building, everyone in the apartment upstairs — including six children — was instantly killed. A floor below, Aboud’s aunts were killed in the same strike, and her sister was taken to Clemenceau Medical Center with serious wounds.

Zahraa Aboud, though, hasn’t been seen since.

“We are not looking for rubble,” said Qassem, 56. “We are looking for life. Or at least for the certainty that will put out the fire in our hearts.”

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Rescue teams gave up after a few days of searching, but families of those missing in the rubble refused to leave the scene and pressured them to keep going.

Qassem Aboud, meanwhile, hasn’t stopped circling Beirut for traces of his daughter. Back and forth, he checks private hospitals, government hospitals, and lists of unidentified patients. In ICU wards across the city, he peers at any face behind an oxygen mask that might be hers.

The Aboud family calls the tragic situation “suspended loss”: They can’t find a sign of life to suggest they may get Zahraa back, but they’ve also been denied a final farewell and the chance to see their daughter off.

Like the others, Qassem submitted a blood sample to the hospital in hopes of later finding a DNA match — and closure.

After days of searching, Qassem came to suspect that the force of the explosion may have thrown his daughter’s body into a neighboring building. When he checked, he found the apartments were either locked or abandoned by departed residents. So far, he can’t find anyone to let him in.

“I feel very helpless every day, but will keep searching until I bury her,” he said.

The rubble itself has become a legal obstacle.

Buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes are classified, under Lebanese law, as private property. Civil defense teams and relief organizations cannot fully clear or demolish them without prior judicial authorization. The red tape is meant to protect property rights, to preserve the legal record, and to avoid tampering with what the law considers a crime scene, according to a source at the public prosecutor’s office who asked to stay anonymous as he’s not authorized to talk to the media.

Some of the legal restrictions have slowed rescues. Families that want to utilize specialized search dogs, which can move through the wreckage faster than people, must file formal requests at the public prosecutor’s office.

“We submitted the requests. We begged the relevant authorities to expedite the judicial procedures,” said a relative of a missing woman who asked not to be identified. “But the Lebanese judiciary has not moved. Every minute that passes is a nail in the coffin of our loved ones, while the judiciary is still reviewing paperwork.”

When families sought exceptional permissions to allow rescue teams to remove the rubble, judicial authorities did not respond to their requests, families of missing people said. (Judicial authorities did not respond to a request for comment.)

Back at Hariri Hospital, families continued filing into a makeshift office opened by the Health Ministry designed to help families identify their lost loved ones. Inside, they recalled the tiniest details of their missing relative, from birthmarks to unique articles of clothing — anything that may lead to closing a case. Then they give their blood. And they wait.

“The goal is not accounting,” said Fawwaz, the Lebanese Ministry of Health official. “It is to return to each victim their name, and to give their families the right to a farewell that ends the spiral of doubt.”

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

The post Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA to ID Loved Ones’ Remains appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Bernie Sanders forced a vote on Wednesday to block the sales of bombs and bulldozers to Israel. The resolutions failed mostly along party lines with a handful of defections to the Republican side, but a record number of Democrats voted against sending weapons to Israel.  

“A supermajority of Democrats oppose this war, are generally against America’s global military interventions,” former Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss tells The Intercept Briefing. Yet Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined 11 Democrats in voting against the measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel, and seven Democrats against the sale of bulldozers used in Israel’s military occupations.

“We do have a Democratic Party leadership that still is part of this very small — and thankfully dwindling, though not fast enough — hawkish faction that is wedded to this idea of American global military domination,” says Duss.

This week on the podcast, Duss speaks to host Akela Lacy about how Democrats should use the overwhelming unpopularity of the war to push an anti-war agenda that brings about real change. 

“There’s a real constituency here for this message,” says Duss. “We need a foreign policy for this era that is based around building peace rather than making war, that is focused on foreign policy that benefits American communities and American workers, but also does not export insecurity and poverty onto others in the world. And I think this is a really opportune moment for it.”

The watershed moment in the Senate came against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive military adventurism.

“My concern about blaming this all on Israel is that it lets Washington off the hook,” says Duss. “We have a foreign policy establishment that is addicted to militarism, that is addicted to war, who often work at think tanks that are largely funded by the military–industrial complex. They are funded by weapons manufacturers. We have a political class that is really deeply committed to an almost religious degree to American primacy in the world, to American global hegemony. Which means that we are up in everyone’s business all over the place all the time.”

“This Iran war is the most egregious and horrible expression of trends in our foreign policy that have been building for a long time, so are these boat strikes,” he says, referring to the Trump administration’s ongoing assassinations of alleged drug traffickers. “We’ve been killing people with flying robots in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere for decades now.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept.

Ali Gharib: And I’m Ali Gharib, a senior editor at The Intercept.

AL: We are well over a month into the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and about a week into a ceasefire that, depending on which side you’re listening to, has either held or not held. Ali, walk us through the latest developments. What’s the status of this war?

AG: When the talks broke down over the weekend, a lot of bluster started to be exchanged between Iran and the U.S. The U.S. imposed its own blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, which is almost, like, comically perfect if it wasn’t so tragic — that the U.S. started this war for unclear reasons, and then Iran punished the U.S. and the world by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Then the U.S. made the war about opening the Strait of Hormuz. Iran agreed to do that under certain conditions, and the U.S. has rejected Iran’s terms, though, as the U.S. tells it, Iran rejected their terms.

But either way, we came to an impasse. And now it is the U.S. that is blocking the Strait of Hormuz. So that’s the Kafkaesque state of affairs in the straits these days.

But for the moment, the ceasefire is holding. The U.S. and its allies — Israel — are not, so far, attacking Iran, and Iran has not been launching weapons at Israel and the U.S.’s Gulf allies and U.S. military assets. 

One of the most interesting things about the state of the ceasefire right now is that even though the U.S. imposed this “blockade” — I’m doing air quotes now — on Iranian ports, the Iranians have not forced the issue when the U.S. has ordered ships coming from Iranian ports to turn around. They have complied, and Iran has not been firing on U.S. naval assets in the strait. So far, everybody is complying. There was word from thinly sourced reporting that our colleague at CNN, Leila Gharagozlou — who, full disclosure, also happens to be my cousin — had mentioned that there had been a U.S. request to Iran, according to the Iranians, for another round of talks coming up.

So diplomacy may indeed be proceeding. We don’t really know, but that’s the state of things right now is that — and I think we can all be thankful for it — is that there’s a lot of bluster, there’s a lot of talk about “They won’t accept our terms, and it’s gonna be bad for them,” on both sides. But so far, there’s been no major escalations in the fighting.

AL: Our listeners know that Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon and Gaza is powered by U.S. money and weapons. And there was a historic vote in the Senate on Wednesday when Sen. Bernie Sanders forced a vote to block more than $450 million in sales of weapons and bombs to Israel.

This is the latest in a series of votes that Sanders has introduced to block these kinds of weapon sales to Israel. The latest vote failed, as did the previous two in April and July of last year. But just as the last vote, a historic number of senators voted for this measure. The last vote to block these weapon sales to Israel in July had a record number of senators vote for it, 27.

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But the vote on Wednesday saw an even greater number of senators move to support this bill, bringing the total to 36. That includes Sanders and another independent senator, Angus King. Zero Republicans voted for this measure. But what’s notable here is that several people who voted either against the last iteration of this resolution, the joint resolution of disapproval, or the previous one, either voted against it or voted present.

Several of the senators who voted against it or voted present have voted for this bill now. This is part of what Sen. Sanders said after the vote is a major shift among Democrats on the topic of Israel and U.S. military support for Israel, particularly during the genocide in Gaza, but also as the war on Iran continues to escalate, and both Republicans and Democrats face increasing criticism over the U.S. entanglement in this war side by side with Israel.

I also want to note several notable Democrats who did sign on to this bill: Cory Booker, who has been a longtime ally of AIPAC, who’s recently sworn off AIPAC money in his upcoming Senate race as part of a broader pledge to reject corporate PAC money. John Hickenlooper, who is facing a progressive challenger who said that she won’t send money to Israel while it’s committing genocide in Gaza. Adam Schiff, who previously voted no on this. Elissa Slotkin, who also previously voted no on this.

Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly were some of the names who stood out to me here. With the exception of Gallego, who started out as a progressive and tacked pretty moderate during his Senate race, these are the bread and butter of the centrists of the Democratic Party. We’re talking about Adam Schiff, Elissa Slotkin, Michael Bennet of Colorado.

AG: Mark Kelly, I think, was a really telling one because he has been such a staunch supporter of Israel and, I think, has the ambitions and maybe also the profile that makes him more viable — and just on a personal judgment level is less silly than the Cory Bookers of the world.

AL: Less silly. He’s an astronaut, he can’t be silly. [Laughs.]

AG: [Laughs.] Well, Kelly is a guy who has voted no on these resolutions again and again and again. Here’s a guy — staunch supporter of Israel — he hasn’t previously voted for any of these resolutions before, and now he is. His logic was interesting because he came out and said that, I am a supporter of Israel, and this is our ally, and we need to be helping them. But we also have to recognize that what’s going on right now in the Middle East is not normal. His phrase was, “Not business as usual.” And he said, “It’s not making us safer,” and the U.S. and Israel are in this war, and there’s no end in sight. That’s what seemed to have turned him against the [bombs and bulldozers].

And I think that coming from maybe one of the more legit presidential contenders in Capitol Hill is pretty significant, Akela.

AL: Yes, I agree. So this vote was broken up into two measures: one which was to block the sale of bombs, the other which was to block the sale of bulldozers, which garnered more support. Ali, tell us about that.

AG: This one, to me, was really interesting. Forty Democrats voted for this. I mean, that is about 80 percent of the Democrats in the Senate. That’s a remarkable number. Maybe not as remarkable as the shift to 36 senators on the bombs. It’s significant nonetheless. What was really interesting here, and our colleague Matt Sledge had reported about this in his article, was that it seemed like these Democrats had an easier time voting against bulldozers than voting against bombs, which doesn’t make sense at first blush.

But how we see the bulldozers actually work in practical application — in southern Lebanon today, in the occupation in general, in the efforts to annex the West Bank — has been to use it to destroy villages and homes and change the realities on the ground to create Israel hegemony over what’s left of the rubble of Palestinian and, more recently, Lebanese villages.

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So that, to me, was an interesting development, because having so many of the Democrats overwhelmingly oppose these things that I think that there is for, maybe not by the twisted logic of an AIPAC-infused Capitol Hill, but to the wider world, you’re like, “Wait a second. Bulldozers?” And actually, these are weapons of occupation and annexation and the apartheid system in Israel.

AL: It speaks to the thinking or the process by which senators are able to talk themselves out of the line that they previously walked on what is considered self-defense for Israel. It’s easier to say, “Yeah, we support an Iron Dome” than “We support bulldozers that we’re seeing used to raze people’s homes and buildings.”

AG: In some ways, it is a much more clear war crime to be razing entire villages than dropping bombs. The Israelis, the Americans, everybody always comes up with these bullshit excuses that are like, “Oh, they were targeting military assets,” and this whole cockamamie collateral damage argument and stuff.

There’s no dispute that when Israel razes an entire village on the Lebanese border — and they said they were going to do this — that is a prima facie war crime. That’s what it is. 

So even though that’s not what Capitol Hill is saying, what Democrats on Capitol Hill are saying, when they voted for this resolution; it’s just interesting to me that that’s the avenue that we’re starting to go down now, even on Capitol Hill.

AL: We talk about all of this and more in today’s episode with Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who introduced the measures to block the bombs and bulldozers that we’ve been discussing. Duss was also the former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a national security and international policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

AG: I, for one, am really eager to hear this conversation. Thanks, Akela.

AL: Thank you, Ali. 

Matt, welcome to “The Intercept Briefing.”

Matt Duss: Thank you. Great to be with you.

AL: Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance left negotiations he was leading to end the war in Iran and open the Strait of Hormuz without a deal. Talks fell apart over U.S. demands that Iran suspend uranium enrichment for 20 years; Iran agreed to five. For context, former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — that Trump proudly shredded in his first term — took nearly two years to negotiate.

To start, Matt, can you bring us up to speed? What is the latest on this war that the U.S. provoked and is now trying to find a way out of?

MD: We’re about a month and a half into this war that began at the very end of February, launched by the United States and Israel together. I think that is notable, as opposed to last June’s so-called 12-Day War, which was begun by Israel bombing Iran. Then days later, the U.S. joined in, dropping its biggest bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities.

This is very much the United States and Israel acting together from the beginning, and they’ve done enormous damage. They bombed a lot of buildings, destroyed a lot of nuclear and military infrastructure, destroyed much if not most of Iran’s navy, killed a lot of Iranian leaders, including notably the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the first day of the war.

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But it has not achieved anything like a victory because no one had any doubt that the United States and Israel could do a lot of damage militarily to Iran, but Iran’s security and defense doctrine has always been based on that understanding and has been built around creating the ability to inflict pain in other ways, economic and otherwise. That is what we are seeing with Iran shutting down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a very narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which a large amount of global oil shipping flows. 

This pain is being felt in the United States with gas prices going up, but, more importantly, by the rest of the world. Even though the U.S.  population is feeling the pain, the worst consequences of this war are already being felt and will continue to be felt by some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. Which is to say the worst consequences of this war will fall upon those who didn’t start it.

AL: On Wednesday morning, Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that the U.S.–Iran war is “very close to being over.” We’ve heard that before, several times in the last few weeks. Do you think that Trump will use the ceasefire period to end U.S. involvement at this point?

MD: I would hope so. The best way for this war to end would be for the people who started it to stop, and that is the United States and Israel. They launched an unprovoked and illegal — and in my view, a strategically counterproductive — war of aggression. But I think the question here is, at what point does Trump either get bored of this war or decide he needs really to get out of it? We’ve seen some reporting indicating that Trump is starting to realize, if not already, that he really miscalculated here, that he was led to believe that this war would be much quicker and easier than it actually was. 

I think he was looking at Venezuela as a model. He came to believe in the magical powers of the American military and special forces to do things and achieve goals. And certainly he had people around him, like Lindsey Graham, like Tom Cotton, and obviously Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who were feeding him this information to say, it’s going to be amazing and quick. It’s going to be glorious, and you’ll demonstrate once again the greatness of Donald Trump. He’s clearly frustrated that it has not gone that way. 

The United States has the ability to inflict enormous damage on Iran or any country, but Iran has also shown that it has ways to respond. And it has not relented, it has not agreed to Trump’s demands, particularly on its nuclear program.

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These are the demands that were presented by Vice President JD Vance in Islamabad last weekend, which Iran did not accept because those demands have not changed. You referenced the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran, and I think what led to the breakthrough there that led to that agreement being signed in 2015 was the United States’ acknowledgment that Iran has a right to enrich uranium. That is a right that Iran had long claimed. It does have a valid argument under the non-proliferation treaty — of which it is a member — which guarantees signers of that treaty the right to peaceful nuclear energy. Iran interprets that to mean they have a right to enrich on their soil. There may be some dispute on that. But Iran, for its own nationalist and political reasons, has always asserted that right. And the Obama administration acknowledging that is what led to what was, I think, a very good nuclear agreement.

As you noted, Trump withdrew from that, that led to this moment. I think until the United States is willing to accept some formula that doesn’t require Iran to give up that right. Iran could agree to not enrich for the time being, while still retaining the right to enrich. It’s possible to see some language that they could come up with that both sides could be satisfied with. But as long as the U.S. continues to press these same demands, we are not going to resolve this issue.

AL: One follow-up here. Iran has characterized the falling apart of these latest round of talks led by JD Vance as a result of the U.S. moving the goalposts and insisting on Iran suspending uranium enrichment after that not having led the strikes under that demand. What’s happening here? Obviously, the nuclear question is always in the background when we’re talking about Iran. But is it fair to say that the U.S. moved the goalpost here?

Matt Duss: I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. moved the goalpost once Trump was convinced to make zero enrichment a condition of talks; this was ongoing last year. I think you saw conflicting information from Steve Witkoff, who’s the real estate dealer, who Trump has decided for some reason to make his lead negotiator everywhere. Witkoff at one point was saying, no, we’re not going to require them to give up all their enrichment.

Some of us heard that and we’re like, OK. That means there’s a possibility of a deal if they want other guarantees — inspections. It’s possible. But once Trump made zero enrichment a demand — and again, you had Netanyahu pressing him on this, you had people like Lindsey Graham, you had a bunch of hawkish think tankers in Washington pressing this on him — we should understand, this was designed to prevent an agreement because these people understand that Iran will not agree to that. That is why they press Trump to make this demand because they understood it would lead to no agreement, and they would get the war they’ve always wanted, which is of course what has happened.

AL: You recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy about why blaming Israel for the war on Iran lets Washington off the hook. Part of your argument is that war-hungry members of both parties have been pushing for this war just as hard as Israel has, including Democrats. I want to talk about those Democrats. Who are they, and what responsibility do they have for this war?

MD: The point I made in the piece, I acknowledge, it’s very clear that this war would not be happening without pressure from Israel. It would not be happening without pressure from Prime Minister Netanyahu in particular, and without pressure from the Israel lobby in Washington. 

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But also, as you noted, I think my concern about blaming this all on Israel is that, yeah, it lets Washington off the hook. We have a foreign policy establishment that is addicted to militarism, that is addicted to war, who often work at think tanks that are largely funded by the military–industrial complex. They are funded by weapons manufacturers. We have a political class that is really deeply committed to an almost religious degree to American primacy in the world, to American global hegemony. Which means that we are up in everyone’s business all over the place all the time. This war that we are witnessing right now is an expression of that — it is one of the most horrible possible expressions of it. 

But my concern about blaming it all on Israel, it distracts us from the problem being here in the United States. It is here in Washington. This is what we need to reform about our own foreign policy rather than locating blame in other places.

AL: Are there Democrats who you think hold particular responsibility, particularly for this iteration of the Iran war? We had reporting about Democratic leadership trying to slow walk this war powers resolution and all this sort of stuff. And our listeners are very interested in knowing actually who bears responsibility for this.

MD: You mentioned, we have the Democratic leadership — Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House — even though they eventually came out in support of the war powers resolution that Senator Kaine and Senator Paul offered a few weeks ago. Actually, they announced their support just days before the war began.

That’s good. I’m glad they came around to the right place. But in my view, it just took way too long. It took too much work to support something that a supermajority of Democratic voters support. A supermajority of Democrats oppose this war, are generally against America’s global military interventions in general.

Yet we do have a Democratic Party leadership that still is part of this very small — and thankfully dwindling, though not fast enough — hawkish faction that is wedded to this idea of American global military domination.

I’d also note here too, we need to hold the Biden administration responsible for some of this too. Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 on a commitment to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement that Trump withdrew from in 2018. It was pretty unequivocal. He wrote a piece, or a piece was written under his name, that was published in October of 2020 that laid out, here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to rejoin this deal, and here’s why.

A lot of us were very encouraged by that. Yet, once taking office his administration hit the brakes, decided we’re going to take our time to rejoin this agreement in the hopes of using the sanctions that Trump had imposed as leverage and get a longer and stronger deal.

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They didn’t do what they promised. Now, in my view, and many of us were advocating this at the time, the thing to do would’ve been just rejoin the deal, remove the sanctions. The U.S. committed to this along with its allies — and then we withdrew from it. So first, rejoin the deal, and that creates an environment where the Iranians are like, “OK, Biden is doing what he said he’d do. Maybe we can talk about a longer deal. Maybe we can keep engaging to address a broader range of issues between the United States and Iran.”

Instead, Joe Biden showed the Iranians that you cannot trust Joe Biden. And we lost, I think, a really important opportunity. After a few months, Iran had its own presidential elections coming up. That current administration that had signed the nuclear agreement under President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif were replaced by a much more hawkish, hard-line president and foreign minister that drove a much, much harder bargain. That made it much more difficult to come to any kind of agreement to getting back into the JCPOA. And of course that failed. We have to acknowledge it was basically the Biden administration that lost the JCPOA and put us on the path to where we are now.

AL: I also just have to mention John Fetterman because we just have to. 

MD: Do we? OK.

AL: [Laughs] I’m curious while I have you, because you were in the Senate at a point in time, and he has been, pretty openly calling for blood thirsty retaliation against Iran.

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Now, the latest is that he’s backing Trump’s peace talks. But what do you make of his, I don’t know if you can really call it an evolution, because he seems to have been this way for quite some time. But yeah, what is your analysis of his position?

MD: Yeah, I don’t really have a great read on it. He basically seems to have been handed a set of talking points about Israel as the good guys and Iran as the bad guys and the Palestinians as the bad guys. And that’s good enough for him. He just has shown no real understanding of these issues. No understanding of the history here or of the policy.

From what I understand, he really resents a lot of the pressure, but that’s tough luck, man. You’re a U.S. senator. That’s part of how this works. If you support bad inhumane policies, get ready to be protested. 

As far as I can see, he has just decided he’s just doubling down. And he doesn’t want to talk about it. I know people who have tried to talk to him about this issue. I’m not one of them. But they have reported he just won’t even consider his position, regardless of the evidence. He’s just made this part of his identity, and I think that I think is very weird and regrettable.

AL: I love that description, “weird and regrettable.” 

[Break]

AL: You worked in Congress at a time when there was a major shift on norms in foreign policy and an increasing willingness by some members, including your former boss, to oppose foreign wars. I want you to tell us about that time and what you saw as prompting that shift.

MD: I think we have seen a really important movement over the past few years. But let’s also remember that Barack Obama was elected in 2008 because of his opposition to the Iraq War. That is really what distinguished Obama in that field. There were some other things, but even he himself and the people around him understood that, one of the strongest arguments, if not the strongest arguments for his presidency, was the fact that he opposed the Iraq War when everyone else in Washington was supporting it, falling in line, either because of their ideology or because they were just political cowards.

He showed that when it mattered, he was able to stand up against the tide. Now, Obama’s project of changing foreign policy obviously ran into some strong headwinds. People can argue that he didn’t try as hard as he should have. I think that’s probably true in some cases, but I think there were some important achievements. The Iran nuclear agreement was one. I think changing Cuba policy was another; withdrawing from Iraq. We can run down the list of mistakes he made as well.

I think the lesson from those two terms was, there is a deeply entrenched, foreign policy establishment in both parties and in Washington broadly — a bipartisan establishment that is, as I described earlier, just committed to this idea of American global military hegemony. Changing that is very difficult. But yet American voters continue to show that they’re supportive of a change.

I wrote a piece in The Guardian last year in the wake of Kamala Harris’s election loss that argued that Trump had won in part because he presented himself as an anti-war president. He and Vance really in the last few weeks before the election made a pro-peace argument.

Now, of course, they were lying. We should have known they were lying at the time. We, of course, know for a fact they were lying now. But my point is not that we should have believed them. My point is that Trump and Vance were at least smart enough to acknowledge that there is a real anti-war constituency in this country.

If you go back every election since the end of the Cold War, every election since 1992 — with the one exception of 2004 — the more anti-war candidate has won. Now I think that’s just an interesting data point. I’m not going to say that’s why they won, but I’m also saying that what it does show is that there’s a real constituency here for this message. 

I want Democrats to realize this is an opportunity to really lean into this argument. We saw Bernie, when he ran in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, again, as with Obama in 2008, a big part of his argument was that he had also opposed the Iraq War. He had the courage to stand up against the tide, and because he rightly predicted it would be a disaster. Even Biden. Going back to 2020, Biden promised to end the forever wars.

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In the wake of these different things that I mentioned, I do think you’ve got a more energetic, a better organized set of organizations, journalists, analysts — let’s just say that there’s a larger anti-war policy community that’s been built over the past 25 years, especially since the Iraq War. We have more champions in Congress who are saying this message, who believe that American foreign policy needs to change.

But obviously, as we see, this war is an expression, as I said earlier, of how deeply entrenched this pro-war establishment remains. So there’s so much work left to be done.

AL: The point that no matter what their policy ends up being, that anti-war candidates have been largely popular, is a really crucial one. I wonder how can we account for any effect that this shift has had on foreign policy, if anti-war candidates are doing different policy once they actually take office?

MD: I think the key is to have first a candidate who is generally committed to an anti-war position. And then staffing that administration with anti-war officials and making clear that this is the policy we’re going to execute as president. We’ve not really had that.

Like I said, Obama did some really important things, but for various reasons, including the fact that he made Joe Biden his vice president, and he made Hillary Clinton his secretary of state, his foreign policy apparatus in his administration was largely populated by Clinton and Biden folks — let’s just say many of whom did not share Barack Obama’s views about shifting American foreign policy.

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I don’t want to impute that they were going against him. I’m just saying, you’ve got a whole cohort of people who have been raised in their whole professional career with these assumptions about American power and how American power should work and the importance of America being everywhere all the time.

And I think the way you really change that is to have a president who understands we’re not going back. We need a foreign policy for this era that is based around building peace rather than making war, that is focused on foreign policy that benefits American communities and American workers, but also does not export insecurity and poverty onto others in the world. And I think this is a really opportune moment for it.

AL: One of the latest developments here was that J Street came out in support of phasing out U.S. military funding for defensive weapons for Israel. While I think there is a fair criticism to be made here that the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is really one without a difference, the broader point is that this is something that J Street has never done before. This comes on the heels of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the same policy commitment earlier this month. I know you’ve been vocal about this, so please, what are your thoughts?

Matt Duss: I think ending military aid not just for offensive weapons, but for all weapons — taxpayer aid — is absolutely right. Now there’s a debate about will we still sell them weapons to commit these atrocities that we’re all witnessing every day, all the time? Some people are calling for a weapons embargo — a full embargo. I think that makes total sense. 

But I’ve also made the point, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made this statement that, when it comes to sales, we need to enforce our own laws, which prohibit these sales as well. So that’s important to note too because I think it’s a very fair argument. If we’re not going to give them these weapons at taxpayer expense, why do we sell them to continue carrying out these same atrocities?

But I would also note that J Street’s shift is a reflection of a lot of really important work that’s been done by the progressive movement, by the Palestinian rights’ movement, by activists and advocates for a long time. 

Some people have pointed to the announcement or the reports that Benjamin Netanyahu also supports phasing out taxpayer aid to Israel. I think that’s right. The way I read that is that Netanyahu understands that we are in a moment right now. Netanyahu, for all his faults and he has many, does have a pretty savvy read on American politics. And he understands that negotiating a new [Memorandum of Understanding], which provides billions of dollars every year in U.S. taxpayer support for weapons for Israel, is going to be extremely politically contentious. 

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This is not 2015 anymore. It’s even a real question whether this could pass. I think it really couldn’t, but at the very least he understands that a contentious process around aid to Israel would be bad in his view for Israel. He’s right. Zeroing out the aid makes some political sense from his point of view.

But I also think it’s worth noting, and this is a point I made as well, is that no country is going to turn down free money. What I’ve seen some indications of is that they’re going to try and reprogram and rebrand this taxpayer aid into “joint research projects,” which is a way of tucking this money away. It’s still going to support and subsidize the Israeli weapons industry and tech industry. It’s still going to be a way to funnel money to U.S. defense contractors for Israel’s benefit. But it’s going to be rebranded in this different way.

But ultimately the goal is the same to get taxpayer aid to Israel and keep it away from the political process. So I think that’s a really important thing to watch for right now.

AL: Going back to the world stage. I was struck by the fact that in the midst of this war in Iran, where JD Vance has been leading key negotiations, he also took a quick trip to Hungary last week to try to help save Viktor Orbán from losing his elections over the weekend. 

MD: Huge success. 

AL: [laughs] It did not work.

MD: Yeah. Oh, wait. No?

AL: No, it did not work.

MS: Oh, yeah. No, it did not.

AL: [laughs] For our listeners, Orbán lost after 16 years in power, leaving behind him a legacy of eroding democratic institutions and undermining press freedom in his country, a model championed by right-wing movements in Europe and the U.S.

The libertarian think tank Cato Institute said, “Orbán’s Hungary is a cautionary tale of what results from an unrestrained executive with strongly centralized power, crony capitalism, and the systematic dismantling of the rule of law.”

What is your understanding of what, if any, implications this loss has for not only the rise of right-wing authoritarianism around the world, but also for Trump, and the fact that his No. 2 was out there trying to push him over the finish line and it did not work?

Matt Duss: Yeah, no, I think it’s great news. We don’t get a lot of that these days, but it’s really great news that Orbán lost — not that he lost, but that he lost resoundingly. That his opponent, Péter Magyar won, didn’t just win, but has a strong enough presence in the legislature now that they’ll actually be able to make real change. So this is really important. 

So Orbán had been serving for his many terms, as a model of an illiberal democrat — as people have various terms — but someone who had been slowly and steadily and quite aggressively refashioning the institutions of government in Hungary to ensure as much as possible a permanent ruling majority by himself and his party and his interests and his populist right-wing authoritarian allies. Of course many around Trump see this as a very attractive model. Steve Bannon is someone who has been working on these issues for many years and promoting this is the way we do it. 

We see parties in other countries. We see, for example, the AFD in Germany, which is a very right-wing party — fortunately, does not have a majority or anything close to it — but they have been steadily increasing their support in the country. 

I think the fact that Orbán finally failed because of his corruption and his failure to deliver basic democratic things. But Hungarian voters just decided, OK, this guy really is too corrupt. Whether their concerns were about basic economic issues, jobs, corruption or ideology, protection of democracy, at the end of the day, they decided to give a strong majority to Orbán’s opponent.

Now, we shouldn’t imagine that Péter Magyar is some huge progressive. He is not. He was someone who was part of Orbán’s party until relatively recently. He’s just less conservative than Orbán. It does seem that he is more committed to real democracy.

AL: In waging this war on Iran, the U.S. has pit itself even more aggressively against a range of global actors, including Russia, China, and India. In the backdrop, Trump has used his second term to increasingly isolate the U.S., alienating even our allies by imposing tariffs and threatening to leave NATO, the trans-Atlantic military alliance between the U.S. and Europe. Where does all of that leave the U.S. and other major world powers geopolitically right now?

MD: What we’ve seen since Trump took office this time, we saw this a little bit in the first term, but in his second term, we’ve really seen an aggressiveness and a sharpening of the way that the United States is using its power. It’s using the dependence of allies and the rest of the world on the United States as a weapon to pressure them, to get them to do things we want.

I forget where this is from, I should probably know this. The idea of diplomacy is getting other countries to see your interests as their interests. Trump dispensed with that. He’s basically like, if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to tariff you. If you don’t do what I want, I’m going to, I don’t know, maybe I’ll invade you. You just have to wait to find out.

The United States has so many tools by virtue of our multiple partnerships, by virtue of the fact that we play such a major role in the global economic and financial plumbing, so to speak. We can use so many levers and tools to create economic pain for other countries to coerce them.

Now, it shouldn’t be surprising that countries don’t like that. Listen, it’s fine for the United States to state its interest to say, listen, we want to do this, and if other countries want to do a different thing, OK, let’s talk about it and see what we can work out. But Trump has simply decided that the United States is powerful, and as a powerful country, we get to do what we want and force others to do what we want as well.

That’s just how he understands foreign policy and global politics. We see this reflected a bit in his approach to Russia, to China and also to Israel. I don’t think he sees the world as divided up amongst great powers, per se. I think Trump really does have a belief in American dominance.

It is a different form of American dominance that was shared by previous administrations — America as the unipolar power, upholding the rules-based order by virtue of its great might and strength. Donald Trump doesn’t believe in a rules-based order. He doesn’t really believe in rules. He believes that the United States is strong and it gets to do what it wants. And other countries that are strong get to do what they want.

He sees the world in terms of a mafia arrangement, in which the United States is the most powerful mob family, and gets to determine the order of how people behave.

But other powerful mafia families get to do what they want too, whether it’s Putin in Russia, whether it’s China, or in the Middle East. Still the United States remains dominant. But Israel is treated as the U.S. enforcer in the Middle East by virtue of Israel’s military and economic power.

AL: Do you think that Trump’s approach to foreign policy has opened the door for another country to step in as a more reliable partner in some of these relationships, like maybe a China or Russia?

MD: I don’t think any country is able or interested in stepping in to take over. This is one of the concerns I had with some of the Biden administration’s approach. Their approach to the Middle East in many ways seemed like it was designed to box out China from coming in and establishing any kind of influence in the region. My response to that was like, why would China, watching the United States for two and a half decades constantly tripping over itself and bleeding resources and attention and wasting all this energy, why would China want a piece of that? It never made sense to me. I think that’s still true.

China clearly wants influence. It expects to play, and I think it has a right to play a major role in shaping global affairs. There are people who disagree with this. Their view is ultimately, China does want to replace the United States as the global hegemon, but at least in the short term, I don’t see anyone doing that.

But what we do already see is other countries, including longtime allies of the United States, as hedging against the United States. They now see the United States as a predator. They are building and strengthening relationships with as many other countries, including China, as they can because they understand, listen, we need options. We have invested and believed for so long that, whatever disagreements we might have with the United States, ultimately we share some basic principles about how the world should be ordered.

But now it’s clear, and frankly, I think it took them way too long to realize this. But now it’s clear that that’s all wrong. So we need to find ways to protect ourselves. We need to create options for ourselves, alternatives to the United States.

AL: I think this is a really interesting distinction because it puts the previous order where there’s a hegemon at the top and everyone else falls into line on its head and raises the question of — I don’t think it’s a new critique to say, why do we keep asking like whether China or Russia’s going to step into this whatever, to this role that the U.S.  played? And that the global stage and the relationships in foreign policy are just changing as the world advances and as society changes. I think that’s interesting. I will say that Trump is currently scheduled to visit Beijing in May to meet with President Xi Jinping.

MD: This summit has already been delayed once. It may very well be delayed again because of this war. The Chinese government has just recently issued some of its strongest statements yet about this war in response to Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump responded to Iran’s blocking the strait by blocking the strait, I don’t know what that’s all about.

It’s interesting because China is the more reasonable actor here. China right now is the government that is standing up for the rules-based order, standing up for international law. When you look at what Israel and the United States are doing here, they have an argument. And that argument has a lot of appeal to countries around the world. So we’ll see. 

I think many have been surprised, especially, looking at the first Trump administration, which really focused Washington’s attention on China as the competitor for the United States. Some have been surprised, including me at how relatively little he’s focused on China in this second term. But clearly they have been building to this, but the fact that they’ve had to delay this summit once already goes back to the point that Trump just miscalculated with this war.

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I’m sure he imagined he would’ve wrapped this up already and forced Iran to put up a new government that loved the United States and loved Donald Trump, and he could just move on to dealing with China. But now he’s bogged down in precisely the sort of war that he promised he would never get into.

AL: And because you mentioned it. China’s President Xi Jinping on Tuesday made the first public statement about this war. As you said, Matt, China is the rational actor or the more reasonable actor in this, demonstrated by this quote, “Maintaining the authority of international rule of law means not using it when it suits us and abandoning it when it doesn’t.” That was Xi Jinping. 

Before we go, I also just want to add that because of the war and the significant ripple effects it’s having, not just here in the U.S.  but around the world, other issues that are just as important have received less attention in this current news cycle. Like the fact that the Trump administration is continuing to kill civilians in the Pacific and the Caribbean striking what he claims are alleged drug smugglers. These extrajudicial killings now exceed 170. And on Monday Trump threatened to use the “same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at sea” against ships that approached its blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.” 

MD: It’s just staggering. It’s just straight murder. That is what we’re doing. 

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They have never provided any evidence — either in a public or a classified setting — that these people were even carrying drugs, let alone that they posed a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. They have not bothered with any of these steps. Anytime they have tried, they have met in a classified setting with members of Congress, those members have almost always come out and said, they didn’t give us anything. 

In the same way that this Iran war is the most egregious and horrible expression of trends in our foreign policy that have been building for a long time, so are these boat strikes. We’ve been killing people with flying robots in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere for decades now. Now one can argue, OK, those assassinations were done with more of a legal process. I’m not convinced or comforted by that at all. I’m sorry. 

So really what this goes to in my mind is that we still need a very serious reckoning with the global war on terror. We need to bring it to an end. We need to dismantle our security state. 

This is a huge political project. And going back to what I said about this being a moment for a real anti-war movement and anti-war president, I want a president who’s going to commit to doing that. It’s not just because it would be nice to have. This is a core thing for our security and our prosperity and for global security. We need to pull ourselves back from this. 

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We need to hold American officials accountable. Not just for the Trump administration, but for multiple administrations who had a hand in these kinds of policies. If we really want to prepare a U.S. foreign policy that’s fit for this new era.

AL: That’s a good place to leave it. Matt, thank you so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

MD: Glad to do it. Thank you for everything you do at The Intercept. I love it.

AL: And that does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that a temporary ceasefire agreement had been reached between Israel and Lebanon. The 10-day ceasefire, set to begin at 5 p.m. ET, will reportedly see a pause to Israel’s relentless assault on southern Lebanon, which has displaced over 1.2 million people and killed at least 2,000 since early March.

Any news of reduced annihilation by Israeli and U.S. forces in the region is, of course, to be welcomed. Just a week ago, Trump was threatening to wipe out the whole civilization of Iran. In Lebanon, Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure like hospitals and demolished villages and homes with ferocity.

In the Israeli context, however, the very meaning of “ceasefire” has been irreparably degraded. This is the lesson of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Under the conditions of an alleged ceasefire in Gaza since October, Israel has killed over 765 Palestinians in the Strip and injured over 2,000 — while maintaining a ground occupation of at least half the territory.

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Those concerned about Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, too, have little reason to believe a ceasefire will see an end to Israel’s expansionist violence.

None of this is a secret. “Israel has no plans to withdraw its military from southern Lebanon during the announced 10 day ceasefire,” an Israeli security official confirmed to Reuters.

Israeli officials frame unambiguous expansion into Lebanon’s territory as the creation of a security “buffer zone.” The plan to maintain control of southern Lebanon is an open one, with a long history, imbued with renewed fervor by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that, even after the current war ends, Israel intends to maintain control over the territory up to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and that all villages near Israel’s ever-moving border would be destroyed.

“[T]he policy of occupying and annexing south Lebanon up to the Litani River has long held influence among parts of the Israeli government,” wrote Mireille Rebeiz, chair of Middle East Studies at Dickinson College.  She noted that it “dates back to influential Zionist leaders — secular and religious alike — before Israeli independence in 1948.”

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Israel has invaded Lebanon seven times in the last half century. Between 1978 and 2000, Israel maintained an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon — the occupation Hezbollah was formed to fight.

It’s worth stressing, too, that while Israel and the U.S. describe the war as one against Hezbollah, it is being waged against the Lebanese people. Much like it is an unacceptable euphemism to describe Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a war with Hamas.

Lebanese journalist Lylla Younes told “Democracy Now!” that in southern Lebanon, as in Gaza, Israel is carrying out a “scorched-earth campaign,” destroying whole villages, mosques, and cultural sites. Her family’s village in the southern border region was bombed earlier this week.

“What the world should know is that we will return to these villages, and when we do, we’ll return to rubble, and it will be an immense process of rebuilding,” she said. That is, if return is possible at all.

Hezbollah, for its part, will not be fighting through the ceasefire, the group’s representatives had said.

“We will be respecting the ceasefire and we will deal with it cautiously,” said Ibrahim Moussawi, a member of the Lebanese Parliament and a Hezbollah spokesperson. He added that “it should hopefully be a beginning of a course of the Israeli withdrawal from our occupied territories.”

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Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam wrote on X on Thursday that he has “full hope” that the Lebanese civilians displaced from the south will be able to return to their homes.

It is an optimism at direct odds with Israel’s open commitment to annexation — and it is a hollow hope in the face of what we’re seeing in Gaza.

“Israeli forces continue their violent attacks and expand their military control of the Strip,” noted Médecins Sans Frontières in a report last week. “Living conditions of Palestinians remain dire, while Israel continues to deliberately obstruct aid, which is translating into entirely preventable deaths.” The humanitarian medical aid group put it plainly: “This is not a ceasefire.”

This cannot be what “ceasefire” gets to mean.

The post Israel Will Keep Occupying Lebanon Despite Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

The Democratic votes on the pair of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., were not enough to overcome universal opposition from Republicans.

Still, the votes represented a watershed moment in the party’s relationship with Israel and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had continued to enjoy strong support from Democratic leaders, despite outrage from the base over the war on Gaza. Sanders said the votes signaled that party leaders are finally taking note.

“This is where the American people are. The polls are very clear: The overwhelming majority of American people do not want to continue to give weapons to Netanyahu and his horrific wars in the Mideast,” he said. “I think the Democrats have caught on to that. It took a little while, but they caught on to that. But Republicans, I think, are standing in opposition to millions of their own supporters.”

Some of the most notable names to vote in favor of blocking military transfers to Israel on Wednesday are potential 2028 presidential contenders.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego were among the Democrats to vote for both the resolutions.

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One resolution targeted the sale of the bulldozers that have been used to demolish neighborhoods in Gaza. Critics say the heavy equipment could accelerate the destruction of Palestinian property in the West Bank, an Israeli-occupied territory that has come under greater threat of annexation under the country’s far-right government.

The bulldozer resolution drew support from 40 members of the Democratic caucus.

Democratic support for the measures came as Americans are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with Israel in public opinion polls. Hassan El-Tayyab, a policy advocate at the Friends Committee on National Legislation who supported the resolutions, said the votes were a sign that Democrats are starting to take their voters seriously.

“What is happening on the Hill is a lagging indicator of these trends we have seen among Americans,” he said. “These folks are starting to see the writing on the wall, reading these tea leaves, that continually supporting this blank check to Israel is going to cost them electorally.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was among those who voted against it, as did Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.

The other resolution, which failed 36–63, was aimed at blocking the transfer of 1,000-pound bombs, of the type that have been linked to civilian casualties in attacks by Israel on Gaza and Lebanon.

That resolution drew support from fewer Democrats. Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island joined the others in voting against it.

El-Tayyab said the bulldozer vote seemed to be an easier commitment for some Democrats.

“It was directly tied to annexation efforts by Israel in the West Bank that threatened the two-state solution,” he said.

On the other hand, the massive bombs were viewed by some senators as defensive weapons. “We heard some arguments on the Hill that certain members considered the 1,000-pound bombs defensive in nature, as they were a deterrent that helped prevent attacks,” said El-Tayyab.

The argument, he said, held no water.

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The breadth of support among Democratic members for the resolutions surprised even of advocates who have sought to cut off the flow of U.S. arms sales to Israel.

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Sanders has fought a long and, at times, lonely fight across administrations to block arms sales to Israel. The first resolution he sponsored, while Democrat Joe Biden was president, drew only minority support within the Democratic caucus.

As the war on Gaza dragged on, however, Democrats’ opinions on Israel soured. The prior high-water mark for one of Sanders’s resolutions was in July 2025, when 27 of the 47-member Senate Democratic caucus, which includes two independents, voted to block the sale of assault rifles to the Israeli police.

If there was any doubt that 2028 contenders are listening, Kelly, the Arizona senator, dispelled it by introducing Sanders’s resolutions on the Senate floor. A longtime supporter of Israel whose political star has risen in the face of personal attacks from President Donald Trump, Kelly said he would always support the country’s right to exist but could not support the arms transfers.

“Our support for our allies must always be about what makes us stronger and safer,” he said. “And we can look at what is happening in the region right now and understand that this is not business as usual. And it is not making us safer. The United States and Israel are fighting a war against Iran without a clear strategy or goal.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in a joint statement with fellow Democratic California Sen. Alex Padilla, tied the arms sales to the ongoing war with Iran.

“We oppose actions that further deepen the United States in an unauthorized conflict in Iran — one with no clear strategy, no legal authority, and no defined end,” he said.

Senate Republicans blasted the resolutions, accusing Democrats of trying to undermine the war effort. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said the resolutions amounted to a helping hand to Iran from Democrats.

“I come to the floor and tell Iran: No one is coming to help you. Not China, not Russia, not North Korea, not Venezuela, not Cuba. Except for the 47 people that sit over here,” Risch said, referring to the Democratic caucus. “They are trying to help you, Iran. We are not going to let that happen. We are not going to abandon our ally, Israel. We are not going to abandon this fight that is taking place. We are going to win this fight, and we have already won it, to a very large extent.”

The arms debate came hours after Senate Democrats voted nearly unanimously, except for Fetterman, in favor of a war powers resolution meant to block Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was the sole Republican to vote in favor of the resolution.

The final 47–52 tally disappointed advocates who had hoped to draw more GOP support. Still, they remain hopeful that more Republicans will come onboard when Democrats force a vote on other pending Iran war resolutions.

The post The Dam Breaks: Democratic Senators Overwhelmingly Reject Arms Sales to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Dusten Mullen, a sergeant with the Phoenix Police Department, has been suspended with pay pending an internal review of his conduct at a protest at Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona, on January 30, according to Phoenix Police Chief Matthew Giordano.

“As law enforcement professionals, we are held to higher standards of conduct — both in and out of uniform,” Giordano said. “When we fall short, we must be accountable, and we will not tolerate actions which undermine the trust the community has placed in the Department.”

Fox 10 Phoenix, the outlet to first identify Mullen, reported that Mullen told Chandler Police Department officers on the scene that he was there in the hopes of getting a rise out of the kids that would then allow the local cops to cuff them.

“My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all and I’ll keep it on film,” Mullen said, according to a police report obtained by the local TV news site. “I also have other people filming from a distance.”

The protest at Hamilton High School was one of dozens of student-led walkouts that took place across the greater Phoenix area that day, coming just over a week after the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis. At Hamilton High, several hundred students walked out and rallied along a thoroughfare, chanting and holding signs decrying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mullen, who in 2025 drew a salary of $336,518, is suspended with pay and was required to surrender his badge and gun pending the outcome of the investigation, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Steve Serbalik, an attorney representing Mullen, said his client was within his rights as a member of the public to voice his disagreement with the students.

“Placing Sgt. Mullen on administrative leave and issuing a media advisory that suggests misconduct based solely on his lawful, off-duty expressive activity appears to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected speech and risks violating both federal and state constitutional guarantees,” Serbalik wrote in a letter sent Monday to Giordano and shared with The Intercept. “I respectfully urge you to immediately reconsider and lift the administrative leave, withdraw or correct the media advisory, and ensure that any ongoing review fully respects Sgt. Mullen’s constitutional rights.”

Gun at Teenagers’ Protest

Mullen’s appearance at the protest sent a wave of fear through some attendees. Megan Craghead, whose 18-year-old son attends Hamilton High School, showed up that day because her 13-year-old daughter wanted to take part in the protest. Craghead told The Intercept it was a peaceful, upbeat scene, and most passersby honked in support of the rally.

That changed suddenly when a pair of girls came running toward her yelling about a man with a gun.

“He was just walking up and down the sidewalk, talking kind of smugly and yelling at the kids,” Craghead recalled. “It felt like something that could easily escalate into something that’s going to be traumatic for all of these teenagers.”

As soon as she heard about an armed man on the scene, Craghead sent her daughter away with Craghead’s sister.

“We had no idea why he was there, he’s wearing a mask, and even if he did not plan to use his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen, right?” Craghead said. “We had all just witnessed the shooting of Alex Pretti, where he was at a protest with a gun and he ended up getting shot and killed. And so even if this armed person did not touch his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen.”

In a TikTok video from the scene, Mullen was seen in a T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and the words “Trump 2024” and “We took the country back.” He concealed his face with a neck gaiter and wore a handgun, along with several extra magazines on his hip.

Surrounded by young people jeering at him, he told a Chandler Police Department that he had been assaulted as he appeared to record the scene on a cellphone.

“Nobody assaulted you,” one person told Mullen.

“Grown-ass man, out here with a gun crying about a little kid,” another person said.

In the wake of the incident, the Chandler Police Department told reporters that a girl was arrested for throwing a water bottle at Mullen, but video of the incident published by Fox 10 appears to show just water — no bottle — hitting him. The charges against the girl were later dropped by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

A spokesperson for the Chandler Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Department With a History

Chandler, a city of about 275,000 people, lies in an area known as the East Valley, and its deep-purple electorate is not particularly known for progressive activism. Amid the deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and heightened border tensions in Arizona, however, many students could see a direct impact on their own lives or those of their friends, according to Craghead.

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“They’re seeing a lot of their friends that are immigrants or have immigrant families feeling really scared right now,” she said. “There’s a lot of things happening in politics that are not directly affecting the lives of teenagers, but this is one of those things that they can see has a direct impact on their own lives.”

Bill Moore, a defense attorney in Phoenix, said he was pleased to see Mullen placed on administrative leave, citing the department’s history of frequently failing to hold its personnel accountable — part of a pattern of misconduct and impunity severe enough to trigger a civil-rights probe by the Justice Department in 2024.

“The ‘blue line’ thing is still very much a thing here,” Moore said, referring to an unwritten code where police look out for one another instead of pursuing complaints about misconduct. “That they took this action tells me that their internal investigation must be fairly damning.”

The revelation that the armed man who showed up to the protest in January was actually a cop sent ripples of anger through the community, according to Brandy Reese, a co-leader of the local Indivisible chapter for Chandler and the neighboring city of Gilbert.

“I find it especially upsetting that he went there armed,” said Reese, who was observing the protest that day from the sidelines. “Why did he feel he needed to do that? I think the whole situation is unfortunate and upsetting.”

Craghead, the mother of the protest attendees, said her opinion of what should happen to Mullen has gone back and forth in the days since she learned that a police sergeant was the masked, armed man who she had seen trying to pick a fight with the kids at the rally. After an initial reaction of wanting his immediate termination, she wondered if he wasn’t within his First and Second Amendment rights to show up, off-duty and armed.

The more she’s thought about it, she said, the more she’s felt anger at his conduct.

“We have a duty to hold our public safety officers to a higher standard. If this was a regular person that had come to counter-protest and they happened to bring their gun, that would be one thing,” she said. “The issue is that he went there with the purpose of agitating children to get them to break the law so that they could be arrested, or worse. So now I’m back to thinking he should be fired.”

The post Armed Off-Duty Cop Tried to Incite Violence at a High School Anti-ICE Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

Within hours after the San Francisco Chronicle dropped a story Friday that accused Swalwell of sexually assaulting a former staffer, over a dozen Democrats had pulled their endorsements of the then-frontrunner for governor of California. CNN followed that evening with a story labeling the former staffer’s accusations as rape and revealing that three additional women were accusing Swalwell of sexual misconduct. He suspended his campaign for governor Sunday, and on Monday, he announced his resignation from Congress. He was out Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET.

The outcry made sense, in part, because of the severity of the allegations: The ex-staffer said Swalwell left her vaginally bruised and bleeding; another woman alleged Tuesday that he had drugged her in order to rape her. But the fact that Swalwell, who has denied the allegations, did not remain in Congress while under investigation suggests that American politicians are sensitive to concerns over sexual abuse and misconduct — particularly as the midterms approach against the backdrop of the Epstein files, and Democrats position themselves as defenders of victims as they head into November.

“It’s hypocrisy if they don’t” speak out, said Nina Smith, a Democratic communications strategist and former senior adviser to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams. 

Smith said that the advocacy from Epstein’s survivors, as well as the people who’ve been speaking out online about Swalwell, helped force lawmakers to take a stand on this issue.

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“It has created this watershed moment on the Democrats’ part to address this issue quickly,” she told The Intercept. “Both parties are recognizing that accountability is something that is at the forefront of a lot of voters’ minds.”

In a February poll from Reuters/Ipsos, 69 percent of respondents said the statement that the Epstein files “show that powerful people in the U.S are rarely held accountable for their actions” represented their views “very well” or “extremely well.”

Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., said that Democrats have to demonstrate “accountability” even when allegations come up against one of their own.

“Our job is to center the people who were harmed, to take allegations seriously, and to make sure there are real systems for justice,” Lee wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “The work and bravery of Epstein’s survivors helped further expose just how deeply these systems are failing us — all while protecting perpetrators with money, connections, or status. That legacy demands more from all of us right now.”

Still, it’s too soon for Democratic leadership “to be patting themselves on the back,” about Swalwell’s swift rebuke, said Michael Ceraso, a Democratic communications strategist who worked on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. He pointed to the level of detail and corroboration in the stories that CNN and the SF Chronicle published, arguing the careful reporting “made it fail-safe for political leaders to do the right thing.” 

And that doesn’t excuse the people who had heard the rumors and continued to support Swalwell until the allegations were in a newspaper, Ceraso added. “I would call bullshit on people” within his proximity who are “claiming they didn’t know this,” he said.

There’s been heavy attention on Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who was long known to be a close friend of Swalwell’s. Gallego claimed Tuesday that Swalwell had “lied to” him — but admitted to hearing that his close friend and colleague was “flirty.”

“I definitely look at the world a different way now,” Gallego told reporters. “I certainly am going to make sure that I’m going to take, you know, personal steps and office steps to make sure that we don’t even get close to a gray line.” 

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown also alluded to other members of Congress being aware of Swalwell’s actions. “I’m not surprised frankly, because there have been rumors after rumors after rumors, his colleague in Washington pretty much said that. That’s what Adam Schiff said, that’s what Nancy Pelosi said,” Brown told ABC 7. 

The Democrats, Lee added, cannot ask voters to trust them on this issue if they fail to hold their members accountable when they engage in abusive behaviors.

“Accountability has to mean something, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it is one of your own, and even when power is involved,” she wrote. “No one and no party should ask for the public’s trust if it is unwilling to hold itself to the same standard.”

The Intercept has not independently verified the allegations against Swalwell. In a statement posted Tuesday, Sara Azari, a criminal defense attorney representing Swalwell, wrote that the former congressman “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him,” calling the accusations “a ruthless and shameless attempt to smear Congressman Swalwell.”

The Intercept reached out to Swalwell’s communications staff for comment; a reporter for The Hill wrote Tuesday that the relevant staff members no longer work for him. Azari did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Smith, who spoke out in 2018 about being sexually harassed and assaulted while working in the Maryland state legislature, said she believes that these abuses will continue to happen wherever disparities in power exist. But she was heartened to see how quickly Democrats called out Swalwell, which she said means that survivors have moved the needle on this issue.

“Survivors have been the most powerful piece of holding elected officials and officials accountable. … They are the ones who have continued to fight in a way that has made all of this possible,” said Smith. “Ten years ago, we really just talked about this behind closed doors.”

The post Swift Swalwell Fallout Suggests the Democrats Have Finally Learned From Epstein appeared first on The Intercept.

While uniting against President Donald Trump on many fronts, Democrats are split on what to do over the domestic spying power — and the party’s leadership isn’t giving much guidance, according to a congressional notice obtained by The Intercept.

In the notice laying out leadership’s advice on bills up for a vote this week, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark simply explained that the relevant top committee leaders were split. House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes supports a clean reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, while Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin wants further reforms.

Clark gave straight up-or-down recommendations on many other pieces of legislation, but not the spying law.

With leadership silent, progressive activists are trying to step into the void to pressure members. They say Trump’s disregard for the rule of law in his second term means that representatives should only vote for the law with reforms. Government officials have engaged a pattern of abuses at the Justice Department.

Centrists on two key committees, on the other hand, say that modest changes enacted in 2024 went far enough and Congress should give Trump the so-called “clean” reauthorization he has requested.

“They, I don’t think, have a stance on this,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s security and surveillance project, said of the Democratic leadership. “I would hope the gutting of oversight systems and what we have seen at DOJ and politicization there would push them against that — but we don’t know yet.”

With Republicans themselves divided, the margin within the Democratic caucus could prove crucial.

Rather than advising members how to vote, however, Democratic leaders is stepping aside. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has said that he personally supports reforms but has not signaled that he will pressure his caucus. (Jeffries’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The debate concerns Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which last came up for renewal in April 2024.

The law allows intelligence agencies to hoover up ostensibly “foreign” communications, such as text messages and emails, and then search them for information about Americans. Intelligence agencies conduct thousands of these “backdoor” searches every year.

Safeguards are supposed to ensure that the National Security Agency and FBI are only searching for information on genuine national security threats. Past reviews of the program have regularly found violations, however, including instances where spy agencies searched for information on Black Lives Matter activists and even members of Congress.

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During the last reauthorization, Congress enacted a handful of reforms meant to put tighter rules into place for when intelligence agencies can search through the collected data, and to ensure that there are more after-the-fact audits. Since then, a review by an inspector general found a steep decrease in the number of apparent violations.

Supporters of a “clean” reauthorization say those reforms went far enough. Opponents say they still want Congress to force intelligence agents to go to a court to ask for a warrant.

Grassroots Opposition?

Progressive groups are trying to exert grassroots pressure. They targeted Himes, the centrist supporter of the “clean” renewal, at a town hall in his district last month, asking him to withdraw his support for the spying law.

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Himes, however, has not budged, saying that he is confident that there have been no abuses under Trump. For his part, Himes is lobbying his fellow members: He convinced House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., to support a clean reauthorization.

On the other side of the debate, Raskin has pointed out that Trump has gutted key oversight bodies, including the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Advocates have also pointed more recently to a secret court opinion, reported by the New York Times, which found significant problems with how the government is tracking its searches of information about Americans.

Prior FISA renewal fights have rarely drawn the kind of in-person, grassroots activism on display at the Himes town hall. Advocates said that what has changed this time around are growing concerns about how spy agencies can use artificial intelligence to search through reams of information on foreigners and Americans.

“These models give a lot of leverage to analysts working inside the national security establishment,” Dave Kasten, the head of policy at the AI safety nonprofit Palisade Research, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday, “which certainly can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the uses to which they are put.”

Further fueling those concerns is the fact that federal intelligence agencies increasingly rely on information obtained through commercial data brokers, which the government contends does not require a warrant even when it pertains to U.S. citizens.

Aside from committee leaders, the FISA reauthorization fight has also split some of the powerful Democratic caucuses.

The Congressional Black Caucus is poised to support a “clean” reauthorization, The American Prospect reported Monday. The caucus did not respond to a request for comment.

In contrast, the chairs of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus released a letter on Tuesday calling for “meaningful” reforms.

In addition to a warrant requirement for “backdoor” searches, progressives are also pushing to limit when and how intelligence agencies can use information obtained from commercial data brokers.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has pointed to the pending April 20 expiration of Section 702 as the reason that Congress needs to urgently renew the law. Progressives, though, pointed out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court effectively provided the spy agencies with a yearlong extension of their spying powers, regardless of what Congress does.

In a rare cross-chamber letter on Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged representatives to wait before reauthorizing the program.

“[T]here are multiple issues related to Section 702 that the American people and many Members of Congress have been left in the dark about,” he said, “including a FISA Court opinion from last month that found major compliance problems. These matters should be declassified and openly debated before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

The post Dem Leaders Aren’t Even Bothering to Rally Caucus Against Trump Domestic Spying Powers appeared first on The Intercept.

On April 11, the U.S. conducted attacks on two boats in the Pacific Ocean, killing two people in the first strike and leaving one shipwrecked. The search for that survivor has been abandoned and that person is presumed dead. Three people were killed in the second strike that day. These attacks were followed by another strike in the Eastern Pacific on April 13 that killed two more people.

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As part of Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has now destroyed 51 vessels and killed 171 civilians. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called “bilateral kinetic actions” along the Colombia–Ecuador border. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced last month.

“There’s a danger that these lawless killings just become background noise,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept in the wake of the 50th boat strike. “The U.S. Congress remains the institution best situated to bring these to halt — if not now, then at least after the midterms. And members of Congress and 2028 hopefuls should be vowing accountability for those who participated in unlawful killings.”

Finucane and other experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

After blowing up one of the boats on Saturday, U.S. Southern Command sent a message to the Coast Guard alerting them to “a person in distress in the Pacific Ocean,” Coast Guard spokesperson Kenneth Wiese told The Intercept.

The Coast Guard “immediately commenced search efforts,” calling on ships in the area to divert to search for the survivor of the U.S. attack. The next day, a French-flagged cargo ship, MV Marius, diverted to the scene but “completed its search with negative results and departed the area due to operational and fuel constraints,” according to the Coast Guard. On Monday, a U.S.-flagged research vessel, RV Sikuliaq, “completed two search patterns provided by the Coast Guard with negative results.” The same day, at 10:43 Pacific time, the Coast Guard suspended its efforts after having found “no signs of survivors or debris.”

Most boat strike survivors have been purposefully killed or left to drown by the United States. Two survivors, for example, clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked on September 2, 2025, for roughly 45 minutes. Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC. He then ordered a follow-up attack, first reported by The Intercept in September, that killed the shipwrecked men.

Search efforts for survivors have seldom resulted in rescues. After a U.S boat strike on December 30, a Coast Guard plane did not head toward the site of the attack for almost two days, reporting from Airwars and The Intercept revealed. A total of 11 civilians died following that attack— including eight who jumped overboard.

The Coast Guard atypically rescued the survivor of a March 19 attack that killed two civilians. The Costa Rican press recently identified the deceased as Ecuadoran citizens Pedro Ramón Holguín, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Solórzano, 34. The injured man was identified as José David Torres Hurtado, 21, a Colombian national. He reportedly remains hospitalized in the burn unit at San Juan de Dios Hospital, “where, according to medical reports, his condition is critical but stable,” said Costa Rican authorities.

The Intercept reported on Monday that the U.S. is waging a pressure campaign against the leading pan-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into the illegal boat strike campaign. After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the U.S. campaign of extrajudicial killings.

The post The U.S. Is Still Routinely Killing Civilians in Boats appeared first on The Intercept.