La Tilde quietly began development early this year and appears to still be a work in progress, pitching itself as a modern media brand for Latin American audiences with articles published in both Spanish and English. Its name references the accent mark emphasizing vowels in Spanish; “news with an accent” is the site’s catchphrase.

“The tilde is not an ornament. It is a millennial arrow designed to provide direction, save space, and turn up the volume,” a narrator states in a promotional video for the site bearing telltale signs it was AI-generated, such as a newspaper whose sloppily rendered headline reads “SO THEE HOUTIERRER TO TO GHAHOBATEE,” followed by imagery of two medieval monks. “That is why we place the accent on what matters. From the regional pulse and your well-being, to the big ideas and the global context.”

So far, La Tilde’s coverage amounts to an unusual blend of personal finance tips (“Why instant payments matter so much for your business and your wallet”) and articles extolling the value of U.S. military operations in Latin America (“Operation Absolute Resolve: The mission that captured Nicolás Maduro and set a new standard for precision and coordination”).

Its article on the U.S. abduction of the Venezuelan president praises the mission in Trumpian prose, calling it “The Perfect Operation – Coordination, Timing and Precision at an Unprecedented Scale,” and “a military operation of coordination and accuracy never seen before.” Citing “information obtained exclusively by La Tilde,” it describes the operation’s tactical brilliance, flawless execution, and incredibly precise coordination of military assets in the air and on the ground.

If this reads like Pentagon a press release, that’s because it is. An explanation for its glowing coverage of the U.S. military can be found after clicking a small link tucked at the bottom of the site. “La Tilde is a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government,” its About page reads.

This easily missed disclosure language is identical to two other Pentagon-sponsored propaganda sites recently revealed by The Intercept.

Targeting audiences, foreign or domestic, with state-run information campaigns remains a politically sensitive topic, and a token disclosure that La Tilde is a U.S.-funded platform allows the American government to say it technically informed readers about the actual source of the information.

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According to a defense official familiar with U.S. information operations, La Tilde is operated as a military messaging platform for U.S. Special Operations Command South, or SOCSOUTH, which executes special forces missions throughout South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. When asked about SOCSOUTH’s role behind La Tilde, spokesperson Trevor Wild replied with the text of the site’s About page noting that it’s a government operation, but declined to comment further.

U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, which is broadly responsible for coordinating military assets in the countries La Tilde targets, denied involvement. SOUTHCOM “does not fund, operate, or have any official association with La Tilde,” according to spokesperson Steven McLoud, who did not respond to further questions.

Unlike most news websites, La Tilde carries no bylines, masthead, or mention of actual staff of any kind. Although the site claims it employs “dozens of freelance reporters and content creators,” at least some of the site appears to have been generated by a large language model. Running articles through Pangram, an AI-text detection service, produced multiple hits for both English and Spanish writing either partially or entirely written by machines (though such tools are known to deliver false positives).

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber-policy adviser, told The Intercept he was struck by site’s shoddiness, describing it as “AI all the way down.”

Despite the low quality of AI-generated articles, this approach could help the Pentagon spin up propaganda efforts faster than in the past. “If you can generate new content and even news fronts at the flip of a switch, your influence operations can shift target and focus much more quickly,” Brooking said. “That seems to be the thinking behind recent AI-powered Russian and Chinese networks, for instance.”

An analysis of subdomains hosted on LaTilde.co reveals the site plans to launch bespoke versions for readers in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, and Peru.

Some pro-U.S. content is clearly tailored to these national audiences. An article filed to the site’s “In Good Hands” section highlights the benefits of U.S.–Panamanian joint jungle warfare training exercises, regaling readers with how “temperatures and heart rates climb at the Cristóbal Colón Naval Air Base as Panamanian security forces push forward through the ‘Green Mile,’ the demanding final test of the Combined Jungle Operations Course.” Such joint initiatives are, according to La Tilde, a bulwark against China’s efforts to engage in similar joint exercises in Latin America. Rather than engage with “Beijing’s predatory practices,” the article suggests countries should follow Panama’s lead and “seek training opportunities closer to home or with longstanding partners such as the United States.”

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The article makes no mention of the controversy surrounding PANAMAX, a joint military exercise between SOUTHCOM and the Panamanian forces that has sparked increased protest on the grounds it violates national sovereignty. Permanent U.S. military installations in Panama were shuttered in 1999 as part of a 1977 treaty between the two countries; Panamanian opposition parties decried the reestablishment of an American military presence under the guise of joint exercises as a “camouflaged invasion.” Participants in the 2025 PANAMAX exercise La Tilde is pushing include the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, a Pentagon training institute whose graduates included thousands of Latin American death squad gunmen and dictator Manuel Noriega.

The importance of military and intelligence-sharing compacts with the U.S. is a recurring theme. “Far from weakening sovereignty, this kind of cooperation can strengthen it,” one article says.

Other stories from La Tilde argue the American side of Latin American controversies, similarly downplaying issues of national sovereignty. One piece describes how the U.S. abduction of Maduro “has reawakened a long-contained hope among millions of Venezuelans inside and outside the country.” Another alleges Ecuador is a nexus of the international cocaine trade, echoing claims the Trump administration has used to expand Operation Southern Spear, SOUTHCOM’s Caribbean airstrike campaign that has killed more than 200 civilians to date.

It’s unclear who exactly is operating the site on a day-to-day basis. A similar network of military propaganda pages, descendants of an Obama-era information warfare program called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, appears to be administered by military contractor General Dynamics Information Technology. Renée DiResta, who co-authored a 2022 report on online propaganda efforts backed by U.S. Central Command, told The Intercept that the TRWI successor websites share a common Google Ads identifier code owned by General Dynamics, according to a recent comprehensive analysis of the network she conducted. La Tilde also runs a legal disclosure with identical language as those sites.

General Dynamics did not respond to multiple requests for comment about La Tilde.

Halcyon Group International, another information warfare contractor that operates Diálogo Américas, a similar pseudo-news site backed by the Pentagon, told The Intercept it was not involved with La Tilde.

Design of the La Tilde website was subcontracted to Antpack, a Colombian digital marketing firm. Multiple files hosted on the site created by the AI image-generation service Midjourney contain the word “Antpack” in their name. The Intercept signed up for a user account on La Tilde, part of planned functionality that will let readers comment and save articles for later. Once registered, The Intercept was able to view comments left on a non-public version of the site used by its developers, who posted under names corresponding to LinkedIn profiles of Antpack employees. Antpack did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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U.S. Special Operations has a long record of leading the American internet propaganda efforts, ranging from high-tech efforts to less-sophisticated projects like phony online newsrooms. SOCOM has since 2018 operated the Joint Military Information Support Operations Web Operations Center, which coordinates information warfare and online psychological operations.

The Intercept reported in 2023 that SOCOM was working on acquiring state-of-the-art “deepfake” video fabrication technologies to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” according to procurement documents. La Tilde appears to be using low-effort AI tools rather than anything cutting-edge. Art accompanying its stories often includes portion of the prompt used to quickly generate the image in the file name, and shows mixed results, such as a rendering of the White House portico missing several of its columns or a diploma with garbled text. Photographs illustrating pro-SOUTHCOM messaging, however, are drawn from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, an official Pentagon media library.

“The intent is probably to fill these sites with generic material, build an audience base, and then slip in more pieces of explicit propaganda, like that rather fulsome recounting of the U.S. attack on Venezuela,” Brooking said. “This is how you build these sorts of networks. But the content is lazy, the AI is bad, and the required disclosures make the whole thing a farce.”

The post The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

The Garden Grove, Calif., GKN Aerospace plant, whose 7,000-gallon chemical tank ruptured last week and threatened to explode, has brought in more than $13 million since 2017 in subcontracts with military manufacturing giant Lockheed Martin, according to an analysis of federal contract data conducted by the Palestinian Youth Movement and independently verified by The Intercept. Further analysis of F-35 production for Israel conducted in 2025 by Ploughshares, a Canadian independent research institute, found that Lockheed doles out subcontracts to hundreds of companies across more than a dozen countries to help build the jets. Among them is GKN Aerospace Transparency Inc., the GKN subsidiary based in Garden Grove, which raked in more than $255 million from subcontracts with Lockheed Martin. 

“While GKN chases contracts and profits, our community pays the price with school closures and disrupted livelihoods,” Sofia Awaida, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement and Garden Grove resident who was evacuated due to the leak, said at a press conference in the city on Tuesday. “And our people abroad pay the price when the same weapon systems produced here are used to massacre people in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran and all across the region.”

Garden Grove is a predominantly working-class and immigrant city in Orange County, just outside of Los Angeles. The evacuation order, which has since been lifted, disproportionately affected residents who are lower income.

GKN Aerospace describes its Garden Grove plant as “the leading provider” of the acrylic bubble that encases the F-35 fighter jet cockpit, known as a transparency canopy. Methyl methacrylate, the highly flammable chemical that began to leak from the facility last week, is a key ingredient in the protective bubbles. 

“Due to the nature of the F-35’s global supply chain, it is likely that the F-35 components produced at the Garden Grove facility are incorporated into aircraft exported to Israel,” said John Ramming Chappell, advocacy and legal advisor at Center for Civilians in Conflict. “This is the same type of aircraft that the Israeli military has used to kill civilians and violate international humanitarian law.”

Since American military pilots landed Israel’s first two F-35 stealth fighter jets at the Nevatim airbase in 2016 — an occasion celebrated with a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayahu, Obama administration officials, and Lockheed Martin executives — the Israeli military has amassed a fleet of 48 F-35 jets, most of them paid for with funding from the U.S. State Department. Earlier this year, amid its genocide in Gaza and ongoing wars in Iran and Lebanon, the Israeli government announced its plans to double its F-35 fleet to 100. The Israeli military’s use of the jets has been tied to repeated allegations of war crimes, including the targeting of civilians in Gaza. Hundreds of human rights and civil society organizations have called on governments to halt their roles in F-35 production for Israel.

On May 19, several days before the leak began, Garden Grove city officials issued a permit for a 34,000-square-foot expansion of GKN Aerospace’s facility. On its website, the company cited increasing demand for F-35 jets as the reason for the expansion, which would enable the company to double its production of aircraft canopies. 

On Tuesday, the Palestinian Youth Movement led a coalition of groups in launching a campaign seeking the closure of GKN Aerospace’s Garden Grove facility. Alongside VietRise, the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, and OC Justice for Palestine, they’re also pushing for a citywide moratorium on military manufacturing contracts and expansion permits and the creation of a half-mile buffer zone between military manufacturers and residential areas in the city. Donald Torres, a city council member from neighboring Stanton, Calif., who was also displaced by the chemical leak, joined the calls for a closure and moratorium.

The coalition presented its demands on Tuesday evening during a packed Garden Grove City Council meeting. Speakers criticized the city for turning a blind eye to GKN’s string of concerning incidents. In recent years, the company agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle charges of environmental violations such as a failure to maintain records of emissions and operating equipment without a permit. Earlier, the company had been penalized for not properly inspecting its machinery and was fined for labor safety violations.

“This crisis was not unpredictable,” said Layal Bata, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. “It is the result of a company and an industry that prioritizes war profiteering over people.” 

Garden Grove and GKN Aerospace did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The Palestinian Youth Movement has campaigns across the U.S. and in Europe to halt the use of civilian and private infrastructure for the weapons supply chain that fuels Israel’s military as it commits genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and upholds its apartheid rule in the West Bank. Another campaign in California calls for an end to military cargo shipments — also F-35 fighter jet components — from the Port of Oakland to Israel. Arms embargo organizers had already been tracking GKN’s Garden Grove facility before the chemical leak due to its role in F-35 production.

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GKN Garden Grove has also reaped more than $4.5 million in additional subcontracts, signed in early 2023, with Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation for production of CH-53k military helicopters, according to federal contracts cited in the Palestinian Youth Movement report. Israel has ordered a dozen of the new Sikorsky military helicopters.

Last summer, anti-genocide organizers in the Netherlands marched to a GKN Aerospace office where protesters accused the company of violating a 2023 court order that had banned the export of F-35 parts from the country to Israel. Other nations with campaigns to halt their roles in producing F-35 components include the United Kingdom and Australia.

At the council meeting Tuesday evening, Dwight Hua, an organizer with VietRise who lives less than a mile from GKN Garden Grove and was also displaced by the leak, joined calls to close the facility. He, like many other residents, had no idea of the plant’s existence before the leak.    

“Why has a company like GKN been quietly existing in our neighborhoods?” he said. “Now the mask is off … this is not a mistake, this is a deliberate result of an industry and company that treats our communities as disposable.” 

Correction: May 28, 2026, 10:48 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the first name of a Palestinian Youth Movement organizer; she is Sofia, not Sarah. It has been clarified to note that Donald Torres joined calls to close the facility but is not a member of PYM’s coalition.

The post Company Behind California Chemical Leak Was Building F-35 Parts Amid Rush of Orders From U.S. and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

It was eight days after Donald Trump took office for a second time, and Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s National Security Council, walked into the Oval Office accompanied by a member of his own counterterrorism team and his boss, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz. The group approached the Resolute desk and laid an intelligence “place mat” with information about a man in Somalia in front of the president.

“Sir, ISIS leader, killed Americans, planning to kill more Americans,” is how Gorka recalled the summary they provided to the president. “We informed him that the Biden administration had been watching him for about a year and a half.” According to Gorka, Trump replied: “What do you mean, we’ve been watching him? Kill him!’”

Gorka said Trump ticked off the “go box” on the operation orders with one of his signature presidential Sharpie markers. Moments later, outside the Oval Office, Gorka recalled, a call was made to Fort Bragg and “elsewhere” to arrange the attack. Less than 30 hours later, Gorka and his colleague were in the White House Situation Room watching the target on massive television screens. “It was Tom Clancy, but it was real,” Gorka recalled recently. “Go time was 8:45 in the morning.” Two minutes before the scheduled attack, there was still no sign of Waltz. A minute later, he walked in, and 60 seconds after, Gorka’s quest was complete.

“Eight forty-five the platform launches what it launches and this individual just disappears from the earth,” Gorka recalled recently in a version of the account told during a softball interview with Dean Cain, a MAGA influencer best known for his role in the 1990s TV series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.” Gorka told the story again and again on Breitbart’s Alex Marlow Show, and to other pro-administration outlets.

In the aftermath of that first strike, Trump took to social media to boast about the attack. “This morning I ordered precision Military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia,” he wrote. “The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that ‘WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!’” In honor of this line — which he said has become the motto of his directorate and is arguably the mantra of the second Trump administration — Gorka and his team wear custom lanyards that say: WWFY & WWKY. Gorka calls it the “most coveted lanyard in the U.S. government.”

Since that strike, the Trump administration has taken the murderous motto to heart, proclaiming versions of it in avenues from Pentagon social media posts to Trump’s foreword to Gorka’s recently released “Counterterrorism Strategy” — and conducting a global killing spree. “Since our first operation on day 11 of this administration, a scant 15 months ago, we have killed 860 jihadis across the globe,” Gorka told Newsmax, noting elsewhere that this figure does not include those killed in the wars in Iran, Venezuela, or Yemen. (Gorka also claimed, two days later, that the number killed in lethal strikes was actually 815. The White House did not reply to a request for clarification.)

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While the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the war with Iran, and even the so-called boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean have been front page news, Trump has supercharged America’s longest ongoing forever war — the conflict in Somalia — with very little notice. But as Trump’s attacks in Somalia have skyrocketed, so has terrorist violence there, according to the Pentagon. War Department statistics show that attacks and fatalities in Somalia have reached epic proportions, even though the War Department seemed to claim that ISIS-Somalia has been annihilated and Trump claims ISIS was wiped out years ago.

“Somalia saw the biggest surge in reported fatalities across all regions,” according to an April report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “The 8,813 deaths linked to al Shabaab and the Islamic State (ISIS) over the past year represent a 93-percent increase from the previous year.” This record throws into broad relief the failure of Gorka’s and the president’s primary counterterrorism strategy and the inability of the administration to kill its way to victory.

Loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect in Somalia, where strikes tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s first four years in the White House, a more than 350 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that for attacks in some countries, a requirement for “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations” was reportedly enforced only if the civilians were women and children. A lower standard was applied to adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. 

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. military conducted 51 strikes in Somalia over four years, according to D.C.-based think tank New America. Last year alone, Trump oversaw 126 attacks, exceeding the previous one-year record of 66 under Trump in 2019. He has already conducted 64 attacks in Somalia this year, and a total of at least 190 there so far in his second term — including an attack that one top U.S. commander called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.” Trump and Gorka are on pace to eclipse the 219 strikes of his first term in just a year and a half in office.

Gorka frames the Biden administration’s failure to conduct wholesale strikes on supposed “jihadis” as a soul-crushing experience for national security professionals from the Intelligence Community and special operations forces. “The morale was so bad,” he recently told Cain. “I’ve got a targeter on my team, an amazing lady, who are in the bowels of an intelligence agency and their job is … for 10 hours a day with headphones watching a screen tracking jihadis.… And for four years, they’re basically not allowed to kill people.” He added: “You say, ‘Hey, we’ve got the coordinates. Can we do something?’ And the White House says, ‘No.’”

Wes Bryant, who called in thousands of strikes against ISIS as a special operations joint terminal attack controller, scoffed at Gorka’s assessment that the Biden administration was negligent in its war on ISIS and capriciously allowing terrorists to operate freely.

“Often, we gain more by watching senior operatives for extended periods because we can then piece together more of an entirety of an operation or organization. Otherwise, all it becomes is whack-a-mole,” Bryant told The Intercept. “Targeting and intelligence collections operations can be likened to an undercover operation against a criminal organization in law enforcement — where we are watching and monitoring and gathering evidence and characterizing every single associate and activity in order to build the big picture of the organization and take every piece of it down versus just one guy that we found.”

Bryant was skeptical of Gorka and his motives. “I’m not sure if he doesn’t know better and just wants to deliver the superfluous talking point to his uneducated far right audience that ‘Trump kills more bad guys’ and is therefore keeping America safer.”

The Intercept sought to interview Gorka through Anna Kelly, the special assistant to the president and White House principal deputy press secretary. She did not reply to that request or to questions about Gorka’s claims.

Trump, who campaigned on ending foreign wars during his 2024 presidential run and pledged to measure success “by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” has conducted military interventions in Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and CIA operations in Mexico.

While claiming to be “the peace president,” Trump — with Gorka as his point man — has actually been attempting to kill his way to victory. “We are bringing down the hammers of hell on our enemies,” Gorka told Newsmax. But official pronouncements from the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and even the White House demonstrate that Trump’s lethal strikes have failed. 

ISIS was, for example, one of the top threats in Trump’s 2018 counterterrorism strategy. He battled the group during his first term and eventually declared victory. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Despite this, the first lethal strike of Trump’s second term — in February 2025 — was on “the Senior ISIS Attack Planner … in Somalia,” according to Trump himself. Three months later, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Trump was back to claiming ISIS had been wiped out. “I defeated ISIS in three weeks,” he said.

This claim has, however, been undermined by the nation’s Africa Command on a regular basis in the year since, amid scores of pronouncements of attacks “targeting ISIS-Somalia.” This month, AFRICOM commander Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson even admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria remain a threat to the homeland today” and that “ISIS-West Africa and ISIS-Sahel [are] becoming increasingly more collaborative.” The next day, Trump undercut his own claims by announcing on Truth Social that U.S. forces had “eliminate[d] the most active terrorist in the world … Abu-Bilal al-Minuki,” a top figure within ISIS–West Africa whom Trump claimed was “second in command of ISIS globally.”

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Despite Gorka’s consistent fawning praise of Trump — he told Cain his boss is the “most incredible commander-in-chief we’ve had of the modern age” — even Gorka’s recently unveiled “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” rebutted Trump’s assertions. That document lists ISIS as one of the “top five Islamist terror groups that have the intent and capabilities to execute External Operations against the United States,” and it spotlighted yet another branch of the group, ISIS-Khorasan, which is active in South Asia. The National Counterterrorism Center also lists a host of additional Islamic State threats: ISIS’s network in Bangladesh, ISIS–Central Africa, ISIS–East Asia, ISIS–Libya, ISIS–Mozambique, and ISIS–Sinai among them.

Trump’s ongoing campaign against the supposedly defeated ISIS and spiking violence in Somalia offers clear evidence of the administration’s failures, even as Gorka touts success to outlets that fail to push back on his claims.

“The find, fix, finish model is peerless,” Gorka said of lethal strikes on the New York Post podcast “Pod Force One.” He boasted that the U.S. is “crushing it when it comes to jihadis.” 

The post Trump’s War on ISIS Is Failing, No Matter How Gorka Spins It appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase in casualties came as Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a written statement that the war had exposed the vulnerability of U.S. military bases across the Middle East and as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened to respond to any U.S. strikes.

“The hands of time do not turn backward, and the nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases,” Khamenei said in his statement. “America, in addition to no longer having a safe place for aggression and military bases in the region, is moving further away from its former status day by day.”

The U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, as President Donald Trump — who previously threatened to commit genocide in that country — has oscillated between claims that a peace agreement is imminent and talk of renewed hostilities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that talks to end the war were continuing but that a peace agreement could take “a few days.” 

Reporting by The Intercept found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official 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.

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On April 8, the day the ceasefire deal was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over the last month, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparity in its casualty count.

Since then, the casualty count has crept upward, with the number of dead increasing by one and the number of wounded topping out at 409 on Tuesday, yielding a combined total of 423 dead and wounded U.S. personnel.

On Thursday, CENTCOM told The Intercept, “13 service members were killed in action and one service member passed due to a non-combat related medical emergency during Operation Epic Fury” — the military’s name for the campaign.

For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. Most DCAS webpages still claim 13 U.S. deaths but one put the tally at 14 as of Tuesday.

The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing 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. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on whether Davius was the recently referenced non-combat fatality.

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 64 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. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Va., this month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

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.

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. CENTCOM did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for clarification concerning the casualty figures.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran War Rise as Military Strikes Begin Again appeared first on The Intercept.

The 192-page report, authored by a Democratic strategist and first published by CNN on Thursday morning, goes in-depth on several factors found to be detrimental to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in its ultimate loss to Donald Trump. Despite the contention within the party over then-President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, however, the war doesn’t get a single mention.

Also missing from the document are the words “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Arab American,” and “Muslim.”

A spokesperson for the DNC declined to comment on the omission of anything having to do with Gaza, instead pointing The Intercept to a Substack written by party chair Ken Martin in which he acknowledged what the committee found to be several shortcomings by the report’s author, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera.

One policymaker who spoke with Rivera in July 2025 for the qualitative, fact-finding portion of the autopsy research told The Intercept that he was surprised when the report emerged with no mention of Gaza or the resulting conflicts within the Democratic coalition. He said that his group had discussed the impact of Gaza policy with Rivera at length. 

“Paul was very clear with us in our conversation that they had done the quantitative review,” said the politico, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue, “and that the data clearly showed that Gaza had hurt Biden and Harris.”

In recent weeks, pressure mounted to release the report in full — a move Martin said he was reluctant to take due to major flaws in the report, which he dubbed “not ready for primetime.”

“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” Martin wrote Thursday in a post on the DNC’s Substack. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.”

Martin also fails to mention Gaza, Israel, or any other terms related to the genocide in his post.

The policymaker said he had found Rivera to be thorough and professional, and he believes Martin is shifting the blame.

“My strong suspicion is that Paul was being thrown under the bus,” he said. “It’s very convenient to a lot of people that a lot seems to be missing, and it would be very convenient if the reason it’s missing is ‘oh, Paul’s really bad at his job.’”

Others defended Martin’s conduct. James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute and a candidate for vice-chair of the DNC in 2024, praised Martin’s leadership but called his pledge to release the report an “unforced error” that was being seized upon by a consultant class hostile to his on focus rebuilding state party infrastructure.

“We know what the mistakes were,” Zogby said. “The question now is how do we not make them again, and we didn’t need to make a fuss over a report that wasn’t going to tell us anything we didn’t know.”

The Intercept attempted to reach Rivera via The Capacity Shop, a firm that lists him as an advisor, but the group did not respond to a request for comment.

“Nothing about this surprises me,” said Linda Sarsour, an organizer from Brooklyn who was active in organizing a campaign to pressure Harris to take a stance against the war. “If they don’t change course quickly to center Palestine, foreign policy and recognize the influence of Arab/Palestinian/Muslim/young/progressive American voters, they will likely have to write another autopsy report post 2028 presidential elections.”

In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza became a key point of contention between the Democratic establishment, on one side, and progressive Democrats, including Arab Americans, on the other. The progressives argued that the failure to take a stance against unflinching support for the genocide was tamping down excitement among the party’s base, especially young voters.

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A group of delegates that dubbed themselves the “Uncommitted Movement” fought to get push the party left on Gaza. The activists put forward a slate of suggested speakers at the party convention in Chicago, including Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American state representative in Georgia, but none of the speakers were accepted.

Romman, who is currently running for Georgia’s state Senate, said she was deeply disappointed to see the lack of mention of Gaza in the report.

While the Gaza war was a key issue for many Arab American and Muslim voters, particularly in a swing state like Michigan, Romman acknowledged that most voters nationwide and in her home state of Georgia were not listing Gaza as their top concern. Still, she said, the issue emerged as something of a smell test for the integrity of Democratic politicians hoping to sell their message to an electorate beset by financial insecurity and healthcare woes.

“For most voters, if you look at what was their top issue, it’s the economy — of course,” Romman said. “But if you want politicians that are going to put you first and implement the kind of economic issues that you need to have a better life, those are going to be the politicians that are not beholden to special interests. And so Gaza became a way to look for that.”

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has sought to thoroughly distance itself from the report, going so far as to release an annotated version highlighting missing data and unsubstantiated claims.

The document contains a disclaimer at the top of every page: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

Update: May 21, 2026, 2:35 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with comments from a policymaker who spoke with Paul Rivera for the DNC autopsy report.

The post DNC Autopsy of 2024 Loss Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel at all appeared first on The Intercept.

The Colorado Information Analysis Center cautioned in a March bulletin that “violent extremists” might perceive “White Supremacy Ideology in ICE Recruitment Materials, Leading to a Potentially Increased Threat Environment.”

The bulletin from an agency tasked with preventing terrorism advised law enforcement offices throughout the United States that these posts could create a “permissive environment to engage in vigilante action and/or violence against individuals perceived to be immigrants.”

These DHS posts, the analysts warned, could convince “white supremacist violent extremists to attempt to join or infiltrate ICE and engage in bias motivated violence, endangering the public, other ICE personnel, and local law enforcement.”

The bulletin circulated following months of inflammatory social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security intended to drive ICE recruitment and promote the Trump administration’s agenda of violent mass deportation.

Colorado officials singled out tweets mimicking memes popular in right-wing online subcultures, referencing the rhetoric, lyrics and tropes commonly used by violent white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Third Reich. The social media campaign drew widespread criticism, with groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center alleging that DHS “is using white nationalist imagery and language to recruit new employees and arrest immigrants.” DHS has defended its online tactics as “bold and effective.”

The bulletin originated from a Colorado fusion center, part of a network of information clearinghouses for local, state and federal police that spread across the U.S. following 9/11. Originally conceived as a counter-terror measure, fusion centers have evolved into a sprawling surveillance apparatus tracking everything from drugs and shoplifting to student protests despite little evidence of their efficacy as a terror-fighting tool.

Reports from fusion centers are widely circulated among law enforcement agencies nationwide. The bulletin from the Colorado fusion center is notable in that it is the first indication that state officials in the U.S. counter-terrorism establishment are concerned about the messaging of DHS under Trump.

“The fact that you have the fusion center putting out a warning for law enforcement offices based on DHS messaging is surprising, even if it seems appropriate,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, who spent eight years as an ICE official both under Obama and Biden and during Trump’s first administration.

She described the evidence presented in the bulletin as “rather damning.”

ICE and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.

Do you have information about fusion centers? Contact the authors on Signal at sledge.41 and sambiddle.99.

The posts highlighted in the report were crafted under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired in March and replaced by Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin. Noem was preceded in her departure by combative DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, who oversaw the agency’s social media push.

The bulletin delved deep into DHS and social media posts, which the report noted have been eagerly reposted by White supremacists from Austria to the U.S.

A January 9 DHS post on X, for instance, included an image of a lone man on horseback with the caption, “We’ll have our home again.” It might look like a piece of romanticized frontier nostalgia to many, but some would recognize the phrase “is a lyric from a song popular within and adopted by white nationalist organizations,” the memo reads. “The lyrics feature lines about reclaiming ‘our home’ by ‘blood or sweat,’ language often used in white supremacist rhetoric.” The memo noted that “Members of the white nationalist group, Patriot Front, have been recorded chanting ‘By God, we’ll have our home,’ the song’s refrain,” and that “Lyrics from the song opened the manifesto of a white supremacist who killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida in 2023.”

After The Intercept reported on DHS’ use of the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots, lawmakers urged Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to stop running the ad.

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DHS’ quotation of a song known to be popular among neo-Nazis is part of a pattern, the report says, of “repeated use of visual or rhetorical elements that overlap with symbols historically referenced within extremist subcultures.” The memo highlights the frequent use of the term “remigration” by the Department of Homeland Security, a term the Colorado law enforcement analysts explained “dates back to 1930s Germany,” where it was used to advocate for forced expulsion of Jews.

It points out Homeland Security’s use of the “Moon Man” meme, a character from a 1980s McDonald’s advertising campaign that has become popular among online racists for its resemblance to a Ku Klux Klansman. The bulletin highlighted one social media user who replied to a DHS post using the “Moon Man” character, stating “it’s TND time” — an abbreviation for the phrase “total n***** death,” which has spread among white supremacists. This user attached his own version of the meme showing the character posing before a swastika flag with a rifle.

“I appreciate them putting it together and so clearly laying out the dangers of using this white nationalist imagery,” Trickler-McNulty said.

The report includes a disclaimer noting that it doesn’t intend “to imply ideological alignment between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and white supremacist ideology.” But the analysts show how the social posts were quickly gaining traction among white supremacists, who were encouraging each other to sign up as immigration agents.

“During the timeframe that these posts from DHS have circulated online,” the intelligence bulletin warns, “white supremacist violent extremist groups have been simultaneously advocating for their followers to join ICE and/or musing about the potential for ICE to turn into a white supremacist militia.”

In a “neo-Nazi accelerationist social media channel,” for instance, internet users talked about infiltrating ICE and using its authority to form a “breakaway militia,” auguring a nationwide race war. Users on a neo-Nazi message board, the bulletin says, “discussed the advantages of joining ICE, viewing it as an opportunity for ‘accelerating conflict in the US’ and ‘beating up race traitors.’ One user claimed that someone in the network had already been a captain at an ICE-contracted detention facility.”

A spokesperson for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which oversees the fusion center, did not answer when asked whether the agency had received a response from DHS about its bulletin. The fusion center spreads information to “private sector, local, tribal, and federal organizations,” spokesperson Micki Trost said in an email statement. “Bulletins help us share information with this network to meet our mission.”

The bulletin also argues that DHS’ posts could provoke violence against law enforcement from those who oppose white supremacists. Antifascist activists might “misinterpret DHS messaging and perceive all ICE personnel, and by extension law enforcement and government officials, as supportive of or complicit in white supremacy, therefore creating perceived justification for violence targeting those individuals,” the report says.

Spencer Reynolds, a former DHS official who advised the department on intelligence collection, domestic terrorism and other national security issues, rejected this warning that law enforcement might find itself at risk. “The intelligence report’s conclusion that DHS’s rhetoric may push both ‘anti-fascists’ and white supremacists to violence presents a false equivalency that ignores historical and present-day facts,” Reynolds, now senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told The Intercept.

“From this country’s founding to today’s crisis, Black people and other people of color have always been victims of white supremacist violence. It is deeply flawed of the bulletin to suggest that ‘both sides’ are likely to resort to violence due to the administration’s inflammatory rhetoric,” he said. “In reality, white supremacy, not the people who adamantly oppose it, has fomented mass violence and oppression throughout our country’s existence.”

The post ICE Recruitment Tweets Are So Racist That Cops Feared They Could Incite Neo-Nazi Violence appeared first on The Intercept.

Thursday’s scathing analysis by the Department of War’s inspector general came on the same day that the top U.S. commander overseeing the war in Iran dismissed reports of civilian casualties and said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools. The inspector general specifically notes that the military stopped funding a database that tracks civilian harm that could be used for such verification.

While damning, the former chief of harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence nonetheless called the new report a “whitewash” that downplays the evisceration of the Center and the entire enterprise devoted to reducing civilian casualties.

The report focuses on the implementation of the Pentagon’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR‑AP, which was mandated by the department to take full effect by the end of 2025. The inspector general found serious deficiencies and a chronic failure to meet timelines for 11 objectives consisting of 133 incomplete “implementing actions” by the end of last year. The inspector general found that the Department of War “did not fully implement any of the CHMR-AP objectives by the end of FY 2025.”

“This is a crisis of the Trump Administration’s own making: They slashed the staffing and funding for civilian harm mitigation, and now they can’t adequately follow the law and implement the CHMR-AP, leaving civilians and our own military personnel at risk,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, told The Intercept. “The Inspector General’s report is clear about what that means: wasted munitions, failed strikes, damaged alliances, and propaganda wins for our adversaries. The Trump Administration needs to reverse course immediately so we can save lives and protect our national security.”

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“We Will Find You and We Will Kill You”

The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of CHMR efforts. More than a year ago, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties.

The 43-page inspector general report details continuing efforts to hamstring protections for civilians in war zones, noting that “DoW Components ended funding for the CHMR data management platform, stopped holding Steering Committee meetings, lost or reassigned many of the personnel dedicated to CHMR, and lost personnel and leadership” at the Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and employing tools for preventing civilian casualties.

Wes Bryant, who until last year served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Center of Excellence, is one of those “lost personnel,” having been forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on efforts to dismantle CHMR efforts.

“It is completely whitewashed of the truth,” Bryant said of the report. “It reads as if the IG is completely deliberately ignoring the fact that the center and the entire CHMR enterprise was targeted for immediate shutdown, that 90 percent of billets were either terminated or forced out, and that what exists of the Center of Excellence since March 2025 is a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority and is completely locked out of visibility and oversight on all investigations and operations.”

The watchdog’s evaluation noted that Hegseth’s War Department “may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy” — which is required under federal law. The investigation also found that eliminating CHMR funding and personnel also “decreases readiness and increases risk to DoW personnel, mission success, and military objectives,” according to officials at the Joint Staff, which is headed by Gen. Dan Caine, and at geographic combatant commands, which oversee U.S. operations in various corners of the world.

While couched in stilted language, the report details dangers to civilians due to cuts to CHMR efforts. It makes note of deficiencies in “personnel and capabilities” to protect civilians under Pentagon regulations that are mandated by federal law. And it mentions a lack of necessary “tools” at the Center of Excellence, including a “data management platform” meant to track civilian harm incidents. The report notes that “according to Joint Staff and [combatant command] officials, eliminating CHMR funding and personnel makes mitigating or responding to civilian harm more difficult.” Such officials also noted that “eliminating CHMR funding and personnel reduces battle space awareness and increases the risk of civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.”

“This report makes it clear that the DoD is not complying with the law, nor its own policies, both of which were built on a bipartisan basis upon years of hard-learned lessons from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “As Congress develops the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they must ensure that it not only provides the DoD with the resources it needs to comply with law and policy but also conduct rigorous oversight to keep the DoD accountable for implementing these critical programs.”

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Reporting by The Intercept found a combatant command that has gone from a military backwater to one engaged in regular kinetic activity — U.S. Southern Command — is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports. After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January , the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, which oversees military operations in Latin America. The organization learned that SOUTHCOM has no mechanism for submitting these reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Center of Excellence.

The report specifically mentions the Center’s “support for organizations such as the U.S. Southern Command,” despite the fact that the Center “lost large numbers of personnel and leaders,” does not have “the tools designed to meet its statutory roles and duties,” and that the Army had developed plans, early last year, to euthanize it.

The report notes that an official from an unnamed combatant command “stated that they largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025.” Another said that they did not “want to spend resources on actions or make future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed.”

As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world — from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East — during Trump’s second term. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.

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The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school. More than 150 civilians were killed, most of them children.

Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, according to a report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society last month; this includes 763 schools. The Red Crescent also reported that more than 334 medical, health, pharmaceutical, and emergency centers have been damaged, including 18 of its own centers. Twenty-four health workers have been killed and 116 injured, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

“U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing late last month.

On Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper — the senior officer overseeing U.S. combat operations in Iran — told senators that the strike on the school in Minab was the only civilian casualty incident he knew of after more than 13,600 U.S. strikes.

Airwars has chronicled more than 300 civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.

“How do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals?” asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., citing a New York Times report. “There’s no way we can corroborate that,” Cooper replied.

The inspector general’s report specifically says that a database used for tracking civilian harm — which could be used in verification efforts — was abandoned. The “Army stopped funding the data management platform,” it notes.

Cooper said that preventing civilian harm is “a matter that I’m passionate about.”

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Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force last year, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.

Late last month, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.

While the U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, Trump has previously threatened to commit genocide there. “We’ll go back and finish them off. And, by the way, more than that,” he said on Friday.

Bryant believes that efforts by congressional Democrats and press coverage of civilian casualties — and the ensuing pressure on Hegseth — has kept the lights on at what remains of the Center of Excellence and held CHMR on life support. “Given all the controversy and heat that Hegseth and the administration have since received for civilian casualties, it has behooved them to be able to technically say that some semblance of the program still exists,” he told The Intercept. “However, I can tell you with 100 percent confidence that it exists at this point entirely on paper and as a legal CYA,” or cover your ass.

The post Internal Pentagon Report Reveals Hegseth Is Willfully Putting Civilians in Danger appeared first on The Intercept.

The brainchild of National Security Council official Sebastian Gorka, the “Counterterrorism Strategy” weaves together Trump’s war on the wider world — which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Iran to Nigeria and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea — with the administration’s war on dissent at home, which has targeted immigrants, legal observers, activists, protesters, and the press.

Under the guise of protecting America, it takes aim at wide swaths of Americans, putting targets on the backs of the most vulnerable.

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The “Counterterrorism Strategy” formalizes a drastic shift in focus for counterterror efforts. Now, according to the Trump administration, the nation is battling three major types of terror groups: “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” the long-standing focus of America’s counter-terror efforts; “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs”; and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”

This last group is defined in the document as people the administration deems to be “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” This puts antifa — a fictional foe that is actually a collection of ideas and not an organization — on par with actual terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, and drug-trafficking syndicates such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. 

The memo makes no mention of right-wing extremist groups, despite rafts of research, from the U.S. government and others, demonstrating that such groups have been responsible for the majority of violent attacks in America in recent years.

Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration published the first official National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The 2003 document purported to set “the course for winning the War on Terror,” with a focus on “destroying the larger al-Qaida network,” by defining the threat and laying out big-picture goals and objectives. New strategies have been issued numerous times, over multiple presidencies, since.

Explaining the 2026 strategy last week, Gorka leaned into the lies which permeate the Trump administration’s document. “Very simply, it’s common-sense counterterrorism based on reality not fake threats,” he explained. “In the president’s foreword and in chapter one, we make it very clear we will not permit the use of the most powerful national security tools in the world including the counterterrorism enterprise to be used as political weapons.”

Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., had a very different interpretation, calling the strategy “a plan on how they’re going to attack people on the left,” noting that antifascists are “not a real terrorism threat in the United States.” She added that the effort is “completely corrupt.”

To contextualize the U.S. government’s radical new approach to counterterrorism, The Intercept analyzed the document, highlighting revelatory passages that show how the Trump administration is bringing the war on terror home.

“We Will Kill You”

History ultimately judges presidents by their priorities, both deeds and words.

While calling out slavery as the cause of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln still focused his second inaugural address on reconciliation over retribution. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations,” he pronounced.

On the eve of World War II, as the threat of fascism loomed over the world, President Franklin D. Roosevelt readied a nation for war, not with ferocious rhetoric but by envisioning a new world founded upon the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress on January 6, 1941. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

These presidents were deeply flawed. Both committed grave injustices, were responsible for immense harm, and neither lived up to their most laudable words. But those words survived for a reason and are now part of the American canon.

For President Donald Trump, the “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” is as good as any collection of words in defining him. Nothing better illustrates his vision of America’s role in the world than Trump’s capstone quote. He concludes the foreword with words that ring true from the streets of Minneapolis, where federal agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti during anti-ICE resistance; to a school building in Minab, Iran, where more than 100 children were killed in a U.S. airstrike; to the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, where close to 200 civilians have been killed in attacks on alleged drug boats; and should follow him forever: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

Treating Americans as Terrorists

Under U.S. law, the government can designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” a process that typically entails a formal declaration by the secretary of state at the direction of the president, allowing the Treasury Department to impose financial penalties and the Justice Department to prosecute people for providing “material support” to such groups. Congress has not passed any law creating a domestic terrorism designation, nor is there a standalone crime of “domestic terrorism.” 

This has not stopped Trump from aiming the counterterror apparatus at domestic targets in his second term. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which Trump issued last September, vaguely defined enemies are not only typified by “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also advocacy of opinions clearly protected by the First Amendment including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

In this document, the Trump administration makes clear it considers any American who it believes has “adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life” to be a terror threat.

“The Trump administration has repurposed the ‘terrorism’ framing and applied it to new boogeymen, like alleged narcos as well as a caricature of their domestic political opposition,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept.

White-Washing Right-Wing Terror

What’s notable here isn’t just the “major terror groups” included — it’s the type of groups the Trump administration omitted. 

“Absurdly, the document incorrectly labels drug cartels, ‘legacy Islamist terrorists,’ and violent left-wing extremists as the top counterterrorism threats — despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. 

In fact, a 2025 analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, over the past decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing militants. Islamist jihadist-inspired attacks resulted in 82 deaths over the same span.

“Radical Ideologies”

The new “Counterterrorism Strategy” signals a jarring shift in the priorities of the national security apparatus. Instead of having the security state primarily focus on foreign actors and those domestic threats responsible for the most violence in recent years — like white supremacists and violent militias — the president is effectively siccing them on anyone who dares to disagree with him or his supporters. 

“This is a very severe degradation of freedom of thought [and] freedom of speech in the country, and it should be raising alarm bells,” said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute.

“It does look like a very straight blueprint drawn from white evangelical Protestant Christian circles,” said Jones, the author of the forthcoming book “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”“What they call radical ideology is essentially anything that differs from that conservative, white evangelical Protestant worldview.”

The Narcoterrorist Boogeymen

By labeling drug-trafficking networks as terrorists, Trump is operating in a long tradition of using the rhetoric of war to refer to an issue that is rooted in public health. The terrorism framing is simply the logical next step in the decadeslong war on drugs that is, more often than not, used as a cudgel by U.S. policymakers to keep Latin American countries in line, said Alexander Aviña, a historian at Arizona State University.

“They’re using drug war counterterrorism as a cover,” Aviña said. “They’re effectively maintaining control over the region through a bunch of proxy right-wing governments, but it’s being framed as counterterrorism, as an anti-drugs operation. The innovation here is that they’re applying war on terror legislation and laws to drug trafficking organizations”

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The problem with labeling drug networks as “terrorists,” however, is that the vast majority of drug traffickers differ from organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group in that they have no real membership, and they operate for profit, not to achieve an ideological objective.

Legacy Islamist Terrorists

Despite Trump’s boasts of his prowess at fighting terrorism, both Al Qaeda and ISIS were the top threats in his 2018 counterterrorism strategy. They are called out specifically in the new document as well.

In fact, Gorka’s inclusion of ISIS directly contradicts longtime claims by Trump. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Last year, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he said: “I defeated ISIS in three weeks.”

“Politically Motivated” Killings of Christians

The idea that Christians, who make up two-thirds of the U.S. population, are under siege is belied by the data. Hate crimes motivated by anti-Christian bias are far rarer than attacks motivated by racism or xenophobia in the United States, and other religious groups are far more likely to report being the victim of a religiously motivated hate crime than Christians. An analysis of 2023 FBI hate crime data found that less than 10 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes were believed to be motivated by anti-Christian bias. 

“There’s really no evidence-based reason why a report focused on the domestic front would disproportionately feature violence against Christians. There’s just no evidence that that is the most pressing problem facing us in the United States today,” said PRRI’s Jones.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, right-wing influencers and media outlets rapidly spread misinformation about the shooter’s gender identity and supposed “pro-transgender” ideology based on unverified claims about the bullet casings used in the shooting. Trans people are far more likely to be victims of gun violence than perpetrators. In mass shootings carried out between 1966 and 2025, less than 1 percent of the shooters were transgender, according to the Violence Prevention Project. The overwhelming majority of shooters were cisgender men. 

“In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, news outlets and people with large platforms online raced to share unconfirmed reports that wrongfully tied the LGBTQ+ community to the shooter,” Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Brandon Wolf told The Washington Blade. “Jumping to those conclusions was reckless, irresponsible, and led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right wing influencers, and a wave of terror for the community that is already living scared.”

“Neutralization” of Adversaries

While Trump has frequently threatened his political opponents in public, experts in extremism told The Intercept that “this kind of language” in a national security document should raise alarm bells. It’s one thing when the president rants about “radical gender ideology” at a rally, said Jones. “But when it gets put into a national presidential security memo, when it gets put into a report that’s led by a task force at the U.S. Department of Justice, and when it’s put into a counterterrorism document … these are laying the legal framework for prosecution.” 

This language of “neutralization” in this new strategy harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program, which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among other domestic groups and individuals and, according to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.

A 1967 FBI memo notes that purpose of this type of “counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” African American groups and leaders. Efforts included “sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages,” “encouraging gang warfare,” “falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers,” and other means to “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the committee. Their investigation found that civil rights leader “Martin Luther King, Jr. was, for instance, the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him” and that “the man in charge of the FBI’s ‘war’ against Dr. King” said they used the same methods employed against Soviet agents.

An Antifa Obsession

Antifa, short for antifascist, is a decentralized, leftist ideology, a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism. Over the last decade, however, Republicans have used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists — as if it were an organization with members and a command structure. They have increasingly blamed antifa for terrorist violence.

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In 2019, during his first term, Trump floated the idea of declaring antifa “a major Organization of Terror,” likening it to the group MS-13, an international criminal gang that originated in the U.S. and that the administration added to the foreign terrorist organization list last year. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” Trump tweeted in 2020, during protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said, however, that antifa was “not a group or an organization” but a “movement or an ideology.” Trump lashed out, calling antifa “well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the … FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source.” After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, Trump blamed “antifa people” for inciting violence. 

Finally, last September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” He followed it by issuing NSPM-7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism … movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” 

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On his press tour touting the new strategy, Gorka said “left-wing violent radicals like antifa and the anarchists” were the “most ascendant” terror group and — without evidence — claimed they were “the people who killed our friend Charlie Kirk.” He said these leftists are “people who think that if you don’t agree with them politically, they get to kill you.”

Locking Up Trump’s Enemies

The new document detours to discuss the wrongful detention of Americans abroad. Ironically, the Trump administration has unlawfully detained thousands of people residing in the United States, including those with legal status, targeting everyone from perceived political dissidents to racial and ethnic minorities. 

Last year, the Trump administration detained Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed, as revealed by legal documents unsealed as a result of litigation from The Intercept and other parties. 
Also in 2025, the administration sent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran national with an order preventing his deportation to his country of origin, to CECOT, a prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses. He has since been released to his home in Maryland, but the administration has continued to target him, including with criminal prosecution.

The Monroe Doctrine

Issued by President James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine is a foundational principle of U.S. foreign policy opposing any foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere — except by Washington. It’s seen by American nationalists and by modern “America First” Trump ideologues as marking a “golden age” of U.S. power in the region, according to historian Greg Grandin.

“Going back to World War I and World War II, America First nationalists have liked the Monroe Doctrine because they saw it as an alternative to liberal internationalism,” Grandin said. “They were never isolationists, even though that word is often applied to them, because they’ve long claimed the right to intervene and project power in the Western Hemisphere.”

Now, Trump is using the spectre of terror to justify extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers at sea and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Boat Strikes and Bogus Stats

The U.S. military has conducted 58 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September 2025, killing more than 190 civilians. 

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 assertion that this campaign has resulted “in a more than 90% decrease in maritime drug smuggling” into the U.S. slightly tempers similarly outlandish and false figures from Trump, who regularly claims that “drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent.” Experts say these claims are meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told The Intercept.

Even the Pentagon’s own figures refute Trump’s numbers. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” said Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The “Trump Corollary”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an attempt by the administration to enshrine a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, with the term also appearing in the administration’s national security strategy document in December. But it’s not entirely clear what, precisely, this corollary means, said Aviña, the historian.

“It’s supposed to be an addition to the Monroe Doctrine, but we don’t get a very precise definition of what that is,” said Aviña. “It harkens back to the Roosevelt Corollary, but Teddy Roosevelt was very clear about what his addition was: international police power.” Trump makes no claim to a new power. “So Trump is working in that tradition, but in a weird and imprecise way.”

Loosened Rules and Civilian Deaths

The loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones spiked. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a more than 329 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. Trump is already on the cusp of eclipsing those numbers in less than a year and half. Since taking office last year, Trump has overseen at least 190 attacks in Somalia.

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

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Using Europe to Promote Bigotry

The document employs its section on Europe to shamelessly promote racism, white nationalism, and Christian supremacy employing a stilted worldview that ignores the U.S. role in the immigration it rails against.

“Trump officials are clearly weaponizing anti-Muslim bigotry in their campaign to heap pressure on Europe. They are baselessly insinuating that European policies that welcomed migrants — who largely fled their home countries due to the impact of U.S. backed wars and regime changes — created an incubator for terrorism,” Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told The Intercept. “At the same time, however, the White House continues to implement the exact kind of violent, interventionist policies that drove mass migration and generated extremism in the first place.”

“There is this kind of praising of Western culture and values, the denigration of ‘alien cultures,’” said Jones. “What’s behind those is really a sense of European superiority, and that gets translated into the U.S. in racial terms. So it really is a white Christian worldview here that’s being projected and protected.”

A Bid to “Protect Christians”

Experts on white supremacy and Christian nationalism told The Intercept that the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about a Christian genocide in Africa in order to stoke white Christian nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments at home. “In Nigeria, it’s genocide against Christians, and in South Africa, it’s the supposed genocide against these white Afrikaners,” Christine Reyna, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told The Intercept. “And so in absence of an actual genocide in the United States against either of these two groups, you can keep that narrative of that existential fear of extermination and genocide and oppression that is alive and well within a certain subset of white Americans.”

In addition to using the conflicts in Africa to spread propaganda domestically, experts on Christian nationalism tell The Intercept that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth believes in waging war to achieve Christian supremacy abroad, without respect to international laws or norms. “Hegseth believes that he is carrying out a spiritual and actual war to vanquish a Christian nation’s enemies and protect and promote a Christian nation,” Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist covering the Christian right, said on The Intercept Briefing podcast. “For Hegseth, biblical law is the only law he feels obligated to obey. The law of war, international law governing military conflicts, and human rights and civilian rights in war — he believes don’t apply to him.”

Trump’s Holy War in Nigeria

While Christians have been the victims of violence in Nigeria, they have not been the primary target, and experts overwhelmingly reject the idea that a Christian genocide is occurring in that country. Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent global monitor of conflict and protest data, found that of the 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria that occurred as of November of last year; 50 of those attacks targeted Christians because of their religion. According to experts, the majority of the violence has focused on land disputes. 

Trump’s Christmas Day attack was another in a long string of failed and futile U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa documented by The Intercept over the last decade This includes blowback from U.S. operations and failed secret wars, civilians killed in drone strikes, coups by U.S. trained officers, increases in the reach of terror groups, surging fatalities from militant violence, human rights abuses by allies, massacres of civilians by partner forces, and a catalogue of other fiascos.

Doubling Down on Failures in Africa

The document casts Trump’s strategy as a departure from the failed forever war interventions of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But Sarah Harrison — who served as an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, where she oversaw the Africa portfolio, and as counsel to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs — sees little difference. “Setting aside the bombast about protecting Christians, the fundamentals of Trump’s Africa CT policy isn’t that distinct from his predecessors: a light military footprint to facilitate intel sharing and drone strikes with an emphasis on supporting the partner nation. These policies fail because they ignore the drivers of conflict and refuse to acknowledge the need for a political solution,” she told The Intercept.

The U.S. government’s own statistics bear out this record of futility and failure. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted 23 deaths from terrorist violence in 2002 and 2003, as U.S. counterterrorism efforts began to ramp up on the continent in the wake of 9/11. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase since the early 2000s, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.

“Reality-Based” Counterterrorism

The document ends as it began, with unserious bombast that reads like little more than AI slop fashioned from administration talking points. Evoking the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which called for a restoration of “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity,” the Trump administration appears to be making up for its own insecurities with claims that the president has restored America’s “civilizational confidence” through a baptism of fire. In reality, the document projects a heady blend of weakness and anxiety and espouses a counterterrorism strategy akin to a 12-year-old boy’s vision of foreign policy: boasts about killing one’s way to victory.

In a post-release media tour where he spoke with MAGA outlets and administration sycophants, Gorka expressed amazement at how little negative reporting there was about the new counterterrorism strategy. “Even the left, they’re so on their heels. I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy,” said Gorka. “Fifty articles were written. … Only one of them … was even slightly negative.” (The Intercept’s invite must have been lost in the mail.) He continued: “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us — which is delicious.” His interviewer, Dean Cain, best known for playing second fiddle in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” responded, “That’s wonderful.” 

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“If the U.S. government counterterrorism enterprise hadn’t jumped the shark before, it certainly has now,” said Finucane. “The administration has repurposed the terrorism framing and applied it not only to alleged narcos but also perceived domestic political opponents — as we saw with the way the administration baselessly smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti as ‘terrorists’ after gunning them down. The whole situation would be much funnier if the Trump administration wasn’t currently engaged in a lawless killing spree under the guise of ‘counterterrorism.’”

The post How Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Puts You at Risk appeared first on The Intercept.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”

Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”

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Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”

Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.

An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.

The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that 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, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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

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.

The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacked U.S. ships guiding vessels through the Strait of Hormuz as part of Trump’s ill-defined “Project Freedom.”

The following day, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said Iran had launched numerous attacks. “Since the ceasefire was announced, Iran has fired at commercial vessels nine times and seized two container ships. They’ve attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times,” he told reporters on Tuesday. He explained that despite attacking U.S. troops, the strikes were “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”

Trump suggested to reporters on Tuesday that Iran knew what actions constituted red lines that would violate the ceasefire, but refused to go on record on what they were. “Well, you’ll find out, because I’ll let you know,” he said, without letting anyone know.

“One of Trump’s standard plays with respect to Iran is resorting to belligerent threats of potentially illegal violence in the hopes of coercing Tehran,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “Notwithstanding Trump’s threat, attacks on U.S. ships are a real possibility and a potential vector for the breakdown of the ceasefire.”

At the press conference alongside Caine, War Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if the truce ended, since the U.S. and Iran had fired at each other in the last 24 hours. “No, the ceasefire is not over,” he replied. “Ultimately, this is a separate and distinct project.” Both he and Trump have also repeatedly claimed victory in the war, that they simultaneously claim is paused.

Hegseth suggested last week in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the ceasefire undercut a 60-day legal deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution for the U.S. to exit the war. (The deadline expired on Friday, though the White House can also extend the timeline for another 30 days to assist with the withdrawal of forces.)

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a ceasefire,” said Hegseth. He reiterated this erroneous contention on Tuesday.

“I do not believe the statute would support that,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., replied, adding that he has “serious constitutional concerns and we don’t want to layer those with additional statutory concerns.”

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Only two ships were known to have passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, and none did so on Tuesday. “As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait,” said Hegseth on Tuesday. Iran’s state broadcaster dismissed Project Freedom as a failure and said Iranian control over the waterway had tightened.

“There’s this ongoing denial of reality by the administration about the global and domestic consequences of this conflict,” said Finucane. “This war is very unpopular. The president’s own popularity has fallen, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better as the economic consequences worsen. The current status quo is untenable, but it’s unclear how the president is going to find his way out of this mess of his own making.”

The post Hegseth Clings to Phony Ceasefire to Help Trump Evade War Powers Pressure appeared first on The Intercept.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, 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, 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. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.”

Fentanyl is generally produced in the United States or Mexico, Baumgartner said. “I have not seen any evidence that fentanyl has ever been smuggled from South America to the United States,” he told The Intercept. “Cartels would not smuggle fentanyl down to South America just to smuggle it back by boat.”

While bales of cocaine float in water, Baumgartner said, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities and would not be seen floating in the aftermath of an airstrike.

Fentanyl or not, Trump has also touted astounding decreases in drug smuggling due to the boat strikes. “Drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent,” Trump said at a January 29 White House briefing. Experts said that Trump’s claim is ridiculous, invented, or involves disingenuous numbers meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Baumgartner noted that even the Pentagon figures put the lie to Trump’s claim. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” he said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

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The word “deterrence” has become a popular Pentagon euphemism for the use of lethal strikes, in contrast to previous U.S. government efforts to marshal economic, diplomatic, and military means to convince adversaries to change their ways. “Deterrence has a signaling effect on narco-terrorists, and raises the risks with their movements,” Humire claimed. But last month, for example, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, including five in five days. “That shows that traffickers, even along that high seas route, are not being deterred,” said Isacson.

The amount of cocaine seized by U.S. authorities suggests the strikes have had little impact on the trade. “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” said Isacson. While data is limited, figures from Customs and Border Protection show that seizures at U.S. borders and along coasts have increased amid the Trump administration’s airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. “CBP’s cocaine seizures have actually gone slightly up since the boat strikes began. Cocaine seized at all U.S. borders in the seven months before the strikes began was 38,000 pounds. In the seven months since, it’s 44,000 pounds — 6,000 pounds more,” Isacson explained.

The Coast Guard recently announced “record-setting interdictions” of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific under Operation Pacific Viper, indicating that large quantities of the narcotic are still transiting through that maritime corridor. Since last August, that service has seized more than 215,000 pounds of cocaine as part of this operation, Coast Guard spokesperson Brandon Hillard told The Intercept. “Narco-terrorists continue to go to great lengths to traffic illicit narcotics within and out of the Western hemisphere,” he said, highlighting “the seizure of hundreds of tons of cocaine.”

The general stability of the drug’s wholesale price also suggests it remains widely available. “The Coast Guard recently seized 1.2 tons of cocaine and reported a wholesale value of $19.3 million. This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner explained of a seizure announced this month. “This report may be using old pricing information, but I would expect a significant spike in prices with even a 20 percent reduction in the cocaine flow.” 

According to the drug-testing company Millennium Health, use of stimulants, including cocaine, is climbing sharply and was detected in urine samples at nearly twice the rate of fentanyl in 2025.

“A 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean that cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States,” said Baumgartner. “The price of cocaine would have skyrocketed. Addicts would be fighting each other over what little cocaine or crack they could find.”

Trump has also advanced absurd statistics about lives saved by attacks on boats. “When you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat,” Trump claimed. This echoed his previous assertion that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Experts say that there is no way of knowing how many lives are saved due to drug interception efforts, but that Trump’s claims are nonetheless untethered from reality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths for the 12-month period ending in November 2025. By Trump’s math, the drugs on the 54 boats would have been responsible for 1,400,000 deaths — 20 times the number of overdose deaths in one year. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

While not as egregious as Trump’s claims, Humire also offered up overdose numbers that appeared calculated to deceive. “As early as September 2025, the Administration had also achieved a nearly 20% drop in deadly drug overdoses in the United States compared to the previous year,” said Humire, crediting Operation Southern Spear with a share of the success. Left unsaid is that the first boat strike occurred that September, meaning the strikes would have had little or no impact on the numbers. The Pentagon did not provide any details on the source of Humire’s figures.

Experts say Humire’s statistics appear to be rhetorical sleight of hand, since Operation Southern Spear is not actually preventing the flow of fentanyl — the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Baumgartner called it “misleading” to link Operation Southern Spear to decreases in overall drug overdoses and drug flow because it “only impacts cocaine smuggling, not fentanyl or other drugs.”

Humire claimed Southern Spear and National Defense Areas on the U.S. Southern border “diminished the flow of fentanyl,” telling Congress it is “down 56% since the same period last year.” In actuality, CBP’s seizures of fentanyl at the U.S.–Mexico border have been declining since 2023. Halfway into fiscal year 2026, fentanyl seizures are almost exactly half of the total for 2025.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also claims that the boat strikes have significantly impacted the drug trade. “Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM AOR have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean,” he wrote in a February post on X. The Pentagon won’t name these “top” traffickers, failing to respond to repeated requests for information from The Intercept.

Lawmakers and other experts say that the Trump administration completely misconstrues the nature of the drug trade. “They have a fundamental misunderstanding that drug trafficking is a business. And that means there is no military solution,” Jacobs told The Intercept.

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Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, echoed this. “They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem, as if there is a command structure of the global drug economy where the person at the top finally says, ‘We’ve had enough. Everyone, stop what you’re doing now. We surrender’ — as if a cartel boss could command users, growers, smugglers, money launderers, and dealers, to all give up. It doesn’t work that way,” he explained. “Even if you did find a case or two of someone deciding to get out of the business, there are an infinite number of replacements willing to step up because that’s where the money is. Smuggling is the business. There’s always going to be a Han Solo.”

The Trump administration’s killing of civilians on alleged drug boats contrasts with the administration’s ongoing embrace of drug traffickers, drug dealers, and certain cartels, as well as its cuts to drug enforcement efforts. Justice Department records show, for example, that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6 percent since 2024. And more than 5,000 FBI and DEA agents have been reassigned from combating drug cartels to immigration enforcement, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump’s then-Attorney General Pam Bondi also scuttled the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces which allowed the department to coordinate investigations of cartels and transnational criminal networks. And last year, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.

To justify January’s U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump administration prosecutors charged him with numerous crimes, including “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and “Cocaine Importation Conspiracy.” The Trump administration is now running the country via a puppet regime that includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who was indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking, having “partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world, and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the United States,” according to the Justice Department. 

Trump has also granted clemency to around 100 people accused of drug-related crimes, including kingpins. He gave, for example, a “full and unconditional” pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted in 2024 for using his office to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked: “Why would we pardon this guy then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?”

On Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., questioned Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the boat attacks. “What legal justification could there possibly be that would allow the U.S. military to strike boats in international waters and kill the occupants of those boats without a showing of evidence that there’s narcotics on those boats?” he asked, before being met by a stream of doubletalk about the legality of the attacks. Unable to elicit a straight answer, Kaine responded: “I think there’s a profound mismatch between what is occurring and the underlying assumptions in the legal opinion.”

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Military briefers have admitted to members of Congress that they cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute survivors of the boat strikes, leading the U.S. to repatriate, hand off, or leave injured victims to drown. Similarly, those killed — if they are involved in the drug trade — are hardly drug kingpins. An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those killed in U.S. strikes found that while they had been smuggling drugs, they were not “narco-terrorists” or gang leaders but laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, two were low-level criminals, and one was a local crime boss. All were from a desperately poor area, and most were crewing such boats for the first or second time. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” said one government official of those killed.

Asked about the disconnect between the Trump administration pardoning drug kingpins and killing low-level persons who may be associated with the trade, Tree said it was par for the course. “The punitive aspect of the drug war has never been about logical consistency,” he said, noting that tobacco will kill close to 500,000 Americans this year, six times the number of overdoses. “Does that mean Trump is going to drone strike the homes of tobacco executives in the U.S.? Can other countries target them since Trump lacks the political will? That would be absurd because we don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

“These are visceral knee-jerk responses designed to make politicians appear tough,” Tree said, “but being tough is not the same as being effective.”

The post Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.”

The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals.

Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence of “artificial general intelligence,” an ill-defined form of superior machine reasoning that may never come to pass. But their fear that AI could kill us all is less hypothetical for those living in places targeted by the Trump administration’s global wars. In Iran, for instance, Anthropic’s Claude AI model “suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance,” according to the Washington Post.

“The risks of integrating frontier AI into the nation’s most lethal capabilities are already existential, both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars, and rank-and-file troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can’t control,” Amoh Toh, senior counsel at Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. “Existing AI models are already pushing policymakers and militaries toward nuclear escalation — there’s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.”

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Silicon Valley has widely embraced AI military contracts despite its worries over lethal AI. Amazon, OpenAI, Musk’s xAI, and Microsoft all earn money from selling large language model services to the Pentagon. Even Anthropic, accused of “betrayal” by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared a national supply chain risk for mounting the smallest of opposition to the Pentagon’s terms, is still keen to participate in the national kill chain. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post a week after the United States bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing more than 100 children.

Google offers a telling illustration of the industry’s increasing coziness with selling AI to the military. Following a 2018 employee revolt over Project Maven, a contract to help target Pentagon airstrikes, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged his company would swear off the business of killing. He wrote in a company blog post that Google would not pursue deals that could cause harm, including applications whose “principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.” He added: “These are not theoretical concepts, they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.”

After watching AI help wage a war that has already killed over 1,700 Iranian civilians, Google this week sent a clear message: We want in. In a deal that makes explicit the extent to which company leadership has abandoned its AI principles, Google agreed to provide AI services to the Pentagon that allow for “classified workloads,” sensitive military work that encompasses tasks like intelligence analysis and targeting airstrikes, The Information reported.

According to the tech news outlet, the deal allows the U.S. military to use Google’s AI models for “any lawful government purpose” — a carveout that could allow any uses the administration deems legal. Take, for example, the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear, the ongoing aerial assassination program against civilian boats accused of drug trafficking that has killed more than 180 people to date. The campaign has been widely condemned as illegal under both international and U.S. law, but the administration has deemed its own actions legal through a Department of Justice memo that remains secret. On Friday, the Pentagon announced additional “lawful operational use” deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon as well.

The Google contract reportedly includes a toothless and unenforceable provision gesturing at concerns over autonomous and spying. “We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight,” the clause reportedly states.

“When I worked at Google, they would spend a lot of time punting into the future, promising a future that would never come,” said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who helped organize the 2018 worker-led campaign against the Maven contract. “‘Don’t regulate us or it’ll kill innovation.’ The talking point is the same today. The reality of Google’s work with the military is it’s part of a tech-military ecosystem that’s killing people today.”

Google spokesperson Kate Dreyer did not respond to questions about the contract’s language, instead touting how the company’s military work applies “to areas like logistics, cybersecurity, diplomatic translation, fleet maintenance, and the defense of critical infrastructure.”

There is little evidence the people in charge find this technology enticing because of its diplomatic translation prowess. In a January address to Musk’s employees at SpaceX, another Pentagon contractor, Hegseth explained how “an embrace of AI” would make the military “more lethal.”

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Musk and Altman, though foes at the moment, can at least find common ground in their support of Hegseth. Musk, a longtime defense contractor, similarly wraps himself in the flag, tweeting in 2023, “I will fight for and die in America.” Altman, who once expressed skepticism toward military work, now frames OpenAI’s mission in terms of patriotic nationalism. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Between Musk’s courtroom visions of the apocalypse and Google’s plunge into classified workloads, the week’s news illustrates the disjointed state of AI industry ethics, where executives say they’re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.

Though AI executives clearly find this a virtuous revenue stream, some of the people who actually built the technology do not. Andreas Kirsch, a research scientist at Google’s pioneering DeepMind laboratory that produced much of the work on which xAI and Anthropic rely, responded to this week’s news with dismay: “I’m speechless at Google signing a deal to use our AI models for classified tasks. Frankly, it is shameful,” he wrote on X. Alex Turner, a DeepMind colleague of Kirsch’s, described the contract in a single word: “Shameful.”

The post Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills appeared first on The Intercept.

There were 279 FBI personnel working on “immigration-related matters” before Trump took office in January 2025, according to bureau records The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500.

In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total of 38,000 FBI employees. 

“That is a huge, huge number of people,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has testified before Congress on the cost of mass deportations. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.”

The flood of FBI personnel into immigration work came in the early days of the tenure of Director Kash Patel, who has shown a willingness to follow Trump’s orders without question or exception. According to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, the redirection may have hampered the FBI’s ability to perform criminal investigative work.

“That’s a striking diversion of resources away from public safety,” Bier said. “We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement. This is showing the extent to which the resources of the FBI were put at the disposal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contrary to the intent of Congress, and the abuse of the funds that Congress grants the FBI to accomplish its mission.”

The documents The Intercept received did not make clear if the employees assigned to immigration were part of the FBI’s total workforce or its smaller subset of 13,700 special agents. In September, the Cato Institute published a disclosure from ICE reporting that 2,840 out of 13,700 FBI special agents — 1 in 5 — were being redirected to work on ICE enforcement and removal operations.

“While the FBI does not comment on specific personnel numbers or decisions, FBI agents and staff are dedicated professionals working around the clock to defend the homeland and crush violent crime,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people, and we surge resources based on needs.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment

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Trump has diverted thousands of agents at a number of federal agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to aid in his administration’s deportation machine. 

The shift started as soon as he returned to office. By January 26, 2025, just six days after Trump’s second inauguration, the FBI had 1,390 employees working on immigration. In the first months of Trump’s second term, he ramped up arrests of immigrants around the country and authorized federal law enforcement at agencies that don’t work on immigration to help his administration carry out its deportation policies.

The FBI reassignments exploded the following month. As the Trump administration issued a directive to allow law enforcement to enter the homes of people it claimed were suspected gang members without a warrant, the number of FBI personnel working on immigration rose to 2,941. 

September’s 6,500-employee number wasn’t even the peak. The number continued increasing throughout the spring and reached over 5,700 in May, when the administration set a new quota to arrest 3,000 people a day. 

Another shocking detail, Bier said, was that the number of FBI agents being diverted to immigration work remained high even after Congress passed July’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which directed an additional $170 billion in funding for immigration and border spending. 

The law “infused tens of billions of dollars” for immigration enforcement,” Bier said, ” — “and yet there’s no let-up.”

“This is not about ‘ICE doesn’t have the money,’” Bier said. “ICE has the money, and they’re going ahead with using criminal law enforcement for mass deportation purposes.”

It’s not clear what the FBI’s “immigration-related” work entails, but the rapid expansion suggests FBI staff are working on issues unrelated to the FBI’s mandate, Reichlin-Melnick added.

“If you look at how quickly the scale of this ramped up and compare it to what we know was happening at the time, it’s very clear that a lot of this — probably the significant majority — was immigration enforcement,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

The increase coincides with an increase in FBI presence at immigration raids. On Wednesday, FBI agents were among the federal law enforcement personnel carrying out raids in Minnesota related to the right-wing allegations of fraud against the Somali immigrant community. 

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The number of FBI personnel working on immigration also raises national security concerns, Reichlin-Melnick added. The FBI had to reassign agents to work on counterterrorism, after previously diverting them to work on immigration, following the U.S. bombing of Iran last summer. 

“The national security implications of this are likely significant. In September 2025, 6,500 FBI personnel were working at least an hour of their day on immigration-related matters,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “There is no situation in which the administration has made the security of the nation better by reassigning these agents.” 

Bier agreed the diversion was potentially dangerous, pointing to the risks brought on by the current U.S. war on Iran.

“Anytime you’re involved in a war — and we certainly are — you should be careful about retaliation and monitoring those threats,” Bier said. “It makes little sense to divert people away from that during this time, especially.”

Update: May 1, 2026, 12:32 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from the FBI sent after publication.

The post FBI Redirected a Quarter of Staff to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push appeared first on The Intercept.

Wyden said the public needs to know about a secret court opinion that found fault with the Trump administration’s use of data collected by the National Security Agency, prompting Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to warn of “consequences” for “distorting highly classified material.”

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The unusually pointed back-and-forth came amid a fight over the reauthorization of a controversial domestic spying program. The barbs exchanged by the senators highlighted how much Wyden has angered colleagues aligned with the NSA who want the spy program to be renewed without changes.

By the end of the day, Congress voted to give the program a 45-day extension to allow further negotiations over its fate.

Wyden had argued for a shorter extension, but he was able to secure a concession. Cotton and the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, agreed to pen a letter to the executive branch asking for the court opinion to be declassified within 15 days.

Wyden says that opinion details serious violations of the program’s guidelines.

“That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” Wyden said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.

Wyden has a long history of trying to pry loose evidence of civil liberties violations by intelligence agencies. Most famously, in 2013, he attempted to force then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to acknowledge the existence of a phone record dragnet months before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures made it public.

His sometimes-cryptic statements warning about secret spy programs have been dubbed “the Wyden siren.”

Most recently he has zeroed in on the court opinion. He irritated supporters of the NSA program on Thursday by initially refusing to give his consent for a 45-day extension of the program, until he secured the letter from Intelligence Committee leaders.

While speaking on the floor about why he opposed that extension, he accused Cotton of ducking the court opinion, prompting a pointed response.

“I am ducking nothing. I am pointing out the senator from Oregon’s long-standing practice of distorting highly classified material in public,” Cotton said. “One of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I’m the chairman of this committee.”

Cotton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Members of Congress are protected from prosecution for comments they make on the floor under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution.

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Little has been revealed about the court opinion besides a New York Times report earlier this month that it centered on searches of information about Americans in a vast database of communications that gets around laws on domestic spying because the data is collected abroad.

Wyden noted that current law already requires the court opinion to be declassified and released to the public at some point. He wants that process sped up so that it can take place before Congress votes on a long-term extension of the surveillance program.

“Congress must use a short-term extension to openly debate the critical issues in front of the American people. I am disappointed that, instead, it sure feels like the other side of the aisle is covering the abuses up,” he said.

Although the debate that was resolved later in the day hinged on a seemingly mundane issue — whether Congress should have three weeks or 45 days for further negotiations — it exposed hard feelings between the committee colleagues.

Wyden said a three-week extension was “more than reasonable,” given that Congress has had months to work on the issue.

Cotton said a longer extension was necessary because Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the committee, recently suffered a family tragedy. Warner’s 36-year-old daughter died earlier this month, and he returned to the Senate this week after taking time off. As the highest-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Warner will play a key role in the negotiations in extending the law.

“I would suggest that comity also counsels that we give a little bit longer than two weeks to a grieving colleague who just had a terrible family tragedy,” Cotton said.

Warner’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Update: April 30, 2026, 5:29 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Congress’s extension of FISA after publication.

The post Ron Wyden Is Pissing Off the NSA’s Biggest Backers. Tom Cotton Warns There Will Be “Consequences.” appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House, including a furious blitz during his second term. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents over three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean.

On Wednesday, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.

“Secretary Hegseth has presided over an expansion in U.S. military operations that has caused devastating civilian harm globally, from Yemen, Iran, and Somalia to extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific,” said Annie Shiel, U.S. director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “This is against the backdrop of a serious reduction in the United States’ capacity and will to prevent civilian harm, including statements from administration officials threatening civilian infrastructure and decrying ‘stupid rules of engagement,’ and the slashing of U.S. military offices and staff tasked with preventing civilian harm.”

The U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world during Trump’s second term from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a U.K.-based organization that tracks civilian harm across the world, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

“Even excluding Iran, we saw that at least 381 civilians were killed by the Trump administration so far, with harm recorded across seven different theaters,” Karlshoej-Pedersen, who is also the co-founder of the Civilian Protection Monitor, explained. “Even if the Trump administration is only responsible for a proportion of those deaths, it looks as if the first year-plus of this Trump administration has been even more deadly for civilians than his whole first term,” she said.

Adding in the 1,700 civilians killed in Iran, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, pushes the death toll — and the overall threat to civilians — to a historic level.

Other counts of civilian casualties in Iran push the death toll even higher. “U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing. This includes an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.

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The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted the attack on the elementary school in Minab, contradicting assertions by Trump that Iran struck the school.

“The girls’ school that got hit in the first days of this war, there is absolutely no question at this point what happened. We made a mistake,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, on Wednesday. “We identified this target based on earlier charts. And yet, two months after it happened, we refused to say anything about it, giving the world the impression that we just don’t care.”

The Pentagon has deflected questions on the Minab attack for almost two months. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Hegseth’s office told The Intercept on Wednesday, while the war secretary said the same to members of Congress, refusing to answer questions about the attack.

“U.S. authorities must ensure that the investigation they announced into the unlawful strike on Minab school is impartial, independent and transparent,” said Bahreini, adding that America “must also repudiate all threats to commit war crimes and other crimes under international law and commit publicly to full respect for international humanitarian law, particularly the prohibition of directing attacks at civilians and civilian objects.”

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to commit genocide in Iran, ahead of warnings of a wave of attacks on civilian infrastructure. After backing off, Trump lobbed new threats on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Iran can’t get their act together,” Trump wrote, above an AI-generated image of himself, donning sunglasses and carrying an automatic rifle, with explosions going off in the background. The caption of the image reads, “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”

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During his testimony on Wednesday, Hegseth lobbed his own bellicose threats. “The days in which these narco-terrorists — Designated Terrorist Organizations — operated freely in our hemisphere are over,” he said. “We are tracking them. We are killing them.” Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 55 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, destroying 56 vessels and killing more than 185 civilians since last September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, 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.

The casualties in Yemen include an attack on an immigrant detention center last year, killing and injuring dozens of Ethiopian civilians, according to an investigation by Amnesty International. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the U.S. military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” said Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the U.S. military has taken to address it.”

When it comes to the Trump administration’s neglect for civilian harm, experts say Yemen was the canary in the coal mine. Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured.

Hegseth spent Wednesday defending the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation machinery in the face of evidence that he has consistently taken steps to undermine it.

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“I know that there is no country on Planet Earth that takes more measures to ensure that civilian harm or civilian casualties are minimized than the United States of America and this War Department. And that is a fact,” he told the House Armed Services Committee. But Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon offices responsible for civilian harm mitigation and fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of military legal counsel and subvert military justice.

The Intercept also found that U.S. Southern Command is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports stemming from the military mission to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to two government officials. Instead, the Pentagon itself is accepting reports directly.

On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, raised the issue of the war secretary’s cuts to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response efforts. “You eliminated the department’s civilian harm reduction staff,” she said, then asking, “Would you not agree something failed because almost 200 children died in Iran as a result of our bombing?”

Hegseth replied, “You’re insinuating something where an investigation is not complete.”

The post Hegseth Brags of a Deadlier War Machine as U.S. Unleashes “Devastating Civilian Harm Globally” appeared first on The Intercept.

Twenty Republicans who opposed a procedural vote earlier this month flipped their position on Wednesday to allow a vote on a three-year extension of the law that allows government agents to search Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Not all the Republicans voted for the final version of the bill, which passed 235–191, but they were crucial in giving Johnson a hand on an initial procedural vote.

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The final bill drew the support of dozens of Democrats, who backed it despite the polarizing central bank digital currency ban. One of the most prominent backers was Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who gave a floor speech in support.

Now that it includes a digital currency ban, however, the House version of the law faces dim prospects in the Senate. The upshot of Johnson’s maneuvering may be that the Senate has the final say on surveillance reforms.

Longtime privacy champion Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept that the versions of reauthorization on the table — one a three-year “clean” extension offered by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and the other the House version with the digital currency ban — were both “deeply flawed and unacceptable.”

Instead, he is pitching colleagues on requiring a warrant before government agents can search through foreign surveillance databases for the communications of Americans.

“We are spending some time now talking to those who want a bill that shows you can have both security and liberty,” Wyden said, “and they are not mutually exclusive.”

Extending Deadline

The high-stakes deliberations are happening against the backdrop of a looming deadline to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which underpins much of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance apparatus.

The law authorizes much of the most valuable surveillance populating intelligence agency reports. It has also been abused hundreds of thousands of times by officials at the FBI to scour through Americans’ communications.

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Johnson tried and failed to secure an extension of the law with minor tweaks earlier this month. Conservatives joined Democrats in opposing that push, and Congress ultimately wound up passing a short-term extension of the law that expires Friday.

The deadline is manufactured, many reformers say. A secretive intelligence court has already granted the government yearlong orders allowing it to continue scooping up information from private providers.

The Senate was set to hold its own vote on the surveillance bill Tuesday but wound up postponing it. In a floor speech, Wyden chalked the delay up to skepticism from senators about the bill in its current form. He called for discussions about reforms.

The nature of those negotiations remained up in the air Wednesday. Some senators said it was possible that Congress would pass another short-term extension of the law.

On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, told The Intercept, “The last thing I heard is that there was going to be another extension to give us more time to figure it out and get the House to decide what they want to do.”

“Dead On Arrival” in Senate

Wyden and other reformers have long pushed for a warrant requirement before government agents can search NSA databases for information on Americans. They say the need for reform is only more urgent now that artificial intelligence has made combing through those databases easier than ever.

They are pushing back against long-held skepticism from members of Congress who contend that requiring agents to get a court order would be too unwieldy in practice.

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In an email to colleagues, for example, Himes, of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he would vote to reauthorize FISA “because it is essential to keeping our country and our constituents safe from terrorists, cartels, spies, state-sponsored hackers, and other national security threats.”

Himes said on the House floor later that the process leading up to the vote on Wednesday was flawed.

“We are where we are, and it is a binary choice. And allowing this authority to expire, which I think we are close to, is not an option,” he said.

Wyden expressed optimism, citing the bipartisan coalition that has so far stymied President Donald Trump’s demand for a clean extension.

“The reality is, we are further along in real reform than we have been since I have been in public service,” he said.

Whatever version of the law the Senate settles on, it likely will not involve a central bank digital currency ban. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has already described that idea as “dead on arrival.”

“That’s messing around with a very important national security issue,” King said of the ban.

Johnson Saves Face

Still, the ban gave Johnson a crucial boost in securing House passage of his own version of the FISA law. The ban on government-issued digital currency took aim at a boogeyman of the far right that is nowhere close to becoming reality.

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For years, conservatives have fretted over the idea that the U.S. Federal Reserve could launch a digital currency that could be traded electronically. Currently, there is no way for ordinary Americans to exchange money through electronic means without the help of a private intermediary, such as PayPal or Visa. A central bank digital currency would give people an option to pass money without the for-profit companies involved.

The Federal Reserve never came close to implementing a digital currency under President Joe Biden, however, and one of Trump’s first acts upon taking office was to issue an executive order aimed at banning research into them.

While conservatives have raised concerns that a central bank digital currency could allow the government to surveil Americans’ every transaction, the issue is distinct from the foreign surveillance law that lays out the NSA’s powers.

Before the bill reached the floor, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, unsuccessfully attempted to strip out the central bank digital currency ban during a House Rules Committee hearing on Tuesday.

“Republicans are obsessed with random, fringe issues,” McGovern said, “instead of doing literally anything to bring down the cost of living.”

The post Mike Johnson Used Crypto Catnip to Get Freedom Caucus Support for Domestic Spy Law appeared first on The Intercept.

Johnson was stymied this month when he attempted to push through a reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The roadblock came thanks to opposition from most Democrats, plus 20 hard-right members of the GOP caucus.

Still, four Democrats crossed party lines to vote for a procedural motion to advance the bill, despite instructions from House Democratic leaders to the contrary. Whether those four support Johnson during a vote this week could prove crucial.

The four Democrats are Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Tom Suozzi of New Jersey, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, and Jared Golden of Maine, who is not seeking reelection this year. None responded to requests for comment.

One advocate said the outcome of the vote could hinge on their decision.

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“It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” said Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”

Given the skepticism of hard-right Republican lawmakers, Johnson needs every vote he can muster. On Thursday, he put forward a new proposal to extend the law for three years, with additional layers of oversight and auditing.

No Warrant Requirement

The latest proposal does not address reformers’ highest priority: a warrant requirement that would force FBI agents and National Security Agency analysts to get a court order before they search for information on Americans from ostensibly “foreign” communications — material collected abroad as the NSA scoops up emails, text messages, and the like.

Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Johnson’s latest proposal does little to change existing law. Under Johnson’s proposal, searches would be reviewed after the fact by a privacy officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and potentially later by an inspector general.

“This just follows the old pattern of adding layer after layer of oversight,” he said. “The idea that the inspector general of the intelligence community is going to stand up to Trump on any sort of abuses is just not going to happen.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York threw cold water on the idea of Democratic leadership formally supporting Johnson during a press conference Thursday before the latest draft was released. He said it would be “extremely difficult” for Democrats to find common ground with Republicans on the issue so long as Kash Patel — who has been embroiled in controversy over allegations about his drinking habits — remains director of the FBI.

Johnson may not need to make major concessions to bring a handful of Democrats over to his side.

A large group of centrists has signaled that they would support a “clean” extension of FISA — without major reforms — if it comes to the House floor. But they have so far followed the advice of Jeffries to oppose a procedural vote to bring the bill to the floor.

On April 17, the smaller group of four Democrats took the additional step of crossing party lines to support Johnson on the procedural vote, which ultimately failed, thanks only to hard-right members of the GOP.

Freedom Caucus Flip?

After that defeat, Johnson secured a short, 10-day extension of the spying law to come up with new legislation. Members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus hope to use the next vote series to secure their long-standing, and unrelated, goal of banning a central bank digital currency.

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Advocates are warily watching that debate. They worry that the digital currency ban could win over enough right-wing Republicans to hand Johnson a victory — a strategy that only works if the four Democrats continue to play along.

Progressive groups outside Congress are already targeting the four with an aggressive pressure campaign. One group, Fight for the Future, has dubbed them “the Fascist Four.”

Another supporter of existing law, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes, D-Conn., told Politico on Thursday that he has gotten an earful from constituents who oppose extending it without a warrant requirement.

“I’ve been taking a ton of risk, I’ve been doing a ton of explanations,” Himes said.

Himes said he has been talking to individual Republicans to craft a compromise, but Johnson’s leadership team has not engaged with him.

The post Meet the Four Democrats Who’ll Decide If Trump Gets His Domestic Spying Law appeared first on The Intercept.

The only reporting that previously referenced Koreans being used as guinea pigs for these experiments was journalist John Marks’s landmark 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Using CIA documents, Marks traced the now-infamous MK-ULTRA project to its start, when it was known as Project Bluebird. In the book, Marks describes how, in October 1950, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were chosen as the first test subjects to receive “advanced” interrogation techniques, with the overt goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

While MK-ULTRA is best known for its invasive experimentation — like LSD dosing and torture — the documents confirm Korean POWs were the unwitting subjects of less splashy attempts at mind control, like being subjected to polygraph tests, with plans for other invasive testing.

The declassified documents, which the National Security Archive released between December 2024 and April 2025, are available through a special collection titled “CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MK-ULTRA.” The National Security Archive website states that the collection “brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.”

The first reference to “Project Bluebird” in the NSA’s collection is an office memorandum from April 5, 1950. Addressed to CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the document lays out the project’s goals, required training, and budget, all while emphasizing that knowledge of Project Bluebird “should be restricted to the absolute minimum number of persons.”

The memo includes detailed plans for interrogation teams trained to utilize the polygraph, various drugs, and hypnotism “for personality control purposes.” These teams were to be made up of three people: a doctor (ideally a psychiatrist), a hypnotist, and a polygraph technician. The memo clarifies that while the doctor and technician would need to undergo approximately five months of training, the Inspection and Security Staff’s own department hypnotist could be made available immediately. In a later memo from February 2, 1951, there are inquiries into acquiring six “hypospray” devices: experimental instruments designed to covertly inject sedatives through the skin via “jet injection.” There’s a request to investigate modification of a “tear gas pencil” and other “devices of unestablished action,” such as the “German ‘Scheintot’ [sic] (appearance of death) pistol.”

The project’s proposed budget of $65,515 accounted for team salaries and equipment like syringes, towels, and film cameras. The budget also allots $18,000 for “Transportation,” and while the actual offshore locations are redacted, a write-up of a CIA meeting held one year later specifically notes a “project in Japan and Korea in which the Army had used a polygraph operator along with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists on Korean POWs.” 

Although the initial proposal for Project Bluebird mostly emphasized the potential for “personality control,” it’s clear that CIA officials were also interested in broader, more ambitious outcomes. One document summarizing a “special meeting” between U.S., British, and Canadian intelligence services notes the CIA’s desire to research “the psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs” and “determining means for combatting communism,” “‘selling’ democracy,” and preventing the “penetration of communism into trade unions.” Another meeting held on May 9, 1950, called for “the Surgeon General of the Army to place on the search list of the Nuremberg Trials papers request for information on drugs, narcoanalysis, and special interrogation techniques.” 

There were requests for other tests that, at the time, were deemed “impossible for security reasons.” According to a memo from September 18, 1951, this included “experiments on the outside with SI inducted over the telephone.” The writer explains that this over-the-phone hypnosis has, so far, been “universally successful,” however testing along agency lines was yet to be approved. 

One declassified memo emphasizing the importance of the project gets more detailed, citing “specific problems which can only be resolved by experiment, testing and research.” Unlike the lists of supplies necessary for Project Bluebird, the “specific problems” officials hoped to explore in the experiments offer a uniquely intimate perspective into the bureau’s interests. A few examples of these “problems” include: 

• “Can we create … an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?”
• “Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two … have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.?”
• “Can we ‘alter’ a person’s personality? How long will it hold?” 
• “Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?” 

This last question surrounding drug-induced amnesia would prove incredibly relevant months later, when the first team of Project Bluebird technicians arrived in Japan to carry out initial tests. According to Marks, these men “tried out combinations of the depressant sodium amytal with the stimulant benzedrine on each of four subjects, the last two of whom also received a second stimulant, picrotoxin.” The team was attempting to induce a state of medically administered amnesia, and according to their reports, the experiments proved successful enough to pursue further tests. Two months later, according to Marks’s book, the Project Bluebird team began testing more “advanced” interrogation techniques on 25 North Korean prisoners of war in Japan.

Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S. The central animating myth behind MK-ULTRA and Project Bluebird is the narrative of the American soldier who returned home after months of imprisonment by enemy forces, only to be revealed as a hypnotized double agent. Throughout the Korean War, American moviegoers were screened films starring and narrated by future president Ronald Reagan. These films showed American troops being psychologically tortured by Chinese and North Korean soldiers until dangerous, anti-democratic ideals were implanted in their minds without their knowledge.

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The knowledge most Americans have about these experiences are based on a work of fiction: Richard Condon’s 1959 political thriller, “The Manchurian Candidate.” In Condon’s book (and its two film adaptations), an American soldier returns home with a secret, one that he himself isn’t even aware of. While held captive by North Korean and Chinese soldiers, the American POW was brainwashed by enemy troops, unknowingly turning him into a sleeper assassin with the goal of being “activated” to kill a presidential nominee. 

As Project Bluebird transformed into Project Artichoke and later MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s goals seemed to shift into one of beating the enemy at their own game. Essentially, programs surrounding psychological experiments were deemed necessary evils after our own troops were coming home hypnotized and transformed by our enemies. While this narrative offers a convenient excuse for why the CIA developed programs like Bluebird in the first place, one declassified document tells a different story. 

In one of the more revealing moments from the entire collection of documents, the CIA’s Morse Allen recounts a conversation with an agency employee about the effectiveness of interrogating individuals through hypnosis. “Individuals under hypnotism will give information,” Allen writes, “but … it could not always be regarded as accurate, since fantasy and even hallucinations are present in certain hypnotic states.” Reading the lengthy budgetary sheets for drugs, syringes, polygraph machines, and hypnotists, paired with the details of Marks’s book, one’s imagination begins trying to fill in the gaps, drifting into fantasy. It’s an experience uniquely fitting for research into the CIA’s pursuit of technology aimed at erasing facts, experiences, and memories.

Throughout these declassified documents are numerous reminders that the Korean War’s label as “The Forgotten War” serves, in part, as intentional obfuscation. People, histories, and crimes are rarely forgotten on accident, and what these disclosures clearly demonstrate is that there remains a world of difference between the forgetting of history and its swift, coordinated erasure.

The post CIA Ran MK-ULTRA Experiments on Prisoners of War in U.S. Custody, Declassified Docs Confirm appeared first on The Intercept.

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.

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.