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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Pentagon Document: U.S. Wants to “Suppress Dissenting Arguments” Using AI Propaganda

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Plans Call for “New Rafah” Built in Israel’s Image — Without Palestinians

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

The Dam Breaks: Democratic Senators Overwhelmingly Reject Arms Sales to Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Israeli Forces Keep Killing Americans While U.S. Officials Give Them a Pass

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

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

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

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

Related

Pentagon Makes Largest Known Arms Purchase From Israel — For Banned Cluster Weapons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It.

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

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

Grassroots Opposition?

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

Related

NSA Won’t Say If It Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Democrats Might Save Mike Johnson’s Push to Give Trump Domestic Spying Power

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Trump Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the monthslong campaign of extrajudicial killings by the U.S. military.

Though the president of the IACHR disputes that the U.S. is pressuring his organization, the State Department responded to questions about the meeting with a statement urging the commission to move onto other matters. A past IACHR president said the organization may fear the “wrath” of the United States, which is the largest financial contributor to the commission’s parent organization, if it launches an investigation.

U.S. lawmakers and experts say an investigation by the IACHR could be an important mechanism to hold the Trump administration accountable for the lethal strikes. Scores of civilians have been killed in the campaign, which has seen families of victims petition the IACHR and sue the U.S. government, accusing it of wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.

Last month, the IACHR — an arm of the Organization of American States, or OAS, charged with the promotion of human rights in the Western hemisphere — held a first-of-its-kind hearing on the legality of the boat strikes. The IACHR considers petitions dealing with violations of rights by member states, including the U.S. At the March 13 hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, International Crisis Group, and the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights made the case that the U.S. boat strikes violate both U.S. domestic and international law.

Related

U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly

Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, noted that the attacks were conducted without the authorization of Congress and were “in violation of international law on the use of force.” Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur and a professor of international law at the University of Sydney, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.” He said these “serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life” and were not permissible as law enforcement actions or in the name of national self-defense or allowed under the law of the sea, under international humanitarian law, under international counter-terrorism law, or treaties targeting narcotics.

The hearing drew sharp criticism from the United States, which sent representatives to the meeting. State Department legal adviser Carl Anderson rebuked the commission for holding the hearing and said it wasn’t fit to review legal claims. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the commission “strayed far outside its mandate” and was being manipulated by the ACLU.

“The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue,” Pigott said. “Convening hearings under these circumstances risks undermining — not strengthening — the credibility of the inter-American human rights system.” Pigott also instructed the commission to work through decades-old petitions instead of focusing on the boat strikes.

Related

Pentagon Claims It “Absolutely” Knows Who It Killed in Boat Strikes. Prove It, Lawmaker Says.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 48 attacks since September 2025, destroying 50 vessels and killing almost 170 civilians. The latest strikes, on April 11 in the Eastern Pacific, killed five people and, according to the Coast Guard, left one “person in distress.” 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.

In December, the IACHR expressed “deep concern regarding reports of lethal operations against non-state vessels” that it said “allegedly resulted in the deaths of a high number of persons.” It called on the U.S. to “refrain from employing lethal military force in the context of public security operations” but emphasized a “willingness to maintain continued dialogue and technical cooperation with the United States to support the protection of human rights in all security and defense policies.”

“What it is is murder,” Juan Méndez, a former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said of the attacks, stressing that he was speaking as an expert on international law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law and not on behalf of the commission. “You’re deliberately shooting at people who may be engaged in illegal action. But if it is a law enforcement issue, then you cannot just kill them. You have to try to arrest them. You have to try to bring them to justice.”

A source close to the IACHR said the United States was clearly pressuring the organization to ignore attacks under fear of losing funding, pointing to Pigott’s decree.

The State Department responded to questions by pointing The Intercept to a statement by Pigott in which he told the IACHR to ignore U.S. “counter-narcoterrorism” operations. “The Commission needs to redirect its focus toward the individual petitions languishing on its docket, sometimes for decades,” he decreed. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment or clarification about which petitions it wants the IACHR to prioritize.

Mendez outlined the potential pressures the IACHR was under. “The Commission may well feel that this is a very delicate situation, and if they take the initiative, they’re going to incur the wrath of the United States,” he explained. “They are stretched for funding. And if the United States cuts the funding, they probably would have to shut down — at least for a while.”

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the U.S. reduced its contributions to IACHR from $2.7 million in 2017 to zero in 2018, leaving other member states and permanent observers from the European Union to make up the shortfall. In 2019, the U.S. withdrew funds from the IACHR due to its promotion of abortion legalization. By last May, the Trump administration had terminated funding for at least 22 OAS programs. The administration did not request specific funds for the OAS in 2026, although the House appropriations report for 2026 provides $46.5 million, similar to 2024 levels. 

The State Department did not provide the total number of OAS programs that saw their funding cut or terminated, nor say how often the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw funding from the IACHR.

Stuardo Ralón, the current president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, pushed back on the claims of bullying by the U.S. “There is no pressure from the United States on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” he told The Intercept.

When The Intercept asked if the commission intends to carry out an investigation into the United States’ lethal strikes, Ralón said, “The IACHR does not conduct investigations. Doing so falls outside its institutional nature and mandate.”

The commission is actually well known for high-profile investigations, including of U.S. immigration detention centers during the Obama administration, and an attack on 43 students from a Mexican teacher training school who were kidnapped and presumably killed in 2014. In fact, the OAS website is filled with references to the “Commission’s investigation[s].”

When The Intercept pointed out that the first line of the Commission’s 10-point mandate states that the IACHR “receives, analyzes and investigates individual petitions in which violations of human rights are alleged to have been committed,” an IACHR spokesperson offered a clarification. “In the context of public hearings, the IACHR does not carry out investigative functions in the strict sense,” wrote Corina Leguizamón. The Intercept did not inquire about the use of public hearings as a means of inquiry.

“We have asked the Commission to fulfill its responsibilities as the premier regional human rights body to conduct a fact-finding investigation of these heinous killings and to ensure that no country can act in this fashion because that will have severe implications on human rights in the region and beyond,” Dakwar, of the ACLU, told The Intercept. “The U.S. government has not put forward any justifications for its premeditated murders. The commission is within its competency and its bounds to fully investigate the egregious violations of international law happening in its own backyard.”

U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif,, also sent a letter to the commission urging them to “scrutinize this administration’s policy and help advance accountability in the international arena.” They added, “The challenges we have faced in securing transparency and achieving accountability underscore the importance of your respected Commission’s contribution.”

Ralón said the IACHR had not taken any steps toward the ACLU’s requests to launch an investigation into the strikes; convene a special meeting with OAS Member States affected by them; or request an advisory opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the legality of the policy. “The IACHR will continue to monitor the situation in accordance with its mandate,” he told The Intercept, stating it “does not have the competence to initiate ex officio actions under the terms proposed, nor to assess the proportionality of the use of force in scenarios that may involve operations in international waters or situations between States.” Ralón added: “The Commission neither anticipates nor rules out future actions; it acts based on the information available, at the appropriate time, and with strict adherence to its mandate.”

Mendez, the former president, said that the IACHR was in a challenging situation. “The Commission could, if they wanted to take the initiative, take the case forward. If they get a formal complaint, they do investigate. They inquire. They ask for information. But under the present situation, they’re unlikely to take any action on their own initiative,” he told The Intercept.

Related

“Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner”

In December, the family of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza, who was killed in a September 15 attack in the Caribbean, filed a complaint with the IACHR. The petition names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the perpetrator, stating that he “was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like those of Alejandro Carranza Medina and the murder of all those on such boats.” It also notes that Hegseth’s conduct was “ratified” by Trump.

The next month, family members of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian men killed in a U.S. boat strike on October 14, 2025, sued the U.S. government for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. Lawyers from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and Seton Hall Law School professor Jonathan Hafetz called the entire campaign of attacks in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful” in their complaint.

The suit was brought in U.S. federal admiralty court under the Death on the High Seas Act, a congressional statute that covers wrongful maritime deaths. The plaintiffs also brought claims for extrajudicial killing under the Alien Tort Statute, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over violations of the law of nations, including extrajudicial killing. Another federal statute, the Suits in Admiralty Act, waives U.S. sovereign immunity — which ordinarily protects the federal government from being sued — over both claims.

The State Department referred to the cases in its rebuke of the March 13 hearing, accusing the IACHR of allowing “the ACLU to exploit the hearing to try to force the United States to prematurely disclose arguments and evidence in two cases pending before U.S. federal courts.”

Last month, Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, told members of the House Armed Services Committee that attacks on Latin American drug cartels are “just the beginning” as he unveiled a terrestrial effort dubbed “Operation Total Extermination.”

Humire announced that the Pentagon supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” and referred to the attacks as “joint land strikes,” saying that America was providing Ecuador with “capabilities that they otherwise would not have.” In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, 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.” 

Gen. Francis Donovan, the chief of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers last month that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even broader campaign. “What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Mendez — also formerly a U.N. special rapporteur on torture and a recently retired professor of international law at American University’s Washington College of Law — said he did not believe that U.S. pressure would affect any future investigation if the IACHR moves forward with an inquiry into the boat strikes. “It doesn’t affect their impartiality and independence, but it does affect what they might do on their own initiative,” he said. “I’m not saying that they will duck and forget about it. This is a very important issue. But they probably want to wait to see who brings what kind of case to them.”

Ralón also said the commission would not be cowed. “The IACHR exercises its functions with full independence and autonomy, in accordance with its conventional and regulatory mandate, and its decisions are not subject to external interference by any State,” he said.

The post State Department Tells Human Rights Watchdog to Ignore Trump’s Extrajudicial Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

That’s because the Trump administration fired hundreds of key State Department personnel with the skills needed to safeguard U.S. citizens abroad and usher them from harm’s way, lawmakers say. These foreign service officers — who lost their jobs amid Elon Musk’s purge of the federal workforce — contacted members of Congress last month with dire warnings about the department’s inability to manage the ongoing crisis.

“The Department is actively preventing experienced, cleared, available officers from helping American citizens in crisis,” a group of nearly 250 mostly mid-career and senior State Department foreign service officers wrote in a letter sent to lawmakers that was shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The crisis now unfolding in the Middle East is, in part, a foreseeable consequence of this and other short-sighted decisions taken by this administration to undermine the federal bureaucracy by eliminating expertise and politicizing our apolitical workforce.”

They added: “The expertise required to manage the current crisis has been systematically removed.”

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

The situation in the Middle East remains dire, even as a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has taken hold following a genocidal threat by President Donald Trump. After Trump teased that he was willing to wipe out Iran’s “whole civilization” earlier this week, the State Department advised American citizens to reconsider travel across the Middle East due to serious risks to safety and security. Days earlier, the department had urged “citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial flight options remain available” and to flee Iraq via “overland routes” due to fears of “widespread attacks against U.S. citizens.” 

The FSOs responsible for the letter to lawmakers are among more than 1,300 State Department personnel fired by the Trump administration as part of a purge by Musk’s now-disgraced Department of Government Efficiency last July. Under the rules governing federal employment, they were not immediately terminated but issued reduction-in-force, or RIF, notices, which is the legally prescribed federal procedure for laying off career civil servants.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs, whose top priority is to “protect the lives and serve the interests of American citizens” around the world, was especially hard hit, losing 102 personnel — including the entire rapid-response consular officer team. These FSOs, all with Top Secret clearances and who are still being paid, have indicated their willingness to return to service, and include many with experience in the Middle East, crisis management, evacuation operations, or so-called “active conflict/ordered departure environments,” according to the letter.

President Donald Trump began his war of choice with Iran on February 28, stating its “objective is to defend the American people.” But it wasn’t until March 2 that the State Department put out an alert for U.S. citizens to “DEPART NOW” from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen “due to serious safety risks.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 3 that stranded Americans should call a State Department hotline for assistance. Those that did were told they were on their own. “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation. At this time, there are currently no United States evacuation points,” an automated message stated.

The entire Massachusetts congressional delegation, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called out the “failures of the Trump administration and State Department to adequately prepare for the threats to American citizens living in the Middle East” in a March 5 letter and asked Rubio to provide answers to detailed questions about the evacuation failures. A month later, the State Department has yet to reply.

“Secretary Rubio has no answers for the failures on his watch, but these brave public servants paint the clearest picture yet of the damage the Trump administration has wreaked,” Warren told The Intercept. “Rubio recklessly purging hundreds of State Department experts has threatened our national security and put U.S. citizens in danger in the Middle East.”

The State Department did not provide answers to detailed questions from The Intercept about the fired FSOs. Instead, a spokesperson passed along anodyne talking points. “The RIFs did not have any negative impact on our ability to respond to the developments in the Middle East, our ability to plan, or our ability to execute in service to Americans,” she wrote in an email. “There were no RIFs that affected our overseas operations that are working in the field to assist Americans.”

As U.S. citizens scrambled to flee the Middle East last month, nearly 20,000 flights to and from the region were canceled and major travel hubs, including the world’s busiest international airport in Dubai, were shut down for days. Americans found themselves stranded in countries that were quickly engulfed in America’s war, like a family from North Carolina left cowering in a bomb shelter in Jerusalem as missiles exploded outside, and a Philadelphia native living in the United Arab Emirates who described the State Department’s evacuation notices as “absolutely cavalier.”

“I saw in the air missiles and lights and all that and everyone got on their knees and started praying,” Evelyn Mushi, who was transiting through the airport in Abu Dhabi with her 82-year-old mother, told NPR. “I’m just very shocked and upset that I see other nations getting their citizens out and we’re just stranded here.” Stuck in a hotel in Doha, Qatar, Odies Turner, a private chef from South Carolina, told ABC News: “I really don’t know what to do. I’ve reached out to the embassy, consulate and airlines. There’s no information on when I will get back home. It’s a mess.”

The Trump administration claims that it “has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans worldwide.” But while Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Operation Epic Fury was the “culmination of months, and in some cases, years, of deliberate planning,” Trump said the administration had no evacuation plans for Americans abroad because “it all happened very quickly.”

With Americans stranded and endangered, the State Department sat on its hands, the FSOs allege. On March 5, a former member of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Rapid Response team with significant crisis management experience volunteered their services but say they were rebuffed. “At this time, there are no opportunities for officers who were subject to the July 2025 RIF to volunteer for the Middle East Consular Task Force,” the FSO was told by the State Department, according to the letter.

The State Department did not reply to repeated questions about why the FSO’s offer was rejected.

Last month, Foreign Policy reported on a letter from John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, to Michael Rigas, State Department deputy secretary for management and resources, in which he noted that many of those fired in July 2025 had offered to assist in the Middle East evacuation effort.

Related

No Way Home, Episode One: Life and Death

Among the fired FSOs are officers who managed emergency evacuations from Ukraine in 2022; evacuation from Afghanistan — including an officer who led operations responsible for relocating 52,000 Afghans across multiple countries in 2025 and another who processed 8,000 evacuees in under 30 days at a remote site; evacuations from the Middle East during the Arab Spring; the tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, including an officer who adjudicated tens of thousands of visas from a single overseas post; the 2006 Lebanon evacuation, which was the largest U.S. noncombatant evacuation operation since World War II; and those that managed posts during ordered departures from Bahrain, Ethiopia, and Iraq, among other relevant experience, according to the letter.

One officer who shared their story on the condition of anonymity noted they joined the Foreign Service in the late 2000s, serving in South Asia and the Middle East, among other posts. A speaker of Urdu, Pashto, and Arabic, this FSO was one of those who played a major role in the Afghanistan evacuation, helping to process more than 34,000 Afghans, including 900 American citizens, whose identities and case statuses, such as those who worked with the U.S. military and had special immigrant visas, needed to be verified. “I loved my work and gave it my all,” said the officer. “I was on sick leave when I received an email that I was laid off. Shock can’t describe how I felt.” Others offered similar resumes and disbelief at the dismantling of the Foreign Service by the Trump administration.

“Collectively, members of our group are prepared to staff multiple crisis task force shifts. We have a deep bench of Middle East experts, consular experience, crisis expertise, crisis communications background, and relevant language skills to immediately deploy to help,” wrote the fired FSOs. “The U.S. Government is not trimming fat. It amputated capability, and Americans are now paying the price.”

The July 11, 2025 reduction in force terminated 1,346 State Department employees, including 276 Foreign Service Officers — some of whom were later reinstated to correct purported firing “errors” — as well as 1,070 civil service employees. The Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations alone lost 62 personnel, including a senior stabilization adviser embedded with the military who supported evacuation planning.

The department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs also lost close to 80 employees between August and December 2025, and the position of the assistant secretary in charge of Near Eastern Affairs remains vacant. The administration’s most recent budget proposed a 40 percent cut to the bureau, although Congress eventually settled on a less dramatic reduction.

The cuts are symptomatic of the hollowing out of the State Department, especially in the Middle East. As of March, the United States had no confirmed ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, Algeria, Libya, or Iraq. Career ambassadors to Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, and Algeria were also dismissed without replacement. The State Department did not respond to a request to confirm that all those positions remain open, nor did the press office address how the lack of leadership in so many key countries has affected diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.

The post DOGE Cuts Left U.S. Unable to Help Americans Stranded in Iran War Zone appeared first on The Intercept.

“I want to occupy,” he told The Intercept. “Yes, occupy, the word nobody likes. I want to occupy southern Lebanon. Move all the Arabs from there, up to the Litani River.”

We’re sitting in the command and control center in Moshav Netu’a, a village so close to the U.N.-brokered “Blue Line” separating Israel and Lebanon that one can see the physical barrier from the windows of many homes. Here, amid a temporary pause in fighting between the U.S.–Israeli alliance and Iran, there’s no sense of peace.

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

Under muddied terms for the two-week ceasefire with Iran, Israel has kept fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching an all-out war on the country’s armed elements and civilians alike. The Israeli military bombed villages and ordered more than 1 million Lebanese civilians to evacuate from the south, territory that is often viewed as Hezbollah’s stronghold due to its significant Shia Muslim population and weapons caches. Israel blew up bridges linking the north and the south of Lebanon. In defiance of previous ceasefire conditions set in November 2024, Hezbollah forces that were supposed to retreat north have remained in the south, and Israeli forces continued to hold five “strategic” hilltops in the north, accumulating more than 10,000 total ceasefire violations.

For the residents of Netu’a, Hezbollah is a problem to be solved, and one to fix with military power.

“The Arabs’ only motivation to stop fighting is if you take their land,” Adom said. “You kill them, it doesn’t matter. You hurt them, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Only taking territories. This is the only thing that matters to them.”

At least seven Netu’a residents told The Intercept that they see the eviction of Lebanese civilians as the only sure way to prevent their own displacement. After October 7, 2023, fearing a follow-on attack by Hezbollah, the Israeli government evacuated kibbutzim and other settlements near its border with Lebanon, including Netu’a, scattering families in hotels across the country.

The evacuation was “like a piece of gum being pulled apart,” said Oranit Manasseh, a mother of four who lives in Shtula, another kibbutz on Israel’s border with Lebanon. “That is what happened to our community, day after day that we were living in hotels away from the kibbutz.”

Manasseh and her children have since been able to return to their home, which was not damaged during the evacuation. When she spoke to The Intercept, the family was staying at a villa in Shtula that would normally host tourists for holidays like Passover but has been sitting largely empty since October 8, 2023, with few Israelis wishing to visit the north for a vacation with incoming missile fire.

Manasseh’s hope, she told The Intercept, is that the Israeli military “depopulate the south, get rid of Hezbollah, and keep the terrorists out.”

Israel’s actions suggest it’s headed in that direction. On Wednesday, in the span of 10 minutes, Israel struck Lebanon more than 100 times, killing at least 300 people. This was the deadliest single incident since the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990. According to reporting from the Financial Times and confirmed by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, more than 100 women, children, and elderly were killed in the strikes, including two journalists and four Lebanese army soldiers.

Part of the justification for Israel’s war on Hezbollah is the view that it is the only way to establish a security buffer to protect communities in the north situated on Israel’s border with Lebanon.

Much like October 7th catalyzed Israeli society’s calls for the war on Gaza — in which Israel killed, according to conservative estimates, 70,000 Palestinians and over 700 more since the oft-violated ceasefire went into effect last year — there are calls to reduce southern Lebanon to rubble.

Related

With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank

They either “crush Hezbollah so that the Lebanese government can disarm, and keep the south free of terrorists,” said another member of Netu’a’s security patrol, or they will have to evacuate again in the future, and it will rip their communities apart.

Israel’s border communities are often referred to as the “periphery.” Looking out from Netu’a, one can see a string of Israeli military outposts situated on the Blue Line, which the U.N. established in 2000, erecting a border wall like the one that cordons off the West Bank. Far from the metropolitan centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, these communities occupy a particular place in Israeli politics, and according to residents who spoke with The Intercept in these communities, there is a consensus that they feel forgotten in the wake of October 7.

“I think the government doesn’t do enough for this area. Israel is like a golden cage,” Manasseh said. “You love it, but we are not safe here anymore.”

These “periphery” residents are working to leverage their political influence to end the “Hezbollah problem,” partly by staying in their communities during this war instead of evacuating, forcing the Israeli military to either protect them or admit they can’t.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

This is also part of what is driving the Israeli military to establish a “security zone” south of the Litani, in the words of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, to “protect” the communities in the north and spare them from another round of evacuation. Israel’s Home Front Command, which is responsible for setting civilian protection guidelines during wartime, announced that because of its strikes on Lebanon, the government would extend the time for Israeli civilians to enter shelters after an alert from zero seconds to 15, due to a partial withdrawal of Hezbollah forces north.

“We all understand that if they reach our borders, it won’t stop there,” said Hila Kronos, who just finished a round of reserve duty in the Israeli military and has been living in Adamit, another Israeli border community, for 20 years. “Maybe not now, but in five or ten years, they could decide everything is calm and use that opportunity to attack Israel.”

Do it now and once and for all is the consensus in these kibbutzim, whose residents insist that they will be staying. “There will be no more evacuations,” another resident told The Intercept.

The desire to establish a security buffer is driving not only Israel’s aerial bombardment campaign, which has claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Lebanese people since the start of the war, but also what used to be a fringe movement that has grown more mainstream in the past two years: the push, as in Gaza, to settle the south of Lebanon.

To do so would require a military commitment that even the most hawkish of Israeli military figures acknowledge Israel does not have. They are facing a manpower crisis and are short more than 15,000 soldiers.

The fringe Uri Tzafon movement, Hebrew for “North Awaken,” which advocates for the Jewish settlement of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, has put their words into action. In February, members of Uri Tzafon launched drones into southern Lebanon, urging residents to evacuate, and breached the security barrier as a demonstration in favor of settlement.

Adom, the Netu’a security official, said that his family does not belong to the Uri Tzafon movement. Still, he told The Intercept, “my middle son wants to establish a movement that would push the government to take control of the area, build settlements, and pass a law declaring it Israeli territory — like the Golan Heights — and formally annex it.”

But Israelis like Kronos are not so sure of this strategy. “They’re trying, but I think we’re losing too many young people,” he said. “There’s too much death for something I don’t believe can actually be achieved.”

Kronos has grown disillusioned living in Adamit, watching war after war claim civilian lives in the south and destroy her home community.

“We were young, without children when we first came here. We would sit on rooftops and watch the rockets, almost like a game, trying to guess where they would land,” Kronos said. “I remember sitting next to a woman. Today she must be around 18. She told me her story: Twenty years earlier, in 2006, she had been sitting in a shelter holding her baby son. She had been told that by the time he grew up, there would be no need for an army in Israel, no war in Lebanon, that things would be better. And now, 20 years later, she was sitting there again, and her son was in Lebanon, fighting.”

The post “I Want to Occupy”: Inside the Israeli Movement Pushing to Raze and Settle Southern Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

“This has been in the works for quite a while,” a U.S. government official told The Intercept, noting that the Selective Service System — which is separate from the Defense Department — had been pressing Congress to revamp the registration process. The official referenced “sliding numbers” of men registering on their own and the potential of war with a near-peer power like China. The official also mentioned a Trump administration “obsession” with creating “comprehensive federal databases.”

Men ages 18 to 25 who are eligible to be drafted have been required to register with the government since 1980. Failure to do so is a felony, which bars unregistered men from most federal jobs, eligibility for student loans, and carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

More than 100 million men have registered in the last 46 years. But according to the Selective Service, just 81 percent of eligible men registered in 2024, a 3 percent point drop from the prior year.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump “keeps his options on the table,” when Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked her about the possibility of a return of the draft. But Trump would be required to get approval from Congress to enact a draft, which was last used during the Vietnam War.

A peacetime draft, begun in 1948, was key to fighting the war in Vietnam and also fomenting resistance to it. About one-third of the American men who served in Vietnam were drafted, and roughly another third enlisted to avoid the draft. A 1968 Department of Defense survey found that 47 percent of volunteers said draft motivations — such as attempting to exercise some measure of control over the timing of their service or the military branch — were their most important reason for enlisting. Patriotism, by comparison, was cited by 6 percent of enlistees.

Related

“Utterly Dismayed”: Air Force Engineer Resigns as Dissent Against Gaza War Slowly Spreads Within Military

Beginning in 1964, students began burning their draft cards as acts of draft resistance. Five years later, student body presidents of more than 250 universities wrote to the White House to say they planned to refuse military induction. Many American men claimed conscientious objector status, refused induction, or fled abroad to Canada, Mexico, Sweden, or elsewhere. It is estimated that around 570,000 men classified as draft offenders.

Throughout the war, men of privilege found sanctuary from the draft through a wide variety of means. Deferments were automatically available for those in graduate school, until 1968, and college until 1973. Around 3.5 million men also received medical exemptions. While the poorest Americans were forced to rely on military doctors for their military physicals, affluent men could visit private physicians and obtain letters to excuse them for even the most minor injuries. One study found that 90 percent of men able to press such claims were successful, even if they were in good health. Trump himself was granted five draft deferments, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, provided by a doctor who rented his office from Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump.

Draft evasion and resistance became so widespread that it almost crippled the Selective Service System. Draftees were also in revolt within the armed forces, leaving the military on the brink of collapse by the early 1970s. When Col. Robert Heinl, a distinguished combat veteran as well as a military historian and analyst, examined the state of the military in Armed Forces Journal in 1971, his evaluation was dire:

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug- ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous.

That same year, President Richard Nixon signed legislation authorizing the end of the draft. The last draftees reported for duty on June 30, 1973, and the next day, the all-volunteer force was established. The Defense Department now celebrates this as “a return to the tradition of voluntary service in the military.” The Pentagon has been able to effectively control this far more docile force where “every soldier, Marine, sailor, airman and guardian in the military today is a volunteer.”

On December 18, 2025, Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2026, mandating automatic Selective Service System registration. The agency’s proposal to automatically enroll men was then submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30. After review, the Selective Service plan will need to be coordinated with other federal agencies that could potentially share personal information about draft-eligible men, including the Social Security Administration and Census Bureau. “SSS will implement the change by December 2026, resulting in a streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment,” according to Selective Service.

The government official said they did not believe that the new Selective Service registration process was geared toward “generating cannon fodder” for a ground invasion of Iran or any of the other fronts in Trump’s mushrooming world war. “This is about effective manpower generation, channeling, management, and surveillance,” the official told The Intercept. 

The post Trump Administration Wants to Make It More Difficult to Evade a Military Draft appeared first on The Intercept.

The ceasefire announced Tuesday night by President Donald Trump and confirmed by Iranian officials is on life support. If Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gets his way, it may soon be dead. 

Over the first 36 hours of the supposed ceasefire, hundreds have been killed and thousands injured in Israeli strikes on Lebanon. The attacks extended beyond Israeli’s traditional targets in southern Lebanon and Beirut’s outskirts into the central parts of the capital — and may mark the heaviest bombardment of the country since Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Trump suggested the ceasefire remains intact because Israel’s attacks are “a separate skirmish,” but the official announcement of the agreement described “an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.” The language was put forward by Pakistan’s prime minister, who had brokered the deal and, according to the New York Times, the U.S. had seen the text before it was publicly released.

The words “including Lebanon,” however, lasted no longer than it took for Netanyahu to talk to Trump immediately before the ceasefire announcement. Trump confirmed Thursday that he told Netanyahu to “low-key it,” appearing to give Israel a green light to immediately violate the ceasefire and put it at risk of collapse.

In response, Iran says it will not open the Strait of Hormuz so long as Israel is violating the ceasefire. And planned talks in Islamabad for the U.S. and Iran to hammer out a longer-term agreement during the two-week ceasefire window have been thrown into doubt.

For his part, Netanyahu sought to dispel any notion that the Iran war was ending, emphasizing that the ceasefire is temporary and “a way station on the way to achieving all of our goals.”

When it comes exerting Israeli influence on the U.S., Netanyahu once infamously said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.” Indeed, according to reports, it was Netanyahu who convinced Trump to launch this war in the first place.

Now, potentially upending U.S. efforts to disentangle itself from conflict with Iran, the Israeli prime minister finds himself on familiar footing: playing the role of spoiler against any form of U.S.–Iran détente.

Decades of Détente-Busting

America’s supposed junior partner has worked ceaselessly to prevent any off-ramp from confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. In 1995, when Iran and the U.S. flirted with economic rapprochement by opening the Iran oil industry to American investment and development, Israel and AIPAC lobbied Congress and President Bill Clinton to block it.

In 2002, as Iran worked directly with the U.S. on Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11, seeking a grand bargain, Israel interdicted a weapons shipment it said was bound for Palestinian forces, making questionable claims about the shipment’s Iranian provenance. The seizure helped tank the exploratory talks on Afghanistan and convinced President George W. Bush instead to infamously cast Iran as part of the “axis of evil.”

Related

For Netanyahu and the Saudis, Opposing Diplomacy With Iran Was Never About Enrichment

Over the course of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear talks from 2013 to 2015, Israel worked to block a deal — with Netanyahu engaging in unprecedented efforts to sabotage diplomacy. He even addressed a joint session of Congress against a nuclear deal over the White House’s objections. Ultimately, Netanyahu succeeded with Trump’s ascension: Under intense lobbying, Trump tore up the deal and nearly brought the countries to war before his first term ended.

Joe Biden campaigned on reentering the deal, but that aim was prematurely dispatched during Biden’s transition when Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist in 2020, prompting Iranian hard-liners to pass legislation that blew up talks. When negotiations finally began in earnest in 2021, Israel launched an attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Iran responded by announcing it would, for the first time, enrich uranium to nearly weapons-grade. The talks, predictably, failed.

Trump’s Second Term

Though Trump has proved to be a willing partner in Netanyahu’s push to increase tensions with Iran, Israel nonetheless now found ways to play the spoiler — much in the same manner it did with Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.

The Israelis successfully turned two round of nuclear talks during Trump’s second term into cover for surprise attacks. Both the war on Iran in June 2025 and the current one were initiated not amid great diplomatic impasses, but when Iran put forward workable proposals. In both cases, U.S. officials said Israel was going to act regardless of the American position — and so the U.S. had to join the wars.

These were not wars to defeat Iran, but rather wars to defeat U.S. diplomatic efforts. They are the kinetic manifestation of Israel’s long efforts to keep the U.S. in a permanent state of war with Iran, sometimes cold, sometimes hot.

If U.S.–Iran talks do move forward and there actually is progress toward hammering out a sustainable cessation of hostilities, Israel will remain a wildcard. Any long-term ceasefire will require Israel’s acquiescence.

If Netanyahu tanks the ceasefire and the U.S. and global economy continues to suffer, Israel’s already plunging support among Americans is likely to falter even further. At this point, however, Netanyahu seems more concerned with his domestic political welfare than his credibility with American voters.

Related

Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq

Netanyahu is widely thought to benefit from wars — from Gaza to Iran and now, most critically, in Lebanon — to shore up his political fortunes. He faces an election in October and losing could lead to the revival of corruption charges that might land him in prison.

The question now may unfortunately not be whether Iran and the U.S. can find a compromise. Instead, the fate of the global economy and, not least, Iranians themselves, could rest between Netanyahu and Trump, who faces his own political challenges in midterm elections this year.

It may once again be a question of whether it is America or Israel who blinks first.

The post The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

Pressed for a more accurate count of U.S. personnel killed or injured during Operation Epic Fury, the Office of the Secretary of War provided a new tally that still undercounts American dead or wounded. This comes after U.S. Central Command ghosted The Intercept after sending lowball and outdated figures last week.

The continued undercount comes amid a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in which both sides have claimed victory. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine noted during a Wednesday press conference that the halt in fighting was only “a pause” in the conflict, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said U.S. forces were “prepared to restart at a moment’s notice.”

When questioned about stale numbers initially sent by CENTCOM, a Secretary of War spokesperson referred The Intercept to the new Operation Epic Fury webpage of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which generates casualty counts for Congress and the president.

DCAS counts 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war, listing out their names. Missing from 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 also recognized him while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

The Pentagon did not reply prior to publication to a request for comment on why Davius was missing from its casualty rolls.

The military’s count of those injured and wounded is even more flawed. Last week, multiple military personnel were injured when a U.S. F-15 was shot down over Iran and an A-10 Warthog crashed near the Straight of Hormuz. One of the Air Force officers from the F-15 who was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces during a Saturday night mission, for example, was “bleeding rather profusely” and “injured quite badly,” according to President Donald Trump. But CENTCOM has failed to provide The Intercept with updated casualty figures reflecting these and other wounded personnel. (The Pentagon’s DCAS may reflect these wounded, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to the system’s lack of detail.)

CENTCOM has not replied to more than a dozen requests for clarification over the last week since claiming to The Intercept in a March 30 email that “since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.”

On its website, the DCAS states that its goal “is to provide as accurate reporting of military casualties as possible.” Yet it posts conflicting counts of troops injured in Operation Epic Fury. On one page titled “Casualty Summary by Casualty Category,” DCAS lists 372 troops wounded in action — a count 23 percent higher than CENTCOM’s claims to The Intercept. On another page titled “Casualty Summary by Month and Service,” DCAS lists an even lower “grand total” of wounded in action: 357. Both counts were updated on April 8.

Putting aside its internal data discrepancies, the way the system defines casualties offers a skewed image of the conflict. Though the DCAS tracks “non-hostile” deaths — meaning individuals killed in accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. For example, the DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. What it doesn’t show — and what the CENTCOM casualty figures also exclude — are more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped out of the war zone for repairs. 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.

The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment on why DCAS tracks non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s impossible to know how many other casualties have been kept under wraps. After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, during Trump’s first term, the administration peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” Trump 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.”

Related

The Media Just Can’t Help Turning Iran Fighter Jet Rescue Into “Black Hawk Down”

Trump claimed that “nobody was even injured” in the Saturday rescue mission that involved hundreds of Special Operations troops and other military personnel. During a Wednesday press conference, Hegseth echoed this, claiming there were “zero American casualties.” But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.

“Not a single thing we’ve done has put an American troop in more of a harm’s way,” Hegseth said on Wednesday. But current and former Pentagon officials say the War Department failed to adequately protect U.S. personnel on bases across the Middle East, forcing troops to retreat to hotels and office buildings during Epic Fury.

U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”

While much of the focus on U.S. forces has centered on air and naval power, it is the Army — whose soldiers man the interceptor missile systems on those bases — that has suffered the most casualties: 251, according to DCAS statistics. The Army is only now seeking sensors designed to assess “blast overpressure,” the sudden onset of a pressure wave from explosions from enemy munitions and the blasts from weapon systems employed by soldiers themselves. It can lead to cognitive impairment and adverse effects on brain health, including traumatic brain injuries. Trump has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” CENTCOM claims that the “vast majority” of injuries of the current war have been “minor.”

Of the 13 deaths counted in DCAS, six were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. A soldier also died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” If the USS Ford injuries were added to the Navy count, that service would take over the top spot with more than 264 wounded. DCAS also counts 39 Air Force personnel wounded in action and 19 Marines.

More injuries are on the horizon. It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. Last year, even before the war, an article in a professional journal published by Army University Press warned that the “relentless demands from training, overseas rotations, and deployments significantly affect servicemembers’ physical and mental health, leading to wellness issues and influencing military readiness. Continuous operations without adequate recovery intervals worsen stress-related illnesses, causing a hazardous balance between duty and health.”

The Pentagon wants $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran but money for long-term health care for veterans of the Iran war will likely push the ultimate price tag into the trillions of dollars.

Around 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed around the Middle East where the United States and Israel, as well as Iran and its proxies, have struck fuel depots, oil facilities, and military sites — all of which release noxious substances shown to negatively affect human health. If they file disability claims at the rate of the extremely short 1990 Gulf War — 37 percent of whom receive compensation today — this alone would add around $600 billion in costs over their lifetimes, according to Linda Bilmes, the co-author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”

The post We Called Out the Pentagon for Undercounting U.S. Casualties in Iran. They Keep Doing It. appeared first on The Intercept.

“We believe democracy cannot be delivered through missiles, and freedom cannot emerge from destruction and more death of innocent lives,” they said in the previously unreported letter.

The signers included Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, the first Iranian American Democrat elected to Congress.

Women have been at the forefront of demonstrations against the Iranian government in recent years, including the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 that were met with a deadly crackdown. The international protest movement was set off by the Iranian government’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly failing to wear the mandatory headscarf properly.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

The Iranian government’s suppression of that protest and another anti-government protest wave earlier this year have been cited as justification for the war that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched in February.

“Remember the great women march,” Trump said at an April 6 press conference at the Pentagon, going on to describe government snipers suppressing protests by shooting demonstrators. In a speech justifying last June’s Israeli-led war against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Women, Life, Freedom movement by name in Farsi.

The Iranian American women who signed the letter, however, said that the war is only encouraging further crackdowns.

“The Iranian people must not become casualties of geopolitical rivalry or instruments of foreign agendas,” the signatories wrote. “We refuse the false choice between repression at home and devastation from abroad. Both deny Iranians the right to determine their own future.”

Trump has given mixed signals as to whether he hopes to pursue regime change in the conflict.

The Iranian diaspora is deeply divided over the war, but a recent poll suggests Iranian Americans may be turning against it.

Related

With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say

Despite the polarized exile politics, many groups responded with horror to Trump’s threat that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has also threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants, which would be a war crime; the U.S. and Israel have already launched scores of attacks targeting civilian sites across the country.

Ansari, the letter’s most prominent signer, said Monday that she plans to file articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “repeated war crimes,” including the bombing of a school that killed scores of young girls.

“As the daughter of Iranian immigrants who fled the brutal Islamic Republic, and the first Iranian-American Democrat elected to Congress, I stand in strong opposition to this illegal war,” Ansari said in a statement. “Iranians deserve freedom and democracy. That cannot be delivered through bombs and destruction of civilian infrastructure. Iran’s future must be determined by Iranians alone — free from war and authoritarian rule.”

The 14 signers of the letter included women serving as city councilmembers, state legislators, and Democratic Party delegates.

The post Iranian Women Elected to Office in U.S. Reject Trump’s Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

“President Trump has repeatedly threatened war crimes in Iran and now he is expressing genocidal intent,” said Sarah Harrison, an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs during Trump’s first term. “Every single lawmaker and national security leader needs to stand against this and make clear to the U.S. military that these are unlawful orders and if carried out they will someday face criminal prosecution.”

This interpretation was echoed by Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer and now a law professor at Cardozo Law School. “The U.S. understanding of the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention requires a ‘specific intent’ to destroy a group — such as a national or ethnic group as relevant here,” she told The Intercept. “That is an intentionally high bar, and one that explicitly would not cover unintended consequences of armed conflict. If acted upon, the President’s statement would be evidence of that required specific intent.”

Trump has repeatedly threatened to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure should the nation’s leaders not heed his demands. “We have a plan because of the power of our military where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12:00 tomorrow night,” he said on Monday. “Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again.” This echoed an Easter morning missive. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump ranted on Truth Social. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

Asked on Monday if he was concerned that his threat to bomb power plants or bridges amounts to war crimes, Trump replied “No, not at all,” and said in another interview, “I’m not worried about it.”

“What President Trump is describing as the destruction of ‘a whole civilization’ would be a war crime, plain and simple,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch and a former senior adviser on human rights to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “There is no gray area on this under international law.”

Civilian infrastructure has been a frequent target since the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran began on February 28. “Strikes on critical infrastructure and industrial sites have disrupted basic services including electricity, water and telecommunications, also leading to increasing immediate and longer term environmental and health risks,” wrote the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, in a brief report issued last week. Airports, cultural heritage locations, hospitals, industrial sites markets, residential areas, and schools have also been struck, including the civilian international airport in Tehran, a power plant in Khorramshahr, and water reservoirs in Fars and Khuzestan. Last week, the U.S. attacked the newly constructed B1 highway bridge, which killed 8 people, who were, according to the deputy governor of Alborz province, not military targets but nearby villagers celebrating Nowruz, the Persian new year.

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed strikes affected multiple nuclear sites, including Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant. Rafael Grossi, head of the nuclear watchdog, warned on Monday that “continued military activity near the BNPP — an operating plant with large amounts of nuclear fuel — could cause a severe radiological accident with harmful consequences for people and the environment in Iran and beyond.”

Trump claimed that the Iranian people actually want the United States to attack their civilian infrastructure, citing “numerous intercepts” of communications. “‘Please keep bombing,’” Trump said on Monday of these supposed pleas. “And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding. And when we leave, and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, ‘Please come back.’”

In actuality, Iranians have been fleeing from Tehran and other major urban areas under attack. Almost a month ago, UNHCR — the U.N. refugee agency — reported that as many as 3.2 million people were already displaced inside Iran due to the conflict. While casualty counts are fragmentary, more than 2,100 civilians had been killed in the war by the end of last month and around 28,000 injured, according to Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education. This included 216 children killed and 1,881 injured, as of April 3.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

Yager noted that Iranians who have already suffered severe government repression, including the mass killings of protesters earlier this year, now face obliteration by America. “They’re being told their entire society could be destroyed by the president of United States, with the power of the U.S. military at his fingertips. His previous threats to bomb their power plants and bridges are threats to the systems that keep people alive, their electricity, water, and health care,” she told The Intercept. “Even before anything happens, that kind of rhetoric creates deep anxiety and fear for millions of civilians who have no control over these decisions but who will bear the consequences.”

Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the war, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. This includes 763 schools. The highest profile of these strikes was the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school. The attack killed around 175 civilians, most of them children. A preliminary Pentagon report concluded the strike was conducted by U.S. forces, directly contradicting assertions by Trump that Iran struck the school.

The Iranian 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.

Around 400,000 people are also facing food insecurity in Tehran alone, according to local authorities. Inflation for groceries is at almost 113 percent, severely curtailing people’s purchasing power, according to OCHA.

The post With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say appeared first on The Intercept.

Both aircraft had two-person crews, U.S. officials told The Intercept, and in both cases, one crew member was rescued and one remains missing.

The downing of the U.S. plane undermined an assertion of strength President Donald Trump made in a nationally televised speech earlier this week.

“They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100 percent annihilated,” Trump said Wednesday. “We are unstoppable as a military force.”

A month ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iranian leaders were “looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over.” He continued: “Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long.” 

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment on how Iran could down an advanced U.S. aircraft when the country supposedly no longer possesses anti-aircraft weaponry.

The loss of the F-15 is the first known instance of an American combat aircraft shot down in Iran since the war began in late February. It comes after Trump repeatedly threatened critical infrastructure in Iran and the U.S. struck the B1 bridge outside of Tehran, which killed eight people and wounded 95, according to Iranian news media.

Last week, at least 15 U.S. troops were wounded in an Iranian attack on a Saudi air base that hosts American troops.

The U.S. military has previously provided misleading and stale casualty statistics, in what a defense official who spoke with The Intercept called a “casualty cover-up.”

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

At least 15 U.S. troops in the Middle East have died since the beginning of the Iran war, including six personnel who were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, and a soldier who died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” More than 520 U.S. personnel have also been injured, according to an Intercept analysis.

On Friday, Iranian state media published pictures and videos that they claimed show parts of the downed plane and one of the ejection seats.

Update: April 3, 2026, 12:45 p.m. ET
The article has been updated with additional information about the surviving crew member who was located.

Update: April 3, 2026, 2:58 p.m. ET
This article has been updated with news of a second U.S. military plane that crashed near the Strait of Hormuz.

The post Iran Shoots Down F-15 Fighter Jet After Trump Bragged They Had No Capability appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, appears to be engaged in what a defense official called a “casualty cover-up,” offering The Intercept low-ball and outdated figures and failing to provide clarifications on military deaths and injuries.

At least 15 U.S. troops were wounded Friday in an Iranian attack on a Saudi air base that hosts American troops, according to two government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or injured in the region since the U.S. launched a war on Iran just over a month ago.

President Donald Trump — who wore a blue suit, red tie, and a ball cap to the dignified transfer of the first Americans killed in the war — said casualties were inevitable. “When you have conflicts like this, you always have death,” he said afterward. “I met the parents and they were unbelievable people. They were unbelievable people, but they all had one thing in common. They said to me, one thing, every single one: Finish the job, sir. Please finish the job.”

On Tuesday, Trump teased that he would wind down the war with Iran in as little as two weeks despite not achieving many of his stated aims, such as “freedom for the people” of Iran, “tak[ing] the oil in Iran,” and forcing Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” At one point, the president even declared that the war would last “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”

CENTCOM has sent outdated statements on casualty numbers, meanwhile, resulting in undercounts, including a statement sent Monday from spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins noting that “Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.” The comment was three days old and excluded at least 15 wounded in the Friday attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The command did not reply to repeated requests for updated figures.

CENTCOM also would not provide a count of troops who have died in the region since the start of the war. An Intercept analysis puts the number at no less than 15.

“This is, quite obviously, a subject that [War Secretary Pete] Hegseth and the White House want to keep under major wraps,” said the defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly.

Related

Trump’s Secret Wars on the World Keep Expanding

In 2024, during the Biden administration, the Pentagon provided The Intercept with detailed chronologies of attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East that listed the specific outpost that was attacked, the type of strike, and whether — or how many — casualties resulted, along with an aggregate count of attacks by country.

The Trump administration’s numbers, by comparison, lack detail and clarity. The current CENTCOM casualty figures do not appear to include more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or otherwise injured due to a fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped off to Souda Bay, Greece, for repairs. CENTCOM did not reply to close to a dozen requests for clarification on the casualty count and related information sent this week.

“CENTCOM and the White House should be providing accurate and timely information on the costs and casualties involved in this war. After all, it is American taxpayers who are funding it and U.S. economic prosperity and economic wellbeing that is being undermined by it,” Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for measured U.S. foreign policy, told The Intercept.

As the U.S. has relentlessly bombed Iran, that country has responded with attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East using ballistic missiles and drones. CENTCOM refuses to even offer a simple count of U.S. bases that have been attacked during the war. “We have nothing for you,” a spokesperson told The Intercept. An analysis by The Intercept, however, finds that bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have been targeted.  

On Tuesday, Hegseth said that Iran retained the ability to retaliate for U.S. strikes but that their attacks would be ineffectual. “Yes, they will still shoot some missiles,” he said, “but we will shoot them down.” On Wednesday morning, officials in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar all reported missile or drone attacks from Iran.

Iranian strikes have forced U.S. troops to retreat from their bases to hotels and office buildings across the region, according to the two government officials. The defense official was livid about the Pentagon’s failure to adequately harden the bases and ridiculed Hegseth’s Tuesday prayer at a Pentagon press conference. “May god watch over all of them, each day and each night. May his almighty and eternal arms of providence stretch over them and protect them,” said Hegseth.

“Why didn’t Hegseth protect them?” the defense official asked. “Anyone with a brain knew these attacks were coming.”

Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”

Kavanagh, who previously called attention to the vulnerability of U.S. outposts in the Middle East, echoed Votel. “It has been clear for years that the rapid proliferation of drones and cheap missiles would put U.S. bases and U.S. early detection radars in the region at risk, yet the Pentagon did little to protect them,” she said. “The failure to invest in hardened infrastructure was a choice. Congress should see this failure as evidence that simply giving the Pentagon more money is not a path to national security.”  

“We would be better off if bases across the region were closed for good,” she added.

In public statements, Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi called out the U.S. for using civilians in nearby Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperative Council states as human shields. “U.S. soldiers fled military bases in GCC to hide in hotels and offices,” he wrote on X last week. “Hotels in U.S. deny bookings to officers who may endanger customers. GCC hotels should do same.”

Votel also expressed concern about troops using hotels and offices, noting it “could turn normal civilian infrastructure into military targets for the regime.”

Last month, an Iranian drone strike on a hotel in Bahrain wounded two War Department employees, according to a State Department cable reviewed by the Washington Post. CENTCOM did not respond to a request to confirm to The Intercept that those injuries stem from a March 2 attack on the Crowne Plaza hotel, a luxury property in Manama, Bahrain’s capital, but one official indicated this was likely.

Votel said that a failure to provide troops with adequate protection may handcuff U.S. operations. “I think this really complicates command and control and could affect unit cohesion and effectiveness,” he told The Intercept, referring to the transfer of troops to hotels and office buildings. “That said, we may not have many options if we cannot protect the military bases where they would normally be bedded down.” 

At least 15 U.S. troops in the Middle East have died since the beginning of the Iran War, including six personnel who were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, and a soldier who died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” More than 520 U.S. personnel have also been injured, including those who suffered smoke inhalation on the Ford.

Prior to the current war with Iran, U.S. bases in the Middle East were increasingly targeted by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles after Israel’s war in Gaza began in October 2023, most of the attacks occurring in the year following the outset of the conflict. At least 175 troops were killed or wounded in those attacks, including three service members who died in a January 2024 strike on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan. Other attacks targeted al-Asad Air Base, the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, Camp Victory, Union III, Erbil Air Base, and Bashur Air Base in Iraq and Al-Tanf garrison, Deir ez-Zor Air Base, Mission Support Site Euphrates, Mission Support Site Green Village, Patrol Base Shaddadi, Rumalyn Landing Zone, Tell Baydar, and Tal Tamir in Syria.

The casualty statistics do not include contractors, most of them foreigners who suffered non-combat injuries. Official U.S. statistics show that there were almost 12,900 cases of injuries to contractors in the CENTCOM area of operations during 2024 alone. More than 3,700 were the most serious non-fatal injuries, including traumatic brain injuries, requiring more than seven days away from work. Eighteen contractors were also killed, all of them in Iraq. The numbers are likely significant undercounts, but if even the fractional number of known contractor injuries is added to the tally, the casualty count for Americans and those on U.S. bases may top 13,600.

The post “Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House and Pentagon won’t tell the American people where the U.S. is at war, and Trump has never gone to Congress for war authorization. But an analysis by The Intercept reveals 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. Due to a lack of government transparency, obscure security cooperation, and carveouts baked into the U.S. Code — like the 127e authority enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the covert action statute that enables the CIA to conduct secret wars — the actual number could be markedly higher.

During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including drone strikes, ground raids, proxy wars, 127e programs, and full-scale conflicts — in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. More than 6,500 U.S. Special Operations forces’ “operators and enablers” are currently deployed in more than 80 countries around the world. And during its second term, the Trump administration has also bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland (perhaps also Iceland), and Mexico.

Under the U.S. Constitution, it’s Congress that has the authority to declare war, not the president, pointed out Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

“Congress has not authorized conflicts in this wide array of contexts, and indeed many lawmakers — to say nothing of members of the public — would be surprised to learn that hostilities have taken place in many of these countries,” Ebright said. “Congressional authorization isn’t just a box-checking exercise: It’s a means of ensuring that the solemn decision to go to war is made democratically and accountably, with a clear purpose and goal that the American people can support.”

Related

Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning

Despite the fact that the U.S. has not declared war since 1941, its military has fought near-constant wars from Korea to Vietnam from the 1950s through the 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century, as the executive branch has come to dominate the government and Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to declare war.

For years, the Pentagon has even attempted to define war out of existence, claiming that it does not treat 127e and similar authorities as authorizations for the use of military force. In practice, however, Special Operations forces have used these authorities to create and control proxy forces and sometimes engage in combat alongside them. Recent presidents have also consistently claimed broad rights to act in self-defense, not only of U.S. forces but also for partner forces.

The Trump administration has even claimed the full-scale conflict in Iran is something other than what it is. Earlier this month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby refused to call it a war. “I think we’re in a military action at this point,” he told lawmakers.

Trump routinely refers to the conflict with Iran as a war, but he has also cast it as an “excursion.” Trump has also erroneously claimed that if he doesn’t call the conflict with Iran a “war,” it circumvents Congress’s constitutional authority.

“We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It’s for legal reasons,” he said on Friday. “I don’t need any approvals. As a war you’re supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that.”

EArlier This month, Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank M. Bradley told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations that secret-war capabilities were key for the United States.

“This environment places a premium on forces capable of operating persistently inside contested spaces, below the threshold of armed conflict,” he said. “Small footprints are necessary to enable denial strategies, strengthen allied resilience, and contribute to deterrence without triggering escalation, and to counter illicit and malign activity without large-scale military presence.”

Related

Pentagon Official on Venezuela War: “Following the Old, Failed Scripts”

Bradley claimed America’s enemies “blur the lines between competition and conflict,” but this is precisely what America has done for decades, including numerous secret wars during both Trump terms. The United States has waged unconstitutional and clandestine conflicts through a variety of mechanisms. The covert action statute, for example, provides the authority for secret, unattributed, and primarily CIA-led operations that can involve the use of force. It has been used during the forever wars, including under Trump, to conduct drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities. It was apparently employed in the first U.S. strike on Venezuela in late 2025 — a prelude to a war, days later, that led to the kidnapping of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by U.S. Special Operations forces.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has been stretched by successive administrations to cover a broad assortment of terrorist groups — most of which did not exist on September 11 — has been used to justify counterterrorism operations, including ground combat, airstrikes, and support of partner militaries, in at least 22 countries, according to a 2021 report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Under Trump, even this signature post-9/11 workaround for war has been eschewed for something more clandestine. Top Pentagon leadership wanted to keep so-called “advise, assist and accompany” or “AAA” missions — which can be indistinguishable from combat — under wraps during Trump’s first term. This led then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to order U.S. operations in Africa to be kept “off the front page,” a former senior U.S. official told the International Crisis Group.

But the bid to keep Trump’s other African wars secret imploded during a May 2017 AAA mission when Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans were wounded in a raid on an al-Shabab camp in Somalia. The Pentagon initially claimed that Somali forces were out ahead of Milliken — U.S. troops are supposed to remain at the last position of cover and concealment where they remain out of sight and protected — but that fiction fell apart, and the truth emerged that he was, in fact, alongside them.

This was followed by an October 2017 debacle in Tongo Tongo, Niger, where ISIS fighters ambushed American troops, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others. The U.S. initially claimed troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. In truth, until bad weather prevented it, the ambushed team was slated to support another group of American and Nigerien commandos attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, another 127e program.

Under 127e, U.S. commandoes — including Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marine Raiders — arm, train, and provide intelligence to foreign forces. Unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are then dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims.

During Trump’s first term, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world. Previous reporting by The Intercept has documented many 127e efforts in Africa and the Middle East, including a partnership with a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military, also during Trump’s first term, that continued long after its members were connected to mass atrocities. In addition to Cameroon, Niger, and Somalia, the U.S. has conducted 127e programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and an undisclosed country in the Indo-Pacific region.

“During the global war on terror, the Department of Defense built out its capacity, and secured legal authorities, to operate ‘by, with, and through’ foreign militaries and paramilitaries,” Ebright said, noting that these authorities had been designed for countering al-Qaeda but had led to led to combat against groups that had not been debated and approved by Congress. “These smaller-scale, unauthorized hostilities through or alongside foreign partners may seem quaint compared to the Iran War and other recent public and persistent hostilities, but for years they deepened the perception that the president may use force whenever and wherever he pleases, even without specific congressional authorization.”

For almost one year, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests from The Intercept for information about past and current 127e programs.

“While Trump claims to be the president of peace, he is actually the conflict-in-chief, waging many pointless and deadly wars, ensuring generational animosity towards a rogue U.S.,” said Sarah Harrison, an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs during Trump’s first term. “His actions are not just unconstitutional and in violation of international law, they make Americans less safe and their wallets less full.”

During his second term, Trump has made overt war across the African continent, conducting airstrikes from Nigeria to Somalia. In the Middle East, Trump has left a trail of civilians dead, from a migrant detention facility in Yemen to an elementary school in Iran.

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

America’s punishing war on Iran has ground on for over a month without a clear definition of victory, a plan for the aftermath, or coherent strategy behind bellicose rhetoric and shifting claims, most recently that the U.S. is fighting a regime change war and will possibly seize Iran’s oil.

“We’ve had regime change if you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead,” Trump said on Sunday, referring to top ranking officials killed in the war including the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The next regime is mostly dead.”

Additional U.S. forces are now being sped to the Middle East to augment more than 40,000 troops already stationed in the region. This included dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, as well as two carrier strike groups. (The USS Gerald R. Ford had to since abandon the fight and travel to port, following a fire on the ship.)

More than 2,000 additional Marines arrived in the region over the weekend, and 2,000 more are on their way by ship. A similar number of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division are expected to arrive soon. The influx of troops comes as Trump has threatened to seize Iran’s oilfields.

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” he told the Financial Times on Sunday. In a Monday Truth Social post, Trump threatened to commit war crimes by “blowing up and completely obliterating all of [Iran’s] Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)”

Related

The Regime Survives, Trump Has to Deal, and Iranians Are the Biggest Losers

The Pentagon has already requested $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for the Iran war, and the ultimate cost is expected to run into the trillions of dollars.

The U.S. is also ramping up conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Since attacking Venezuela and abducting its president in January, the U.S. has reportedly undertaken a regime-change operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Trump has also repeatedly spoken of “taking” Cuba. He has also threatened to annex Greenland (and possibly Iceland), turn Canada into a U.S. state, and carry out military strikes in Mexico.

The chief of U.S. Special Operations Command recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” and said his elite troops “remain postured to provide… support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  The U.S. claims to be currently at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. has conducted an illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, destroying 49 vessels and killing more than 160 civilians. The latest strike, on March 25 in the Caribbean, killed four people.

“Trump wants to call DoD’s summary executions on the high seas a war because he thinks that will allow him to kill civilians. And he wants to call the war in Iran a military operation so he doesn’t have to go to Congress for approval,” explained Harrison, who also previously served in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. “It doesn’t matter what imaginary legal constructs Trump comes up with, it won’t protect him or his officials from accountability for these undeniably illegal uses of force.”

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-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.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced earlier this month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region.

Harrison drew attention to the human costs of the raft of conflicts being waged by the Trump administration, remarking on “all the people who are needlessly dying because of one man’s ego and how it makes the U.S. much less safe.”

Successive White Houses and the Pentagon have also kept secret the full list of groups with which the U.S. is in conflict. In 2015, The Intercept asked the Pentagon for “a complete and exhaustive list of the groups and individuals, including affiliates and/or associated forces, against which the U.S. military is authorized to take direct action” — a Pentagon euphemism for attacks. Eleven years later, we’re still waiting for an answer. Asked more recently for a simple count — just the number — of wars, conflicts, interventions, and kinetic operations, the Office of the Secretary of Defense offered no answers. “Your queries have been received and sent to the appropriate department,” a spokesperson told The Intercept weeks ago before ghosting this reporter.

“The proliferation of unauthorized, presidentially initiated conflicts raises profound challenges for our rule of law, democracy, and accountability around matters of war and peace,” said Ebright. “This is true, too, of secret wars that government officials may refer to as ‘light-footprint warfare’ or ‘low-intensity conflict,’ not the least because we’ve repeatedly seen intermittent strikes or raids give way to protracted military engagements and larger-scale operations.”

Bradley — perhaps best known for ordering the double-tap strike that killed two shipwrecked men last fall — recently offered a murky catalogue of “state adversaries, terrorists, and transnational criminal networks” aligned against the United States, including China, Russia, “Iran, its proxy forces, and terrorist organizations,” and other unnamed “state adversaries”; transnational criminal organizations that “continue to attempt to exploit the southern approaches to the United States”; ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates; as well as “terrorists” and “extremist groups” in Africa. The State Department currently counts 94 foreign terrorist organizations around the world, including 13 that were designated back in 1997. Thirty-seven groups, about 40 percent of the list, were added under Trump — 27 during his second term. The most recent addition, the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, was designated earlier this month. The administration also maintains a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations which it will not disclose.

For weeks, The Intercept has asked if the White House even knows how many wars, conflicts, kinetic operations, and military interventions the U.S. is currently involved in. We have never received a response.

The post Trump’s Secret Wars on the World Keep Expanding appeared first on The Intercept.

The deployment includes the division’s “headquarters element,” support staff, and some personnel who manage logistics, planning, and command operations, the sources said.

The order comes as the Pentagon is weighing the broader deployment of the 82nd Airborne’s “Immediate Response Force,” a 3,000-soldier brigade capable of deploying anywhere in the world within a day, which was first reported by the New York Times on Monday. It also comes as thousands of Marines are headed to the region along with at least three more ships, including the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship with F-35 attack jets with vertical takeoff and landing capability, as well as attack and transport helicopters.

Open source reporting suggests dozens of transport aircraft used to ferry troops and cargo have been flying out of airfields used by America’s most elite commandos, including the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.

U.S. ground troops could be employed to carry out a number of varied missions from more conventional combat operations to specialized commando missions. These could include seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub, or securing that country’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island. We did Iwo Jima. We can do this,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Fox News Sunday over the weekend. “I don’t know if you take the island or you blockade the island. But I know this: the day we control that island, this regime, this terrorist regime, has been weakened. It will die on a vine.”

“People are going to have to go and get it,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month when asked about Iran’s uranium.

The potential expansion of Operation Epic Fury into a ground campaign would be another major escalation of President Donald Trump’s expanding world war.

Related

Sources Briefed on Iran War Say U.S. Has No Plans for What Comes Next

One of the U.S. officials, who has been briefed on Operation Epic Fury, speculated that Trump’s fixation on and fascination with the supposed success of Operation Absolute Resolve — in which the U.S. attacked Venezuela and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro — might prompt something similar in Iran.

Orders for the deployment of thousands more members of the division may come within hours, said one of the officials on Tuesday afternoon.

The Office of the Secretary of War referred questions about the deployment of ground forces in Iran to the White House, which did not immediately return a request for comment.

Last week, Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank M. Bradley said that he has long viewed Iran and its proxies threatening the freedom of navigation in and around the Middle East as “the most dangerous crisis” facing the United States. “I would anticipate that along those same lines, the ability to project force into increasingly contested environments where U.S. national interests are threatened is the characterization of the next most dangerous crisis,” he told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. “That is why that we have made our ability to do that our top modernization priority. If you look at the operation conducted under Absolute Resolve into Venezuela, I would argue it’s the most sophisticated integrated inter-agency joint force raid ever conducted.”

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

The U.S. forces being sped to the Middle East will augment more than 40,000 troops already stationed in the region and forces brought in before the Trump administration began its latest war with Iran on February 28. This included dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, as well as two carrier strike groups. (The USS Gerald R. Ford had to since abandon the fight and travel to port, following a fire on the ship.)

The Pentagon has already requested $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran. The ultimate cost of the war is expected to run into the trillions of dollars.

The post Leaders of Elite Paratrooper Unit Ordered to Middle East as Trump Weighs Iran Ground War appeared first on The Intercept.

Attacks on Latin American drug cartels are “just the beginning” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, told members of the House Armed Services Committee last week.

Humire indicated that many more strikes in Latin America are on the horizon. The comments came a day after President Donald Trump again teased American annexation of Cuba. “I do believe I’ll be the honor of — having the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump said last week. “Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”

Humire announced that the Department of War supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” — Pentagon-speak for March 3 strikes on unnamed “Designated Terrorist Organizations” previously reported by The Intercept. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” he said.

The U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region. In response to a request for comment, U.S. Southern Command referred The Intercept to a statement on X by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense confirming the bomb landed in Colombia.

Related

U.S. Military Joins Drug War in Ecuador: “It Wasn’t Going to Be Just Boat Strikes Forever”

Humire referred to the attacks as “joint land strikes” and said that America was providing Ecuador with “capabilities that they otherwise would not have.” The U.S. has since conducted at least one more strike with Ecuador. “Yes — as @POTUS has said — we are bombing Narco Terrorists on land as well,” self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on March 6, announcing the new strike. Days later, in a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, the White House informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.” 

The attacks in Ecuador are also part of, and an expansion of, Operation Southern Spear: the U.S. military’s illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. has conducted 46 attacks since September 2025, destroying 48 vessels and killing almost 160 civilians. The latest strike, on March 19 in the Pacific, killed two more people and left one survivor. 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.

“This Administration is barely paying lip service to the constitutional or international law governing the use of force. But we have these rules for a reason,” said Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer and now a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. “Rushing to war on one man’s whims is the exact opposite of what the Constitution demands.”

Gen. Francis Donovan, the SOUTHCOM commander, told lawmakers last week that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even larger campaign. “What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Humire could not say how many land strikes were being conducted across almost 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations. “I don’t have an exact number,” he replied to a question. But when asked by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, if the War Department would “be moving to a lot more terrestrial strikes,” Humire replied, “Yes, ranking member.”

The Office of the Secretary of War did not respond to a request to clarify how great that increase might be.

Humire said the U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign was “setting the pace for regional, deterrence-focused operations against cartel infrastructure throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.” The word “deterrence” has become a popular Pentagon euphemism for the use of lethal strikes, in contrast to previous efforts to U.S. government efforts to marshal economic, diplomatic, and military means to convince adversaries to abandon a specific course of action. “Deterrence has a signaling effect on narco-terrorists, and raises the risks with their movements,” Humire claimed.

In January, the U.S. attacked Venezuela and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. It now rules the country through a puppet regime. Federal prosecutors have reportedly drafted a criminal indictment against Venezuelan Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, threatening her with corruption and money laundering charges if she does not continue to do the bidding of the Trump administration. Trump also recently teased the possibility of making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state.

The Trump administration is reportedly undertaking a regime-change operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel Díaz-Canel as a requirement for negotiations between the U.S. and that island nation. U.S. officials are said to favor Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of 94-year-old Raúl Castro, the former Cuban president and brother to Fidel, the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008. Díaz-Canel referenced U.S. plans to “seize the country” on X late Tuesday and said the U.S. would be met with “impregnable resistance.”

“I am holding Cuba,” Trump said recently, noting his costly regime-change war in the Middle East takes precedence at the moment. “We’re going to do Iran before Cuba.” Trump imposed an oil blockade on Cuba in January, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis. The island’s national electrical grid has already collapsed three times this month, with one blackout lasting more than 29 hours. U.N. human rights experts have condemned Trump’s fuel blockade on Cuba as “a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order.”

Trump, who has repeatedly spoken of “taking” Cuba, is the latest in a long line of U.S. presidents who have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government. During the Cold War, the CIA launched the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The agency also tried to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times. The U.S. also conducted a covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.

In the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon prepared top-secret plans to pave the way for an attack on the island. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a top-secret memorandum titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” It described numerous false-flag operations that could be employed to justify a U.S. invasion, including a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)” and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and blaming the incident on Cuba. Other U.S. plans for covert action on the island specifically prioritized attacking Cuba’s electrical grid.

Asked if the Joint Chiefs of Staff were involved in analogous actions today, spokesperson Maj. Annabel Monroe referred The Intercept to Southern Command, who then referred The Intercept to the State Department, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Related

Latin America’s New Right Ushers in Pan-American Trumpism

Humire said that the War Department was “currently focused on partner-led deterrence operations,” but would not rule out unilateral U.S. strikes across Latin America. He said that, in addition to Ecuador, the U.S. had forged agreements with 17 partner-nations in the Western Hemisphere, as part of the so-called Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. This international body, formally announced by Trump at his Shield of the Americas summit earlier this month, will focus on “bi-lateral and multi-lateral operations against cartels and terrorist organizations.”

Humire was asked if any of the 18 nations were concerned about issues of sovereignty regarding the U.S. potentially conducting attacks in their countries. “Members of the coalition specifically signed a joint security declaration mentioning that they want this support and most of them all are looking for this,” he replied. But the barebones statement they signed is astonishingly vague and offers little of substance on the subject.

Humire indicated that the U.S. had leveraged gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela to strong-arm Cuba and assist in “gaining compliance from Nicaragua,” as well as “shifting the Caribbean in a favorable direction toward U.S. interests.”

Recent official leaks about the potential U.S. indictment of President Gustavo Petro of Colombia on drug charges — the official reason for Maduro’s kidnapping, and the means reportedly used to keep his successor, Rodriguez, in line — suggest the U.S. may employ that tactic as leverage or an eventual pretext for military action. (Petro has denied ties to drug traffickers.)

Related

“Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner”

“It sounds as if Petro is potentially on the chopping block,” a former defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to his current employment, told The Intercept. The source said leaks about the potential indictment of Petro, coupled with the U.S.–Ecuadorian attack, which has stirred up tensions along the South American nations’ border, increasingly look like a coordinated campaign to foment “discord” if not conflict. Asked in January about attacking Colombia, Trump responded: “It sounds good to me.”

The U.S. attacks on the Colombia–Ecuador border come as America has recently established a “permanent FBI presence in Ecuador,” joining agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. Just before the U.S. began attacks on the Ecuador–Colombia border, Donovan traveled to Quito, Ecuador’s capital, to meet with President Daniel Noboa and senior Ecuadorian defense officials. 

Last August, Lt. Col. Phillip Vaughn — the commander of an Expeditionary Task Group overseeing Air Force Special Operations in the Caribbean and South America — coordinated meetings to increase “interoperability between U.S. and Ecuadorian forces” to “counter illicit actors operating along Ecuador’s northern border” with Colombia including “operational planning scenarios, execution of close air support procedures,” and “multiple topics on Joint Terminal Attack Controller support,” which relates to targeting and airstrikes.

America’s Western hemisphere blitz is part of what Trump and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine”: a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. While President James Monroe’s policy sought to prevent Europe from colonizing and meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has wielded his variant as a license for America to do exactly that.

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.” Humire defined “America’s immediate security perimeter” as “Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” Trump has also threatened to annex Greenland (and possibly Iceland), turn Canada into a U.S. state, and conduct military strikes in Mexico. Humire also detailed efforts to strong-arm Panama to cut ties with China to ensure access to the Panamanian-owned canal that he nonetheless called a U.S. “national asset.”

Related

Sources Briefed on Iran War Say U.S. Has No Plans for What Comes Next

In addition to his wars in the Western hemisphere, Trump has also launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during his second term — most of them sites of U.S. conflicts during the war on terror.

Smith, the House Armed Services Committee ranking member, told Humire that Trump’s wars in the Americas also appeared to be morphing into a new “forever conflict” with no clear goal or “end point.” Asked what “level of achievement” would be necessary to “stop kinetic action,” Humire responded with a wall of words about border security, terrorism, and cartels. When Smith interrupted to clarify if the boat strikes would continue unabated, Humire confusingly replied: “No, correct.”

The post Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning appeared first on The Intercept.

Johnson decided to delay a vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that had been scheduled for this week, Politico reported Friday. The move gives critics of the law more time to push for reforms, including a requirement that federal agents get a warrant before searching for information on Americans.

If the bill ultimately advances to the House floor, however, some top Democrats — including the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut — are already lobbying colleagues to vote for Trump’s request. Others, including members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are pushing back.

The internal debate among both Democrats and Republicans is a rerun of a clash two years ago over FISA — only this time, Trump’s reelection and the war on Iran have raised the stakes. The spying law expires next month.

With Republicans split, advocates say Democrats have a rare chance to push through added safeguards.

If they want to.

Figures from the Democratic establishment have often been ambivalent or openly hostile to reforming the law, one of the most controversial pieces of post-9/11 legislation and a focus of Edward Snowden’s disclosures.

“Evidence of Misuse”?

Johnson initially seemed poised to push through a vote on the law this week — but reports emerged last Friday that he had delayed the vote until the middle of April. That delay came in the face of skepticism about extending FISA without reforms from hard-liners in Johnson’s own party, such House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, R-Md.

Section 702 of FISA allows employees of the FBI and other agencies to search for information on U.S. citizens and residents among spy data that is collected abroad.

Congress has passed a series of partial reforms intended to curb widespread abuses of the law by the FBI. During fiery debate over the law in 2024, Johnson managed to narrowly get the bill through the House by agreeing to a two-year extension.

He also teamed up with then-President Joe Biden to pressure members to defeat by a single vote reformers’ most highly sought-after amendment, a provision that would have forced federal agents to go to a judge before searching for information about Americans.

The vote this year is shaping up to be as much of a nail-biter, and it appears that Johnson may need Democrats to lend an assist. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., says that he will vote against extending the law without reforms, which means that Johnson can only afford to lose one other GOP member.

Himes, who is leading the push to get Democrats to pass a “clean” renewal of Section 702, said in a letter to his party colleagues last week that he understood why they might have concerns about the Trump administration having access to that powerful spying tool. Still, he urged them to vote for reauthorization if the bill makes it to a final floor vote.

Related

Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live”

“If I saw any evidence that Trump administration officials were directing the intelligence community to use Section 702 for illegal or improper purposes, such as to persecute, surveil, or harass Americans,” he said, “I would urge a ‘no’ vote on reauthorization, even though I recognize the program’s unparalleled national security value. I have not seen evidence of misuse, despite being on the lookout for any hint of it.”

One House staffer who asked for anonymity to speak freely said they were surprised that Himes has not pushed for concessions from Johnson — on FISA or other legislation — in exchange for Democratic support.

That support could be especially crucial if Johnson struggles to pass a procedural vehicle, known as a rule, to get the bill onto the House floor for a final vote.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said during a press conference last Thursday that his entire caucus would oppose proceeding to a vote under a rule, which is standard practice for the opposition party in the House.

Jeffries left open the possibility, however, that Democrats could freely cross party lines to support bringing the bill to the floor under a suspension of the rules, which would require support from a two-thirds majority of House members.

“Jim Himes is emerging as arguably the most important actor in this fight,” said Sean Vitka, executive director of the left-leaning group Demand Progress, which supports further reforms to FISA. “The most significant question at the moment is: Will he be able to marshal enough Democrats to go with his play? And that ultimately is a question of whether or not members of Congress think people are looking.”

“Times Have Changed”

On the opposite side of the debate from Himes, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., sent a letter to Democrats Thursday urging them to oppose a “clean” reauthorization of the surveillance bill.

Under pressure from the Biden administration and to the disappointment of privacy advocates, Raskin voted in favor of the legislation two years ago. He said in his letter this week that “times have changed.”

“The safeguards put in place in 2024 have been badly eroded by the Trump Administration,” he wrote. “The ‘clean’ extension favored by President Trump and Stephen Miller leaves the Trump Administration in charge of policing its own abuses of this authority — and what could go wrong with that?”

Raskin did not directly condition support for the bill on adding a warrant requirement, the longtime holy grail of privacy advocates.

In a letter Thursday, more than 90 civil rights and progressive groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Demand Progress, and Indivisible called on Congress to require the government to obtain a warrant before searching for communications about Americans.

Related

FBI’s Warrantless Search Ruled Unconstitutional in a Blow to Government Spying

They also highlighted a relatively new issue: the data-broker loophole. Under current law, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been able to skirt civil liberties protections by buying information from data brokers that could include location data, search histories, and transaction records of Americans.

FBI Director Kash Patel testified during a Senate hearing Wednesday that the agency was gleaning “valuable intelligence” from such data.

Advocates hope that in addition to a warrant requirement, Democrats could use their leverage in the surveillance bill debate to close the data-broker loophole.

Dems in Disarray

Some Democrats who helped doom a warrant requirement last time have yet to signal how they will vote this time around.

Related

Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It.

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., gave a passionate defense of the domestic spying bill on the House floor in 2024. His primary opponent, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, has already attacked him over the issue.

Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe gave a closed briefing to House members about the law on Wednesday. Speaking to The Intercept after that meeting, Goldman said he was still deciding whether to support a clean reauthorization.

“From my perspective, I’m going to need more data and information and need to have some way of verifying the information that they are providing, because I have no faith that this administration is doing anything by the law,” Goldman said.

Another Democrat who voted against a warrant requirement in 2024 and now faces a primary challenge from the left, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said he also has yet to decide.

“There are threats to the country, and then there are threats for the country from this administration,” Cohen said. “It’s kind of a balancing act.”

“Fake” Deadline

Advocates pushing for added reforms would have to guide them through both the House and Senate before the April 20 expiration of the current law.

Related

Counterterror Director Used Hamas Attack to Justify Mass Surveillance Program Renewal

The ongoing conflict with Iran is adding to the pressure, with Trump’s supporters arguing that it makes passage of a “clean” reauthorization more important.

One supporter of a warrant requirement, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said this week that he now supports a clean reauthorization.

“We have been at this for 10 years,” Jordan told reporters Wednesday. “There has been huge improvement based on the reforms we have done over the last decade, and this is a temporary extension, a short-term extension at the time we have this military operation going on in Iran.”

Reform advocates, however, have argued that the pending deadline is not as pressing as it seems. If the law expires next month, intelligence agencies may still be able to force tech companies to hand over communications under existing authorizations from a special surveillance court that do not expire for months.

“We have time to get this right,” Raskin said in his letter. “Opposing ‘clean’ reauthorization does not mean Section 702 suddenly turns off in April. FISA explicitly allows existing certifications to continue past a sunset. The government is in court right now making sure that Section 702 surveillance extends well into next year, no matter what.”

The post Democrats Might Save Mike Johnson’s Push to Give Trump Domestic Spying Power appeared first on The Intercept.

In a March 11 memo, Hegseth, who has made grooming and appearances a central focus in his time at the helm of the U.S. military, raised the bar to qualify for a religious exemption to his blanket ban on beards. The guidelines lay out a strict new process by which service members may apply for a religious exemption and subject those who’ve already received one to a reevaluation, arguing they need to ensure their religious beliefs are “sincerely held” and have a genuine conflict with the grooming standards.

Service members who have spoken against Hegseth’s focus on grooming standards say his restrictions on beards are exclusionary to people from religious communities that require adherents to follow specific tenets of faith around beards, hair, and other grooming matters.

Sikhs, for example, who have served in the U.S. military since at least World War I, are required by their faith not to cut the hair on their head, to keep a beard, and to wrap their long hair in a turban. Members of many schools of Muslim tradition likewise have rules around beards and hair length.

A Sikh advocacy group derided the new requirements as “completely unnecessary.”

“Sikhs and other service members of faith already earned their accommodations, under policies and processes established under both the Obama and first Trump Administrations,” the Sikh Coalition said in a statement. “If there are accommodations that the Department of Defense feels are not sincere, they could have chosen to pursue those cases with a process that doesn’t force every single soldier, sailor, airman, guardian, and Marine with an accommodation through more paperwork and bureaucracy.”

The Department of War did not respond to a request for comment.

Related

Military Leaders See Iran War as “God’s Divine Plan” — a Chilling Turn for Trump’s Fascism

Hegseth introduced the new guidelines as the military increasingly embraces overt Christianity and Christian nationalism, including an ideological turn on the Air Force Academy’s oversight board and the presentation of the war on Iran as part of “God’s divine plan.”

The changes come months after Hegseth declared war on “beardos” in a combative speech in September.

“If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave,” Hegseth said at the time.

In a November letter to Hegseth, four senators — Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. — warned that an overly strict grooming standard could force religious service members from the ranks and ultimately harm the military’s primary mission of national security.

“This will happen either by forcing out servicemembers with accommodations earned through carefully following their branch’s established processes or signaling to members of these religious communities that their contributions are not needed in the world’s greatest fighting force,” the senators wrote. “At a time when readiness and retention remain urgent concerns, such a move would be ill-advised.”

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of service members’ rights to observe tenets of faith while in the military, limiting Hegseth’s ability to put in place an outright ban on any facial hair. He has opted instead to tighten the screws on anyone wishing to get an exemption.

Courts have generally required the military to accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can demonstrate a compelling operational need.

Under the new rules, anyone applying for an exemption — or facing reevaluation under the new guidelines — must submit a sworn statement affirming their religious beliefs, a statement detailing those beliefs, a statement explaining how the grooming standard would conflict with those beliefs, and supporting evidence backing up their “sincerely held” beliefs. Additionally, anyone applying for an exemption must receive from their unit commander a written assessment of the applicant’s sincerity of belief.

The policy also places commanders in the position of evaluating the sincerity of a service member’s religious beliefs. False statements could expose service members to disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The post Hegseth Makes Troops Prove “Sincerely Held” Faith in Latest Beard Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

As email dated Thursday compares immigration enforcement to fighting wildfires and other disaster response and implores civilian employees and contractors to “step up for our country’s next challenge.”

Those who volunteer “will directly support the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they work to ensure a safe and orderly immigration system,” reads the email, listed as from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. “To date, participants have helped ICE and CBP develop concepts of operation, provide logistics support, and managed enforcement activities that enhance public safety.”

ICE and CBP have faced a wave of public backlash in recent months, as immigration operations have terrorized communities across the country and killed two civilians in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month, and in February, Congress triggered a partial government shutdown by letting DHS funding lapse while Democrats request reforms.

Related

Pentagon Claims It Needs Additional $200 Billion to Pay for War on Iran

A photo of the memo, which was first reported by Military Times, appeared Thursday afternoon on an unofficial Facebook page for Air Force personnel. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the email’s details match those of an earlier department press release published March 11.

The Pentagon’s current call for DHS support appears to be a re-up of an earlier ask for volunteers made last August. At that time, Michael A. Cogar, the deputy assistant defense secretary for civilian personnel policy, expressed pride in civilians joining the efforts of DHS.

“This is a national security problem, and our civilians have the critical skill sets to support DHS in their mission,” Cogar said in August. “We’re proud that our civilians are already willing to sign up.”

The memo sent out Thursday claimed that more than 900 people had submitted applications so far to take part in the details, but did not specify how many people have been deployed. The March 11 press release claimed that around 200 civilians had deployed as part of the program.

Related

National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States

The email linked to a page on USA Jobs, a clearinghouse for federal job opportunities. The page, titled “Volunteer Force,” advertises a salary range of $25,684 to $191,900 per year. A list of potential volunteer duties include data entry, operational support, assisting ICE and CBP with managing the flow of detainees, and logistical planning.

The Pentagon has taken an active support role in DHS activities since the beginning of Trump’s second term, when Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border and authorized the armed forces to deploy there.

Pentagon spending on border security has been the subject of controversy over the past year. In December, Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration of siphoning at least $2 billion from the Pentagon’s budget and prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts over its traditional focus on national security.

Spokespeople for DHS, ICE, and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The post Pentagon Implores Civilian Workers to Join ICE “Volunteer Force” appeared first on The Intercept.