The increase followed the collapse last week of the ceasefire with Iran amid tit-for-tat attacks between the countries.

As hostilities escalated, Iran called for revenge on the U.S. for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war in February.

The numbers for both wounded and dead U.S. service members in the war increased on Monday, according to the Defense Department.

Iran claimed Sunday that it “demolished the U.S. Army’s surface-to-surface missile base” in Kuwait, killing three American military personnel.

U.S. Central Command responded: “There are zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.”

On Monday, however, the Pentagon’s Iran war death toll, which was last updated Friday, went up by one.

Pentagon statistics show a sailor died in what was provisionally deemed a “non-hostile” fatality with a “pending” caveat, meaning it could later be revised to a hostile death.

It marks the first U.S. fatality on the Pentagon rolls since March. It was not immediately clear whether the new death listed occurred in Kuwait.

The U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, CENTCOM, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ceasefire Collapse

Iran’s military said on Monday that it launched strikes aimed at American military targets in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Hours before, U.S. forces attacked Iran in response to strikes on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

President Donald Trump renewed his past protection-racket threats to seize the Strait and begin charging a 20 percent toll on all goods passing through it.

“We’re gonna keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it,” he said on Monday. “We’re gonna get paid for guarding it, a lot of money.”

Following a week of public funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei called for retribution for the late supreme leader’s assassination.

“We pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars from the criminal and disgraced killers,” he said. “This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.”

In addition to killing Khamenei, Trump’s war on Iran has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, including more than 150 — most of them children — in an attack on an elementary school.

U.S. Death Toll

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 428, a more than 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official count of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

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The number of casualties in the DCAS system fluctuates from time to time. On Monday, the number of U.S. deaths during Operation Epic Fury, the military’s name for the campaign in Iran, increased by one, to 14 total.

For a short time in May, however, the count was already at 14 before dropping back to 13, without explanation. Following the drop, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths.

The Pentagon list of the dead is missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who reportedly died of a sudden illness in Kuwait on March 6.

Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly recognized Davius as a fallen service member.

Wounded U.S. Personnel

On Monday, the number of U.S. wounded from the Iran war rose by one, to 414.

Like the official U.S. death toll, it has fluctuated, rising from 385 to 428 during a pause in hostilities in April. Later that month, the number suddenly declined by 15 without public comment from the Defense Department, leading to questions about manipulation of the figures or incompetence at the Pentagon.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries.

The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. More than 200 sailors injured during a fire aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford in March are, however, missing from the tally.

The post Iran Claims to Kill 3 U.S. Service Members in Kuwait appeared first on The Intercept.

Documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that technology from the Virginia-based startup Anomaly 6 has been used to assist the “Anomalous Health Incidents Cross Functional Team,” the Pentagon’s official Havana syndrome investigatory task force. That group studies a cluster of strange symptoms claimed by personnel from U.S. spy agencies, the State Department, and elsewhere in the federal government.

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In 2022, The Intercept revealed that Anomaly 6 had used a provocative demonstration of its surveillance prowess in a closed-door business pitch. The company, which purchases bulk cellular location data harvested from millions of unwitting smartphone users around the world, showed a potential customer that its data stores were so vast and accurate that it could pinpoint the movements of employees of both the CIA and NSA, tracking them as they commuted between their homes and their respective agencies headquarters. It was a remarkable demonstration of the advanced capabilities of private sector surveillance brokers, who lean on unscrupulous smartphone apps and advertisers that indiscriminately share and sell users’ location data.

For any military, the appeal of this technology is obvious, and the Pentagon has used commercial device tracking for years. Although Anomaly 6 previously marketed its wares by showing how it could spy on fellow Americans, the pitch also showed how the company could track a foreign adversary’s naval assets abroad, for example.

It’s not clear on what basis the U.S. Air Force Concepts, Development, and Management Office chose Anomaly 6 for its Havana syndrome investigation; federal records note the contract is worth nearly $6 million and set to run through September.

Anomaly 6 and the Air Force did not respond to a request for comment.

The Air Force redacted most of the document before releasing it to The Intercept, providing only fragments of information about how Anomaly 6 is help investigate “anomalous health incidents.” The contract, described in public procurement records as Project Yellowfin, notes that the Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team will make use of the company’s “expertise in location intelligence” to “identify actors and activities of interest,” and that the “Contractor shall produce data visualization products capable of being utilized as stand-alone brief materials by decision-makers and senior leaders. These products will enable briefers to highlight geographical distribution, temporal patterns, patterns of life, and interconnectivity of events and actors.”

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This reference to actors of interest may relate to the intensely held belief by Havana syndrome patients that their suffering is due to a covert energy-based attack by a foreign government. In its 2022 pitch, Anomaly 6 singled out its ability to track the movements of Chinese and Russian military personnel, both countries that have been implicated in hypothesized Havana syndrome schemes.

Last year, the U.S. intelligence community released a report that stated most of its constituent agencies believe it is highly unlikely the symptoms are the result of actions by a national adversary.

When asked if Anomaly 6 location data had been used to investigate this proposed nexus or contributed to the intelligence report, the Air Force did not respond. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the reorganization of the Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team, now a division of the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, helmed by former Uber executive Emil Michael. Michael’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Company That Bragged It Could Track U.S. Spies Hired to Investigate “Havana Syndrome” appeared first on The Intercept.

Maybe.

“To me, I think it’s over,” President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, referring to a preliminary truce inked in Islamabad, Pakistan, in June. That ceasefire, an American capitulation intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a key oil and gas shipping route whose closure by Iran was wreaking havoc on the global economy — never quite took effect. The price of oil spiked to its highest level in weeks following Trump’s Wednesday remarks.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” said Trump, referring to Iran’s leaders, as he wrapped up his trip to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They’re cuckoo.” At one point in his remarks, the 80-year-old president claimed that a U.S. warship was attacked by the “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”

The June agreement between the United States and Iran, designed to usher in further negotiations toward permanently ending the war that Trump began on February 28, echoed another faux ceasefire, signed in April, which was also largely a fiction.

Trump’s statement that he “thinks” the ceasefire has concluded surprised one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Shouldn’t he know?” the source said.

That official said the Trump administration had mismanaged the conflict and been repeatedly outmaneuvered by Iran, leading to a “twilight state” between war and peace, which has allowed Tehran to fortify its defenses and reconsolidate power. “He must be trying for the record of how many times you can lose the same war.”

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An Intercept analysis found that, despite celebrating the June agreement as a victory, the Trump administration failed to achieve any of its war aims. For weeks, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests for confirmation that the June ceasefire had collapsed and no goals of the war were reached. The White House did not reply to a question on Wednesday concerning the collapse of the ceasefire nor Trump’s claim of an attack by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”

The United States attacked Iran on Tuesday, after reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil sales. U.S. Central Command said that it had struck “over 80 targets with precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” Iran did not claim responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks on commercial ships, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Qatari ship carrying liquefied natural gas in waters off Oman’s coast.

CENTCOM also claimed to have attacked “more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait.” U.S. officials have previously claimed to have completely annihilated Iran’s naval forces. “Their Navy is gone,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 11, just after the first ceasefire was announced and fell apart.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and Parliament speaker, accused the United States of multiple violations of the June ceasefire agreement, in a Tuesday post. “The era of bullying and extortion is over. It leads nowhere. We don’t fold,” he wrote. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement published on state media on Wednesday, that in response to U.S. violations of the ceasefire, it had attacked 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait and also shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone.

“They’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said during his remarks in Ankara.

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During the president’s war of choice on Iran, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes almost unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm-monitoring group Airwars. On the first day of the war, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more civilians would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates. 

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran war is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known American casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

Trump vowed more attacks on Iran at the NATO summit. “I’ll give them a little warning we’re going to hit them hard tonight,” he said. On Monday, Trump threatened attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure that would “affect 91 million people,” almost all of them civilians.

“The child-killing and terrorist U.S. military in the early hours of this morning openly violated the ceasefire and violated the Islamabad understanding by launching an airstrike on a number of coastal bases and civilian stations,” the IRGC said in its statement.

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CENTCOM claimed to have struck Iranian air defense systems, “command and control networks,” coastal radar sites, and other targets and threatened further attacks. “CENTCOM forces remain postured and prepared to hold Iran accountable when the agreement is not adhered to or obeyed,” the command posted on X.

After previously failing to make good on his pledge to ensure Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” since Tehran still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium, Trump said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “de-nuke it.”

The U.S. official laughed when appraised of Trump’s pledge. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked of Trump’s denuclearization statement. The official said Trump had painted himself into a corner. “There is one word that describes this man and this war: a trainwreck.”

The post Another Trump Ceasefire With Iran Crumbles appeared first on The Intercept.

Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.

“Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”

A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.

In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.

“There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”

Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.

“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”

Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.

Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.

The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.

There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide report doesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.

Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled.

In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient.

“The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.

A Pattern of Abuse

When Spc. Mayra Diaz was assaulted on the Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, she was lucky to survive.

Diaz was blindfolded, with her hands bound over her head, having water poured on her face — “waterboarding me and causing me to choke,” Diaz later wrote. Her attacker “then wrapped a cord around my neck in an attempt to kill me.”

The assailant was a superior, Sgt. Greville Clarke, who knocked on her door at the barracks before threatening her with a pistol and raping her during the attack. The Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks; officials chose not to issue a public warning, citing concerns about compromising the investigation and causing potential panic.

The problems of homicide and suicide among women in the Army are inextricable from the prevalence of sexual assault. In some cases, like Diaz’s, a sexual attack involves an attempt on a woman’s life. Rape and sexual abuse are known to be detrimental to mental health, increasing the risk of suicide or self harm.

“There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for victims of military sexual trauma. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”

Male soldiers faced a smaller increase in suicide rates compared to civilian men than Army women did compared to civilian women, and men in the Army have a lower risk of dying by homicide than their non-military counterparts.

In fact, The Intercept’s investigation found, suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.

Some cases have made national headlines, such as the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, who took her own life at 20 years old after reporting sexual harassment.

For Ruiz’s family, the timing of her death raised troubling questions, echoing fellow Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillén’s infamous 2020 murder by an Army specialist. A subsequent Army inquiry into Ruiz’s case, reported by Telemundo, pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”

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Years earlier, in the wake of Guillén’s death, an independent review revealed “a total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Investigators issued 70 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul of the military’s sexual harassment and assault prevention programs.

But the violence didn’t stop. Women at Fort Hood continued to experience a grim roll call of harm: Homicide. Sexual assault. Suicides.

Three deaths at Fort Hood were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained by The Intercept.

Counting Guillén and Ruiz, there were nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years. The Defense Department’s most recent suicide report does not provide data on how many suicide decedents experienced sexual trauma, although the Pentagon has provided this data in previous years.

From 2001 to 2023, nearly 1 in 4 women service members experienced sexual assault, according to the Brown University’s Costs of War project, much higher than the numbers annually reported by the Pentagon. Research identifies those experiences as a key driver of suicide risk. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among women veterans have risen faster than among men.

In Diaz’s view, institutional failures were a key factor in her assault.

“Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks,” Diaz wrote in a federal tort claim, “Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”

Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. He died by suicide in custody.

Diaz was “in a U.S. Army base in a locked barracks, opening the door to someone in uniform. It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do,” Christine Dunn, an attorney representing Diaz, told The Intercept. “You don’t expect someone who’s in a uniform to be a serial predator.”

Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post, and only after she and her sexual assault representative made clear that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave.

“I suffered from extreme paranoia, exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large,” Diaz wrote. “I abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened to me. … I began going to weekly therapy but have stopped going because I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.”

The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or reports of Clarke’s predation specifically.

The anxiety, Diaz wrote, has never fully gone away.

“What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” her complaint stated. “It was entirely preventable.”

False and Frivolous

Last year, Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change its 15-6 regulation, which governs the process for investigating military-related misconduct like sexual harassment. Now the first step is verifying the “credibility of accusers with new disciplinary measures for soldiers who submit knowingly false or frivolous complaints.

Some fear the rule may discourage those experiencing sexual harassment from reporting incidents, perpetuating a “culture of victim blaming,” according to Protect Our Defenders’ Connolly.

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While Hegseth rolls back protections, the issue of violence against women in the military appears to be getting worse. The Intercept’s analysis shows that from 2011 to 2020, the per capita rate of women dying by suicide or homicide in the Army was 15 per 100,000. From 2021 to 2024, following the Army’s attempted reforms in the wake of Vanessa Guillén’s killing, the rate increased over 35 percent, to 21 per 100,000.

And deaths continued their pace in 2025.

Siegal McIntyre, the UNC professor studying domestic abuse, pointed to cases like that of Sgt. Francine Martinez, who was just weeks away from her 25th birthday on a night out at Fort Hood in September 2021, when she ran into the father of her child. He was a fellow soldier with whom she had recently separated, and Martinez had filed for child support weeks earlier.

An argument broke out, and when Martinez got into a car to leave, he followed, and eventually shot her in the head. She was hospitalized for two weeks before dying from her injuries, leaving behind her 1-year-old.

Research and Pentagon data indicate that rates of domestic and intimate partner violence in the military, particularly in the Army, are higher than the civilian population. Most victims are women, who also make up most of the homicide cases tied to that violence.

Martinez’s death was one of three cases the Defense Department reported in 2021 in which service members killed someone in a domestic or interpersonal dispute.

But data compiled by The Intercept identified at least seven cases that year in which service members were suspected of killing a spouse or partner in acts of domestic or intimate partner violence — more than double the official count.

“When the situation involves a marriage or partnership between agents and service members, it only complicates reporting,” said Siegal McIntyre.

A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report from 2021 suggests the number could be higher still, identifying several additional domestic violence-related homicides. The Intercept’s investigation also found other years’ congressionally mandated reports also have data tracking problems.

A Project on Government Oversight investigation revealed thousands of abuse cases involving Army personnel were mishandled, many never entered into tracking systems. Investigators could only look at 10 out of more than 60 Army installations. A Government Accountability Office report found the Pentagon doesn’t reliably screen for sexual assault when service members seek care or leave service and lacks systems to prioritize treatment or ensure confidential, long-term support.

“I don’t think there’s a mechanism within the Army for holding itself accountable,” said Dunn, who is also representing some of the 80 victims suing Army gynecologist Maj. Blaine McGraw, who was assigned to Fort Hood in 2023; he has since been accused of recording and making harmful physical contact with women during gynecological exams. (The Army did not comment on McGraw’s case, which remains ongoing.)

Some women who came forward had gone to McGraw seeking rape kits for sexual assault and say his actions further traumatized and distressed them.

“When the institution is facilitating the assaults and allowing them to happen, the institution needs to be held accountable,” Dunn said. “Almost every client who comes to me wants to come forward so that this wouldn’t happen to other women.”

A Failing System

In response to questions from The Intercept, the Army acknowledged having recorded more homicides than were noted in the dataset provided based on The Intercept’s FOIA request.

Between 2021 and 2023, the Army recorded a total of 16 homicides among active-duty women, Hagan told The Intercept. The data provided to The Intercept for its FOIA request counts only nine.

Hagan did not respond to follow-up questions on the discrepancy, and the Army did not provide data outside the years 2021 to 2023.

But the additional homicides would make the disparities found by The Intercept’s investigation even wider. If the same pattern of undercounting extends across the full 14-year span of our data, the true toll could be substantially higher.

After the independent review of Fort Hood following Guillén’s killing, Hagan said, the Army “implemented a series of major reforms to strengthen prevention, reporting, and accountability for sexual harassment and assault.” It shifted its criminal investigations division to civilian leadership, requiring more independent investigations, establishing stricter missing-soldier response protocols, and expanding data-driven oversight of cases.

But the deaths have continued, including another homicide at Hood last year. To advocates, there are other solutions to address these failures.

“You have to call DoD into Congress and demand answers on why progress hasn’t been made,” said Connolly. “Congress could scrutinize the data on domestic violence and other issues. They can appropriate more resources to DV investigations and hold hearings.”

“The potential solution lies with how funding is or isn’t tied to oversight,” Siegal McIntyre said. “Without Congress doing its job, nothing can change.”

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a House Armed Services Committee member and Air Force veteran, said The Intercept’s findings reflect a broader failure of leadership and oversight.

“This report is staggering, and unfortunately, unsurprising,” she said. “Servicewomen consistently bear the brunt of harassment, assault, retaliation, and systemic failures within the ranks, and it is costing them their careers, their safety, and in far too many cases, their lives.”

In a 1995 Defense Department study on homicide victims by gender, female service members across active-duty branches were killed at higher rates than both their male counterparts and women nationally. A Marine Corps and Navy-specific study covering 1995 to 1999 found similarly elevated risks.

The Pentagon never did further analysis. Ana Roque believes that change would fundamentally start with how the military builds itself to protect women like her daughter.

“I understand that the country needs soldiers, but recruiters need to be more careful regarding where these individuals come from,” Roque said. She called for more police and camera surveillance on bases, arguing that if it had been present, “they could have seen him moving my daughter’s body in broad daylight.”

She wishes she could have her daughter back.

“She always had a smile, no matter how difficult her day was,” Roque said. “She made time to help colleagues with various issues and never said no. I have many stories written in my notebook from soldiers and civilians who knew her and told me, ‘She saved me,’ simply by taking a minute to listen to them. She loved her family; we would talk three times a day: at 7 a.m., during my lunch break, and at night, when she would always say ‘Good night, Mommy.’”

How we analyzed the data

Reporters working for The Intercept submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Pentagon seeking data on all U.S. Army active-duty noncombat deaths from 2011 through August 2025. In response, the Department of Defense provided a spreadsheet detailing 5,285 U.S. Army deaths over the 14-year period categorized by rank, gender, military occupation, and cause of death. The latter was classified as either illness, self-inflicted, accident, pending, or undetermined.

To calculate the per capita suicide and death rates for women in the U.S. Army in this time period, The Intercept pulled manpower data from the Defense Department for each year in our analysis to provide the total number of women in the Army. National and international data on homicide and suicide was pulled from the FBI Crime Data Report, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to compare suicide and homicide rates.

There is no publicly available equivalent data for Army veterans, nor has such an analysis been done for the Navy, Air Force, or Marines.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

The post Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants appeared first on The Intercept.

Turning Murder Into Content

Half a decade later and I still remember his voice. A young man lies on the ground, begging, pleading, screaming as another man, swinging a machete, forces him to place his right arm on a small wooden bench. The attacker wants to make things easier on himself.

But it was never going to be easy.

The assailant begins hacking away. Swinging the panga again and again and again, taunting his victim as he delivers the blows. It unfolds slowly. You learn that even for a strong man with a large, sharp blade, it’s difficult to amputate an arm. Excruciatingly difficult.

It’s got to be the longest 1 minute and 18 seconds ever. After the final swing, you see the victim kicking his legs back and forth — in a way I’ve never seen another human move — writhing in agony on the ground.

For a while, my sources in conflict zones, and others who knew I investigated atrocities, would regularly send me such gruesome videos. There was the man lying in a street in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an assailant with a machete attempts to cut off his leg below the knee; I can still remember the exact sound of his cries. There’s the video of the captured Kurdish fighters. I recall how the second woman to be killed — just before she’s shot, point blank, in the head — watches the execution of her comrade. She doesn’t plead or cry or even flinch.

I would dutifully watch the videos, analyze them, and then pitch an article if I could make something of the footage. “You are going to die,” said a Cameroonian soldier, speaking to a group of women he referred to as “BH” — shorthand for the terrorist group, Boko Haram. In that video, which I reported on for The Intercept back in 2018, soldiers force their victims to kneel, including a woman with a toddler strapped to her back. One of those men directs the tiny girl to stand next to her mother. He then pulls the little girl’s shirt over her head, blindfolding her. You can guess what follows.

Videos of war zone violence, from Myanmar to Ukraine to the Middle East, have proliferated even more in the years since. Drones chasing panicked soldiers, or even toying with their quarry, before killing them, have grown into a popular modern motif. And graphic video of ambushes, executions, and traditional trophy “photos” are a commonplace. This type of footage, which used to lurk at LiveLeak and deeper recesses of the internet, is now more ubiquitous, circulating in more accessible online locales like Reddit.

Watching footage of such slaughter comes with a price. In 2015, Eyewitness Media Hub conducted a survey of people who often work with graphic “user-generated content.” Even back then, more than half of the 209 respondents reported that they viewed distressing media several times weekly. Twelve percent of the responding journalists and almost a quarter of the human rights and humanitarian workers said they viewed such traumatic content daily. Forty percent of respondents said that viewing such distressing images and video had a negative impact on their personal lives, leaving them with feelings of isolation, flashbacks, nightmares, and other stress-related symptoms. One quarter reported high or even very high “professional adverse effects.” More recently, a 2023 study of 300 Pakistani journalists found more than 66 percent reported experiencing indirect trauma.

“Intrusive recollections — re-seeing traumatic images one has been working with — are not unusual,” wrote Gavin Rees at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, where I was once a fellow. “Our brains are designed to form vivid pictures of disturbing things, so you may experience images popping back into consciousness at unexpected moments.”

I’ve certainly found this to be true. As a conflict and crisis reporter, I saw some disturbing things in the field which lodged in my brain. But strange as it may sound, some gruesome videos have had more staying power than horrors I saw in person. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve also encountered among other journalists, soldiers, veterans, and witnesses of war violence. I once knew a man who saw something incredibly traumatic — an almost unthinkable atrocity — which his mind blocked out almost entirely. He watched a movie where nearly the same type of murder-spectacle played out and was horrified. He told me that after watching the film, he couldn’t believe someone would do such a thing — and yet, he had seen exactly that same horror show.

In recent months, my laptop has been filling up with a different type of snuff film. The footage is very similar to those Cameroonian clips: defenseless people being slaughtered as the murderers film. In these cases, however, the videos are shared not by some low-ranking murderer or accomplice-in-arms. The first of them was posted on social media by the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, President Donald Trump. Several later videos were posted online by self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The most recent clips have been shared by a military command headed by a four-star Marine Corps general, Southern Command chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan.

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Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 200 civilians, since September 2025.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings. These summary executions are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial. After each of these double or triple or mass murders, Trump, Hegseth, or SOUTHCOM have posted a video of those civilians being executed from above.

Snuff films have become a signature of the second Trump administration. Just eight days after Trump took office for a second time, Sebastian Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on the National Security Council, said he presented Trump with a target in Somalia. “Kill him!’” Trump replied, and the man was slain in an airstrike. “He declassified the video because the president wanted to post it. So he posts the video of the hammers of hell being dropped on this ISIS leader,” Gorka recalled with a laugh. “President puts it on Truth Social. … He got 120 million likes in like 18 hours. And at the bottom of that post, he wrote, ‘We will find you and we will kill you.’ Which we have made into the motto of our directorate.”

This cavalier attitude toward turning murder into online content stands in stark contrast to past U.S. military responses to videos of killings released by foes. Twenty years ago, U.S. military officials condemned terrorist “snuff films” — snipers filming their kills — in Iraq. And when it came to a video of two dead American troops shared online, the U.S.-led Multinational Division Baghdad “condemn[ed] the release of the video in the strongest of terms.” The command added: “It demonstrates the barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life.”

A decade later, as the Islamic State group released shocking execution videos, one of Hegseth’s predecessors — Chuck Hagel — expressed revulsion at the group’s spectacle of slaughter. “I think regardless of your background, your experience, just as a human being with having some sense of decency and respect for human life and other people, it makes you sick to your stomach,” he said of the group’s videos of the killing of defenseless civilians. “But it again reminds of the kind of brutality and the barbarism that is afoot in some of these areas of the world.”

But Gorka — back then the national security editor of Breitbart News — had a different takeaway. He also mentioned ISIS’s brutality but seemingly with more than a hint of admiration. “Every American, everybody who stands for the values of this republic needs to watch these videos because then you understand the nature of the threat of the brutality of the people we’re facing,” he said of ISIS’s snuff films in 2014. “It’s very, very slick. Think about one thing — just two weeks ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda, issued a 55-minute lecture in Arabic. … That’s not going to bring you recruits. That’s not going to further your cause as a jihadist. These people do instant little messages. They do these short videos. They have a very, very professional audio/visual social media crew.”

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Whether or not Gorka has been the driving force behind the snuff film fixation, the Trump administration seems to be larded up with MAGA minions channeling their inner ISIS. When the Iran war began, military officials began spoon-feeding Trump so-called highlight reels of strikes on targets, according to reporting by NBC: “The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of ‘stuff blowing up.’”

The White House has then taken such footage and spliced in clips from action films, TV shows, and video games to create online content. In one, the White House combined clips from Nintendo’s Wii Sports with videos of attacks on Iran. Another — captioned “STRIKE” — featured a former professional bowler, anthropomorphic AI bowling pins labeled “Iranian regime officials,” a fake fighter jet, and real airstrike footage. Videos of airstrikes were also combined with short clips — “Gladiator,” “Braveheart,” “John Wick,” “Superman,” “Better Call Saul,” “Dragon Ball Z” — to create “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” a video posted by the White House and eagerly shared online by top administration officials. It ends with a voiceover saying “flawless victory” — an audio clip from the video game “Mortal Kombat.”

“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie,” Ben Stiller, who directed and starred in the movie “Tropic Thunder,” featured in the aforementioned Justice video, wrote on social media. Three months later, the White House’s murderous mash-up remains on X.

The White House employs a media strategy that melds influence operations with influencer culture, muddying the news cycle, laundering lies, and countering critical coverage by flooding the zone with shoddy propaganda, TikTok-style memes, rancid AI slop, and music videos. “We’re here. We’re in your face. It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic,” Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital media team, told the Washington Post last year, after countering criticism of its brutal anti-immigrant policies with social media that turned federal viciousness into a joke. The Trump administration’s viral war porn provides another layer of calloused cruelty obscuring the human costs of America’s global killing spree.

In a 2002 New Yorker essay on images of the suffering wrought by war or torture, Susan Sontag reflected on photographs of Black victims of lynchings from the 1890s to the 1930s. “The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it,” she wrote. “The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens, as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree.”

The Trump administration’s snuff films are no less dehumanizing or shameless — even if the victims are censored in the footage — and the cheering replies on social media celebrating the boat strikes and murder memes are the modern-day equivalent of those churchgoers’ grins. But unlike the singular images of horrific violence meted out on black victims across the U.S., we are — 100 years later — drowning in endless videos of boat strikes and drone attacks and impacting missiles and bombs dropped on apartment buildings. The voyeuristic nature of the content dehumanizes the victims and debases us all.

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Trump, Hegseth, Gorka, and Donovan might be immune to any shame, regret, or guilt. Serial killers — people who murder a series of victims over a period of time — often lack empathy or remorse. But the entire kill chain involved in strikes and the propaganda apparatus that transforms footage of murders into social media content is filled with thousands of people — military personnel, members of the intelligence community, White House workers, and others — for whom these videos might not be so easy to dismiss and forget.

Most of the Trump administration’s boat strike footage plays like the movies of his childhood, flickering black-and-white footage, and the movies of his parents’ youth, silent films. You don’t hear the explosion of a missile’s impact or the cries of the wounded and dying. In that respect, it’s different than a homemade video of a young man having his arm hacked off with a machete. Those sounds, those cries got stuck in my head — more so than even the visual horror. The Americans who make the snuff films possible might be spared this. But in the end, that might actually be worse.

A veteran once told me of a murder he replayed again and again in his head for the rest of his life. Like the boat strike footage, he said there was no sound. That’s what he said was so terrifying. This veteran always saw the victim, mouth agape, screaming in agony. But he could never conjure a soundtrack. It was awful. Unnerving. Maddening. Agonizing. It caused his head to ache, his chest to tighten, and his guts to twist into knots. This horrific hush was deafening. He told me that, decades and decades later, it was — above all — this “silent scream” that tortured him.

The post The Trump Administration’s Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation appeared first on The Intercept.

Now some high-ranking Democrats are lining up to support another permanent appointee with a dubious claim to the legal job requirements — Jay Clayton — who has also openly questioned the integrity of U.S. elections.

Clayton’s nomination will be heard by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., hopes to have him confirmed as soon as Thursday — a lightning-fast process for a top intelligence post.

What’s at stake, however, isn’t just the outcome of Clayton’s nomination process. Trump’s pick is intertwined with the fate of a key domestic surveillance law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that expired Friday.

Privacy advocates are worried that Clayton’s nomination will give some Democrats the excuse they have been looking for to vote for renewing Section 702. The advocates are raising concerns about Clayton and calling on Congress to add a warrant requirement to the surveillance law, no matter who ultimately takes over as intel chief.

The top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who have both supported renewing Section 702 without major changes, have issued positive statements about Clayton’s nomination.

Neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has tipped their hand as to whether Clayton’s nomination will lead them to support a so-called “clean” renewal of Section 702.

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Jeffries said last week that he supports making significant reforms to the law, although he did not specifically commit to a warrant requirement.

Sean Vitka, executive director of the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, urged Democratic leaders to stand firm on reform.

“There is no universe where the momentary person who happens to satisfy Himes and Warner’s vibe check,” Vitka said, “should mitigate everybody’s concerns that are decades old with warrantless surveillance.”

Election Conspiracies

The reauthorization of Section 702 once appeared to be on a “glide path,” according to Warner. The law sets the parameters for when intelligence agencies can warrantlessly search American communications collected abroad.

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Congress was within days of passing a new version of the law with minor tweaks when Trump nominated Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to serve as temporary director of national intelligence.

When he tapped Pulte, Trump said he wanted to him to use the post to investigate “rigged” elections. That alarmed Democrats who noted that Pulte is already accused of misusing sensitive mortgage databases to help launch investigations against Trump’s political enemies.

The intelligence chief post has no formal role in election administration, but that did not stop outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from appearing at an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, ballot warehouse.

Pulte’s lapdog reputation was not the only thing that worried Democrats. They also noted that he did not meet the job requirement for the intelligence chief post in statute, which states that the nominee “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Centrist Democrats who were willing to renew Section 702 despite Gabbard’s overt politicization of the intelligence chief job finally had enough when it came to Pulte’s nomination. Even Warner and Himes voted against the law’s reauthorization.

Trump’s nomination of Clayton was an attempt to undo the backlash. Clayton currently serves as the federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and was previously the Securities and Exchange Commission chair — the kind of resume that reassures Washington insiders.

“I’ve known and respected Jay Clayton for decades,” Himes said on X. “His intelligence, temperament and deep commitment to public service will make him a terrific DNI. Had this nomination been made a week ago, lots of pain might have been avoided.”

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Advocates were more dubious. They noted that only days before his selection, Clayton had been asked on CNBC about the delays in returning California’s election results that had fueled right-wing conspiracy theories.

“On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job,” Clayton said, without offering evidence. “And the American people are right to question it.”

Clayton’s willingness to engage with one of Trump’s favorite tropes alarmed advocates, who say that Gabbard’s role in the Georgia warehouse raid shows how the intelligence chief post could be misused to sow election doubt.

Even centrist Democrats concede that, like Pulte, Clayton doesn’t have “extensive” national security experience. In his defense, supporters point to the role of federal prosecutors in launching national security cases.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the armed services committee, sounded a note of skepticism on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We have to look very clearly at Jay Clayton,” Reed said. “He is a very accomplished lawyer, but the statute requires someone taking this job to have significant national security experience, and that has to be measured. I don’t think he does.”

Senators of both parties will have an opportunity to probe Clayton’s qualifications at Wednesday’s confirmation hearing. Warner has said that Clayton will have to answer questions about his views on elections.

Whatever happens with his nomination, privacy advocates say the entire saga of replacing Gabbard further proves the need for major reforms to Section 702.

“It doesn’t matter who’s in charge,” longtime privacy booster Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said on June 11. “FISA 702 can’t be renewed without real reforms.”

“Case in point: Trump’s latest nominee for director of national intelligence was peddling election conspiracies just a few days ago.”

The post Are Jeffries and Schumer Getting Ready to Greenlight Domestic Spy Power for Trump? appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a second ceasefire and the eventual reopening the Strait of Hormuz under a preliminary deal scheduled to take effect on Friday. “Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said on Monday, one of several Iranian leaders taking a victory lap after outlasting the Trump administration.

Trump’s war has already killed thousands of Iranian civilians — including more than 150, most of them children –  in a strike on an elementary school. The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. This tally, however, is missing hundreds of casualties, including two soldiers wounded in action earlier this month.

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For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over almost two months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count. A defense official told The Intercept that it was impossible to tell whether Pentagon casualty analysts were “grossly incompetent” or had been ordered to manipulate the figures.    

Since the 15 wounded vanished in April, the DCAS casualty count has steadily crept upward to top out at 413, where it stood on Tuesday morning. This includes one sailor wounded in action this month. Central Command did not reply to a request for further information about the injury.

The official figures appear to be missing two soldiers who were recently wounded in action. CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told NBC News last week that two crew members from a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter downed by an Iranian drone on June 8 were receiving medical care. And a CENTCOM social media post said they were in “stable condition.” But DCAS lists no Army personnel wounded in action this month.

The official tally of war dead also appears to be an undercount. For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. DCAS briefly raised the total to 14 last month before dropping it back to 13, without any explanation on the fluctuation.

The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, in Caine’s words, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, last month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

The casualty 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.

On April 21, two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions about why more than a dozen casualties had been disappeared by the War Department, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them. After almost two months, The Intercept has yet to receive a response from the duty officer.

The Pentagon did not reply to a request for clarification on Monday about whether the duty officer ever returned to their desk.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran Are Still Rising appeared first on The Intercept.

With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.

If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.

Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.

On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.

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“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”

“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”

“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.

The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.

The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.

Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

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“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday.  That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.

Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”  

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.

Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. The president said the U.S. was still negotiating whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years but hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension.

Trump has consistently criticized the JCPOA. “Barack Hussein Obama gave them 1.7 Billion Dollars in ‘Green” Cash,’” he wrote during a social media rant in April. Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that the U.S. would release $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of nuclear negotiations. “The accord secures the unfreezing of all Iranian assets and addresses compensation for wartime damages,” said Baghaei.

Trump said that if the U.S. does not sign a final nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States might assume the role of “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. The proposed extortion scheme appears akin to the 19th-century Barbary States, which practiced state-supported piracy to exact tribute from other nations. The United States fought two separate wars against two of these North African states: Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, and Algiers from 1815 to 1816.

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A recent Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, his stated objectives, and supposed American achievements found the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted.

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out his most ambitious objectives. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

Since April, the White House has not replied to requests for further information about Trump’s inability to achieve world peace. Trump has also failed to accomplish even his more modest goal, as the region remains mired in conflict. Israel continued its war on Lebanon on Sunday and said it was not involved in the new pact. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. … We are not party to this agreement,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “He should be very thankful to us for doing this,” he said of the war, lapsing into typical hyperbole. “Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

The post Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

While Feindt sat in the Senate chamber, her 4-year-old son was in the military’s care, spending the day at the North Post Child Development Center at Fort Belvoir, in nearby Virginia. There, according to records reviewed by The Intercept, he was subjected to treatment that would leave lasting psychological effects.

It took a year for Feindt and her husband to figure out what it was.

In a series of interviews with The Intercept, Feindt described a grueling pattern of obfuscation in which military officials refused to answer questions about her child’s treatment, directed her to file public records requests, and claimed not to have the attendant evidence — then produced it months later. Military experts characterized these delays as part of a pattern in which the institution seeks to slow-walk and minimize findings of child abuse or mistreatment to decrease reputational damage. Over a year of persistent requests, Feindt and her husband finally pieced together a picture of their child’s treatment during at least two instances that January: The day of the hearing, when staff mocked and harassed the 4-year-old, and a few days earlier, when surveillance video showed them stepping on his feet and pinning his legs under a table. Local authorities later classified the treatment as child abuse.

“My son barely has the words to describe what happened to him,” Feindt told The Intercept. “You can see it in the video — they’re screaming while the abuse is taking place.”

Three other military families whose children suffered maltreatment in U.S. Army facilities described similar roadblocks. Parents who sought surveillance footage in other abuse investigations described receiving heavily redacted videos, incomplete clips, or footage with audio removed.

“This is a standard tactic in administrative cases,” said Ryan Sweazey, a retired Air Force officer and former inspector general. “They tell you the investigation is done, and if you want to challenge it, you have to file a FOIA request. The report then comes back heavily redacted months or years later.”

That’s what happened to the Feindt family: Army officials allowed them to review only a limited portion of the footage and would not provide copies of the video. While they watched, Feindt and her husband recorded audio and later described the scenes in a memorandum to Defense Department officials, both of which they shared with The Intercept. When the family sought additional footage and records, Feindt said officials directed them to file a Freedom of Information Act request before saying the remaining footage had been deleted after review.

According to Feindt’s memorandum, three staff members watched the teacher pin the 4-year-old’s legs and mock him without intervening. The footage then shows the teacher yanking the child upward by his clothing, grabbing him by the wrists, and pushing him out of camera view, Feindt and her husband write. In the audio the family shared with The Intercept, a child Feindt identified as her son can be heard screaming for the teacher to stop.

Accusations of child abuse in the Army are handled through a quasi-judicial body known as the Incident Determination Committee, or IDC, which operates without many of the safeguards found in civilian courts. These panels can include social workers involved in the underlying case, members of the chain of command, or personnel with limited subject-matter expertise. The committee applies a “preponderance of information” standard that experts say can produce conclusions at odds with civilian investigators reviewing the same evidence.

Once the committee reaches a determination, parents are typically not allowed to review how the decision was made. Proceedings occur behind closed doors, with no transcript, evidentiary record, or opportunity for cross-examination available to families or attorneys.

“It’s one entity acting as judge, jury and executioner. There is no real due process, and there are almost no checks and balances,” said Sweazey.

The Feindt family was left unsure why their IDC did not substantiate abuse claims despite medical concerns and video evidence reviewed by investigators. Feindt tried to attend the committee’s hearing, but her request was denied. Afterward, she sought additional CCTV footage from the daycare, but Fort Belvoir officials told her the case was closed and she would have to file a FOIA request.

The system overseeing military child care centers is so fragmented that even grieving parents struggle to determine who is responsible when something goes wrong, said Jason Degenhard, a retired Army master sergeant who served in special operations. In 2012, Degenhard’s 4-month-old son was in the care of the child development center on Pope Air Force Base (which today is part of Army base Fort Bragg) when a caregiver placed him on his stomach for tummy time, propped him against a rolled blanket, and left the room, as reported by WRAL News in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The infant’s muscles were not developed enough to support his weight, and he suffocated, causing catastrophic brain damage. The baby, named Sonny, was removed from life support days later.

“If you are a new parent trying to figure out how these centers are doing, you really do not have anything to go off of,” Degenhard said. In his telling, his chain of command supported the family immediately after Sonny’s death, but he remained troubled by what he described as limited institutional accountability afterward. Although the center was located on Pope Air Force Base, it operated under Army garrison authority, and Degenhard said the overlapping bureaucracies often left the family unsure who had the authority to provide answers or accept responsibility.

After federal prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges, the Degenhards settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government. Their emotional distress claims were dismissed.

“The heartbreak goes beyond the personal,” said Degenhard, who is still suffering from grief 14 years later. “The professional heartbreak is the lack of accountability, the lack of communication, and the lack of supervision.”

Feindt’s son became fearful and mistrustful of adults, regressed in potty training, and developed nightmares after Hegseth’s January 2025 confirmation, she told The Intercept. The family transferred him to another daycare, where Feindt said he struggled to adjust and accumulated roughly 20 behavioral incident reports in his first month, prompting administrators to bring in trauma specialists for support. His doctors said his symptoms resembled post-traumatic stress.

Army internal documents and communications acknowledged that supervisors watched her son being mistreated but did not intervene; no mandatory reporters documented the incident; and the parents were never notified. The conduct aligns with the Defense Department’s criteria for emotional maltreatment of a minor, but the Army IDC refused to classify the child’s treatment as abuse.

“For 15 months, the military told us this didn’t meet criteria,” Feindt said. “They made our lives a living hell.”

More than a year after the incident, in March 2026, Fairfax County Child Protective Services substantiated the case as child abuse and neglect, according to information provided to the family and confirmed by The Intercept. The finding will remain on the caregiver’s record for seven years.

On May 1, Fort Belvoir Child and Youth Services sent a letter to parents acknowledging a “founded disposition of a child abuse allegation,” stating that one caregiver had been removed from the facility and another was in the process of being terminated.

Records reviewed by The Intercept indicate the conduct at the childcare center extended beyond a single confrontation involving Feindt’s son.

Investigative materials obtained through FOIA describe repeated incidents in which caregivers allegedly mocked, threatened, and harassed children inside the classroom. Investigator notes reviewed by The Intercept describe a caregiver tugging a child’s hair, lifting a child by the back of their shirt, roughly repositioning children during classroom activities, and swinging a broom at a child.

In November 2021, when Pete Hegseth was a co-host on “Fox & Friends Weekend” and Amanda Feindt was an Army major, a storage tank maintained by the U.S. military began leaking jet fuel into the drinking water supply at Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam in Oahu, Hawaii. In what became known as the Red Hill incident, for the name of the fuel storage facility, about 20,000 gallons of JP-5 jet fuel contaminated drinking water for roughly 93,000 people, including members of the military and civilians. The Associated Press reported that about 6,000 people were poisoned.

Feindt and her family were among the military households exposed to contaminated drinking water during the Red Hill fuel leak. After developing severe gastrointestinal symptoms, the entire family sought emergency medical care. Her infant son suffered chemical burns after bathing; her husband underwent multiple medical procedures for ongoing complications; and her daughter later developed neurological issues that the family believes stemmed from the exposure. The Feindts were evacuated from their home, shuffled between seven hotels, and relocated across the country twice. Feindt, a former cancer patient, developed enlarged and suspicious cervical lymph nodes.

Feindt became a substantiated whistleblower and lead plaintiff in a lawsuit over the fuel leak, arguing that the contamination had upended her family’s health, finances, military career, and daily life. Hegseth was of the first national reporters to contact her about Red Hill.

“There was a lot of back-and-forth by email,” Feindt said, recalling that Hegseth knew her attorney and would write from his personal Gmail as he followed the case. “He would check in about Red Hill, and we would give updates to him and Fox. He always seemed like he would advocate for us as a reporter.”

In the four years since Feindt’s exposure at Red Hill, the family has managed more than 700 medical appointments, multiple surgeries, and long hospitalizations. The Army moved the family to Fort Belvoir so Feindt could enter the Soldier Recovery Unit, a program intended to support service members with complex medical issues.

When her son experienced abuse at the Fort Belvoir childcare center, Red Hill came back to haunt her.

Staff members for Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll told Feindt they would not meet with her because of her association with the Red Hill litigation, which she believed had already concluded. (A federal court found the U.S. government liable for poisoning military families through the Red Hill fuel spill, but awarded substantially lower damages than plaintiffs sought.) She escalated the matter beyond Army leadership, going up to Stephen Simmons, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military community and family policy, who acknowledged Feindt’s concerns and indicated he was aware of the situation as it unfolded in messages reviewed by The Intercept.

Simmons referred The Intercept’s request for comment to the Pentagon’s public affairs team, which did not answer detailed questions.

Sweazey, who also runs a nonprofit that supports whistleblowers, said he believes Feindt faced retaliation after pressing the Army for accountability.

“Unfortunately, it appears to be retaliation, and it’s not rare,” Sweazey said. “The moment someone questions the institution, they can become a target.”

Experts say abuse allegations inside military childcare centers often move slowly, with limited transparency and strong institutional pressure to minimize failures.

“Burying cases like these is a matter of control and institutional survival,” said Maj. Gen. Dennis Laich, a retired Army officer and director of the Eisenhower Media Network. “Incidents viewed as leadership failures can damage careers.”

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When a toddler named Evie Glick came home injured from the Ford Island childcare center in Honolulu in 2022, staff told her mother that Evie had tripped, fallen, and hit her head. Jennifer Glick, a special agent with the Army Criminal Investigation Division, accepted that explanation at the time.

The following year, Navy Family Advocacy officials informed the family that Evie may have been physically abused at the daycare after another military family, the Kuykendalls, raised concerns uncovered while investigating the abuse of their own daughter, Bella. The Kuykendalls later launched Operation Mei Mei, an advocacy effort pushing for greater transparency and accountability in military childcare centers.

When the Glicks sought details, records, and footage, they said they received few answers.

It wasn’t until nearly three years after Evie’s injury that Glick saw surveillance footage through Operation Mei Mei. She said the videos contradicted the explanation she had originally been given.

“We were lied to. The [daycare] never told us our daughter was abused,” Glick said. “My first question, being in law enforcement myself, was: Where is the investigation?”

Glick said the footage showed a caregiver grabbing Evie by the arm, pulling her to the ground, and making her head strike the floor — causing the injury that, years earlier, the family had been told happened when Evie fell. In another clip, Glick said, a provider removed Evie’s shoes and socks and threw them away while the 18-month-old cried and wandered the classroom for 16 minutes.

Glick later filed a FOIA request seeking additional footage. She said the material she eventually received was heavily edited, redacted, and stripped of audio.

“They told me I could only view it with a JAG officer present,” Glick told The Intercept, referring to a judge advocate general, or a military lawyer. “There were three clips, each less than 20 minutes long. It wasn’t the full footage I asked for.”

As Feindt was fighting for recognition of her son’s abuse, and unbeknownst to her, the North Post Child Development Center at Fort Belvoir lost its accreditation.

In July 2025, the facility failed to complete required renewal requirements, including annual reporting and coordination of a site visit, as The Intercept confirmed with the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

The Intercept asked Fort Belvoir this April whether the center had experienced any recent changes to its licensing or accreditation status, including suspension, probation, or revocation. Fort Belvoir Public Affairs responded that the facility’s “current licensing status has not been changed” but did not directly answer questions regarding accreditation or respond to related follow-ups.

Unlike civilian daycares, Defense Department child development centers are not licensed by the state where they’re located. Instead, they operate under DoD oversight, but DoD policy requires centers to maintain national accreditation standards.

“My number one problem is that [Army childcare centers] are not responsible or reportable to the state,” said Degenhard, the father whose infant died in Army care. “They follow their own compliance and standards.”

According to a summary circulated among parents following a May 14 Fort Belvoir Parent Advisory Board meeting reviewed by The Intercept, installation officials later acknowledged the center had lost accreditation and recently reapplied. Families had not been informed the facility had operated without accreditation for almost a year.

Feindt said she first learned of the lapse from a former daycare employee and independently contacted the accrediting organization to verify the information before raising it with installation leadership. The issue was later discussed at the parent meeting, where officials acknowledged the loss of accreditation.

Feindt said she was relieved that the caregiver who abused her child had been fired. “But this is not just about our family,” she said. “It’s a serious indictment of a system that failed to protect military children.”

“Leaders at all levels will be held accountable,” Hegseth announced at the confirmation proceeding Feindt attended in January 2025. “And warfighting and lethality and the readiness of the troops and their families will be our only focus.”

Since taking office, Hegseth has made the military’s killing capability and the restoration of what he calls a “warrior ethos” the defining themes of his tenure. He has ordered the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the Defense Department; repeatedly criticized what he describes as “woke” influences in the military; and personally intervened in a series of culture-war controversies involving military installations and schools. Critics argue those battles have consumed attention that could otherwise be directed toward long-standing quality-of-life issues affecting service members and their families.

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Lawmakers like Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, are pushing for greater transparency through measures like the Military Child and Youth Program Abuse and Neglect Notification Act, which would require timely notification to parents and establish more consistent reporting standards across services when allegations of abuse arise. But experts say the military continues to struggle with accountability when abuse allegations emerge inside its own child care system.

“How can anyone be mission ready or focused on lethal force if the military, in my family’s case, literally poisoned my child and now I can’t take them to daycare because they were abused?” Feindt said.

For Glick, her child’s abuse fundamentally changed how she views military service and childcare inside the Defense Department.

“That affects readiness because people will walk away if they don’t feel their children are safe,” she said.

The Pentagon has shown it can respond quickly when controversies involving children attract national political attention. After parents complained and a flurry of right-wing press coverage erupted over a transgender teacher who wore an animal tail and collar at a Fort Bragg elementary school, Hegseth proudly announced the teacher’s firing within weeks.

Feindt said the speed of that response contrasted sharply with her family’s experience.

“It shows they can act quickly when something becomes politically important,” she said. “But when military children are actually being harmed, families are left fighting the system alone.”

More than a year after the incident involving her son, Feindt said she believes meaningful change will only come if military families and senior leaders speak publicly about what they have experienced.

She pointed to a photo Hegseth posted online showing him fist-bumping a child alongside the caption: “This is our why.”

“Well, if that’s the case,” Feindt said, “why aren’t we taking care of our military kids? Why do we have a system that protects itself instead of protecting our children?”

The post An Army Whistleblower Believed in Pete Hegseth — Until the Military Covered Up Her Child’s Abuse appeared first on The Intercept.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., had said he personally supported reforms, for instance, but declined to whip votes against the law.

President Donald Trump’s appointment of housing czar Bill Pulte to be the nation’s spy chief, however, appeared shore up Democratic leaders’ spines — for now.

Citing Pulte’s lack of experience and fealty to Trump, Jeffries on Thursday corralled his members into opposing a short-term extension of the law, leading to a 218–198 defeat of the measure. Democratic leaders did not issue a formal whip notice, but they did release a forceful statement against it hours before the vote was set to take place.

The different approach from leadership between the two votes was “night and day,” one Democratic staffer told The Intercept.

Dozens of the 42 Democrats who had voted for the “clean” renewal last time reversed their positions, dooming an attempt by Speaker Mike Johnson. R-La., to pass the short-term extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before it expires Friday.

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The hardened line was welcomed by advocates, but in a letter penned by dozens of civil society groups they told Democrats not to flip back without changes — whether Pulte is slated to take the helm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or not.

Hours after the failed vote, Trump said he would nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to serve as national intelligence director. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had resigned, saying her husband had been recently diagnosed with bone cancer, and is expected to depart on June 19.

There are bedrock policy problems with the surveillance law that go much deeper than the personnel Trump installs atop spy agencies, the groups said in the letter. They asked Democrats to block a long-term renewal of Section 702 unless it includes major reforms.

“Voting for a clean reauthorization of Section 702 is co-signing the Trump administration’s mass surveillance agenda,” the groups said in the letter. “Key administration officials — including Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel, and outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard — have made it clear that this reauthorization fight is a White House priority, and that reform is an unacceptable impediment to the administration’s agenda.”

The letter targeted 42 Democrats — including House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes, D-Conn. — who voted in April for a “clean” three-year renewal of Section 702 with only minor tweaks.

Himes was among those who, citing Trump’s appointment of Pulte to replace Gabbard, changed positions and voted against the extension Thursday.

Only Seven Holdouts

The fight over FISA has roiled Congress for months. Following the “clean” renewal’s failure and lawmakers’ inability to agree on a compromise for a longer extensions, more than 90 Democrats voted for the shorter-term postponement of Section 702’s expiration.

Since then, advocacy groups have kept up their pressure on Democrats. Thursday’s vote suggests they are making progress. Only seven Democrats voted for the short-term renewal of the law on Thursday, compared to 199 opposed. The split was reversed in the Republican caucus, with 190 votes in favor and 19 against.

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The Democrats voting in favor of the short-term extension were Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas; Donald Davis of North Carolina; Jared Golden of Maine; Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey; Susie Lee of Nevada; and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.

While the privacy advocates said reforms shouldn’t hinge on any spy official’s fate, they did say their preexisting concerns about the spying law were heightened by Trump’s appointment of Pulte and the administration’s recent release of a counterterrorism strategy calling for a crackdown on “left-wing extremists.”

“It is alarming that, under these conditions in particular, any Democratic members of Congress would vote to extend a warrantless surveillance authority for this administration to wield with no meaningful oversight,” the groups said. “The case for reforming Section 702 has never been more urgent. It is critical that you protect your constituents from the Trump administration’s mass surveillance agenda.”

The groups signing the letter Thursday — including the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, and many local chapters of the organizing group Indivisible — support requiring intelligence officials to obtain judicial approval for searches of American communications.

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Debates over the law, which was first passed in 2008, have occasionally flared thanks to events such as the disclosures of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Trump’s complaints about a “deep state” intelligence conspiracy against him — though GOP opposition to the spy law dwindled with Trump taking power.

The privacy advocates, however, said they have never seen left-leaning organizers as fired up as the current round of debate over the spying law — organizing that helped precipitate the turnaround by some Democrats.

Some Democrats who were previously staunch supporters of the domestic surveillance law, such as Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., and now facing serious primary challenges voted against clean reauthorization in April, though Goldman missed Thursday’s vote.

Trump’s appointment of Pulte to serve as intelligence chief has put the law’s most fervent Democratic supporters in a bind, however, given his lack of qualifications for the job and accusations that he has wielded sensitive government databases against Trump’s opponents.

Himes, for instance, led the House Intelligence Committee’s Democrats in writing a letter to Trump calling on him to rescind his appointment of Pulte on Wednesday.

The Connecticut representative sounded exasperated in comments to Politico earlier this week. In previous fights over renewal of the surveillance law, reformers have suggested that the deadlines were artificial because of certifications from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing spy agencies to continue collecting overseas communications for another year.

“It’s a total mess,” Himes told the outlet. “Very sadly, I think we’re going to test this untested question about whether the program can run on a judicial certification alone.”

The post Hakeem Jeffries Finally Finds a Spine: Dem Leaders Rallied Against Extending Domestic Spy Law appeared first on The Intercept.

This week, U.S. forces bombarded Iran after the downing of an American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded with strikes on targets across the Middle East and threats to “turn the entire region into hell.” Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst on Wednesday night that the U.S. fired 49 Tomahawk missiles at targets inside Iran, in addition to bombing raids by fighter jets. Yingst reported that Trump also said, “We’ll bomb the S out of them tomorrow night'” if Iran did not sign a peace agreement. Trump followed this on Thursday by declaring the U.S. would be “hitting Iran … VERY HARD TONIGHT.”

The burgeoning forever war contradicts months of reassurances by Trump that a peace deal with Iran is imminent.

An Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, stated objectives, and supposed achievements finds the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted. 

A Promise of World Peace

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out, with complete clarity, his most ambitious objectives. Claiming Iran was already “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated,” Trump said his war would bring peace to the region and, somehow, the globe. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

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The bombing campaign was, indeed, “heavy.” The “pinpoint” attacks included a strike on an elementary school that killed between 150 and 175 civilians, most of them children. And thousands more civilians died in other strikes. Almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, including homes, hospitals, and schools, have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war, according to an April report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society. An estimated 400,000 people have been affected by damage to houses and apartments. But Iran was not “very much destroyed,” much less “obliterated.”

Peace in the Middle East, it goes without saying, never came to pass. The U.S.–Israeli strikes actually kicked off a regional war that grew to include more than a dozen countries, including Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Beyond this, the inability of the self-proclaimed “peace president,” head of the world’s newly created Board of Peace, and recipient of the first FIFA Peace Prize to achieve “peace throughout … the world” may stand as Trump’s grandest failure.

Just two days after setting out his topline goals, Trump began publicly vacillating and dramatically scaling back U.S. aims. “Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities,” he said during a March 2 White House ceremony. “Second, we’re annihilating their navy. … Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon. … And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”

Months later, these objectives remain unmet.

Eliminating Missiles

While the United States claims to have struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran, leaked U.S. intelligence assessments found evidence that Iran restored 30 of the 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz to operational status, and retained 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and 70 percent of its mobile launchers. Reports emerged that in April and May, Iran began efforts to repair its Yazd Missile Base. In just one day last week, Kuwait says it was targeted by an Iranian barrage of “13 hostile ballistic missiles.” On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel. And on Thursday, Iran attacked multiple countries in the region, including Jordan which said it shot down 20 Iranian missiles.

During an aborted interview with NBC News that aired on Sunday, even Trump admitted he had failed. “They have some missiles left,” he said. “I would say, percentage-wise, maybe 21, 22 percent of their missiles. It’s a lot of missiles.” 

Annihilating the Navy

While the U.S. sunk many Iranian ships, the Iranian Navy has not been annihilated. In fact, U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the war effort, has repeatedly referred to actions by Iran’s Navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy in the months since Trump laid out his aims, demonstrating that both still exist, upending Trump’s frequent boasts to the contrary.

Just last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is no Iranian Navy,” and in the next breath admitted there was, referencing Iran’s “Boston Whalers with machine guns on them.”

Ending the Nuclear Program

Iran also still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium. And there is no evidence that nuclear sites that were not attacked during Trump’s 2025 Iran war, such as Pickaxe Mountain, were ever damaged. Last week, in fact, Rubio confirmed that Iran’s “nuclear program” still exists. And during his recent NBC interview, Trump acknowledged that Iran still possessed its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and “they can get it, I guess, with years of work.”

Last week, Rubio even suggested Iran might be allowed to continue enrichment at some later date, noting it would need to accept “severe and long-term limitations, and/or cancellation, of enrichment.”

Halting Funding of Militias

The Trump administration has also failed to ensure “that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Days after Trump declared this war aim, House Republicans introduced legislation stating that “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and provides substantial financial and military support to groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.” In the months since, even the Trump administration says the president’s goals haven’t been achieved.

In mid-April, the State Department said that Iran still “funnels the wealth of the Iranian people to Hizballah and other terrorists in the Middle East.” That same month, the Treasury Department took action against a “constellation of Iran-backed terrorist militias,” specifically “seven Iraqi militia commanders responsible for planning, directing, and executing attacks against U.S. personnel, facilities, and interests in Iraq,” including leaders of Kata’ib Hizballah, Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada, Harakat Al-Nujaba, and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haqq. In May, the Treasury Department again targeted “Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq,” sanctioning “leaders of Iran-aligned terrorist militias Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq” and referencing still “other Iran-aligned terrorist militias in Iraq.”

Unconditional Surrender

This assemblage of failures has been compounded by other unmet war aims. On March 6, Trump set the terms for an agreement with Iran. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he wrote on Truth Social. In the months since, that hard-line stance has turned to mush.

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“There is the prospect before us — which could happen today,” Rubio said last week of a potential peace deal, in a weak-kneed explanation to lawmakers. “We’re hopeful that something like that could happen in which the straits would reopen, we would enter into a period of negotiations on very specific topics — delineated negotiations in the hope of reaching an outcome that’s acceptable to us, and something they would be able to do as well.”

Reopening the Strait

The “straits” in question have become another sticking point and catastrophe. After failing to achieve all his initial war aims, Trump added another that was nothing more than a return to the status quo antebellum in the Strait of Hormuz: opening the waterway to traffic after Iran imposed a wartime blockade.

Before the war, the average number of vessels crossing the strait — a critical artery for the world’s oil, fertilizer, helium, critical materials for microchips, and numerous other goods — was more than 120 per day. It has never been close to that level again.

“I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out,” Trump declared on April 4. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on April 7, Trump wrote on social media that he would “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran” on the condition that Tehran agree to the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”

The next day, the White House declared: “Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump Administration negotiates a broader peace agreement — once more proving Peace Through Strength victorious.” But that same day, Iran closed the strait, following continued Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. 

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In response to Iran’s blockade, the U.S. imposed its own blockade of the strait on April 13, barring commercial vessels from entering or leaving Iranian ports. Then on April 15, Trump posted: “I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz.” Two days later, Trump claimed, “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again.” On April 19, Trump said Iran had launched attacks in the strait and noted Iran had announced a blockade. On April 23, Trump ordered the Navy to attack Iranian ships laying mines in the strait. On May 6, Trump teased that the war might be “at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran.” A day later, Trump said U.S. warships came under Iranian fire in the strait. The situation was still dragging on when Trump wrote, on May 29: “The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.” On Monday, a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the strait was downed by Iran. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains functionally closed, except for a tiny trickle of traffic. “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted on Wednesday. “More than 200 Commercial Ships have safely traveled through the Strait.” (About 3,000 ships normally traverse it every month.) On Thursday, Iran announced that it, again, closed the strait to oil tankers and commercial ships.

Oil industry analysts say that global oil reserves are dwindling and that if the war doesn’t wrap up in the near term, petroleum prices could skyrocket to $150 a barrel. “The oil will go down,” Trump said on NBC, but acknowledged the war had driven up prices. “We’re going to have higher gasoline. We’re going to have a little higher fertilizer,” he admitted, before equivocating further when asked if gasoline prices had peaked. “Well, it depends. I mean, it depends where the war goes. It could be,” he waffled. “If we sign an agreement, it’ll go down now. Otherwise, it’ll go down after we’re finished.”

Oil prices rose to about $95 a barrel on Thursday as the U.S. and Iran continued to launch attacks. Trump said on Wednesday that the price of oil would have been at $250 a barrel had the U.S. government not been siphoning off “millions of barrels” of Iran’s oil over the course of the war. On Thursday, Trump posted that the U.S. would also soon seize Iran’s “oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.” Despite the rampant oil theft and threats of more to come, U.S. inflation accelerated for a third straight month in May, driven by energy prices which rose 3.9 percent over the month.

A Peace Deal

The “agreement” in question is still another failed aim. On March 23, Trump told reporters about supposed peace talks and cited “major points of agreement, I would ​say — almost all points of agreement.” Iran denied negotiations had taken place. Two days later, Trump claimed Iran wanted to “make a deal so badly.” On March 26, he said Iran was “begging to make a deal.” On April 15, he said the war was “very close to over.” On April 17, Trump claimed that Iran had “agreed to everything” and that “we will get a deal in the next day or two.” 

“An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization,” Trump announced on May 23. On June 2, Trump wrote: “as I told Iran, ‘It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal.’” Then Trump told NBC late last week: “We’re very close to having a deal.” But on Monday, Trump said a “Final Deal” has yet to be “reached.”

What such a “deal” will end shines a bright light on another flip-flop failure by the president. Trump went from claiming, in early March, that the U.S. won the war with Iran, to attempting to convince Americans that he never even went to war in the first place. “We don’t call it a war,” he said before the end of that month. “We call it a military operation.” By early May, Trump was calling it a “mini war” or “a little detour.”

Just Give Him Two Weeks

The deadline for when this “mini-war” will finally end may be the most telling of Trump’s failed aims and achievements. It’s well known that Trump’s lying and laziness coalesce around one simple phrase: two weeks. “We’ll have something in two weeks,” Trump said in January of an agreement with Europe to extend U.S. control over Greenland, to take one example.

Trump has long used this two-week delaying tactic when faced with vexing questions about anyone and everything, from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war on ISIS to international trade and the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks really means later. Except when it means never.

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The ceasefire with Iran, announced on April 7, was initially supposed to last “two weeks” while the two countries inked a deal to end the war, according to Trump. He claimed at the time that they were already “very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”

On Monday evening, Trump held a tele-rally for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham where he addressed his failed war with Iran. “We’re negotiating now, and they want to make a very good deal. They’re willing to give us everything,” Trump claimed, noting, “It’ll happen very soon.” The president then added in his favorite faux time frame: “I think we are winning that battle, but you’re really going to win it over the next two weeks when we declare total victory.”

The post A Point-by-Point Breakdown of Trump’s Failed Iran War Objectives appeared first on The Intercept.

Then President Donald Trump tapped Bill Pulte — an unqualified housing official accused of misusing sensitive databases to pursue the president’s political vendettas — to oversee the nation’s spy agencies. That got the centrist Democrats’ attention.

Warner, who serves as ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, voted with every Senate Democrat except for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman last week against advancing the renewal of the NSA program authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

In the face of pushback from Democrats and some Republicans, Trump declined to back down on his choice. Instead, he said Tuesday that he was moving up the effective date of Pulte’s appointment to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to June 19.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a longtime critic of Section 702, said that there’s unprecedented support for reforming the law.

“I have been doing this a while,” Wyden, who is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “I am the longest serving member of SSCI in history, and I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.”

That doesn’t, however, mean that reform efforts hinge on Pulte’s political fate. Though the announcement narrowed the odds that the spying program will be renewed before it expires Friday, the fracas over Pulte has revealed a deep divide among Democrats that could keep the issue alive.

Centrists such as Warner would still vote to renew Section 702 if Pulte is sacked. Other Democrats, like Wyden, say that Pulte’s selection only exacerbated long-standing issues such as the lack of a warrant requirement for searching through the NSA’s data.

“Firing Pulte doesn’t fix the problem,” Wyden told reporters on Tuesday. “There have to be reforms.”

Section 702 has been the subject of an intense behind-the-scenes squabble since Congress passed a short-term, 45-day extension of the program in April.

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Mike Johnson Used Crypto Catnip to Get Freedom Caucus Support for Domestic Spy Law

The law allows the FBI and other agencies, including ODNI, to pore through Americans’ communications collected abroad without a warrant. Ostensibly, there are safeguards in place to prevent those agencies from targeting specific Americans — but courts have repeatedly found widespread violations of those rules.

For years, civil liberties advocates have sought to create a warrant requirement that would require the FBI and other agencies to go to a judge to read through Americans’ communications.

That idea has proven a nonstarter for defenders of Section 702 such as Warner, who argue that it would create insurmountable logistical obstacles for agents hoping to prevent terror attacks. Warner has long allied with Republicans to push back on the warrant proposal.

Compromise Flop

Since April, a bipartisan coalition of civil liberties supporters in Congress has managed to block a long-term reauthorization of Section 702. In recent weeks, Warner helped craft what was billed as a compromise proposal intended to win over enough of the critics to allow the passage of a long-term renewal of the law.

Then, Trump said on June 3 that he would appoint Pulte to serve as temporary director of national intelligence, to replace departing chief Tulsi Gabbard.

The announcement immediately soured centrist Democrats’ plans to help secure passage of a FISA extension. Pulte, whose net worth is at least $190 million, is a private equity firm founder who became a minor internet celebrity for giving away money on Twitter. Then Trump appointed him last year to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In those roles, Pulte helped launch housing fraud probes of Trump nemeses including Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. He is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office for allegedly misusing confidential government databases for information on the president’s foes.

“There were already sensitive negotiations that were ongoing,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday. “And then Donald Trump chose to elevate this partisan political hack, Bill Pulte, into this position of great sensitivity, effectively tossing a hand grenade in the midst of these negotiations as we approach the deadline to potentially renew surveillance authority.”

The compromise deal floated by Warner and others had never impressed privacy advocates. They said the changes it made to the law mostly layered on more layers of internal oversight, which would not stop a determined Trump flunky from abusing the NSA’s spying powers.

Even calling it a “deal” was misleading, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit working on law and policy.

“The members who drafted this legislation, basically Trump allies plus Sen. Warner — all longtime opponents of 702 reform who are in complete alignment with each other on the fundamental points of debate — they were the members who drafted the legislation,” she said on a conference call Tuesday. “Members who support reform were shut out.”

Push and Pulte

While Warner and other Democratic supporters of the program voted against putting its renewal on the Senate agenda last week, that boiled down to a repudiation of Pulte instead of a sudden change of heart on the program.

“Pulte is the major stumbling block for people like myself and Mark Warner, who are generally supportive because of the importance of the program,” Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “But we can’t in good conscience hand the keys to the country’s most significant car to a teenager.”

In the Republican caucus, a faction of members with libertarian tendencies support adding a warrant requirement. Some longtime supporters of the program, on the other hand, have dismissed the significance of Pulte’s appointment.

“He’s an interim guy, he’ll be there for weeks to a couple months, so I don’t understand why it’s a big issue anyway,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who serves on the Intelligence Committee.

Privacy advocates are largely aghast at the appointment of Pulte, but they hope the expiration of Section 702 will create space for reform. They were heartened on Tuesday when Jeffries gave some of his strongest statements yet in support of overhauling the law.

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“Donald Trump needs to withdraw his decision to elevate Bill Pulte,” Jeffries said on PBS. “That’s a starting point, not an ending point. And then we can see if we can responsibly get to a place where there are enough reforms built into the law to provide guardrails and protect the American people.”

Reformers have a smorgasbord of reform proposals. Wyden wants to create a warrant requirement not only for searches of NSA data, but also one for searches of sensitive information available on the open market, such as location tracking from commercial data brokers.

Wyden said he senses a rare opportunity, pointing to support from Republicans such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and said, “Both of us have bipartisan bills with almost all of the provisions we’re talking about.”

The post Momentum Builds to Rein In Domestic Spying Law — Whether or Not Bill Pulte Survives as Intel Chief appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

A 40-foot go-fast boat with four 200-horsepower engines sped off from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula deep in the night of September 1. It was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio would later say.

As the peñero cut through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, a secret U.S. Special Operations plane flew high above. Its transponder was “squawking” its military identity by radio. But to the 11 people on the boat below, the plane — a secret Special Operations aircraft with a non-military appearance — would have looked like a civilian aircraft. Its munitions were hidden inside the fuselage, rather than affixed visibly under its wings.

A month earlier, War Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an execute order directing Special Operations forces to attack suspected drug smuggling boats and kill their crews, according to three government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to attack the boat to Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, who presided over the September 2 mission — according to four sources.

Now, Hegseth and numerous military officers were watching live video of the boat as it plowed through the Caribbean waters. The Americans gathered at the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could see the men in the boat clearly, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

The secret plane dove low enough that those on the boat noticed it, said three government officials familiar with the operation. It apparently unnerved the men aboard so much that they turned the boat around and headed back toward Venezuela.  

Bradley — now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — consulted with Col. Cara Hamaguchi, JSOC’s staff judge advocate, before ordering SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed speedboat, according to government sources. In an instant, the vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. Two survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull as the Americans watched from above.

According to officials, Bradley explained in briefings that because the September 2 attack was the initial strike of the campaign and was conducted by the secret plane, the survivors would have had no idea they were attacked by the aircraft. They probably believed the explosion was caused by a catastrophic engine malfunction, Bradley said in the briefing.

The two men were shipwrecked, helpless, or clearly in distress, six people who saw video of the attack said. Bradley watched as the injured men clung to what remained of the boat. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on CNN after viewing video of the attack.

Three sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as well as the Senate and House Armed Services committees confirmed that the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for roughly 45 minutes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources.

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Bradley again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance on whether he could legally attack the shipwrecked men. Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including that lawmaker who viewed the video, said that the survivors waved their arms and, logically, must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All believed the men were signaling for help, rescue, or surrender. “Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” said one of the sources, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising one’s hands is a universal sign of surrender for members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked — are considered hors de combat, the French term for those no longer in the fight, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit on this point. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

Bradley found a workaround. While he declined to comment to The Intercept, a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.” About 45 minutes after the men had been thrown into the water, a second missile screamed down on Bradley’s order, killing them. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that those killed by U.S. forces were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” and members of a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But from the very beginning, questions swirled among members of Congress and their staffers about the identities of those killed in the attack — and why there were so many of them.

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing. 

One of the government officials at the briefing explained that questions arose about the few boats targeted by the U.S. with greater-than-expected numbers of people on board; the September 2 strike was singled out due to the especially large number of passengers.

Out of more than 60 strikes since, only four involved boats with six or more people aboard, almost all of them in the initial wave of attacks. In October 2025, there were two strikes on boats with six crew members and one with eight people on board. Since then, just one other vessel has had as many as six crew.

Sources and methods of identification were a major topic of the fall briefing, where it became increasingly clear that JSOC did not positively identify everyone on the boats, said the official. “Questioning then led to trying to understand who these people could be,” that official said.

The second source at the briefing said they were astonished by Bennett’s candor that victims of human trafficking might have been among those killed. “I was surprised. But only by the admission,” said that official.

Military officials with knowledge of the strikes also discussed the likelihood that some of those on board were being trafficked, were part of a more generalized smuggling operation, or had simply hitched a ride on the vessel, said another government official who was not at that briefing.

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In later classified briefings, the Pentagon’s story of who was aboard the vessel changed — but only marginally, said two government officials. Just one person aboard the go-fast boat on September 2 was a member of a so-called “designated terrorist organization,” while 10 were “DTO affiliates,” according to the officials who received those later briefings. Both said that they were under the impression that little more than a conversation with a DTO member might confer affiliate status but said that the military’s explanations were vague.  

For weeks, The Intercept has sought to speak to Bennett, the deputy director for Special Operations on the Joint Staff, about the strikes and his briefings. “RADM Bennett is unavailable for an interview,” Maj. Annabel Monroe, a spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Intercept. “As a matter of policy, the Joint Staff does not confirm specific operational details or comment on ongoing or potential future military actions.”

Asked specifically for comment from Bennett and the Joint Staff about the trafficking remark and about how many victims of U.S. boat strikes may have been passengers of any sort, such as trafficking victims, smuggled persons, or paid passengers, Monroe replied: “Nothing further to add.” 

Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, said the command was unaware of any allegations of victims of trafficking being killed on September 2 or in subsequent strikes.

“Targeting decisions are based on comprehensive assessments and reviewed through established processes,” a spokesperson for U.S. Southern Command told The Intercept. “Every narco-terrorist killed … was an affiliated member of a Designated Terrorist Organization actively transporting illicit material along known trafficking routes in international waters.”

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — drawn up by an interagency lawyers working group including representatives of the CIA, the State Department, White House counsel, Department of Justice, and the Department of War — claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels with whom the Trump administration claims they are in a “non-international armed conflict.” Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attack. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

Six current and former government officials briefed on the boat strikes or with experience in counter-narcotics smuggling efforts said that while the vessel struck on September 2 might have had cocaine on board, the sole intent of its voyage was not drug trafficking.

“No one would smuggle cocaine with 11 people on board their drug-running boat,” said one of the current officials, noting that it was a waste of space, fuel, and created security risks. “It just is not done. Full stop.”

That official, who talked with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said that the vessel’s profile more closely matched that of a ship smuggling various types of cargo, including people. 

Retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin, said the number of passengers was an obvious red flag. “I’m disappointed in the quality of planning for this operation,” he told The Intercept. “There appears to have been a lack of knowledge and expertise in what cocaine smuggling operations look like.”

The vessel that would become the target of the first Trump administration boat strike reportedly left San Juan de Unare in Venezuela on the night of September 1. The 11 men aboard all hailed from that town or nearby Güiria, coastal communities on the Paria peninsula in Venezuela’s Sucre state. It’s an impoverished region where 90 percent of the population is food insecure; the nongovernmental organization Transparencia Venezuela identified the area as the country’s prime center of, and transit hub for, human trafficking.

Reporting by Venezuela’s El Nacional identified Güiria and San Juan de Unare as having gone from fishing and tourist centers to “corridors of organized crime,” as the economic crisis in the country “drove many fishermen to replace fishing with smuggling gasoline, migrants, and eventually, drugs.” Some boats are known to carry mixed cargos of drugs, weapons, and people.

A 2020 report on human trafficking in the Caribbean found that Venezuela was “the greatest supplier of trafficking victims to Trinidad and Tobago” — and that 43 percent of those trafficked from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago travel from Sucre. It cited a Venezuelan government official who drew specific attention to Güiria due to its proximity to Trinidad and Tobago, stating it was “frequently used clandestinely for human trafficking.” A 2025 U.S. State Department report also highlighted the “long-standing allegation that national guard and coast guard members active in coastal states, such as Sucre and Falcon, facilitated the transport of trafficking victims to Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago.”

A recent investigation by a consortium of journalists from Venezuelan outlets noted immigrant transport, people smuggling, and human trafficking is integral to the desperately poor population of Güiria and “as ordinary a job as teaching school — only far better paid.” The journalists wrote:

In this Venezuelan town, people do not call the illicit transportation of drugs and other goods … to neighboring Caribbean islands or Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula “drug trafficking” or “smuggling.” They call them vueltas—literally “runs” or “jobs”—borrowing the slang Colombian traffickers use for narcotics shipments, contract killings, or debt collections.

For many people in Güiria, those vueltas are the only path to a decent life.

According to a 2025 analysis by InSight Crime, a think tank that studies organized criminal activity in the Americas, gangs from Sucre are involved in “cocaine trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, arms trafficking, and the contraband of animals and minerals.” Roughly 30 percent of trafficking victims who pass through the region wound up in sexual exploitation networks, Transparencia Venezuela found.

While trafficking victims are often assumed to be women and girls forced into sexual slavery — and many are — men and boys represent nearly half of the total number of human trafficking victims worldwide. And males are frequently mentioned in reports on Venezuela. A 2019 State Department investigation of human trafficking, for example, noted Venezuelan men were “increasingly vulnerable to forced labor in destination countries, including islands of the Dutch Caribbean.” A 2023 State Department report noted “an increase in male Venezuelan labor trafficking victims” in Trinidad and Tobago. It also details “migrant smuggling, which serves as traffickers’ primary method of transportation of victims from Venezuela.”

Between 2019 and 2022, 69 percent of Venezuelan immigrants in South America interviewed by the Mixed Migration Center reported having hired smuggling services to leave their country.

In 2023, the Curaçao Public Prosecutor’s Office also put out a warning about child trafficking, particularly from Venezuela: “Trafficked children range in age from 4 to 15 years old and are often transported in boats that also carry drugs and firearms on board.”

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An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those slain in boat strikes examined the life of one of the men killed in the September 2 attack: Luis “Che” Martínez. The AP found that Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss, made his living smuggling both drugs and people across borders, according to several people who knew him. He had been incarcerated in late 2020 on human trafficking charges after a boat he had operated capsized, killing almost 25 people — including two of his sons and several other relatives, according to local reporting at the time. He was eventually released from custody and returned to smuggling people and narcotics, acquaintances told the news outlet.

In the aftermath of Trump’s first boat strike, the size of the death toll immediately surprised those knowledgeable about illicit trade in the region. “With 11 people on board, there could have been a human smuggling element as well,” InSight Crime observed just after the September 2 attack, noting that such go-fast boats generally have a crew of two or three people. “You do not need 11 people on board a single vessel to smuggle drugs, even for a very big consignment.”

“I would have expected much more attention to what smuggling operations look like and how to distinguish serious bulk cocaine smuggling boats from inter-island smugglers that might be primarily carrying passengers,” said Baumgartner, the retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

When questioned just a day after the initial strike, at a press conference in Mexico City, Rubio explained the reasons for the attack by first mentioning human trafficking. “The President of the United States has determined that narcoterrorist organizations pose a threat to the national security of the United States,” he explained. “They are traffickers of people, they are traffickers of deadly drugs,” he said.

Facing outrage over the extrajudicial killings, Bradley has attempted to quiet questions about who the U.S. has targeted.

In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bradley confirmed significant involvement in the boat strikes by the National Security Agency. He has also reportedly told lawmakers that U.S. intelligence officials had verified the identities of the 11 people on the boat on September 2 and validated them as legitimate targets. But Special Operations Command would not confirm what Bradley told lawmakers about the identities of the 11 people killed. And numerous government officials who spoke to The Intercept said that claims that intelligence “confirms who these people are” — as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson asserted in December — is a rhetorical sleight of hand, if not an outright lie.

JSOC did not know the names or supposed affiliations of all persons aboard the vessel struck on September 2, numerous government sources told The Intercept.

Two sources specifically mentioned that some passengers were identified only by an obvious nom de guerre. “I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two. … But we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in December. “I don’t think we have any idea, who precisely, any of the individuals in these boats are.”

“Srikes [sic] are deliberate, lawful, and precise — aimed squarely at narco-terrorists and their enablers, not civilians,” a Southern Command spokesperson told The Intercept by email. “SOUTHCOM has full confidence in the operational and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”

SOUTHCOM routinely claims, in fact, that “intelligence” confirms that targeted vessels are “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” But last week, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, revealed that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria” involved in the boat strikes.

Behind closed doors, in fact, Pentagon officials don’t even pretend that they need to know who they are attacking. “They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate.”

Most of the government officials, including lawmakers briefed on the attacks, who spoke with The Intercept said that they believed the vessels targeted in the campaign are involved in illicit trafficking and are not simply fishing boats. But without stopping and searching boats, many said it was impossible to know for certain who and what is aboard a particular vessel.

In late April, Bradley told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the boat strikes are built upon the targeting procedures of the post-9/11 drone wars. “It is based off of the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,” he said, referring to strikes targeting people. Over that span, the U.S. has consistently killed civilians the world over — from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Somalia and Libya to Yemen — due to intelligence failures and targeting errors.

“There has never been a ‘perfecting’ of persona targeting. Just because the U.S. military — and other U.S. forces — conducted many strikes against known targets under the moniker of counterterrorism does not mean that they became significantly better at it over time,” said Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser to the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Over those same two decades being lauded as a time of learning lessons for the U.S. military, human rights groups documented repeated civilian deaths tied to flawed intelligence or assumptions or bias.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept, for instance, revealed a raft of errors leading up to a drone strike in Somalia that killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Special Operations forces who conducted the strike were confused, despite months of “target development,” and argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. They mistook a woman and child for an adult male and never even knew how many people they killed.

“When Adm. Bradley references ‘the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,’ he’s actually invoking an architecture that human rights groups criticized regularly for overconfidence in the intelligence, confirmation bias and assumptions, and institutional incentives to interpret ambiguity as threat confirmation,” Yager said.

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Five experts, including current and former government officials, say that it’s impossible that the U.S. has not killed innocent people in its boat strike campaign given the long-standing limitations of U.S. targeting procedures, such as an overreliance on signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio admitted that the U.S. has erroneously identified boats as possible targets, only to pull back. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” he said. “There are multiple times that I’ve been aware of … because it doesn’t meet the criteria or because there’s doubt.”

“Secret planes and SIGINT aren’t the answer. Confirmation bias continues to be a problem,” one government official briefed on the boat strikes told The Intercept. That official said it was far more likely that U.S. forces had misidentified or outright failed to notice a person aboard one of the boats that have been struck than that they knew the names and affiliations of everyone they had killed.

Government statistics confirm the limitations of intelligence, profiling, and the ability of U.S. personnel to identify supposed drug traffickers from afar. Between September 1, 2024, and October 7, 2025, the Coast Guard interdicted 212 boats headed toward the U.S. that it suspected of drug-trafficking. Forty-one of them, or about 20 percent, had no illicit contraband on board, according to official statistics. As for ships just off the coast of Venezuela, the amount wrongly suspected of carrying drugs was a shade higher: 21 percent.

When asked about the statistics showing 1 in 5 vessels had no drugs aboard, Yager told The Intercept that “positive identification of both targets and civilians has been a known problem in the U.S. military kill chain.”

“In the case of the boat strikes, that’s a high rate of mistaken identity,” she said. “My guess is that the U.S. military has no idea who these people actually are before moving to kill them.”

The post Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking appeared first on The Intercept.

Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept that Section 224, named “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” is highly irregular — and closely resembles a bipartisan bill backed by the pro-Israel lobby that died in Congress earlier this year.

“I can’t think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore.

Unlike traditional foreign military aid programs, Section 224 would establish a framework for integrating Israeli-developed technologies directly into U.S. research, procurement, manufacturing, and acquisition processes — which military experts warned would be complicated, if not impossible, to unwind. It would apply across areas including AI, autonomous systems, cyberwarfare, biotechnology, missile defense, and defense industrial production.

Astore, who has taught military history at multiple institutions, said he’s particularly concerned about the AI component. “Israel is a leader in using AI predictive models and programs to surveil and kill people, using manned and unmanned drones,” he said. “The ‘smart,’ even autonomous technologies Israel has used against Palestinians could very well be used by the U.S. government against American citizens — especially the so-called radical left that President Trump appears to see as domestic terrorists.”

The debate is raging as Congress prepares to take up the fiscal year 2027 NDAA, a routine piece of legislation that spells out congressional priorities and budgeting for the armed forces. The House Armed Services Committee approved the legislation on Thursday evening; it now advances for consideration by the full House.

A handful of legislators from both parties have rebuked Section 224. Among them is Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican known for opposing all foreign military aid — a stance that drew the ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and drove millions in spending against him in the recent primary he lost to a Trump-backed challenger.

Massie was quick to condemn the proposal before it moved forward, writing: “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and Massie’s frequent collaborator, attempted to do something similar at the committee stage. On Thursday, Khanna introduced an amendment seeking to remove Section 224, arguing that Congress should not deepen military integration with Israel at a time when lawmakers are increasingly questioning the future of the U.S.–Israel relationship. But the amendment failed in committee after opposition from both Republicans and Democrats, including Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., who argued the U.S. benefits from access to Israeli military technologies developed under real-world combat conditions, citing missile defense, drone warfare, and other emerging capabilities as areas of mutual interest.

According to its proponents, the goal of Section 224 is to transition Israel away from decades of dependence on U.S. taxpayer-funded military assistance and toward a model centered on trade, co-development, and defense partnership — mirroring a desire expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With the Obama-era Memorandum of Understanding with Israel set to expire in 2028, Israel and its backers in Congress are searching for new ways to preserve U.S.–Israeli military collaboration. The current U.S.–Israel MOU provides approximately $3.3 billion annually in foreign military financing and $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation, totaling $38 billion over 10 years through 2028.

Netanyahu stated in January that he hoped to replace Israel’s dependence on American military assistance in the next decade. Less than a month later, lawmakers in both the House and Senate introduced the United States–Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (FUTURES) Act of 2026, a bipartisan proposal designed to expand U.S.–Israel cooperation in many of the same tech and AI areas as Section 224.

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The FUTURES Act was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and in the House by Reps. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, and Don Davis, D-N.C. All four sponsors have received substantial campaign support from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups.

The legislation also received public backing from both AIPAC and FDD Action, the advocacy arm of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has long advocated for deeper U.S.–Israel defense and technology cooperation.

The FUTURES Act did not advance as standalone legislation — but many of its core concepts later reappeared in Section 224 of the FY2027 NDAA. Legislative records and congressional offices contacted by The Intercept indicate that Section 224 adopts the same initiative and many of the same provisions previously proposed in the FUTURES Act, including language related to integrating Israeli-origin technologies into U.S. military programs, defense industrial cooperation, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, biotechnology, cyber capabilities, and joint research and development.

The Intercept contacted the House Armed Services Committee and the Department of Defense, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office, seeking clarification on the origins of Section 224 and whether Pentagon officials participated in its development. Neither the committee nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment before publication.

The Pentagon’s refusal to answer questions about Section 224 comes amid renewed scrutiny of U.S.–Israel intelligence relations. Reporting published this weekend by the New York Times and Military.com detailed Defense Department concerns regarding Israeli espionage risks, raising additional questions about efforts to deepen technological integration between the two countries.

Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations member who previously served as chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, argued that deeper military integration raises broader concerns about the technologies and doctrines the United States may adopt through closer cooperation with Israel.

“Israel is a terrorist state, wantonly committing atrocity and genocide largely facilitated by its use of AI, and we are further along on the same path but, at the very least, complicit,” Bryant said. “And moreso the more we militarily integrate and partner with Israel.”

In a piece for The Guardian, the co-authors of the upcoming book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, described Section 224 as “not an alliance with a talented and responsible ally that will help keep the US safe, but a trap being set by Israel and its lobby to bind our country to a state that, for all its past promise, has gone rogue.”

The post Congress Is Trying to Permanently Integrate U.S. and Israeli Defense Tech appeared first on The Intercept.

The second measure failed 324-92 Thursday afternoon, a day after passage of a war powers resolution focused on Iran sent a message to the Trump administration.

Ninety-one Democrats voted for the measure sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to block U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon. 117 Democrats voted against.

Citing a range of drafting concerns, Democratic leaders voted against the resolution but promised to support a tweaked version from Tlaib in the future.

At least some pro-Israel Democrats, however, said they opposed to anything that would tie Israel’s hands in Lebanon.

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Tlaib’s measure would have halted U.S. involvement in the Israeli assault on Lebanon without further congressional approval. The Israeli attacks have claimed at least 3,500 lives, displaced over 1 million people, and left wide swaths of the country, including entire towns, in ruins.

The war in Lebanon, which Israel had continued over reported objections from President Donald Trump, is widely seen as an obstacle to a deal with Iran to end the U.S. war there. Iranian officials have excoriated the Israeli attacks and threatened to suspend talks because of them.

U.S Aid for Israel War?

The Trump administration has not explained the extent of its involvement in the war being waged by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel says its attacks are aimed at Hezbollah fighters despite the growing civilian death toll.

There are widespread suspicions that the U.S. government has provided support for the attack in the form of intelligence sharing and other coordination. The administration has not responded to a May 4 letter from Sen. Pete Welch, D-Vt., about whether and how the U.S. is aiding Israel.

Tlaib spoke out in support of her measure during a debate on the House floor on Wednesday.

“This vote on the Lebanon war powers resolution is a clear moral choice: Do you stand with the Netanyahu government and Trump’s endless war crimes, or do you stand with human life, peace, and justice?” she said.

In response, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., accused supporters of the measure of serving as “proxies for Hezbollah.”

That kind of language was not limited to the GOP. It echoed a similar statement made by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., on social media last month.

“Hezbollah is evil — kneecapping our ability to track and respond to their terror serves nobody except Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords,” he said about Tlaib’s resolution.

Other Democrats said they were opposed to the measure on more technical grounds. In a joint statement Thursday, House Democratic leaders said they were worried that it might prevent the U.S. from securing its embassy in Beirut or assisting the country’s official military, the Lebanese Armed Forces.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass.; and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said they were opposed to the measure that was up for a vote Thursday, but would support another one that Tlaib has introduced addressing those concerns.

Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said he was optimistic that support for halting U.S. involvement in the Lebanon war would grow in a future vote.

“If we don’t stop what’s going on in Lebanon, getting a true and lasting ceasefire with Iran is virtually impossible,” he said. “So it is critical we try to curtail U.S. involvement in any operations in Lebanon.”

The post House Dems Coming Around on Iran War — But Won’t Vote to Stop Israel’s Destruction of Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

To any reasonable person, a ceasefire is exactly what it sounds like: It is the total cessation of military attacks to end a war. But to the mainstream American media outlets covering the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, what constitutes a “ceasefire” is a rhetorical exercise.

Today, Iran launched missiles at the international airport in Kuwait. As the New York Times reported: “The barrage was one of the biggest attacks on a Gulf nation since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire took effect in April.” ABC News’s live update coverage ran with the breaking news headline “Iran targets US forces, Kuwait airport amid ceasefire.” Over at CNN, the headline was “Kuwait’s airport attacked as fresh Iran-US strikes strain ceasefire.”

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Of course, Iran’s latest campaign didn’t come out of nowhere: It comes two days after the U.S. announced that it had bombed radar and drone sites in the country, and one day after Israel bombarded south Lebanon with airstrikes and artillery yet again, reportedly killing at least four people across two towns.

All that bombing, and all of its attendant death and suffering, sure doesn’t feel like a “ceasefire” in any real sense. Still, the Times, along with other national news outlets, continues to spin the fantasy that the ceasefire is intact — only now it’s increasingly “fragile” or “tested.” The paper of record has gone so far as to say that it “hangs in balance.” 

In a piece of news analysis in the Times last week — on the heels of the U.S. bombing Iran for the second time in three days — the paper made the case that “a truce isn’t necessarily doomed if the missiles are still flying.” It also argued that while a ceasefire might sound like an end to the bombing, the geopolitical definition hinges on whether both sides agree that a “ceasefire” remains in effect.

If government officials call it a ceasefire, who is the New York Times to question it?

For many months, another ceasefire in name only has been touted in Gaza. What that’s looked like in practice is Israel relentlessly bombing the Palestinians on a near-daily basis. Al Jazeera reported that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza was announced in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 922 people and injured 2,786.

To the people of Gaza and of south Lebanon, there is no ceasefire. Continuing to carry water for the idea that we’re no longer at war, or that there’s been any meaningful progress made to end this war, is to provide cover for the U.S. and Israel, the countries that launched this war of aggression and continue to execute it. It also provides President Donald Trump with the political cover he so desperately desires as he realizes that he’s powerless to end the deeply unpopular war he started with Israel, and that no number of testy phone calls will move the needle if our ally won’t agree to a true ceasefire.

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The mainstream media is perfectly comfortable spinning the fiction that we’re currently in a gray zone somewhere between war and peace because the stakes are an abstraction. To them, blindly supporting American imperialism and Israeli aggression are baked-in ideological assumptions, not matters of life or death. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has done more than any other media organization to massage the language around Israel, Gaza, and Iran to an extreme degree.

But words like “ceasefire” matter a great deal, which is why it’s critically important for the media to call out acts of war for exactly what they are. In this way, the brutal fact of war is black and white: Your country is either killing people with the bombs it’s dropping, or it’s not. Failing to acknowledge that reality is worse than dishonest — it is to irrevocably deprive those paying the highest price of their humanity.

The post Stop Calling It a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

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

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 64 Navy personnel have been wounded in action.

Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Va., this month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses. CENTCOM did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for clarification concerning the casualty figures.

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