A photo posted by the unit itself, however, seems to suggest that the U.S. was providing support as far back as December of last year. 

The photo, in tandem with the administration’s own statements, highlights the murky nature of the arms ban, how it was imposed, and under what U.S. authority. Two mechanisms could have barred arms transfers: a law passed by Congress specifically prohibiting assistance to Azov, and the so-called Leahy laws that block support to units responsible for grave rights violations. 

“My guess is that the Department found that the Brigade is a ‘new unit,’ distinguishable from the Battalion and the Regiment.”

The State Department said this month that weapon shipments will now go forward after a Leahy law review, but won’t comment on if and when a Leahy ban was in effect. The congressional prohibition, the U.S. says, does not apply because it barred assistance to the Azov Battalion, a predecessor to the Azov Brigade. The original unit had earned scrutiny for alleged human rights violations and ties to neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies.

The U.S. has not made clear about when the apparent ban started, but a deputy Azov commander and media reports indicate some type of prohibition has been in effect for nearly a decade — though the congressional ban has only been in effect since 2018.

“There was a request for resources for the 12th Special Forces Brigade, which prompted a Leahy vetting process, in which they were found to be eligible,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept, suggesting the approval process did not deal with any existing bans. (The State Department did not respond to questions asking for clarity if that was the case.)

One former American official said that because of the unit’s byzantine history of reorganizations and official status, the State Department should better explain its decisions.

“Given the history of the Azov Regiment, the Azov Battalion, and the Azov Brigade, the State Department’s ought to provide a more detailed rationale for the finding that the Brigade is eligible pursuant to the Leahy law,” Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, told The Intercept. “My guess is that the Department found that the Brigade is a ‘new unit,’ distinguishable from the Battalion and the Regiment. If that’s correct, the Department should say so.”

U.S. Special Ops Training

Restrictions on U.S. military support may have been in effect when the Azov Brigade’s official Telegram channel and X account announced in March that the unit’s personnel recently completed an American military training. The course, on civil–military cooperation, was provided by U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, or SOCEUR, according to the posts.

One attached photo shows a captain in the Azov unit being presented with a certificate dated December 2023 by a person with a blurred face in U.S. military fatigues. A second photo shows a group of people in U.S. military apparel holding an American flag next to a group of several dozen others, some of whom are holding a flag with the Azov insignia.

Department of Defense spokesperson Tim Gorman would not comment on the SOCEUR training, including whether or not it was legal, and referred The Intercept to the State Department. (The Azov unit did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department also declined to answer repeated questions about the SOCEUR training and its legality, or whether there had been other U.S. military training with Azov before clearing the group under the Leahy laws.

The spokesperson told The Intercept that it found no evidence of the Azov Brigade committing violations of human rights that would bar American aid under the Leahy laws.

Russia has tried to discredit the Azov Brigade, the State Department spokesperson said, by conflating it with its predecessor, the Azov Battalion militia. The Azov Battalion, which is under congressional sanctions, was absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014 then underwent several more reorganizations before becoming a brigade in 2023. Others have echoed concerns of propaganda against Azov, pointing to Russia’s amplification of claims about Nazis in Ukraine to justify its invasion.

“That militia disbanded in 2015 and the composition of Special Forces Brigade Azov is significantly different,” the spokesperson noted. Another spokesperson, meanwhile, said, “The Battalion was disbanded in 2014 and the United States has never provided security assistance to the ‘Azov battalion.’”

With the State Department leaning on the distinction between the “battalion” and the “brigade” to get around congressional sanctions, some representatives are moving to shore up the statutory ban on military support to Azov. In recent days, the proposed defense appropriations language was updated. 

“None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, intelligence, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion, the Third Separate Assault Brigade, or any successor organization,” the new language reads, gesturing to a brigade created by Battalion veterans, as well as the Azov Brigade itself. The current language in effect only addresses the Azov Battalion.

A former House staffer who was involved in efforts to ban support to Azov, requesting anonymity for fear of threats from the group, told The Intercept, “The fact that Congress is moving so quickly to reaffirm that the ban does apply to ‘successor organizations’ like the Azov Regiment, Azov Brigade, or whatever else they might change their name to next, shows that the White House view doesn’t hold water.”

Significantly Different?

As it is, the State Department’s limited rationale for lifting arms restrictions rests on the claim that the composition of the battalion and the brigade are “significantly different.” That finding would be made under provisions of the Leahy determinations that allow for differentiating between old and “fundamentally different units,” such as changes in leadership and culture. 

Yet the Azov unit has significant continuity and, while Leahy laws are concerned with human rights, the State Department’s appeal to the Leahy determination may not cover the ideological justification of the congressional ban on the transfer of arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.

Azov commander Denys Prokopenko and deputy commander Svyatoslav Palamar, for instance, are holdovers from the original battalion militia. And, along with other higher-ranking Azov members, they are linked to white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies, as Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin reported in The Nation last year. 

“If the White House wants to arm and train the most neo-Nazi-linked group in Ukraine, it should push for Congress to remove the ban.”

The suggestion that the battalion was “disbanded” and the brigade is “significantly different” is also undermined by the unit’s own words. A page on their website celebrates its 10-year anniversary. “This is the path from a few dozen volunteers, who had only motivation and faith in justice, to a special purpose brigade — one of the most effective units of the Defense Forces,” it reads.

Another biographical page suggests the Azov Battalion was never actually dissolved, but subsumed into the official Ukrainian military structure. “On September 17, 2014, by order of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the ‘Azov’ battalion was reorganized and expanded into the ‘Azov’ special purpose militia regiment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the page says. “On November 11, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine signed an order on the transfer of the ‘Azov’ regiment to the National Guard of Ukraine, with its further staffing up to the combat standard of the National Guard brigades.”

Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs who resigned in protest of the administration’s policy on Israel’s Gaza war, told The Intercept he was not aware of any standing restriction on Azov. He recalled speaking to subject matter experts who said there were no concerns, and, as far as he knew, the unit had been eligible for aid since at least 2022. “My understanding is that they genuinely are different entities,” he said, adding that he did not see any evidence while at the State Department to suggest the Azov Brigade should be prohibited from receiving security assistance.

Ukrainian officials, for their part, seemed to suggest to the Washington Post that there was indeed a ban, one that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba apparently raised to Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month. (Paul said there was “something odd going on, but my solid recollection is that there was no restriction, so I’m not sure what the Ukrainians are on about.”)

Two months ago — after the social media pictures appearing to show the training — Prokopenko, the Azov commander, said on X, “Azov is still blacklisted from receiving any U.S. aid.” In a May post, Prokopenko complained Azov had fought to defend Mariupol in 2022 with limited resources and outdated weapons because of the congressional ban on aid — suggesting the statutory sanctions applied to the unit at the time.

“The unavoidable reality is that there is a current ban on U.S. arms and training going to the Azov units,” said the former House staffer. “If the White House wants to arm and train the most neo-Nazi-linked group in Ukraine, it should push for Congress to remove the ban.”

“That may be a tall ask, however, as Congress is currently seeking to strengthen the law, rather than weaken it.”

The post The U.S. Says a Far-Right Ukrainian Army Unit Can Now Get Aid. A Photo Shows Training Was Already Happening. appeared first on The Intercept.

In college and early in her career, Byrne had dedicated herself to the field of counterterrorism and its attempt to catalog, explain, and ultimately deter non-state political violence. She was most concerned with violent right-wing extremism: neo-Nazis infiltrating Western armies, Klansmen plotting on Facebook pages, and Trumpist militiamen marching on the Capitol.

In video meetings with her remote work colleagues and in the conference rooms of Menlo Park, California, with the MAGA riot of January 6 fresh in her mind, Byrne believed she was in the right place at the right time to make a difference.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine. A country of under 40 million found itself facing a full-scale assault by one of the largest militaries in the world. Standing between it and Russian invasion were the capable, battle-tested fighters of the Azov Battalion — a unit founded as the armed wing of a Ukrainian neo-Nazi movement. What followed not only shook apart Byrne’s plans for her own life, but also her belief in content moderation and counterterrorism.

Today, she is convinced her former employer cannot be trusted with power so vast, and that the systems she helped build should be dismantled. For the first time, Byrne shares her story with The Intercept, and why the public should be as disturbed by her work as she came to be.

Through a spokesperson, Meta told The Intercept that Byrne’s workplace concerns “do not match the reality” of how policy is enforced at the company.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Byrne grew up in the small, predominantly white Boston suburb of Natick. She was 7 years old when the World Trade Center was destroyed and grew up steeped in a binary American history of good versus evil, hopeful she would always side neatly with the former.

School taught her that communism was bad, Martin Luther King Jr. ended American racism, and the United States had only ever been a force for peace. Byrne was determined after high school to work for the CIA in part because of reading about its origin story as the Nazi-fighting Office of Strategic Services during World War II. “I was a 9/11 kid with a poor education and a hero complex,” Byrne said.

And so Byrne joined the system, earning an undergraduate degree in political science at Johns Hopkins and then enrolling in a graduate research program in “terrorism and sub-state violence” at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. Georgetown’s website highlights how many graduates from the Center go on to work at places like the Department of Defense, Department of State, Northrop Grumman — and Meta.

It was taken for granted that the program would groom graduates for the intelligence community, said Jacq Fulgham, who met Byrne at Georgetown. But even then, Fulgham remembers Byrne as a rare skeptic willing to question American imperialism: “Hannah always forced us to think about every topic and to think critically.”

Part of her required reading at Georgetown included “A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat,” by former Defense Department official Matthew Kroenig. The book advocates for preemptive air war against Iran to end the country’s nuclear ambitions. Byrne was shocked that the premise of bombing a country of 90 million — presumably killing many innocent people — to achieve the ideological and political ends of the United States would be considered within the realm of educated debate and not an act of terrorism.

That’s because terrorism, her instructors insisted, was not something governments do. Part of terror’s malign character is its perpetration by “non-state actors”: thugs, radicals, militants, criminals, and assassins. Not presidents or generals. Unprovoked air war against Iran was within the realm of polite discussion, but there was never “the same sort of critical thinking to what forms of violence might be appropriate for Hamas” or other non-state groups, she recalls.

As part of her program at Georgetown, Byrne studied abroad in places where “non-state violence” was not a textbook topic but real life. Interviews with former IRA militants in Belfast, ex-FARC soldiers in Colombia, and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation complicated the terrorism binary. Rather than cartoon villains, Byrne met people who felt pushed to violence by the overwhelming reach and power of the United States and its allies. Wherever she went, Byrne said, she met people victimized, not protected by her country. This was a history she had never been taught.

Despite feeling dismayed about the national security sector, Byrne still harbored a temptation to fix it from within. After receiving her master’s and entering a State Department-sponsored immersion language class in India, still hopeful for an eventual job at the CIA or National Security Agency, she got a job at the RAND Corporation as a defense analyst. “I hoped I’d be able to continue to learn and write about ‘terrorism,’ which I now knew to be ‘resistance movements,’ in an academic way,” Byrne said. Instead, her two years at RAND were focused on the traditional research the think tank is known for, contributing to titles like “Countering Violent Nonstate Actor Financing: Revenue Sources, Financing Strategies, and Tools of Disruption.”

“She was all in on a career in national security,” recalled a former RAND co-worker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. “She was earnest in the way a lot of inside-the-Beltway recent grads can be,” they added. “She still had a healthy amount of sarcasm. But I think over time that turned into cynicism.”

Unfulfilled at RAND, Byrne found what she thought could be a way to both do good and honor her burgeoning anti-imperial politics: Fighting the enemy at home. She decided her next step would be a job that let her focus on the threat of white supremacists.

Facebook needed the help. A mob inflamed by white supremacist rhetoric had stormed the U.S. Capitol, and Facebook yet again found itself pilloried for providing an organizing tool for extremists. Byrne came away from job interviews with Facebook’s policy team convinced the company would let her fight a real danger in a way the federal national security establishment would not.

Instead, she would come to realize she had joined the national security state in microcosm.

Azov on the Whitelist

Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.

She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.

Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.

Related

Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations”

A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.

A 2022 third-party audit commissioned by Meta found the company had violated the human rights of Palestinian users, in part, due to over-enforcement of the DOI policy. Meta’s in-house Oversight Board has repeatedly reversed content removed through the policy, and regularly asks the company to disclose the contents of the list and information about how it’s used.

Meta’s longtime justification of the Dangerous Organizations policy is that the company is legally obligated to censor certain kinds of speech around designated entities or it would risk violating the federal statute barring material support for terrorist groups, a view some national security scholars have vigorously rejected.

Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.

Still, Byrne had doubts about the model because of the clear intimacy between American state policy and Meta’s content moderation policy. Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government,” Byrne said in an interview.

She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.

Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible.

In February 2022, as Russia prepared its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Byrne learned firsthand just how mercurial the corporate mirroring of State Department policy could be.

As an armed white supremacist group with credible allegations of human rights violations hanging over it, Azov had landed on the Dangerous Organizations list, which meant the unit’s members couldn’t use Meta platforms like Facebook, nor could any users of those platforms praise the unit’s deeds. But with Russian tanks and troops massing along the border, Ukraine’s well-trained Azov fighters became the vanguard of anti-Russian resistance, and their status as international pariahs a sudden liability for American geopolitics. Within weeks, Byrne found the moral universe around her inverted: The heavily armed hate group sanctioned by Congress since 2018 were now freedom fighters resisting occupation, not terroristic racists.

As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne’s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. “They’re no longer neo-Nazis,” Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position of the White House.

Related

Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion

Shortly after the delisting, The Intercept reported that Meta rules had been quickly altered to “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Suddenly, billions of people were permitted to call the historically neo-Nazi Azov movement “real heroes,” according to policy language obtained by The Intercept at the time.

Byrne and other concerned colleagues were given an opportunity to dissent and muster evidence that Azov fighters had not in fact reformed. Byrne said that even after gathering photographic evidence to the contrary, Meta responded that while Azov may have harbored Nazi sympathies in recent years, posts violating the company’s rules had sufficiently tapered off.

The odds felt stacked: While their bosses said they were free to make their case that the Battalion should remain blacklisted, they had to pull their evidence from Facebook — a platform that Azov fighters ostensibly weren’t allowed to use in the first place.

“Key to that assessment — which everyone at Facebook knew, but coming from the outside sounds ridiculous — is that we’re actually pretty bad at keeping content off the platform. Especially neo-Nazi content,” Byrne recalls. “So internally, it was like, ‘Oh, there should be lots of evidence online if they’re neo-Nazis because there’s so many neo-Nazis on our platform.’”

Though she was not privy to deliberations about the choice to delist the Azov Battalion, Byrne is adamant in her suspicion that it was done to support the U.S.-backed war effort. “I know the U.S. government is in constant contact with Facebook employees,” she said. “It is so clear that it was a political decision.” Byrne had taken this job to prevent militant racism from spilling over into offline violence. Now, her team was instead loosening its rules for an armed organization whose founder had once declared Ukraine’s destiny was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Related

Facebook Tells Moderators to Allow Graphic Images of Russian Airstrikes but Censors Israeli Attacks

It wasn’t just the shock of a reversal on the Azov Battalion, but the fact that it had happened so abruptly — Byrne estimates that it took no more than two weeks to exempt the group and allow praise of it once more.

She was aghast: “Of course, this is going to exacerbate white supremacist violence,” she recalls worrying. “This is going to make them look good. It’s going to make it easier to spread propaganda. Ultimately, I was afraid that it was going to directly contribute to violence.”

In its comments to The Intercept, Meta reiterated its belief that the Azov unit has meaningfully reformed and no longer meets its standards for designation.

Byrne recalled a similar frustration around Meta’s blacklisting of factions fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but not the violent, repressive government itself. “[Assad] was gassing his civilians, and there were a couple Syrians at Facebook who were like, ‘Hey, why do we have this whole team called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals and they’re only censoring the Syrian resistance?’” Byrne realized there was no satisfying answer: National governments were just generally off-limits.

Meta confirmed to The Intercept that its definition of terrorism doesn’t apply to nation states, reflecting what it described as a legal and academic consensus that governments may legitimately use violence.

At the start of her job, Byrne was under the impression right-wing extremism was a top priority for the company. “But every time I need resources for neo-Nazi stuff … nothing seemed to happen.” The Azov exemption, by contrast, happened at lightning speed. Byrne recalls a similarly rapid engineering effort to tweak Meta’s machine learning-based content scanning system that would have normally removed the bulk of Azov-friendly posts. Not everyone’s algorithmic treatment is similarly prioritized: “It’s infuriating that so many Palestinians are still being taken down for false-positive ‘graphic violence’ violations because it’s obvious to me no one at Meta gives a shit,” Byrne said.

Meta pushed back on Byrne’s broader objections to the Dangerous Organizations policy. “This former employee’s claims do not match the reality of how our Dangerous Organizations policies actually work,” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said in a statement. “These policies are some of the most comprehensive in the industry, and designed to stop those who seek to promote violence, hate and terrorism on our platforms, while at the same time ensuring free expression. We have a team of hundreds of people from different backgrounds working on these issues every day — with expertise ranging from law enforcement and national security to human rights, counterterrorism and academic studies. Our Dangerous Organizations policies are not static, we update them to reflect evolving factors and changing threat landscapes, and we apply them equally around the world while also complying with our legal obligations.”

Malicious Actors

But it wasn’t the Azov reversal that ended Byrne’s counterterror career.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Meta had a problem: “It’s tough to profile or pinpoint the type of person that would be inclined to participate in January 6, which is true of most terrorist groups,” Byrne said. “It’s an ideology, it lives in your mind.”

But what if the company could prevent the next recruit for the Proud Boys, or Three Percenters, or even ISIS? “That was our task,” Byrne said. “Figure out where these groups are organizing, kind of nip it in the bud before they carry out any further real-world violence. We need to make sure they’re not in groups together, not friending each other, and not connecting with like-minded people.”

She was assigned to work on Meta’s Malicious Actor Framework, a system intended to span all its platforms and identify “malicious actors” who might be prone to “dangerous” behavior using “signals,” Byrne said. The approach, she said, had been pioneered at Meta by the child safety team, which used automated alarms to alert the company when it seemed an adult might be attempting inappropriate contact with a child. That tactic had some success, but Byrne recalls it also mistakenly flagged people like coaches and teachers who had legitimate reason to interact with children.

Posting praise or admiring imagery of Osama bin Laden is relatively easy to catch and delete. But what about someone interested in his ideas? “The premise was that we need to target certain kinds of individuals who are likely to sympathize with terrorism,” Byrne said. There was just one problem, as Byrne puts it today: “What the fuck does it mean to be a sympathizer?”

In the field, this Obama-era framework of stopping radicalization before it takes root is known as Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE. It has been criticized as both pseudoscientific and ineffective, undermining the civil liberties of innocent people by placing them under suspicion for their own good. CVE programs generally “lack any scientific basis, are ineffective at reducing terrorism, and are overwhelmingly discriminatory in nature,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Byrne had joined Meta at a time when the company was transitioning “from content-based detection to profile-based detection,”said Byrne. Screenshots of team presentations Byrne participated in show an interest in predicting dangerousness among users. One presentation expresses concern with Facebook’s transition to encrypted messaging, which would prevent authorities (and Meta itself) from eavesdropping on chats: “We will need to move our detection/enforcement/investigation signals more upstream to surfaces we do have insight into (eg., user’s behaviors on FB, past violations, social relationships, group metadata like description, image, title, etc) in order to flag areas of harm.”

Meta specifically wanted the ability to detect and deter “risky interactions” between “dangerous individuals” or “likely-malicious actors” and their “victims” vulnerable of radicalization — without being able to read the messages these users were exchanging. The company hoped to use this capability, according to these meeting materials, to stop “malicious actors distributing propaganda,” for example. This would be accomplished using machine learning to recognize dangerous signals on someone’s profile, according to these screenshots, like certain words in their profile or whether they’d been members of a banned group.

Byrne said the plan was to incorporate this policy into a companywide framework, but she departed Meta too soon to know what ultimately came of this plan.

Meta confirmed the existence of the malicious actor framework to The Intercept, explaining that it remains a work in progress, but disputed its predictive nature.

Byrne has no evidence that Meta was pursuing a system that would use overtly prejudiced criteria to determine who is a future threat, but feared that any predictive system would be based on thin evidence and unconsciously veer toward bias. Civil liberties scholars and counterterror experts have long warned that because terrorism is so extremely rare, any attempt to predict who will commit it is fatally flawed because there simply is not enough data. Such efforts often regress, wittingly or otherwise, into stereotypes.

“I brought it up in a couple meetings, including with my manager, but it wasn’t taken that seriously,” Byrne said.

Byrne recalls discussion of predicting such radicalism risk based on things like who your friends are, what’s on your profile, who sends you message, and the extent to which you and your network have previously violated Meta’s speech rules. Given the fact enforcement of those rules has been shown to be biased along national or ethnic lines and plagued by technical errors, Byrne feared the worst for vulnerable users. “If you live in Palestine, all of your friends are Palestinians,” Byrne said. “They’re all getting flagged, and it’s like a self-licking ice cream cone.”

In the spring of 2022, investigators drawn from Meta’s internal Integrity, Investigations, and Intelligence team, known as i3, began analyzing the profiles of Facebook users whose profiles had run afoul of the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, Byrne said. They were looking for shared traits that could be turned into general indicators of risk. “As someone who came from a professional research background, I can say it wasn’t a good research methodology,” Byrne said.

Part of her objection was pedigree: People just barely removed from American government were able to determine what people could say on online, whether or not the internet users lived in the United States. Many of these investigators, according to Byrne’s recollection and LinkedIn profiles of her former colleagues she shared with The Intercept, had arrived from positions at the Defense Department, FBI, and U.S. intelligence agencies, institutions not known for an unbiased approach to counterterror.

Over hours of interviews, Byrne never badmouthed any of her former colleagues nor blamed them individually. Her criticism of Meta is systemic, the sort of structural ailment she had hoped to change from within. “It was people that I personally liked and trusted, and I trusted their values,” Byrne said of her former colleagues on Meta’s in-house intelligence team.

Byrne feared implementing a system so deeply rooted in inference could endanger the users she’d been hired to protect. She worried about systemic biases, such as “the fact that Arabic language just wasn’t really represented in our data set.”

She worried about generalizing about one strain of violent extremism and applying it to drastically different cultures, contexts, and ideologies: “We’re saying Hamas is the exact same thing as the KKK with absolutely no basis in logic or reason or history or research.” Byrne encountered similar definitional headaches around “misinformation” and “disinformation,” which she says her team studied as potential sources of terror sympathy and wanted to incorporate into the Malicious Actor Framework. But like terrorism itself, Byrne found these terms simply too blunt to be effective. “We’re taking some of the most complex, unrelated, geographically separated, just different fucking things, and we’re literally using this word terrorism, or misinformation, or disinformation, to treat them as a binary.”

Private Policy, Public Relations

Toward the end of her time at Meta, Byrne began to break down. The prospect of catching enemies of the state had energized her at first. Now she faced the grim, gradual realization that she wasn’t accomplishing the things she hoped she would. Her work wasn’t making Facebook safer, nor the people using it. Far from manning the barricades against extremism, Byrne quickly found herself just another millennial in a boring tech job.

But while planning the Malicious Actor Framework, these feelings of futility gave way to something worse: “I’m actually going to be an active participant in harm,” she recalls thinking. The speech of people she’d met in her studies abroad were exactly the kind her job might suppress. Finally, Byrne had decided “it felt impossible to be a good actor within that system.”

Spiraling mental health struggles resulted in a leave of absence in the spring of 2023 and months of partial hospitalization. Away from her job, grappling with the nature of her work, Byrne realized she couldn’t go on. She returned at the end of the summer for a brief stretch before finally quitting on October 4. Her departure came just days before the world would be upended by events that would quickly implicate her former employer and highlight exactly why she fled from it.

For Byrne, watching the Israeli military hailed by her country’s leaders as it kills tens of thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terror exposes everything she believes wrong and fraudulent about the counterterrorism industry. Meta’s Dangerous Organizations policy doesn’t take lives, but she sees it as rooted in that same conceptual injustice. “The same racist, bullshit dynamics of ‘terrorism’ were not only dictating who the U.S. was allowed to kill, they were dictating what the world was allowed to see, who in the world was allowed to speak, and what the world was allowed to say,” Byrne explained. “And the system works exactly as the U.S. law intends it to — to silence resistance to its violence.”

In conversations, it seems most galling for Byrne to compare how malleable Meta’s Dangerous Organizations policy was for Ukraine, and how draconian it has felt for those protesting the war in Gaza, or trying to document it happening around them. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta not only moved swiftly to allow users to cheer on the Azov Battalion, but also loosened its rules around incitement, hate speech, and gory imagery so Ukrainian civilians could share images of the suffering around them and voice their fury against it. Byrne recalls seeing a video on Facebook of a Ukrainian woman giving an invading Russian soldier seeds, telling him to keep them in his pockets so they’d flower from his corpse on the battlefield. Were it a Palestinian woman taunting to an Israeli soldier, Byrne said, “that would be taken down for terrorism so quickly.”

Today, Byrne remains conflicted about the very concept of content moderation. On the one hand, she acknowledges that violent groups can and do organize via platforms like Facebook — the problem that brought her to the company in the first place. And there are ways she believes Meta could easily improve, given its financial resources: more and better human moderators, more policy drafted by teams equipped to meet the contours of the hundreds of different countries where people use Facebook and Instagram.

While Byrne and her colleagues were supposed to be preventing harm from occurring in the world, they often felt like they were a janitorial crew responding to bad press. “An article would come out, all my team would share it, and then it would be like ‘Fix this thing’ all day. I’d be glued to the computer.” Byrne recalls “my boss’s boss or even Mark Zuckerberg just like searching things, and screenshotting them, and sending them to us, like ‘Why is this still up?’” She remembers her team, contrary to conventional wisdom about Big Tech, “expressing gratitude when there would be [media] leaks sometimes, because we’d all of a sudden get all of these resources and ability to change things.”

Militant neo-Nazi organizations represent a real, violent threat to the public, and they and other violent groups can and do organize using online platforms like Facebook, she readily admits. Still, watching the way pro-Palestinian speech has been restricted by companies like Meta since October 7, while glorifications of Israeli state violence flows unfettered, pushed her to speak out publicly about the company’s censorship apparatus. 

In her life post-Meta, galvanized by the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Byrne has become active in pro-Palestinian protest circles and outspoken in her criticism in her former employer’s role in suppressing speech about the war. In February, she gave a presentation on Meta’s censorship practices at the NOLA Freedom Forum, a New Orleans activist group, providing an insider’s advice on how to avoid getting banned on Instagram.

She’s still maddened by the establishment’s circular logic of terrorism, which casts non-state actors as terrorists while condoning the same behaviors from governments. “The scales of acceptable casualties are astronomically different when we’re talking about white, state-perpetrated violence versus brown and black non-state-perpetrated violence.”

Unlike past Big Tech dissidents like Frances Haugen, Byrne doesn’t think her former employer can be reformed with tweaks to its algorithms or greater transparency. Rather, she fundamentally objects to an American company policing speech — even in the name of safety — for so much of the planet.

So long as U.S. foreign policy and federal law brands certain acts of violence beyond the pale depending on politics and not harm — and so long as Meta believes itself beholden to those laws — Byrne believes the machine cannot be fixed. “You want military, Department of State, CIA people enforcing free speech? That is what is concerning about this.”

The post She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook. appeared first on The Intercept.

Weapons and ammunition were being handed out to civilians in the streets of the capital. Lang, who had served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on Ukrainian front lines following Russia’s first incursion into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, realized that his combat skills would be useful. He thought to himself, “My country is under attack, I have to do something.” 

Born in North Carolina, Lang enlisted in the U.S. military at the age of 18. After his service, which ended under murky circumstances, he moved to Ukraine and lived there on and off since 2015. Between now and then, he has also been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, a double murder in the U.S., and has spent time inside a jail cell. The man is no stranger to violence.

On that March day in 2022, Lang woke up early to make a phone call, but before he could dial, his phone rang. The man at the other end of the line went by the call sign “Dragon.” He was an old contact from the Right Sector, an ultranationalist militia once loosely attached to the Ukrainian military.

“He’s like, ‘You want to come to Irpin with me and fuck the Russians?’” Lang told me in one of our many text and phone conversations over the last year and a half. “And I was like, ‘Absolutely.’”

The Right Sector largely formed in 2014 during the Maidan protests that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, sparking a Russian-backed invasion of the Donbas region and the annexation of Crimea. The Right Sector was part of a ragtag, emergency mobilization of Ukrainian troops that included groups like the infamous Azov Battalion. 

To many in Ukraine, the Right Sector and groups like it were a key part of helping the country fend off the initial 2014 invasion and establish the legitimacy of the nascent government, even if the group waved a red and black fascistic flag and counted among its ranks anarchists, soccer hooligans, and some neo-Nazis. 

With the war entering a new, even more violent phase in 2022, the Right Sector was rallying to join the national resistance. Five minutes after the call, according to Lang, Dragon pulled up to his home in Kyiv. Shortly after that, Lang says, he was asked by Dragon’s commander if he was familiar with a number of “Western weapons” systems and if he could help lead attacks.

“I looked over everything and I was like: ‘Yeah, I know how to use all of this.’ And it was like, ‘Awesome, take whatever you want.’”

The Right Sector commander, who Lang said was serving under a branch of the Ukrainian special forces, put him to work in a squad with other foreign vets who were skilled and could take on Russian regulars in the streets of Irpin, a strategically crucial city north of Kyiv and near Bucha, the site of eventual Russian war crimes.

“We would basically create small kill teams,” Lang explained. “So groups of 10 to 12 guys, and we would go out and we would ambush Russian convoys … basically hit, get away, and disappear.”

Opposing Russia was second nature to Lang. Fighting was too. But Lang had never before served in uniform while an international fugitive.

The story of Craig Lang is messy and ominous because it raises questions about who we ask to fight for us. 

Lang’s time in Ukraine is in some ways a microcosm of the muddy and convoluted foreign interventions peppered across the last nine years of warfare in the country. Whether it was the failure of diplomatic interventions by the Obama administration and the fumbling of Javelin rocket sales — or instrumental training missions that helped wean Ukraine off of Russian-styled warfare — Western intervention has both inhibited the Kyiv government’s power and undoubtedly helped it.

Lang was a trendsetting foreign volunteer years before some 20,000 foreign applicants responded to the February 2022 call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for NATO veterans and other able-bodied fighters to join his country’s International Legion against Russia. Lang had made his way to Ukraine not long after he left the U.S. Army with what he says was an “Other Than Honorable Discharge” in 2014 after an alleged armed altercation with his ex-wife and going AWOL from his base. (The Pentagon would not clarify the specifics of his exit.) Though Lang once claimed in court to have traumatic brain injuries from one of his tours in the Middle East, he has volunteered — or tried to volunteer — for at least three foreign conflicts (for example, one in South Sudan in 2017), not including his U.S. Army tours. That obsession with fighting, along with his connection to alleged war crimes, is backed up by court documents and yearslong reporting by multiple outlets.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept about his history of fighting in Ukraine and his legal troubles, Lang was candid about his past. 

In his telling, it all started when a post-military job in the oil fields of North Dakota wasn’t enough. He saw the news clippings about what was happening in Donbas during 2015, a time of intensified trench fighting between Kremlin-backed separatists (plus covert Russian regulars) and Ukrainian forces. Lang decided to try to find a way over to the war. After a little bit of Facebook digging and some text message exchanges with contacts, he found himself on a flight to Ukraine. 

This coincided with my own foray into covering the conflict. In 2015 and 2016, I was investigating the NATO-backed training programs that countries like Canada and the U.S. were leading to bolster the Ukrainian military. The training goal was to quietly and cheaply transform a rusting and corrupt Soviet-era outfit into one capable of countering any future Russian attempts at total war, without triggering an open conflict between the alliance and Russia. 

It was a classic case of proxy war, and as time went on, the Western training and funding helped grow and professionalize the Ukrainian military.

But volunteer militias like the Right Sector that had overtly far-right and ultranationalist ideologies continued to play a role in key areas of Donbas. In 2017, I was embedded at a Right Sector base near the now-decimated town of Marinka. I observed a platoon of very capable militiamen engaging in regular firefights and artillery exchanges with Russian-backed forces across the no man’s land. On walls and shoulder patches, I also saw sonnenrads (the Black Sun symbol of the Third Reich) and various other neo-Nazi runes.

These units formed a tiny fraction of the Ukrainian forces, though some were trained by NATO. Right Sector soldiers fought to defend Kyiv last year and still do; Azov, whose fighters were seen dipping their bullets in pig fat as a taunt to their Chechen Muslim enemies, put up a relentless defense of Mariupol. (Azov was made an official regiment of the Ukrainian military that until recently used a neo-Nazi symbol in its emblem.)

Even in the U.S. military community, signs of far-right extremism linked to violence aren’t hard to find. According to a University of Maryland study from last year, since 1991 over 600 American active duty and veteran soldiers committed acts of extremist violence. The large majority of those were politically far right, including several of the January 6 attackers and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a strict adherent of the neo-Nazi book “The Turner Diaries.”

The presence of groups like Right Sector and Azov is a complex feature of Ukraine’s war effort since 2014 but not a sign of widespread Nazism. The country, facing total annihilation, has needed everyone and anyone it could muster to fight back against a vastly superior Russian force. But even if your country is facing an existential battle, that choice comes with a price if the conflict entangles NATO and draws billions of dollars in weapons transfers from the Pentagon. Everyone from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized on these connections to portray Kyiv as a modern-day Fourth Reich, although Ukraine’s president is openly and proudly Jewish. 

Then there’s the further complicating matter of the thousands of foreign volunteers who have fought on Kyiv’s side, who are sometimes painted as mercenaries in league with a Nazi regime. Not unlike the weapons transfers and NATO’s training efforts, waves of volunteer foot soldiers have been a Western and global export to the war since 2014.

“I went to the Right Sector because it was easier,” Lang told me. “Because back then, it was actually illegal for foreigners to serve in the [Ukrainian] army. It didn’t become legal for us to serve in the Armed Forces until 2016.”

The Right Sector was a well-known and popular landing spot for foreign fighters, some with links to American extremist organizations and the global neo-Nazi movement. Though Lang described himself as a “constitutionalist” in a 2016 Vice profile of his Right Sector unit, he fervently denies being a far-right extremist. The United Nations formally accused the Right Sector of human rights violations in a 2017 report before it was subsumed into the regular Ukrainian military after the war intensified last year.

“It was mostly like trench fighting in some places,” remembered Lang. “Sometimes the Russians would push on the positions and try to take it, and you could get into some sketchy situations.”

Like many American volunteers with combat tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where the enemy rarely has howitzers, Lang experienced incoming shelling for the first time in Donbas. 

“I’d been around the occasional mortar rocket in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said, “but this was the first time that I actually had force-on-force encounters with artillery.”

Lang told me the unit he first fought with in 2015 had several foreigners and English speakers, including “a group of Austrians” with military experience, some of whom “were literally AWOL from the Austrian army. They had illegally left their unit.”

That same Right Sector unit became known to authorities. In 2018, the FBI began investigating claims that Americans and other foreign fighters in Ukraine committed war crimes in 2015 and 2016, when Lang was serving. He was suspected of beating prisoners and possibly executing some of them before burying them in unmarked graves. The probe into the allegations came to light after a pro-Russian and ex-Ukrainian security services worker leaked documents about the war crimes allegations; the documents included correspondence between the U.S. Justice Department and Ukrainian authorities in 2018 and 2019, asking for information on Lang and others.

The FBI said it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation” into Lang. But last year, Austrian media reported that an Austrian who served in Lang’s Right Sector unit and with other Americans was convicted of war crimes in a regional court in Feldkirch. Lang has never been charged with any alleged crimes in a U.S. court for his service with the Right Sector. By 2016, he had left the group and joined up officially with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He left the country sometime in 2017 and returned in late 2018, after which he met and married a Ukrainian woman and had two children.

Between July 2017 and late 2018, Lang’s story took a dramatic or sinister turn, depending on whether you believe his version of events or the lengthy one offered by the Justice Department in court records.

According to a series of Justice Department documents, Lang is accused of murdering Serafin and Deana Lorenzo in a Florida parking lot in April 2018 with the help of another U.S. Army veteran, Alex Zwiefelhofer, who is currently in jail awaiting trial for those murders. The Justice Department says the two men, who met in Ukraine while serving with the Right Sector, intended to rob the couple of $3,000 in a fake gun sale. Their plan, according to court documents, was to use the stolen cash to finance a trip to Venezuela, where they both wanted to join paramilitary forces resisting the government. The same filings note that in June 2017, the two came to the attention of U.S. authorities when Kenyan border guards detained and subsequently deported them for trying to join forces fighting in South Sudan.

Flight records show Lang flew into Colombia from Mexico City in September 2018 and then left in November of the same year, eventually landing in Spain on his way back to Ukraine. One NBC News report from 2019 cites an Arizona court document saying Lang got a fake passport in North Carolina and then traveled through the border state to Mexico on his way south to Colombia. He categorically denies any involvement in the Florida murders and says that after a brief stint in the Colombian jungles with an unnamed paramilitary unit that opposed the Venezuelan government across the border, he flew back to Ukraine.

Since 2019, Lang has resisted a U.S. extradition order over the alleged murder of the Lorenzos. He was first taken into custody at the Ukraine-Moldova border crossing, setting off a back-and-forth in Ukrainian courts, which involved time in jail. He was facing almost certain extradition in the waning days of 2021. But his lawyers appealed the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which agreed to hear it over considerations that he could face a life sentence or the death penalty in Florida. Previously, the Ukrainian government had asked for assurances from the Justice Department that Lang wouldn’t face the death penalty, which a U.S. attorney reportedly agreed to in court. By February 2022, Ukrainian prosecutors confined Lang to Kyiv’s city limits as he awaited word from the European Court. 

Then Russia invaded, and Lang’s fate became intertwined with the region’s bloody geopolitics. In the chaos of that initial period, all seemed potentially lost for Ukraine. The CIA, the Pentagon, and even President Joe Biden, in private chats with Zelenskyy, predicted certain defeat for Ukraine within a matter of days. During that time, when it wasn’t clear whether Zelenskyy would be assassinated or imprisoned or continue as a head of state, Lang found his way back into the war effort. 

Once Lang linked up with Dragon and his Right Sector unit, he wasted no time getting into combat. He was quickly assigned to a team of foreigners, he said, including British citizens as well as “some Colombians, and some Argentinians.”

“We had one time where we’re sitting there engaging a BMD,” said Lang, using an acronym for a Soviet armored vehicle. He described firing a rocket propelled grenade at the vehicle in the streets of Irpin when he and his comrades suddenly came face to face with a Russian soldier. 

“We turn a corner and there’s a [Russian] machine gunner coming, running towards us,” Lang told me. “The two Ukrainians in the front, they pop the guy in the shoulder, he fucking runs behind a piece of cover and we call out to him, we’re like: ‘Hey, man, you surrender. Come on over.’ He won’t come so I prep a [fragmentation grenade], toss the fucking frag at him.”

The Russian tried to flee but, according to Lang, “He just gets lit up like it’s a fucking turkey shoot.”

While it can be difficult to confirm the accounts of foreign fighters, Lang provided a series of contract documents signed from the beginning of the full-scale invasion until the summer of 2022. One of the documents is a contract between Lang and the “Special Forces of the Marines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine from the aggressor — Russian Federation.” It was signed in March 2022 and has no end date. International Legion documents, signed by Lang with a blue pen, state that the legion is enlisting the “service of foreigners and persons without citizenship in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Those documents are dated July 2022. In a Raw Story report from May, an FBI agent confirmed that Lang was “fighting with Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces against Russian forces” as late as August 2022. 

Kacper Rekawek, a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project who is familiar with documents between the Ukrainian military and foreign fighters, said that the legion contract appears to be real.

The Right Sector declined to speak to The Intercept about Lang’s record fighting with the unit.

“We are active military personnel and are not authorized to provide any information,” a spokesperson said in a text message, citing a commander who wouldn’t authorize any comment on Lang. “At this stage communication on this matter is prohibited by the management.”

Did Ukrainian military authorities care about his status as a fugitive from the U.S. government when they enlisted Lang last year? 

“Oh, they were all aware of it,” Lang said, referring to Ukrainian military leaders and his ongoing extradition case for the Florida killings. “You know, everybody was aware of it. Nobody cared.”

Lang said he fought as far east as Kharkiv in the Donbas region until an order “came down from the top” demanding that he leave the front and return to Kyiv.

The Zelenskyy government is now determined to ship him back to the U.S. to face charges, which highlights questions about how foreign fighters and members of the International Legion have been used since the war began. Several foreign volunteers who signed contracts with the legion have denounced what they call the Ukrainian military’s double standards, particularly in the early stages of the war. They have complained of being treated as cannon fodder and given few weapons. Though some standards have risen in the last year, many foreign fighters have left and far fewer are joining up. 

Lang, meanwhile, faces possible extradition and has again been confined to Kyiv by Ukrainian prosecutors. Ukrainian prosecutors declined to comment, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces have yet to respond to requests for comment on Lang’s criminal case or his military service on behalf of Ukraine.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said they “cannot make any comments” regarding Lang’s status. But court records show that in July 2022 — around the time Lang claims he was booted from the Ukrainian military — his case was assigned to a new judge in the Middle District of Florida. On June 8, U.S. attorneys filed a notice of status acknowledging that Lang’s extradition “remains pending” as they await the outcome of the European Court appeal. 

Whether Lang will ever step into a U.S. courtroom remains to be seen. 

“I don’t want to go back [to the U.S.] because I don’t feel like I’d get a fair trial,” he told me. “When we find out that there’s a secret war crimes investigation against me, it doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy that I’m going to have a fair trial.”

The post Wanted for Murder, an Army Vet Escaped to Ukraine — and Fought the Russians appeared first on The Intercept.

The goal of the change is to remove less of this material. In updating the policy, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also made an internal admission that the policy has censored speech beyond what the company intended.

Meta’s “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals,” or DOI, policy is based around a secret blacklist of thousands of people and groups, spanning everything from terrorists and drug cartels to rebel armies and musical acts. For years, the policy prohibited the more than one billion people using Facebook and Instagram from engaging in “praise, support or representation” of anyone on the list.

Now, Meta will provide a greater allowance for discussion of these banned people and groups — so long as it takes place in the context of “social and political discourse,” according to the updated policy, which also replaces the blanket prohibition against “praise” of blacklisted entities with a new ban on “glorification” of them.

The updated policy language has been distributed internally, but Meta has yet to disclose it publicly beyond a mention of the “social and political discourse” exception on the community standards page. Blacklisted people and organizations are still banned from having an official presence on Meta’s platforms.

The revision follows years of criticism of the policy. Last year, a third-party audit commissioned by Meta found the company’s censorship rules systematically violated the human rights of Palestinians by stifling political speech, and singled out the DOI policy. The new changes, however, leave major problems unresolved, experts told The Intercept. The “glorification” adjustment, for instance, is well intentioned but likely to suffer from the same ambiguity that created issues with the “praise” standard.

“Changing the DOI policy is a step in the right direction, one that digital rights defenders and civil society globally have been requesting for a long time,” Mona Shtaya, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told The Intercept.

Observers like Shtaya have long objected to how the DOI policy has tended to disproportionately censor political discourse in places like Palestine — where discussing a Meta-banned organization like Hamas is unavoidable — in contrast to how Meta rapidly adjusted its rules to allow praise of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion despite its neo-Nazi sympathies.

“The recent edits illustrate that Meta acknowledges the participation of certain DOI members in elections,” Shtaya said. “However, it still bars them from its platforms, which can significantly impact political discourse in these countries and potentially hinder citizens’ equal and free interaction with various political campaigns.”

Acknowledged Failings

Meta has long maintained the original DOI policy is intended to curtail the ability of terrorists and other violent extremists from causing real-world harm. Content moderation scholars and free expression advocates, however, maintain that the way the policy operates in practice creates a tendency to indiscriminately swallow up and delete entirely nonviolent speech. (Meta declined to comment for this story.)

In the new internal language, Meta acknowledged the failings of its rigid approach and said the company is attempting to improve the rule. “A catch-all policy approach helped us remove any praise of designated entities and individuals on the platform,” read an internal memo announcing the change. “However, this approach also removes social and political discourse and causes enforcement challenges.”

Meta’s proposed solution is “recategorizing the definition of ‘Praise’ into two areas: ‘References to a DOI,’ and ‘Glorification of DOIs.’ These fundamentally different types of content should be treated differently.” Mere “references” to a terrorist group or cartel kingpin will be permitted so long as they fall into one of 11 new categories of discourse Meta deems acceptable:

Elections, Parliamentary and executive functions, Peace and Conflict Resolution (truce/ceasefire/peace agreements), International agreements or treaties, Disaster response and humanitarian relief, Human Rights and humanitarian discourse, Local community services, Neutral and informative descriptions of DOI activity or behavior, News reporting, Condemnation and criticism, Satire and humor.

Posters will still face strict requirements to avoid running afoul of the policy, even if they’re attempting to participate in one of the above categories. To stay online, any Facebook or Instagram posts mentioning banned groups and people must “explicitly mention” one of the permissible contexts or face deletion. The memo says “the onus is on the user to prove” that they’re fitting into one of the 11 acceptable categories.

According to Shtaya, the Tahrir Institute fellow, the revised approach continues to put Meta’s users at the mercy of a deeply flawed system. She said, “Meta’s approach places the burden of content moderation on its users, who are neither language experts nor historians.”

Unclear Guidance

Instagram and Facebook users will still have to hope their words aren’t interpreted by Meta’s outsourced legion of overworked, poorly paid moderators as “glorification.” The term is defined internally in almost exactly the same language as its predecessor, “praise”: “Legitimizing or defending violent or hateful acts by claiming that those acts or any type of harm resulting from them have a moral, political, logical, or other justification that makes them appear acceptable or reasonable.” Another section defines glorification as any content that “justifies or amplifies” the “hateful or violent” beliefs or actions of a banned entity, or describes them as “effective, legitimate or defensible.”

Though Meta intends this language to be universal, equitably and accurately applying labels as subjective as “legitimate” or “hateful” to the entirety of global online discourse has proven impossible to date.

“Replacing ‘praise’ with ‘glorification’ does little to change the vagueness inherent to each term,” according to Ángel Díaz, a professor at University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and a scholar of social media content policy. “The policy still overburdens legitimate discourse.”

“Replacing ‘praise’ with ‘glorification’ does little to change the vagueness inherent to each term. The policy still overburdens legitimate discourse.”

The notions of “legitimization” or “justification” are deeply complex, philosophical matters that would be difficult to address by anyone, let alone a contractor responsible for making hundreds of judgments each day.

The revision does little to address the heavily racialized way in which Meta assesses and attempts to thwart dangerous groups, Díaz added. While the company still refuses to disclose the blacklist or how entries are added to it, The Intercept published a full copy in 2021. The document revealed that the overwhelming majority of the “Tier 1” dangerous people and groups — who are still subject to the harshest speech restrictions under the new policy — are Muslim, Arab, or South Asian. White, American militant groups, meanwhile, are overrepresented in the far more lenient “Tier 3” category.

Díaz said, “Tier 3 groups, which appear to be largely made up of right-wing militia groups or conspiracy networks like QAnon, are not subject to bans on glorification.”

Meta’s own internal rulebook seems unclear about how enforcement is supposed to work, seemingly still dogged by the same inconsistencies and self-contradictions that have muddled its implementation for years.

For instance, the rule permits “analysis and commentary” about a banned group, but a hypothetical post arguing that the September 11 attacks would not have happened absent U.S. aggression abroad is considered a form of glorification, presumably of Al Qaeda, and should be deleted, according to one example provided in the policy materials. Though one might vehemently disagree with that premise, it’s difficult to claim it’s not a form of analysis and commentary.

Another hypothetical post in the internal language says, in response to Taliban territorial gains in the Afghanistan war, “I think it’s time the U.S. government started reassessing their strategy in Afghanistan.” The post, the rule says, should be labeled as nonviolating, despite what appears to be a clear-cut characterization of the banned group’s actions as “effective.”

David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept these examples illustrate how difficult it will be to consistently enforce the new policy. “They run through a ton of scenarios,” Greene said, “but for me it’s hard to see a through-line in them that indicates generally applicable principles.”

The post Meta Overhauls Controversial “Dangerous Organizations” Censorship Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

The Ukrainian military’s counteroffensive against Russia is underway. Aided by the U.S. and other Western powers, Ukraine is making a push to expel Russian troops. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain are joined by Rajan Menon, the director of the Grand Strategy program at Defense Priorities and author of several books, including “Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order.” Menon was recently in Ukraine, and he describes the developments in the country, more than one year since the Russian invasion began. Menon breaks down the regional differences in Ukraine and the geopolitical challenges to ending the conflict.

[Intercepted intro theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The war in Ukraine, now dragging into its second year, has entered a critical phase. The Ukrainian military is currently in the midst of a counteroffensive aimed at pushing Russian troops out of its territory this summer. The most conservative estimates say that the war, triggered by Russia’s invasion in early 2022, has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides, and perhaps far more.

Despite widespread suffering and destruction, including to civilian areas in Ukraine, the conflict still has no end in sight. The outcome of the summer offensive as well as shifting political tides in the United States will have a huge influence on the final outcome of this bloody conflict, whenever it does come to an end.

JS: We’re joined now by Rajan Menon. He’s the director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities; that’s a thinktank. Most recently, he was a professor at City College of New York and, before that, at several other universities.

Rajan, it’s great to have you with us. Thanks for being here on Intercepted.

Rajan Menon: Thank you, Jeremy, thank you, Murtaza.

JS: So you just got back from a trip to Ukraine. You’ve gone back and forth to Ukraine a number of times since the Russian invasion escalated last February. Tell us where you were in Ukraine, how long you were there for, and the purpose of this visit.

RM: So, this was my third visit and, on this particular one, I spent some time in Kyiv, because there were a number of meetings that I had scheduled and a conference that I attended, at which there were various American military experts, including some former generals. After that, I drove with a friend of mine who runs an NGO in Kyiv, about 350 miles east to Kharkiv, which used to be, until 1934, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.

Now, when you get from Kharkiv further east — that is Eastern Kyiv province — you are in what is, or what used to be, a conflict zone. And from there I went to various towns that may be familiar to you, certainly to those who follow the war very closely. In no particular order: Izyum, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Balakliya, Kostyantynivka. And I was within about three miles of what they call the “zero line” in Bakhmut.

JS: And your trip was over the course of how many days? How long were you there?

RM: Just shy of three weeks.

JS: I think this would be really helpful for a lot of people, because you indicated before that it might be familiar to people who follow the situation closely, a lot of people are not following it on the granular level that you are. But what I think would be really helpful is, give people a sense of where things are at right now. There’s a lot of talk about a coming Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia. Vladimir Putin – and you’ve written about this – doesn’t seem to show any indication that he’s going to quit this invasion and occupation anytime soon, but give us a sense of where things stand right now on the ground with this war.

RM: Sure. Just some wider context, and I’ll be very quick. Ukraine in land area, European Russia aside, is the largest country in Europe, so it is a very big place. Getting there is hard because you can’t fly in, the airspace is closed, so you have to land in Warsaw. And you can’t go straight from Warsaw to Kyiv, which is 16 hours, not because one might not be physically capable, but there’s an overnight curfew, so one stays in Lviv and then drives the rest of the way.

On the way to Kyiv, you would not know that this is a country at war. When you approach Kyiv, you see more checkpoints, you see busted up bridges and damaged homes, but you really get to the war zone when you are east of Kyiv and start entering an area that’s called the Donbas.

The Donbas consists of two provinces: Donetsk and Lugansk, and Lugansk is totally under Russian control, and has been for some time. Donetsk is contested, about half/half between the Russians and the Ukrainians. So I was in the Ukrainian occupied part of Donetsk. The other major conflict zones are in the provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhia, which are to the south.

So, the main conflict areas, to sum up, are in the east, in Donbas, and in the south, in Zaporizhia and Kherson. So, I’ve also been to Kherson.

MH: Rajan, you’ve been to Ukraine several times since the conflict started, and your last trip was at this very critical moment, as Jeremy mentioned, of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. So many people in the United States and elsewhere have been discussing this counteroffensive as a possible turning point in the war, an effort to expel Russia from some of the regions it’s occupied since the war began, or almost two years ago.

Can you tell us a bit about the environment in the country at the moment? How are Ukrainians experiencing this current mobilization, and what success or lack of success have the Ukrainians experienced so far since the counteroffensive began?

RM: Right. So, just again, quickly, some wider context. This is my third visit. I was there in August, and then I was there in late December to January. That is, as you may recall, the time when the Russians were taking aim at big Ukrainian cities to turn the lights and the water off. This time, I was there to see the counteroffensives, and my timing is always impeccable; it was declared [as] starting by President Zelensky about a day after I left.

Nevertheless, what has been misleading is, people think, well, when the counteroffensive begins, you know, there will be some guy with a sandwich board saying the counteroffensive has begun. For the last month, there has been enormous Ukrainian activity in one of the provinces I mentioned, Zaporizhia. Which is important because, if you drive south of Zaporizhia and reach the coast of the Azov sea, if the Ukrainians do that, they cut in half the land bridge, the land corridor that, in this war, the Russians have built connecting the mainland of Russia to Crimea.

And so, that is the name of the game. I expect a lot of the activity to occur in Zaporizhia. We’re already seeing signs of it. We will also see some signs of it, and have recently, in Southern and Western Donetsk province,

JS: You’ve written a lot about the prospects for a negotiated settlement to the war, and you remain very skeptical that that is in the cards, at least in the near future.

Talk a bit though about how you see the perspective from Ukraine’s side and from Russia’s side of why such a resolution is not in the cards for the very near future. Like, the Russian perspective on things, and then what you’re hearing from people on the ground in Ukraine, that leads you to believe that we’re not going to see a negotiated settlement anytime soon.

RM: Right. So we are about 16 months into this war, and people, first of all, didn’t expect the war to last this long. They thought the Russian Army would overcome Ukrainian defenses and take Kyiv within a matter of [weeks], some said even fewer. So, here we are in a place we never expected. For a war to end, and that applies to this particular war, one or more of the warring parties – in this case, two – have to decide that negotiation is better than the alternative of fighting. Neither side, for wholly different reasons, is at that point, and I have seen no indication on the Ukrainian side or the Russian side that they believe their best option now is to negotiate. In other words: each feels that it can win.

Now, whether that’s true or not is beside the point. So, those people calling for a halt to the fighting, I understand completely their intentions. There has been a war that has been horrific in its consequences; we can talk about it. But, as far as the Ukrainians see it, that would essentially partition their country, because it would leave the areas which are fairly substantial that the Russians hold in their hand. So, those areas, once again are Lugansk Province and Donetsk Province – part of the Donetsk Province. And then, Southern Kherson and Southern Zaporizhia. Northern Kherson, the Russian army was evicted from by the Ukrainians in September. So, a ceasefire call is seen as a partition.

Now, Putin believes he can have it all, that is he can take all of these provinces, and that time is on his side, because he simply has more firepower, and the Ukrainians are backed by a 30-Coalition Alliance; namely, NATO. And that, over time two things will happen: their stocks will begin running low and they’ll worry about their own preparedness, but, inevitably, collective action problems will develop. That is to say, they will be pulling and pushing in different directions. And some arguing that a negotiated settlement is necessary, pressure will be put on Ukraine, and Putin will come out ahead. That is his calculation.

JS: One common theme that you hear from Russian commentators who are supporting Putin’s so-called “special military operation in Ukraine” is this almost ominous sense that Russia hasn’t deployed its big guns yet. Hasn’t really, seriously, attempted to quote-unquote “win this war.” I’m not just talking about the specter of using a nuclear weapon. I mean, just in terms of tactical military hardware and sort of all-in strategy on the part of Putin.

Is that just bravado or wishful thinking? Or is it the case that Russia hasn’t really played its best cards yet, militarily, in its effort to conquer Ukraine?

RM: Right. So this is a very good question, and we should break it down, because it’s complicated.

In terms of firepower – that is artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, aircraft, any weapon you name – the Russians have overwhelming superiority. Certainly quantitatively, we can talk about the qualitative balance in just a bit. That leaves the number of soldiers. Now, in theory, because Russia has a population of 141, million and Ukraine has 44 million, even the mobilizable component of that population is so large on the Russian side that the Ukrainians can’t match it.

So, the question is, have the Russians withheld large number of recruits that they’ll throw into battle at a time of their choosing? I’m skeptical that they have. So, I have talked to a lot of people in the Ukrainian government, and different ones, so I could crosscheck what they were telling me, and I said, how many Russian troops are there now of various sorts in Ukraine? And they said about 300,000-plus.

Now, what I didn’t follow up asking – which I should have, I didn’t have my wits about me, I guess, then – is, does that include regular units, non-combat units, and private militia such as the Wagner Group, and the fighters of the Chechen warlord, if you will, Ramzan Kadyrov. But, also, a private army of the energy giant Gazprom, that people don’t hear much about.

But, no matter how you slice it, there are a large number of Russian troops in the country. Now, do they have more? I’m skeptical, because when they started attacking the electricity grid in the winter and early spring, that would’ve been the time to really put in large additional numbers, and they have not. So, the idea that they have this huge force waiting that they can throw into battle doesn’t persuade me. And I’ll give you one example of why I am skeptical.

So, recently, as you may have heard, there were two anti-Putin insurgent groups operating from Ukrainian territory, obviously with the full knowledge of Ukraine, quite possibly with the full support of Ukraine; nothing happens there that the Ukrainian government doesn’t know about.

So, they went into Belgorod Province, which is just to the north of the Ukrainian border, the Russia-Ukrainian border, and nobody showed up for about an hour. Not the police, not the interior ministry troops. And they created a swath of about 20 kilometers wide. Now, this is the Russian Federation, the other superpower.

So, the Russians rotated troops from Donetsk in the East where they’re fighting, Bakhmut in particular, and wheeled them around to Belgorod, and backfilled the deficit by calling the private militias that exist in Donetsk and Lugansk to Bakhmut to hold the line. Had they had large numbers of readily deployable troops, they wouldn’t have done that.

MH: Rajan, there’s something that’s very interesting to me, that in February, 2022, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, it seemed very obvious that this was intended to be a short conflict on the Russian part.

RM: Yes.

MH: And now, you know, we’re over a year and a half into it and the Ukrainians are launching a counteroffensive. It seems that a stalemate of sorts developed or, at the very least, the Russians have entered into a conflict from which there’s no obvious endgame for them. From your own observations, being from abroad and in the field in Ukraine, can you tell us – I [have] two questions.

First of all, what do you sense of the Russian strategy for the conflict going forward? If there is a path to victory for them, how do they envision that happening, or what is the desired end state that they’re looking for? And, secondly, in terms of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, can you give us a sense of their aims, as well as the morale and the perception of Ukrainians themselves on how they plan to use this offensive to change the trajectory of the war?

RM: So, first, on the Russian side, the two of you may remember during the Afghan war were, the Afghan mujahideen said, essentially, the Americans have the advantage over us in just about everything, except in one thing: they may have the watches, [but] we have the time.

What they meant was, over time, they were prepared to fight and die in larger numbers, and that the United States would simply decide to wind up and call it quits. And they were correct. Something similar happened in Vietnam, although it’s not an exact parallel.

So, part of Putin’s belief is, he has the resources, industrially and militarily and in terms of soldiers, to continue fighting this war. There has been no sign of demonstrations in big cities that the regime cannot either corral, manage, or intimidate. The war seems not to have become a huge political problem; he hasn’t ever called it a “war” or an “invasion,” he’s called it a “special military operation.” He mobilized about 300,000 people in September but, since then, has not called for general conscription. And he’s been very careful. I think he’s mobilized more outside the big ethnic Russian cities to other places.

So he thinks he can continue fighting this war, and he’s convinced that sanctions have been an inconvenience, but they haven’t brought the Russian economy to its knees. So, his belief is, eventually the West will believe that Ukraine cannot win this war, and there will be some negotiating, and he will have the upper hand.

The Ukrainians are in a dicey position, because they have to prove at every turn that they’re a good bet, that they can keep advancing, that they can keep the confidence of the West. Because, unless they do so, the weapon supplies might dry up.

So, for example, everyone said it was a crazy idea for them to hold this town in Donetsk called Bakhmut, but they stayed there, took enormous punishment, but also killed a lot of Russians, because they felt that a retreat would have two consequences. First, they would have to defend a place further west, the Russians were not going to just stop at Bakhmut. And, secondly, that however one spun it, that it would be seen as a Ukrainian retreat against superior firepower. So, they’re under pressure.

Now, what do they hope to gain? Well, maximally, they’ll tell you they want to liberate all of their territories, going back to 2014 – that is, including Crimea – plus all the territories that have been taken since February 22nd, 2022. Personally, I think that is not going to happen, but that’s not an argument you want to make in Ukraine, because people are almost in a state of religious fervor about needing to do this, and how they have been wronged, and Putin is an aggressor, and so on.

But I think that if they were able to gain significant ground in Donetsk, and also in the south in Zaporizhia and in Kherson, that will be a fairly substantial victory. And, minimally, that is not beyond the cards in my view. It’s not a done deal, and I’m always leery about predicting things in this invasion, because a lot has happened, frankly, that surprised a lot of people, including me. So, take under advisement, this is the best I can tell you, based on what I have observed and the facts that I follow.

JS: One of the recent incidents that’s been in the news a lot, and where you have very starkly competing different narratives, is the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine that was destroyed, I believe, on June 6^th, sometime between 2 and 3 a.m. Ukraine has accused Russia of destroying it, also saying it’s a war crime, because of the type of infrastructure that it is. Russia is saying that Ukraine blew up this dam.

What can you tell us about what you know about that right now, or your analysis of this back and forth of accusations?

RM: So, let me tell you very quickly, if I might, what the consequences of this are. It’s released an enormous amount of floodwaters to the South, into Zaporizhia, and especially into Kherson. The water has submerged, for instance, the burial grounds of infected cattle, and so there’s potentially an anthrax threat looming. It has ruptured sewage systems, there is possibly a cholera epidemic. There are mines and other ordinance that are now floating in the water, and that poses a human hazard. It’s also led to mass evacuations and submerged or washed away houses entirely. So, this is a classic disaster.

Now, one narrative that’s been put up by the Yale professor Timothy Snyder, whom you may have heard of, who is a very strong supporter of Ukraine and has rallied support for Ukraine in this country is, there is no reason for Ukraine to do this. While it is engaged in the southern offensive, why would it flood the territory that it is about to invade? So that’s one side.

The other side is, why would the Russians do this? Because they have spent months and months now, erecting multi-layered, fairly sophisticated defenses of all [types], all the way from the conflict zone in the east, in Lugansk province, making a kind of halfmoon to Kherson. And why would they allow what has happened, their own defenses to be swept away, their own soldiers to be retreating in panic; some, by the way, having commandeered dinghies of civilians. I saw one picture, which is very poetic, as it were, of two soldiers in a dinghy, one colored yellow and one colored blue, which is exactly the color of the Ukrainian flag. So, the question is, why would they do this?

I know enough about war – and the two of you do, too – that, you know, truth really is the first casualty. And I’m not in a position yet to pronounce on what exactly happened, who did it. Now, this makes people on both sides really angry, because you’re supposed to take a position.

Another theory is that there was simply an engineering failure and a rupture of the dam. I would give that some credence, because accidents happen, but the timing strikes me as just too extraordinarily coincidental and peculiar. So, I’m not in a position to tell you who did it, but it has created a disaster. One other thing, by the way: gallons and gallons, tons and tons of oil have been dumped into the river and it’s contaminated water supplies, and the water is not drinkable.

So, that’s where we are. I wish I could tell you that I know for certain who did it. I’m very careful about what I say about these things, and so, I’m not going to say that, I can just tell you the competing narratives. If you pushed me and said, well, in your gut, what does it tell you? I would say probably more the Russians, because they control the area, but that doesn’t mean the Ukrainians couldn’t have done it, but my money would be on the Russians.

MH: The images of the impact of that flood were really devastating. It seemed that the towns flooded and so forth, and the widespread destruction of what seemed to be agricultural lands in Ukraine as well.

Rajan, just from the time you spent there, can you give us a sense of, in addition to the flood, the level of damage and destruction that has been done to Ukrainian infrastructure and cities as a result of this conflict, and what you’ve observed of that impact on the Ukrainian population?

RM: I’ve seen a lot of it. And, without being melodramatic, I will tell you that, like you, I’ve seen many pictures but, until you see it up close, you have, really, no visceral sense of how much damages have been done, and what awaits Ukraine by way of post-war reconstruction, which is going to be a huge task. And if you’d like to, we can talk a little bit about what post-war Ukraine faces, no matter how the war shakes out.

So, I was in the city of Kramatorsk, which is about 40 miles, maybe fewer than that, from Bakhmut, right? The city that everyone’s probably heard of. It was a city of about 180,000 before the war. The number of people there dropped in about three months to about 40,000. Kramatorsk is a big rail junction, and so, people from surrounding areas rushed there and tried frantically to get on trains. One day the Russians hit the place with a missile carrying cluster munitions and killed about 60 people. There’s a real memorial there for the children who were killed, stuffed animals and stuff, the platform is guarded. And then there’s building after building in Kramatorsk that’s been destroyed. And, by the way, I’m mentioning Kramatorsk, but this is what you’ll see in other towns as well. Schools, houses, administrative buildings, factories, you name it, you see it.

The other thing that’s really evident when you enter Kramatorsk, there seems to be nobody around. This is a big city, it’s a kind of an ugly Soviet-styled industrial city, so it doesn’t have much, but nobody is around. And, when you do see people, they seem disproportionately to be older people who have nowhere to go, or who are too ill or physically disabled to go anywhere. The younger people, the people most needed for economic revival, have left.

Now, this is the situation in other towns I’ve been to. For example, places Izyum or Kostyantynivka, which is the closest I got to the frontline in Bakhmut. So, the destruction is immense. Now, it is localized, in the sense that, when you go west of Kyiv, you see nothing at all, you might even imagine that you’re not even in a war zone. In Kyiv itself you see some evidence of destruction but, by and large, the defense has been really quite good. So, we’re really talking about the south of the country and the east of the country; I’ve seen the south as well, and there’s been huge destruction.

Now, that doesn’t even include the Russian-occupied part. So, take a city like Mariupol, which is on the sea of Azov, in the south, that the Russians have taken. They basically took it by leveling it and turning it into a parking lot. Their signature approach to the war is to reign down artillery, which they have a lot more of, destroy a city, and then send in the infantry.

So, to give you an example of the exchange ratio – that is, how many artillery shells the Ukrainians fire versus the Russians – in Bakhmut, on certain days, it’s been 10,000 incoming artillery shells for every 1,000 that the Ukrainians can send toward Russian lines.

So, there’s nobody in the American military, no officer, who has faced this kind of thing. Because the adversaries we’ve tangled with – Libya and Iraq, for example – were just not able to respond in this fashion. So the Ukrainians are fighting a war that – and so are the Russians – that we have not witnessed since World War II. This is a wholly different kind of thing. This was the kind of war that Europe was supposed to have put behind it, because the era of democracy, and peace, and the end of history, and so on, was upon us. But we’ve been revisited by all of the stuff that we were supposed to have left behind.

[Intercepted mid-show theme music.]

JS: You know, this, like all wars, there’s just this dominant propaganda that gets emitted from all sides, and this is true. You mentioned some of the more recent U.S. wars. I mean, let’s be clear, the U.S. engages all the time in its own propaganda, and, obviously, Russia is swimming in a whole pool of its own propaganda right now. But Ukraine has proven itself to be a pretty sophisticated propaganda disseminator itself.

There have been recent reports about Ukraine cracking down, not just on its own citizens freedom of expression and movement, etc., but also on international reporters and news organizations that Ukraine believes are not sort of toeing the line. But I wanted to ask you a more nuanced set of questions about the geopolitical propaganda battle here.

The New York Times recently did a report that was focusing on some of the Nazi imagery that’s been on some of the patches of Ukrainian troops, or troops fighting on the Ukrainian side. And, of course, the Azov Battalion is a regular talking point, of people who are defending Russia’s operation, or just raising questions about the political nature of some of the political factions in Ukraine and how that’s manifested in various military units or battalions.

So the first thing I wanted to ask you is: is Putin’s contention that the real issue here is to fight against fascism, or fight against neo-Nazis in Ukraine? Is it entirely without merit, or are there elements to this that you think are worth discussing or dissecting?

RM: So, there is no question that there are groups – you mentioned the Azov Battalion – that exist in Ukraine, and they can be called fascistic or Nazi-istic, whatever the term of art you want to. And there are other such groups and there are also groups that you see flying the red and black flag, which is associated with the Ukrainian’s insurgent army which, in turn, is associated with one Stepan Bandera. What the Ukrainian insurgent army did when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and came into what is now Western Ukraine was to collaborate with them, not so much because they bought hook, line, and sinker, Hitler’s worldview, but they wanted to create a separate Ukrainian state, which meant purging it of Poles and also Jews. And this has cast kind of an ugly stain on certain periods of Ukrainian history. So, there’s no question that there are such groups.

Putin’s view, however, is that this is the denazification operation. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in Ukraine, and to say that the country’s politics are defined by these groups is a vast exaggeration. They are simply not. On top of that, the government of Mr. Zelensky, who is a Russian-speaking Jew from the southern town — not deep south, but south from Kyiv – called Kryvyi Rih, or Krivoy Rog, as it used to be called in Soviet times. Zelensky is a Jew, and some of his relatives were people who died in the Holocaust. The Prime Minister, Denys Shmyhal is a Jew. The most important person next to Zelensky, his top advisor, Andriy Yermak, is a Jew. And I could go on and on and on.

So, I think the idea that this is a government that is dominated by Nazis is simply false on its face, but Putin, I think, needs to have a narrative where he suggests that this is somehow a war that is akin to World War II. So, one can concede two things, right? One can concede, yes, there are right-wing groups in Ukraine. You do see the Bandera flag.

When I went to Kherson, for example, that had just been retaken by the Ukrainian army in December when I was down there, there was still fighting going on, on the town square there was a Bandera flag. And sometimes you see soldiers wearing Bandera patches. So, there is this element. But to say that what we have in Ukraine is a Nazi government, and that it’s being backed by the United States, I think is a vast exaggeration. I just have not seen any evidence of that, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the country.

MH: So, in July, Rajan, there’s a NATO summit taking place which, obviously for Ukraine, is very pivotal, because the Ukrainians rely very heavily on U.S. and other western countries’ arms and political support in this conflict. Can you get a sense of how Ukrainians perceive their relationship vis-a-vis NATO at the moment, and how they feel about potential political changes in the United States and elsewhere, and how important that is to their own ability to keep fighting the Russian invasion of their country?

RM: If you visit there, it won’t take you very long to realize that joining NATO has become not just an article of faith among Ukrainians, it’s become almost like a religion, right? They believe that they’re owed this because they have stood up to the second most powerful military machine on the face of the earth. Nobody thought they would be able to withstand the Russian assault. They’ve not only withstood it, but they’ve repelled it from certain areas. And then they will tell you that this is a war not just about Ukraine, but about Europe and Western civilization. There’s this whole narrative about how significant this resistance is. That leads them to believe that they have earned a place in NATO. But I’m cynical enough to believe that countries, at the end of the day, calculate what their interests are.

Now, fast forward to this summit that’s going to happen in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July. The Ukrainians, I think, would like to get into NATO. I think there’s absolutely no chance that they’ll be admitted as a full member. And, in fact, Macron is on the record as having said so. Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, has said so. And, interestingly enough, Biden has never stood up and said, folks, you are wrong, I actually am going to persuade you that Ukraine should be admitted.

The most pro-Ukrainian group in NATO are the Baltic Trio – Estonia, Lithuanian, Latvia – and Poland. But they don’t have the capacity to swing the entire alliance, because the Washington Treaty of 1949 has an article in it – I forget precisely which it is, you can look it up – which says, in order to admit a new member, there has to be unanimous consent. So, one country – and high on my list would be Hungary – could still muck this up, from the standpoint of the Ukrainians.

There’s another complication. In 1995, before NATO actually started implementing expansion, it had become a concept, and implementation hadn’t started; that started in 1997. NATO published a document about what is going to be our procedure for admitting new members. And there is an article in it which says, if a country has a territorial dispute, or is engaged in a hot war with another country – that’s not the term that was used, it’s the term I’m using – that that would be taken into consideration and could be a factor in its admission. Now, it doesn’t say, we’ll never admit such a country, but that clause could be used by countries in NATO that say, it’s not time yet. So, I think it’s a long shot at the moment.

There’s talk of a security guarantee, but what does that really mean, exactly? Because a security guarantee would tell Ukraine, if you’re attacked, the countries that issue the security guarantee – some subset of NATO presumably – would come to its defense. Well, Ukraine is already being attacked.

Now, some Ukrainians have suggested, well, a security guarantee can just apply to the areas Ukraine now controls, because the Russians never controlled it, or the Ukrainians have, quote, “liberated it.” The problem with that, of course, is that battle lines shift. And so, what if there’s an area that is now controlled by the Ukrainians that the Russians then enter? Then, does the security guarantee kick in? So, if a country is issuing the security guarantee, that would be a big consideration to think about.

So, it’s a very complicated thing. But I think it’s very difficult to have a conversation with the Ukrainians where you try to explain to them the scenarios under which they may not get into NATO or they may not get a security guarantee. That doesn’t go over very well, because of the emotional intensity of hatred toward Russia.

And I should add one other thing: it’s wrong, I think, to see this as a conflict where Ukraine is fighting Russia, but there are two Ukraines. There is ethnic Ukrainian Ukraine, Ukrainian-speaking, and so-called Russophone Ukraine in the eastern south. I’ve met now so many civilians and soldiers who are Russian speakers, or ethnically Russian, who are 100 percent of the mind that this is a war in which their country, Ukraine, is facing Russian aggression.

So, there’s an enormous sense of outrage and hatred, even the belief that this is not just a Putin war that the Russian people by and large supported, why aren’t they demonstrating? And so, you come along as an outsider and say, well, here are the complications that might prevent you from getting into NATO or getting a security guarantee. You know, that doesn’t really go very well. But I’ve had discussions like this.

JS: I wanted to ask you because, in much of the discourse in the United States – and, in fact, in much of the discourse in Europe – the entire context of the war focuses on this as a naked act of aggression by Vladimir Putin. And I think there’s no question — and you write this quite eloquently in your recent Substack piece – is that Vladimir Putin chose to do this. He bears the responsibility for it. I think any reasonable person who’s been monitoring these events will accept that as established fact.

However, there is value to understanding the mindset and the perspective that led to this moment of Putin making the decision to escalate so dramatically, to throw so much military hardware, to commit what I think you can only describe as systematic war crimes for a sustained period of time in Ukraine. But none of that erases the fact that there actually is a political context and a historical context to this, and I would really appreciate hearing you describe, from Russia’s perspective. why Putin believed that this was a justifiable course of action.

RM: Right. So, my good friend John Mearsheimer and I have debated this a lot. And this program ought not to be about me, but let me just give you a sense of my own intellectual peregrinations from NATO expansion to this war.

From the get-go, I thought NATO expansion was a terrible idea, because I thought that the Russian economy was down and out, about a 30 percent contraction in the 1990s. The political system was chaotic. The war in Chechnya was not going well, all this under Boris Yeltsin, and the country was just really a wreck.

But we tell them, the Cold War is over, Russia is a partner of the United States, but we’re going to take this Cold War Alliance and march it towards your borders. Now, this has been seen as a fixation of Vladimir Putin, but the historical record shows without question that Yeltsin was opposed to it with every fiber of his being, and made it very, very clear.

So, in my mind, there was no case to be made that this would be seen – that is, NATO expansion – as a benign act from the United States. Nobody saw it that way, and I think it was a complete fantasy to believe that the Russians really wouldn’t mind. Or, as a former ambassador to Moscow, and the American Ambassador, Mike McFall says, that this has got nothing to do with Ukraine.

So, we should have expected some reaction. Did I expect a reaction in the form of a full-blown invasion of Ukraine? I absolutely did not. But 2014 was a bit of a bellwether or warning that Russia took this very, very seriously, and Ukraine in particular, because of its location, and its culture, and linguistic connections with Russia was a place that was really important to them.

Now, where people like Mearsheimer and I part ways is that, in 2008, at the Bucharest Summit of NATO, NATO basically opened the door in principle to Georgia and Ukraine. Now, fast forward to 2022, February 24^th, 2022, which is when the war, the special operation began. NATO had kept Ukraine waiting for 14 years, 14 years, without even giving it a membership action plan, despite repeated entreaties by Ukraine. So there was no sign whatsoever, as far as I can tell, that Ukraine was about to enter NATO.

Now, if you ask me, OK, why then did Putin wage this war at this time? I can only give you speculative answers, but this is a question that historians will have to look at and explain in terms of timing. So, the reason I oppose this war is that I do not like preventive wars of regime change. Not preemptive wars, where you see the adversary gearing up and taking palpable step steps to attack you, and you decide, I’m not going to wait, I’m going to respond, because clearly there’s a war coming.

A preventive war is just an imagined situation where you say, at some point down the line, a country might be hostile to me. It’s doing nothing that makes me think that it’s really hostile now, but it might, and I’m going to attack. So I was 100 percent against the Iraq War – not that the two wars, Iraq and Ukraine, are the same – because it was a preventive war of regime change. I think the world becomes just much more of a dangerous place if this happens.

So, this was a preventive war of regime change. I don’t think it was the case that Russia faced a mortal peril, or an existential threat, as people say, that necessitated this war. I also think, by the way, that this war is going to be a strategic disaster – strategic in a broad sense, not just a military sense – for Putin. So, my own views have evolved, and some of my friends who were with me in the battle against NATO expansion are not particularly pleased, and I find myself in a strange situation, but this is where I am, for better or for worse.

Now, why did Putin do it? My own hunch is that during the Covid period nobody saw him. He was in isolation, he was asking for Russian archives to be sent to his palatial residence, and he was marinating himself in the histories of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. He was penning these essays, arguing that Ukraine and Russia were one people, casting doubt on whether Ukraine was truly a separate country. And there emerged a separate Putin. This was not a war that he took after wide consultation with his group.

You may remember this rather Saddam Hussein-like video, where Putin is sitting at a table about 50 yards almost, it seemed, from his major advisors, and each of them was called to the podium to say why they believe this war is necessary now. So, this is a lot. I mean, I generally am not somebody who believes that history turns on individual figures, there are broader forces at play, but I think this is really Putin’s war. He owns it, and he cannot really, therefore, let go of it. Which is another reason, by the way, that he is determined to fight and eke out something that he can bring home called success.

MH: So Rajan, since the start of the war, one thing that observers have been very concerned about is the possibility of escalation, between Russia and Ukraine, but also between outside powers in Ukraine, including the United States. And one thing you mentioned earlier was the issue of Crimea which, in 2014, Russia annexed, and Ukrainians are keen to take back at some point in the future.

Would a Ukrainian attempt to take back Crimea be construed as a red line for Russia? And, if not, what would be Russia’s red lines? And how may Russia respond, beyond what they’ve done so far, if they felt that a very critical interest was at stake, or if Putin himself felt had his own political stability or ability to remain in power and Russia is threatened?

What may Russia do, and what could trigger that response?

RM: Again, if I might, some wider context. So, when we talk about the counteroffensive, it’s now officially declared as having begun by Zelensky, but a lot of kinetic activity, as it were, was happening before that.

So there are three axes along which this counteroffensive will be fought. In Donetsk, to take back the part of Donetsk that Russia still occupies. And, if that goes well, the neighboring province of Lugansk; Donetsk and Lugansk, again, comprised the area known as Donbas. So, the east is one possibility.

The South, there are two areas: Zaporizhia, and then Kherson further west. If there is an attack on Crimea, it is liable to come from Kherson, where the Ukrainians sliced through, and arrive in northern Crimea. There is a big supply hub called Dzhankoi in the northern part of Crimea. Once there, they could announce their presence, that would really rattle the Russians, especially if they took down the Kerch Strait Bridge yet again. I’m not saying this is going to happen, but this is one scenario that one can imagine.

Now, what would Putin do? I’ve told friends of mine not to send me any more articles on nuclear escalation, because I don’t learn anything from them anymore. Because here’s how we do it, right? We sit down and try to think, OK, I’m Vladimir Putin. I have nuclear weapons. If the war goes south, goes badly, under what circumstances might I escalate the threat of nuclear weapon use or actually resort to it? And you map out certain possibilities: scenario A, scenario B, scenario C, and you arrive at a certain scenario that you think is the scenario.

The problem with that is its deductive logic, and our deductive logic may or may not mirror Putin’s own calculation. We simply have no way to know, because we don’t know what he thinks about this. It’s very closely held, maybe even his advisors don’t. But it gets even worse.

Even, let’s assume, that, at this moment, the three of us could game out and come to an agreement on what sequence of events might lead to nuclear escalation. Two weeks hence or three weeks hence, the situation on the ground may change, so that Putin’s calculations may change.

So the answer I’m about to give you is an unsatisfactory one: we don’t know. What we do know is that we are dealing with a nuclear power, and the possibility of escalation always has to be kept in mind. Which is why the Biden administration has been very careful supplying weaponry but not doing things or providing weaponry that edges across that line and provokes Putin. Anthony Blinken, who’s no slouch when it comes to backing Ukraine, on at least two occasions, has said that Crimea could be Ukraine’s red line.

So, the big question that has to be asked is if the Ukrainians look like they’re gearing up to take Crimea – let’s assume we have a situation where that looks like it’s going to be the case – will there be pressure on them not to do it because of the worry that there could be a nuclear war?

One final point. The most likely scenario would be tactical nuclear weapons used on the battlefield to bust up Ukrainian troop concentrations, but that would also contaminate the surrounding ground and affect Russian forces as well. Putin’s escalation would not mean an attack on the United States, because the United States would strike back, and that would be completely irrational.

So that’s what’s likely to happen if it happens, but I’m not in a position to tell you how close we are. I am in a position to tell you that, of all of the areas, Crimea is certainly the one that has a certain valence for Putin, where we could really, seriously see this and would have to think about it.

JS: On this program we’ve had a number of guests recently, including Professor Alfred McCoy, the historian from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and McCoy doesn’t claim to be a specialist on Russia or Ukraine, but he was speaking about China’s role in the world. And one of the points that he raised with China becoming much more assertive in the world, engaging in very big scale diplomatic offerings, particularly of late in the Middle East. But also pointing out that China has very good and deep relationships with, not just Russia, but also with Ukraine. And he was suggesting that you could read the tea leaves and believe that China is contemplating trying to be the main broker of an end to this war between Russia and Ukraine.

I wanted to ask [about] your reaction to that, but also, what does a negotiated solution look like at the end of the day? I’m not a Russia or Ukraine expert, but I know a bit about war and, particularly, U.S. strategy in war. It seems as though what General Milley, the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has indicated before that Ukraine’s going to have to give something up at the end of this, seems like the most likely scenario.

But I want to hear from you. Your reaction to the possibility of China playing a role in brokering the end of this, in part because of the immense influence it has over Russia, not just politically, but economically. Its relationship with Ukraine, but also, what Ukraine and Russia might have to give up in a real end to this thing.

RM: Alfred McCoy is a very good historian. I know his work and have great respect for him.

Now, let’s look at how the Chinese look at this. There is, on the one hand, a strategic partnership between China and Russia bound together by arms transfers, energy supplies, trade, which has increased significantly after the Western sanctions. China, along with India, has significantly increased its energy imports from Russia. So, the question is, how do the Chinese see this?

My own reading of this is that Xi Jinping is not an idiot and, well over a year into this war, he believes that Putin has gotten himself into a mess. He won’t say this. His main interest in the war, I believe, is not some ideological sympathy with Putin or some sense of fraternal love for the man. It is that, if Russia is defeated, let alone collapses – I’m not saying that’s about to happen, but let’s assume that Russia is taken down not just one peg, but by several pegs – then the United States will focus full bore on China, and China does not want that to happen.

On the other hand, I think Xi Jinping does not believe that Russia can, in a meaningful sense win this war, he may not think Ukraine can win this war. He is a possible mediator. I think this is the position that Professor McCoy has taken and, I think, with some good reason. But Xi Jinping wants to pull off something dramatic, such as the diplomatic normalization that he brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t think, I believe, that conditions are conducive now, for the reasons that I mentioned they weren’t conducive to a peace settlement at the top of the show, but I think he’s certainly a likely candidate.

It’s important to realize that the Chinese have significant stakes in Ukraine as well. They are Ukraine’s largest trade partner, they import large amounts of grain from Ukraine. They’re building a new subway line in Kyiv, they’ve refurbished some ports. And so, to some extent they’re all in with Russia, but not as much all in as one might think, and I think it would do them enormous diplomatic credibility if they were to pull this off.

So, they’re waiting in the wings. I can’t see the United States, obviously, mediating. Some people mention India or Indonesia. I just don’t think they have the heft to do this. I think it will be China, if it happens. But we’re a long way from there, because I think the Chinese read the tea leaves and they realize neither of these parties thinks that a settlement is necessary now, because they think they can win. And, as long as they think that, they will not agree to the hard compromises that will be necessary.

Now, what will those compromises be? I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs some time ago that said, if Ukraine could get back 85 to 90 percent of its pre-war territory, it might want to think about a settlement because, otherwise, it faces potentially years of destruction that will take decades and decades to resolve, and it might want to bite the bullet. Now, again, this is not a proposal or a suggestion that goes over well in Ukraine, because the belief is that the wind is at their back and they can win it all.

In the end, this will require some kind of compromise by both parties. Who will give how much, and where, remains to be seen, and I think we’ll have a much better idea of this come the end of the fall. I don’t think the maximalist version of Ukrainian victory is simply achievable in any reasonable time span.

The question is, will Putin be convinced that time is, in fact, not on his side, and will there be an inclination on his part to negotiate. And will there be, simultaneously, a Ukrainian belief that they haven’t been able to take it all, the West is not in the market to support an open-ended war, and therefore they have to bite the bullet and come to some kind of an agreement. I’m not saying that that will happen, but that’s one scenario to think about.

MH: Rajan, thank you so much for joining us on Intercepted today.

RM: Thanks very much. It’s been a pleasure.

MH: That was Rajan Menon, the Director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities.

[Intercepted end-show theme music.]

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the Lead Producer. Our Supervising Producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan Mixed our show, and this episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you want to support our work at The Intercept, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. It’s also tax deductible.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted wherever you get your podcasts. And definitely do leave us a rating or a review. It helps other people to find the program.

If you want to give us feedback or send an email to us, you can do so at podcasts@theintercept.com. That’s podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Ukraine on the Offensive appeared first on The Intercept.

The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front.

In 2018, the Los Angeles Times described the Misanthropic Division as “one of many neo-Nazi groups that have mushroomed throughout Ukraine in recent years.” In 2020, the Daily Beast characterized it as “the militant foreign volunteer wing of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.” The Guardian, in 2014, also said that the Misanthropic Division “is linked to the Azov battalion.” There are few other mentions of it in the news archive.

Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” Among members of the group chat, Bleriot has become a martyr, a fallen comrade to be mourned and celebrated. One meme shows a Black Sun wheel — an icon of Nazi occultism — behind his smiling face.

Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry. Bleriot’s family could not be reached for comment. Efforts to reach French authorities for comment on whether Bleriot was known to them were also unsuccessful.

A spokesperson for the Azov Battalion, which began around 2014 as a far-right street gang and has since evolved into a professional special operations regiment of the Ukrainian army, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Bleriot and the Misanthropic Division. But back in April, I met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov movement, at their base in Kyiv. I had not heard of the Misanthropic Division then, but I did ask Biletsky about foreign fighters. “We have volunteers from different countries,” he told me. “We’ve had Europeans, Japanese, people from the Middle East.” He also mentioned Belarusian, Georgian, Russian, Croat, and British volunteers. He pointed out that some of them had been Jews. However, “I can assure you that there are no Americans,” he said. “Not even western Europeans for that matter,” he added, slightly contradicting himself.

The Azov base, in the semi-industrial outskirts of Kyiv, was in an abandoned Soviet factory compound. Inside the main building, a yellow flag with Azov’s notorious Wolfsangel symbol in the center hung from the rafters. In two places, there were Black Sun clocks on the walls; such sun wheels, or Sonnenrads, also found on the floor of Heinrich Himmler’s castle in Germany, are widely used by contemporary adherents of Nazi ideology to signal their Aryan supremacist beliefs. Azov apologists say that they are merely indigenous Ukrainian symbols that must be understood in an Eastern European context. In any case, the sun wheels, backlit by blue neon, certainly lent the Azov base a neo-Nazi aesthetic. There were soldiers in full battle gear walking around, looking as squared-away and intimidating as any in Ukraine, and two women who worked as secretaries. The ground floor was full of new recruits, exclusively young white men, speaking Ukrainian and Russian.

Since Azov formed about eight years ago, it has attracted relentless controversy for its quasi-fascist ideology, unapologetically espoused by Biletsky, and alleged abuses against the few minority groups that exist in Ukraine, including the Roma. There is plenty of photographic evidence of Azov fighters displaying Nazi symbols on the battlefield (often with the intent to troll Russia). Azov has tried to clean up its image in recent years and present itself as depoliticized, and it is now an official component of the Ukrainian military, not an independent militia. But it has far more autonomy than any other regiment of the army. It presents itself as an elite corps and has attained an extraordinary degree of prestige and admiration in the eyes of ordinary Ukrainians for its stalwart defense of Mariupol, its home base, which finally fell to the Russians on May 20, following a dramatic, three-month-long siege. Although many hundreds of Azov soldiers were taken prisoner, many more young Ukrainian men have signed up to replace them.

“Azov is growing,” Maksym Zhorin, the commander of an Azov special operations unit in Kyiv, told me in April. “Our emphasis is on the future.” He added, “It might sound weird, but the actions of the Russian federation have been beneficial for us.”

As I noted in a recent piece for Harper’s, when I left the base, I saw a small group of men hanging around outside the gate, and guessed from their appearance (paramilitary attire, neck tattoos, ball caps) that they were foreign volunteers. With several Azov soldiers standing next to my translator and me as we waited for a taxi, I didn’t think it wise to approach them, but I overheard them speaking English. The one phrase I caught distinctly, over the idling engine of an armored vehicle, was “foreign legion.” Also, who knows who was responsible for it, but “WHITE POWER” was spray-painted on the kiosk right in front of us, alongside the driveway — in English, no less.

Bleriot’s death, the possible existence of more extremists like him among the ranks of Ukraine’s foreign fighters, and the rise of Azov as an internal military power should not be taken as representative of Ukraine’s society, government, and armed forces as a whole. Russian propaganda would have people believe that Ukraine and its military are full of neo-Nazis and completely under the sway of radical Russophobes. These falsehoods evaporate as soon as you set foot in the country. Ukraine does have a notably vigorous and aggressive ultranationalist sector, but even Azov, the most powerful and influential far-right force, remains a fringe movement. Ukraine is one of the biggest countries in Europe and contains multitudes. Its president is Jewish, a former TV comedian. Before Russia invaded, issues like corruption and economic stagnation were much bigger problems in the lives of ordinary people than the specter of roving gangs of fascist youths. If the Russians were really worried about neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, and white-supremacist militants, they would look in their own country, where such movements flourish as much as, if not more than, in Ukraine.

Likewise, Bleriot should not be taken as representative of the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion. Amid the chaos of the first two months of the war, most of the foreigners who flocked to Ukraine to fight were turned away and went home. The International Legion only accepted those with substantial military experience, mostly from the U.S. and U.K. Bleriot, who told an Argentinian interviewer that he had served one year in the French army, would have barely made the cut. There’s little doubt that he claimed the Misanthropic Division’s neo-Nazi ideology, as articulated in spaces like its Telegram channel, but such extremists, isolated and small in number, also find their way into the U.S. military on a regular basis.

As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim.

Images readily available on the internet show young men from the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, and elsewhere displaying the group’s piratical-looking flag, often in conjunction with other hate symbols, and it’s possible to find photos and videos of Ukrainian soldiers, who appear to be engaged in actual combat, sporting its various badges, patches, and T-shirts. It could be a cohesive military unit made up of foreign volunteers, sheltered under the wing of the Azov Battalion, but I can find no convincing evidence, at the moment, that it is anything more than a toxic Telegram meme popularized by Azov’s most black-pilled fanboys, only a few of whom may really be serving in the unit.

The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers.

The real question, when it comes to Ukraine’s foreign legion and some of the more distasteful characters that its international call-to-arms has attracted, is how much of a threat they pose to their countries of origin. The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers. Radical miscreants from all over the world who subscribe to the blood-and-soil ideology of neo-Nazi subcultures like the Misanthropic Division have a very real opportunity to travel to Ukraine, get military training, and participate in intense armed conflict against a technologically advanced enemy. If they survive, their combat experience could give them the confidence and ability to carry out acts of political violence in their home countries. This is clearly cause for concern at a time when incidents of hate crimes and domestic terrorism are on the rise.

In the same Facebook post of June 4 that announced Bleriot’s death, the International Legion also disclosed the death of Björn Benjamin Clavis, a German of unknown age. The photo of him shows a man who looks about 30 with buzzed hair in the uniform of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force. On the back of his right hand is an unmistakable tattoo of an Iron Cross, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as a “commonly-used hate symbol” favored by “neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

It’s possible that Clavis got the tattoo for innocuous reasons. It’s not that uncommon a symbol. The logo of the Independent Truck skateboard company, for example, looks a lot like an Iron Cross. So does the badge given out for marksmanship in the U.S. Army. However, the ADL’s analysis suggests that nonracist display of the Iron Cross mostly takes place in the United States. In Germany, where Clavis was from, it is very much associated with the Third Reich.

The post Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Could Be a Time Bomb for Their Home Countries appeared first on The Intercept.

The policy shift, made this week, is pegged to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and preceding military escalations. The Azov Battalion, which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement, began as a volunteer anti-Russia militia before formally joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014; the regiment is known for its hardcore right-wing ultranationalism and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members. Though it has in recent years downplayed its neo-Nazi sympathies, the group’s affinities are not subtle: Azov soldiers march and train wearing uniforms bearing icons of the Third Reich; its leadership has reportedly courted American alt-right and neo-Nazi elements; and in 2010, the battalion’s first commander and a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, Andriy Biletsky, stated that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].” With Russian forces reportedly moving rapidly against targets throughout Ukraine, Facebook’s blunt, list-based approach to moderation puts the company in a bind: What happens when a group you’ve deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault?

According to internal policy materials reviewed by The Intercept, Facebook will “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Internally published examples of speech that Facebook now deems acceptable include “Azov movement volunteers are real heroes, they are a much needed support to our national guard”; “We are under attack. Azov has been courageously defending our town for the last 6 hours”; and “I think Azov is playing a patriotic role during this crisis.”

The materials stipulate that Azov still can’t use Facebook platforms for recruiting purposes or for publishing its own statements and that the regiment’s uniforms and banners will remain as banned hate symbol imagery, even while Azov soldiers may fight wearing and displaying them. In a tacit acknowledgement of the group’s ideology, the memo provides two examples of posts that would not be allowed under the new policy: “Goebbels, the Fuhrer and Azov, all are great models for national sacrifices and heroism” and “Well done Azov for protecting Ukraine and it’s white nationalist heritage.”

In a statement to The Intercept, company spokesperson Erica Sackin confirmed the decision but declined to answer questions about the new policy.

Azov’s formal Facebook ban began in 2019, and the regiment, along with several associated individuals like Biletsky, were designated under the company’s prohibition against hate groups, subject to its harshest “Tier 1” restrictions that bar users from engaging in “praise, support, or representation” of blacklisted entities across the company’s platforms. Facebook’s previously secret roster of banned groups and persons, published by The Intercept last year, categorized the Azov Battalion alongside the likes of the Islamic State and the Ku Klux Klan, all Tier 1 groups because of their propensity for “serious offline harms” and “violence against civilians.” Indeed, a 2016 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found that Azov soldiers had raped and tortured civilians during Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

The exemption will no doubt create confusion for Facebook’s moderators, tasked with interpreting the company’s muddled and at time contradictory censorship rules under exhausting conditions. While Facebook users may now praise any future battlefield action by Azov soldiers against Russia, the new policy notes that “any praise of violence” committed by the group is still forbidden; it’s unclear what sort of nonviolent warfare the company anticipates.

Facebook’s new stance on Azov is “nonsensical” in the context of its prohibitions against offline violence, said Dia Kayyali, a researcher specializing in the real-world effects of content moderation at the nonprofit Mnemonic. “It’s typical Facebook,” Kayyali added, noting that while the exemption will permit ordinary Ukrainians to more freely discuss a catastrophe unfolding around them that might otherwise be censored, the fact that such policy tweaks are necessary reflects the dysfunctional state of Facebook’s secret blacklist-based Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. “Their assessments of what is a dangerous organization should always be contextual; there shouldn’t be some special carveout for a group that would otherwise fit the policy just because of a specific moment in time. They should have that level of analysis all the time.”

Though the change may come as welcome news to critics who say that the sprawling, largely secret Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy can stifle online free expression, it also offers further evidence that Facebook determines what speech is permissible based on the foreign policy judgments of the United States. Last summer, for instance, Motherboard reported that Facebook similarly carved out an exception to its censorship policies in Iran, temporarily allowing users to post “Death to Khamenei” for a two-week period. “I do think it is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy,” Kayyali said of the Azov exemption. “That has always been how the … list works.”

The post Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion appeared first on The Intercept.

Last month, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., introduced legislation to give Ukraine $500 million for arms purchases and impose what he’s called the “mother of all sanctions” on Russia if it invades. The bill mandates a number of reports on U.S. defense equipment transfers and Russian intelligence threats as well as the expansion of American news propaganda. But it makes no mention of reports to oversee whether U.S weapons go to white supremacists like the Azov Battalion, a unit in the Ukrainian National Guard with ties to the country’s far-right, ultranationalist National Corps party and Azov movement. Last year, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to label the Azov Battalion a foreign terrorist organization, saying it “uses the internet to recruit new members and then radicalizes them to use violence to pursue its white identity political agenda.”

The issue was not on Menendez’s radar Wednesday. “That’s a level of detail I’m not sure [about],” he told The Intercept when asked if his bill includes monitoring provisions. By Friday morning, bipartisan talks for a joint sanctions and weapons bill had broken down, frustrating members of Congress who seek to assert themselves into the foreign policymaking process narrowing the White House’s diplomatic tool set if Russia invades. Menendez, whose bill remains on the table, told reporters Wednesday that his door is still open to Republicans to come up with legislation together. Meanwhile, Ukraine has already received tons of ammunition and weapons from the U.S.

Menendez is the Democrats’ most powerful foreign policymaker in the Senate, and his stance appears to reflect the dominant mood in Washington. Russia issued a statement Thursday saying that the U.S. has not provided security guarantees in response to a draft treaty, and the U.S. alleged that Russia lied about withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border. Menendez’s pursuit of mandatory sanctions on Russia and weapons funding for Ukraine is in line with the foreign policy establishment’s hawkish posture.

And Menendez isn’t the only member of Congress who appears unconcerned that U.S.-funded weapons could fall into the wrong hands. “I’m not considering any of that right now,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe and regional security cooperation.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, told The Intercept that the U.S. “should certainly monitor and scrutinize the way those arms or weapons are used.” However, “our main goal is to aid the Ukrainians in their defense.”

Past reporting shows that the U.S. doesn’t have sufficient procedures in place to track where its arms are going and prevent them from ending up with extremists. What’s known as the “Leahy vetting” process is supposed to certify whether foreign forces have committed “gross human rights violations” before greenlighting U.S. government support. But that proved ineffective in making sure that neo-Nazis in the Azov Battalion weren’t receiving U.S. training, the Daily Beast reported in 2015.

Congress has also passed measures, signed into law repeatedly since 2018, forbidding funds from going to arms and training for the Azov Battalion. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a defense bill that included an amendment sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to vet forces receiving U.S. military assistance for violent ideologies, “including those that are white identity terrorist, anti-semitic, or islamophobic.” But when the bill reached the Senate, Tlaib’s amendment was stripped from the final version during negotiations. Meanwhile, Ukrainian-American researcher Oleksiy Kuzmenko reported in September that officers belonging to an informal right-wing group called Military Order Centuria, which has ties to the international Azov movement, have trained at a Western-backed military institution.

Menendez and Shaheen appeared unaware of past failures to enforce the law against funding the Azov Battalion.

“I think that any of our arms sales always have conditions, or even our arms transfers have conditions, and so I’m sure the [Defense Department] would have conditions to make sure that they are headed to Ukrainian armed forces, not to others,” Menendez said.

“But there’s always a risk if you have an invasion and others take over, there’s always a risk that anywhere in the world that arms can be used by someone else,” he added, despite evidence that neo-Nazis already exist in the Ukrainian military.

Shaheen, for her part, said that she’s not considering provisions to keep an eye on arms because “the administration has already approved weapons to Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, as Senate Democrats and Republicans debate a strategy toward Eastern Europe moving forward, Ukraine has already received from Lithuania Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, the small, lightweight weapons that the U.S. famously armed the mujahideen with during the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.

The post Neo-Nazis Not Top of Mind for Senate Democrats Pushing Weapons for Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept.

In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, rapidly changed its typically strict speech rules in order to exempt a variety of posts that would have otherwise been deleted for violating the company’s prohibition against hate speech and violent incitement.

Internal Meta materials reviewed by The Intercept show that in early March the company temporarily enacted an exception to its hate speech policy permitting Facebook and Instagram users in Ukraine to call for the “explicit removal [of] Russians from Ukraine and Belarus,” posts that would have otherwise been deleted for violating the company’s ban on calling for the “exclusion or segregation” of people based on their national origin. The rule change, previously reported by the New York Times, was part of a broader package of carveouts that included a rare dispensation to call for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin, use dehumanizing language against Russian soldiers, and praise the notorious Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, previously banned from the platform due to its neo-Nazi ideology.

While Meta has argued that these unusual steps are necessary to ensure that Ukrainian civilians can speak in their own defense online, critics say the changes highlight the extent to which non-Western civilian populations are neglected by the platform and illustrate the pitfalls of a California tech company equitably dictating what’s permissible in a foreign war zone.

In a statement signed by 31 civil society and human rights groups, this criticism is directed squarely at American internet titans like Facebook. “While we recognize the efforts of tech companies to uphold democracy and human rights in Ukraine, we call for long term investment in human rights, accountability, and a transparent, equal and consistent application of policies to uphold the rights of users worldwide,” reads the letter, which was shared with The Intercept ahead of publication. “Once platforms began to take action in Ukraine, they took extraordinary steps that they have been unwilling to take elsewhere. From the Syrian conflict to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, other crisis situations have not received the same amount of support even when lives are at stake.”

The open letter calls on Facebook and other American social media platforms to increase the scope and transparency of their human rights due diligence and to apply it equitably. “Currently, platforms are devoting greater time, attention, and resources to their users in the United States and Western Europe,” the letter says. “This happens both because of the potential for greater regulation by the United States and the European Union and because media based in the United States plays a significant role in influencing public discourse about companies, prompting greater attention to issues of public interest for the United States.”

Dia Kayyali, a researcher who studies the offline effects of content moderation at the nonprofit Mnemonic and organized the open letter, said, “While initially it seemed like platforms were responding rapidly and forcefully, it became clear that the reality was more complicated.” Kayyali noted that “like activists from so many other conflict zones, Ukrainian civil society tried to get platforms to take their concerns seriously after Russia’s initial invasion in 2014. It wasn’t until media pressure and interest from the U.S. and Western European countries that platforms really started taking action.” As a result, civilians suffering in conflict zones that draw comparably little attention from Western media are still waiting for hands-on treatment from the American companies that dominate so much of the internet.

After Meta’s hate speech and incitement exemptions expired last month, a new internal policy memo distributed to Meta content moderators outlined the company’s current approach. Headlined “Removing ambiguity — Not permitting hate towards Russian citizens & allowing Ukrainians to call for self-defense from invasion,” the memo, reviewed by The Intercept, explained that the company is “allowing Ukrainians to call for national self defense in the context of the invasion. It applies only within Ukraine and only in the context of speech regarding the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.” Like the hate speech exemptions, the policy is a clear loosening of company rules to spare Ukrainians from running afoul of the company’s own twitchy censorship apparatus: “Our standard rules would limit our users ability to make their voices heard at a critical time in Ukrainian history,” as the company put it to moderators. It’s unclear how exactly Meta is defining a “call for self-defense from invasion,” and the only examples of the sort of speech the company is seeking to protect are very broad: “To call for national defense, discuss Ukraine’s military actions, and react to Ukrainian President Zelensky’s calls for civilians to take up arms in defense of their homes.”

“They pretty consistently create policies that line up with Western goals.”

“The entire guidance and language reeks of double standards,” said Marwa Fatafta, head of Middle East and North Africa digital rights policy at Access Now, a signatory to the new statement. Fatafta noted that the new language was encouraging because it suggested that Meta is “listening carefully, attuning, and adjusting their policies as the situation evolves,” but that enshrining expressions of “national self-defense” in Ukraine should mean enshrining resistance to military aggression outside Europe too. “Meta agrees that they should respect national calls for self-defense for Ukrainians, but they have never granted that to Syrians or Palestinians,” Fatafta said, noting that Facebook was quick to exempt the Azov Battalion from its Dangerous Organizations policy but not other similarly designated groups. “Imagine Facebook making an exception for Hamas calling for resistance or self-defense against the Israeli occupation. It is unthinkable.”

Protecting the ability of Ukrainians suffering at the hands of an invading army to freely express their pain and hope against defeat is uncontroversial. But this license to openly root against the opposing team is not doled out to all civilians equally: “Are Yemenis allowed to call for Saudis to leave their country? Are Palestinians allowed to call for Israelis to leave their country?” asked Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Meta did not respond when asked by The Intercept if it provides similar latitude to other populations to call for self-defense in the face of a foreign invasion or occupation. “We know they have done the exact opposite in Palestine,” York said, citing deletions of content protesting the Israeli occupation. “They pretty consistently create policies that line up with Western goals.”

“There are other wars. Why can’t someone say similar things about U.S. soldiers?”

Meta’s lopsided notions of whose “national self-defense” is worth protecting has spurred strife inside the company too. A Meta source familiar with the company’s content policy discussions told The Intercept that the changes “sparked heated and emotional debate on Meta’s internal Workplace,” a communication tool used at the company. “Voices of Russian employees were joined by the rest of Meta’s internal community, citing divergence from core principles and double standards in relation to other military conflicts.”

Another Meta source, who also spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, noted that internally “there have been a lot of questions about why it is OK to do this to Russians but no one else” since “there are other wars. Why can’t someone say similar things about U.S. soldiers?”

Internal attempts to get any answers out of Meta’s policymaking black box have been as futile as those outside the company. “There is no actual transparency here as to why specifically this is OK for Ukraine but [nowhere] else,” this source said, explaining that Meta’s explanations to corporate staff haven’t gone beyond CEO Mark Zuckerberg tapping Facebook policy chief Monika Bickert “to repeat the talking points” that are provided to the media. The source said that the company response to the war in Ukraine struck them as a reaction to outside pressure — “‘Meta Censors Ukrainian Freedom Fighters’ is a bad look,” they remarked — rather than a reflection of any consistent principles. “We twist ourselves into knots creating incoherent carveouts about ‘public interest’ and ‘right to know,’ but it’s just to save our own asses. There isn’t rhyme or reason otherwise. And that is really, really bad for a company that controls a significant portion of the internet.”

“We twist ourselves into knots creating incoherent carveouts about ‘public interest’ and ‘right to know,’ but it’s just to save our own asses.”

Facebook’s swift tailoring of its speech rules to help the Ukrainian resistance has drawn particularly pointed comparisons to Palestine, where Meta users appear to enjoy no such protections for civilians who have long resisted a foreign military force.

In Palestine, where the ongoing Israeli occupation has seen decades of violence against civilians and international human rights condemnations, Facebook and Instagram users who voice opposition to that unwanted foreign military presence often have their posts deleted without explanation or recourse. “Never, never, ever was there any carveout or exception for Palestinian speech on Facebook,” said Fatafta of Access Now. “I can say that with full confidence.”

The open letter notes how “in May 2021, in anticipation of forcible evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestinians engaged in protests that Israeli security forces violently suppressed. Social media platforms removed massive amounts of content posted by Palestinians and their supporters, who were trying to document and share these human rights violations, as well as political discussions about Palestine around the world.” The Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh “documented more than 500 violations against Palestinian content on these platforms between May 6 and May 19, 2021. … Speech was removed in this context that may have been left up had it received the kind of contextual analysis platforms are claiming to do in Ukraine now.”

Far from loosening its rules to help Palestinians speak out against their occupation, Facebook has in fact implemented rule changes to aid the occupier: Last year The Intercept reported that the company had created stricter hate speech rules around using the term “Zionist,” a move experts said would make it even more difficult for Palestinians to protest their treatment by Israel.

Just as longtime observers of Meta’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy say the blacklist of terrorists and criminals is an avatar of American foreign policy values, content moderation experts told The Intercept that exceptions to the rule are fundamentally political choices. Civil society groups, including those that have discussed these issues with Meta, say there is no indication that the company similarly fine-tunes its policies to ensure the speech of other civilian populations under occupation and bombardment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s York argued that in other Facebook-entangled conflicts, unlike Ukraine, “the U.S. has an interest in supporting the occupier. Facebook staff, especially their policy staff, are American and not immune to bias.”

The post Facebook’s Ukraine-Russia Moderation Rules Prompt Cries of Double Standard appeared first on The Intercept.

Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.

Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.

No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence — nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.

“This is deliberate censorship of human rights documentation and the Palestinian narrative.”

“This is deliberate censorship of human rights documentation and the Palestinian narrative,” said Mona Shtaya, an adviser with 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, a civil society group that formally collaborates with Meta on speech issues. During the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, between August 5 and August 15, 7amleh tallied nearly 90 deletions of content or account suspensions relating to bombings on Meta platforms, noting that reports of censored content are still coming in.

Marwa Fatafta, Middle East North Africa policy manager for Access Now, an international digital rights group, said, “Their censorship works almost like clockwork — whenever violence escalates on the ground, their takedown of Palestinian content soars.”

Instances of censored Palestinian content reviewed by The Intercept include the August 5 removal of a post mourning the death of Alaa Qaddoum, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in an Israeli missile strike, as well as an Instagram video showing Gazans pulling bodies from beneath rubble. Both posts were removed with a notice claiming that the imagery “goes against our guidelines on violence or dangerous organizations” — a reference to Meta’s company policy against violent content or information related to its vast roster of banned people and groups.

Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin told The Intercept that these two posts were removed according to the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, pointing to the company’s policy of censoring content promoting federally designated terrorist groups. Sackin did not respond to a follow-up question about how an image of a 5-year-old girl and a man buried in rubble promoted terrorism.

Palestinians in Gaza who post about Israeli assaults said their posts don’t contain political messages or indicate any affiliation with terror groups. “I’m just posting pure news about what’s happening,” said Issam Adwan, a Gaza-based freelance journalist. “I’m not even using a very biased Palestinian news language: I’m describing the Israeli planes as Israeli planes, I’m not saying that I’m a supporter of Hamas or things like these.”

Rights advocates told The Intercept that the exemptions made for the Russia-Ukraine war are the latest example of a double standard between Meta’s treatment of Western markets and the rest of the world — evidence of special treatment of the Ukrainian cause on Meta’s part since the beginning of the war and something that can be seen with media coverage of the war more broadly.

Though the majority of users on social platforms owned by Meta live outside the United States, critics charge that the company’s censorship policies, which affect billions worldwide, tidily align with U.S. foreign policy interests. Rights advocates emphasized the political nature of these moderation decisions. “Meta was capable to take very strict measures to protect Ukrainians amid the Russian invasion because it had the political will,” said Shtaya, “but we Palestinians haven’t witnessed anything of these measures.”

By taking its cues from U.S. government policy — including cribbing U.S. counterterrorism blacklists — Meta can end up censoring entirely nonviolent statements of support or sympathy for Palestinians, according to a 2021 statement by Human Rights Watch. “This is a pretty clear example of where that’s happening,” Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine director, told The Intercept of the most recent takedowns. While Human Rights Watch’s accounting of recent Gaza censorship was still ongoing, Shakir said what he’d seen already indicated that Meta was once again censoring Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech, including the documentation of human rights abuses.

It’s unclear which specific facet of Meta’s byzantine global censorship system was responsible for the spate of censorship of Gaza posts in August; many posters received no meaningful information as to why their posts were deleted. The Meta spokesperson declined to provide an accounting of which other policies were used. Past takedowns of Palestinian content have cited not only the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy but also company prohibitions against depictions of graphic violence, hate symbols, and hate speech. As is the case with Meta’s other content policies, the Violent and Graphic Content prohibition can at times swallow up posts that are clearly sharing the reality of global crises rather than glorifying them — something the company has taken unprecedented steps to prevent in Ukraine.

Meta’s public-facing Community Standards rulebook says: “We remove content that glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others because it may create an environment that discourages participation” — noting a vague exception for “graphic content (with some limitations) to help people raise awareness about these issues.” The Violent and Graphic Content policy places a blanket ban on gruesome videos of dead bodies and restricts the viewing of similar still images to adults 18 years and older.

In an expanded, internal version of the Community Standards guide obtained by The Intercept, the section dealing with graphic content includes a series of policy memos directing moderators to deviate from the standard rules or bring added scrutiny to bear on specific breaking news events. A review of these breaking news exceptions shows that Meta directed moderators to make sure that graphic imagery of Ukrainian civilians killed in Russian attacks was not deleted on seven different occasions, beginning at the immediate onset of the invasion. The whitelisted content includes acts of state violence akin to those routinely censored when conducted by the Israeli military, including multiple specific references to airstrikes.

According to the internal material, Meta began instructing its moderators to deviate from standard practices to preserve documentation of the Russian invasion the day after it began. A policy update on February 25 instructed moderators to not delete video of some of the war’s earliest civilian casualties. “This video shows the aftermath of airstrikes on the city of Uman, Ukraine,” the memo reads. “At 0.5 seconds, innards are visible. We are making an allowance to MAD this video” — a reference to the company practice “Mark As Disturbing,” or attaching a warning to an image or video rather than deleting it outright.

“It’s always been about geopolitics and profit for Meta.”

On March 5, moderators were told to “MAD Video Briefly Depicting Briefly Mutilated Persons Following Air Strikes in Chernigov”— again noting that moderators were to deviate from standard speech rules. “Though video depicting dismembered persons outside of a medical setting is prohibited by our Violent & Graphic Content policy,” the memo says, “the footage of the individuals is brief and appears to be in an awareness raising context posted by survivors of the rocket attack.”

The graphic violence exceptions are just a few of the many ways Meta has quickly adjusted its moderation practices to accommodate the Ukrainian resistance. At the outset of the invasion, the company took the rare step of lifting speech restrictions around the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi unit of the Ukrainian military previously banned under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. In March, Reuters reported that Meta temporarily permitted users to explicitly call for the death of Russian soldiers, speech that would also normally violate the company’s rules.

Rights advocates emphasized that their grievance is not with added protections for Ukrainians but the absence of similar special steps to shield besieged civilians from Meta’s erratic censorship apparatus nearly everywhere else in the world.

“Human rights is not a cherry-picking exercise,” said Fatafta. “It’s good they have taken such important measures for Ukraine, but their failure to do so for Palestine emphasizes further their discriminatory approach to content moderation. It’s always been about geopolitics and profit for Meta.”

How exactly Meta decides which posts are celebrating gruesome wartime death and which are raising awareness of it is never explained in the company’s public overview of its speech rules or the internal material reviewed by The Intercept.

A January 2022 blog post from Meta notes that the company uses a “balancing test that weighs the public interest against the risk of harm” for content that would normally violate company rules but provides no information as to what that test actually entails or who conducts it. Whether an attempt to document atrocities or mourn a neighbor killed in an airstrike is deemed glorification or in the public interest is left to the subjective judgment calls of Meta’s overworked and sometimes traumatized content contractors, tasked with making hundreds of such decisions every day.

Few would dispute that the images from Ukraine described in the Meta policy updates — documenting the Russian invasion — are newsworthy, but the documents obtained by The Intercept show that Meta’s whitelisting of material sympathetic to Ukraine has extended even to graphic state propaganda.

The internal materials show that it has on multiple instances whitelisted Ukrainian state propaganda videos that highlight Russian violence against civilians, including the emotionally charged “Close the Sky” film Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented to Congress in March. “Though the video depicting mutilated humans outside of a medical setting is prohibited by VGC policy the footage shared is in an awareness-raising context posted by the President of Ukraine,” said a March 24 update distributed to moderators.

On May 13, moderators were told not to delete a video posted by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry that included graphic depictions of burnt corpses. “The video very briefly depicts an unidentified charred body lying on the floor,” the update says. “Though video depicting charred or burning people is prohibited by our Violent & Graphic Content policy … the footage is brief and qualifies for a newsworthy exception as per OCP’s guidelines, as it documents an on-going armed conflict.”

“Meta is replicating online some of the same power imbalances and rights abuses we see in the real world.”

The internal materials reviewed by The Intercept show no such interventions for Palestinians — no whitelisting of propaganda designed to raise sympathies for civilians or directives to use warnings instead of removing content depicting harm to civilians.

Critics pointed to the disparity to question why online speech about war crimes and human rights offenses committed against Europeans seems to warrant special protections while speech referring to abuses committed against others do not.

“Meta should respect the right for people to speak out, whether in Ukraine or Palestine,” said Shakir, of Human Rights Watch. “By silencing many people arbitrarily and without explanation, Meta is replicating online some of the same power imbalances and rights abuses we see in the real world.”

While Meta seems to side against allowing Palestinian civilians to keep graphic content online, it has intervened in posting about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to keep images live by siding with the occupying Israeli military. In one instance, Meta took steps to ensure that a depiction of an attack against a member of the Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank was kept up: “An Israeli Border Police officer was struck and lightly wounded by a Molotov cocktail during clashes with Palestinians in Hebron,” an undated memo distributed to moderators reads. “We are making an exception for this particular content to Mark this video as Disturbing.”

The post Facebook Tells Moderators to Allow Graphic Images of Russian Airstrikes but Censors Israeli Attacks appeared first on The Intercept.

The world’s largest arms dealer, the United States, is leading an effort among NATO nations to dramatically increase the flow of weapons to the besieged government in Kyiv. While the Biden administration has resisted calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a move which could result in an overt hot war between major nuclear powers, the weapons transfers represent a significant escalation of Western involvement.

Despite strong efforts in recent weeks from NATO governments and many large media outlets to minimize or excise the relevant role Western powers played in the years leading up to Russia’s brutal invasion, there has been a sustained proxy war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington for a decade. Unless the desired outcome is a full-spectrum war between Russia and the U.S.-NATO bloc, Western nations — particularly the U.S. — must ask themselves whether the current course of action is more or less likely to facilitate an end to the horrifying violence being imposed on Ukraine’s civilian population.

Throughout its two terms, the Obama administration resisted providing overt lethal assistance to Ukraine, concerned that such a move by the U.S. would provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, President Barack Obama maintained that stance, though his administration did provide a range of other nonlethal military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, including training. That posture shifted under President Donald Trump, and Washington began a relatively modest flow of weapons shipments. Trump’s attempt to cajole Ukraine into involving itself in his electoral battle with Joe Biden notwithstanding, U.S. military support for Kyiv has ticked steadily upward.

Even before Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration had begun a process of increasing lethal aid. In his first year in office, Biden approved more military aid to Ukraine — some $650 million — than the U.S. had ever provided. On February 26, as a result of Putin’s invasion, the guardrails came off: an “unprecedented” additional $350 million weapons package was pushed through. There is now wide bipartisan support in Washington for an immediate and aggressive $13.5 billion effort to ship American arms and other assistance, including humanitarian aid, to Ukraine. The package will also cover the cost of additional deployments of U.S. military assets and troops to the region. Historically, weapons shipments to Ukraine have taken months to implement. Now they are moving within days.

The U.S. has moved at remarkable speed to deliver the weapons approved by Biden in late February: A range of Javelin antitank missiles, rocket launchers, guns, and ammunition have already made their way onto the battlefield. “The shipment of weapons — which also includes Stinger antiaircraft missiles from U.S. military stockpiles, mostly in Germany — represents the largest single authorized transfer of arms from U.S. military warehouses to another country,” according to the New York Times, citing a Pentagon official.

More than a dozen other NATO countries and several non-NATO European nations have started or expanded their weapons shipments to Ukraine. In a significant move, Germany broke with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons to conflict zones. As part of its initial package, Berlin is moving some 1,500 rocket launchers and Stinger missiles and potentially additional Soviet-era shoulder-fired Strela missiles. The European Union has also broken its own resistance to providing lethal assistance and entered the arms market with a commitment of nearly half a billion dollars in weapons to Ukraine. EU treaties prohibit the use of budgetary money for weapons transfers, so the union tapped funds from its “off-budget” European Peace Facility. “For the first time ever, the EU will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “This is a watershed moment.”

The substantially expanded and expedited Western arms shipments, and increased intelligence support, could prolong large-scale military action. NATO has also said that any Russian attack against the supply lines facilitating the flow of weapons to Ukraine will trigger an invocation of Article 5 of the NATO charter, thus raising the specter of military action against Russia. Moscow, which has already labeled the sweeping sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies a declaration of “economic war,” has warned that nations sending weapons to Ukraine “will be responsible for any consequences of such actions.”

The weapons will not be sufficient to defeat Russia militarily.

The weapons will surely aid Ukrainian forces in waging counterattacks against Moscow’s invasion but will not be sufficient to defeat Russia militarily. Should Moscow succeed in forcibly taking major Ukrainian cities or even in toppling the government, the Western weapons are likely to be used in a protracted armed insurgency and war of attrition that may produce echoes of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The dominant Western media and government narrative about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine requires a total rejection of the legitimacy of any Russian security concerns. Viewing Putin as an unhinged madman coldly acting out of a love of brutality and conquest may be a more satisfying narrative, but it will not bring an end to the war. Any diplomatic or negotiated resolution of the crisis will necessarily entail Ukrainian concessions, so it’s important to understand Moscow’s point of view. In an interview with ABC World News on March 7, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to acknowledge this. “I think [Putin] is capable of stopping the war that he started,” Zelensky told David Muir. “And even if he doesn’t think that he was the one who started, he should know one important thing, a thing that cannot deny, that stopping the war is what he’s capable of.”

It is understandable and reasonable that people across the U.S. and Europe are demanding their governments send more weapons to support Ukraine in resisting the Russian invasion. Without the Western-supplied weapons Ukraine already possessed, it is very likely Russia would be in control of much larger swaths of the country. It is also vital that people advocating such a policy consider whether a sizable increase in U.S. and NATO weapons transfers will prolong the conflict and result in even more civilian death and destruction.

If the Western position is that Russia must publicly admit that it is criminal and wrong, and if such a confession is a precondition to any negotiation, then flooding Ukraine with even more weapons is a logical move — especially if you believe that Putin is insane and wants to bring the world to nuclear war and annihilation if he is not able to seize Ukraine. If, however, the aim is to end the horrors as swiftly as possible, then we require a serious analysis of the impact such large-scale weapons shipments will have on the fate of Ukrainian civilians and the prospects for an end to the invasion.

If the flow of weapons delays a negotiated settlement between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, then it is hard to see the massive scope of the weapons transfers as a clear positive.

It may be the case that the flow of Western weapons to the Ukrainian forces will so bleed Russia that it pulls out of Ukraine, fatally damaging Putin’s grip on power and saving many lives. In that case, these shipments will be seen as a decisive factor in Ukraine’s defeat of Russia. But if it doesn’t, and the flow of weapons delays a negotiated settlement between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, then it is hard to see the massive scope of the weapons transfers as a clear positive.

In a thoughtful analysis for Responsible Statecraft, Russia expert Anatol Lieven argued that Ukraine had already achieved a significant victory against Putin. “For it is now obvious that any such pro-Russian authorities imposed by Moscow in Ukraine would lack all support and legitimacy, and could never maintain any kind of stable rule,” Lieven wrote. “To keep them in place would require the permanent presence of Russian forces, permanent Russian casualties and permanent ferocious repression. In short, a Russian forever war.” He argued, “The Ukrainians have in fact achieved what the Finns achieved by their heroic resistance against Soviet invasion. The Finns convinced Stalin that it would be far too difficult to impose a Communist government on Finland. The Ukrainians have convinced sensible members of the Russian establishment — and hopefully, Putin himself — that Russia cannot dominate the whole of Ukraine. The fierce resistance of the Ukrainians should also convince Russia of the utter folly of breaking an agreement and attacking Ukraine again.”

The U.S. and NATO are not going to kick countries out of NATO, and Putin knows that, despite his call for an effective return to NATO’s 1997 footprint. NATO is not going to withdraw its forces and weapons from Poland, the Balkans, or the former Soviet territories of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. But Putin clearly believes his demand that Ukraine enshrine neutrality in its laws and commit to staying out of NATO is realistic. In recent days, critics of NATO expansion have pointed to the 2008 observations of Biden’s CIA Director William Burns as particularly relevant on this point. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” Burns noted in a diplomatic cable from Moscow to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which he quoted in his 2019 book “The Back Channel: American Diplomacy in a Disordered World.” “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Russia is also demanding that Ukraine recognize the independence of the two breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, and that Crimea is Russian territory. Since 2014, an estimated 14,000 people — including large numbers of civilians — have been killed in fighting between the government — aided by paramilitaries, including armed neo-Nazi elements — and Russian-backed insurgents, mercenaries, and paramilitaries in the eastern Donbas region. The practical reality now is that Russia appears to be on its way toward consolidating control of those areas. Barring direct NATO intervention, Ukraine would have to sacrifice an immense number of lives and resources in what would almost certainly be a failed military venture to wrestle back even nominal control of these territories.

Despite the absurdity of Putin’s sweeping portrayal of Ukraine as a state run by Nazis, there are murderous fascist elements in Ukraine, including some that have been given official legitimacy within its armed forces. Since 2018, largely because of the work of Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressive lawmakers, there has been an official ban on U.S. assistance going to the far-right Azov Battalion. Verifying that the ban is being respected by Ukraine is almost impossible, especially now that Azov is an official part of the country’s National Guard. If the U.S. were blunt in publicly condemning the role of neo-Nazis and other far-right actors in Ukraine, including those within the armed forces and semi-official militias, it would help undermine Putin’s exaggerated rhetoric.

Given the long history of fascism in Ukraine, dating back to World War II, it’s dishonest to dismiss the ongoing involvement of neo-Nazis in the politics and armed forces of Ukraine. In the midst of the invasion, and with the massive flow of Western arms into Ukraine, it is unimaginable that U.S. and NATO weaponry will not fall into the hands of some of these forces. Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar is one of the few members of Congress to publicly criticize the increased flow of weapons. She said “the consequences of flooding Ukraine” with weapons “are unpredictable and likely disastrous,” and that she was particularly concerned about “paramilitary groups w/out accountability.” In her Twitter thread on the issue, Omar clarified, “I support giving Ukraine the resources it needs to defend its people, I just have legitimate concerns about the size and scope.”

The steady post-Cold War expansion of NATO, combined with the U.S.-backed removal of a democratically elected, pro-Russia president in 2014, along with the increased flow of weapons to Ukraine, and the bloody eight-year war against Russian separatists in the east of the country are all major aspects of Moscow’s narrative. They do not in any way constitute a reasonable justification for this brutal invasion, but this history will all be relevant to any peace settlement.

There is much discussion these days about the events in Ukraine heralding a new era in international order. Within the elite U.S. foreign policy power structure, we are witnessing evidence of a merging of neoconservative Cold War politics and the “military humanism” at the heart of the Clinton administration’s justification for military action in the 1990s. Putin’s own actions have contributed to an expansion of the very threats he claims to be confronting. His criminal invasion of Ukraine has fueled U.S. and NATO efforts to increase their ground forces near Russia; the U.S. has deployed more than 15,000 troops to Europe in response and the total number of U.S. troops in Europe is approaching 100,000. The invasion has attracted even more neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “foreign fighters,” and they are pouring into Ukraine under the cover of defending the country against foreign aggression. Russia’s actions will also further flood the region with mercenaries and weapons that can easily be transferred and trafficked. The Russian economy is being pummeled, and brave protests against the war are spreading inside Russia. Putin may have some fifth-dimensional chess he believes he is playing, but everything we currently understand suggests that he has made a monumental series of severe military and political miscalculations.

The Biden administration has made a number of decisions over the past two weeks that indicate there are influential voices of restraint at high levels of power in the administration. This week, the U.S. nixed a proposal by Poland to transfer MiG-29 warplanes to Ukraine, saying it could be viewed by Russia as escalatory and make direct conflict between NATO and Russia more likely. On March 2, the Pentagon canceled a previously scheduled intercontinental ballistic missile test, and the administration has made a consistent case against imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine despite impassioned pleas from Ukraine and indications that many Americans want one — or think they do.

The decisions made now in Washington, other NATO capitals, and Moscow will have sweeping ramifications for years to come. Citizens of Western nations cannot control the actions of Putin, but they can advocate for commonsense responses from their own leaders. This requires considering the predictable and foreseeable long-term consequences of short-term action. In the face of heinous atrocities against civilians and a heartbreaking refugee crisis, it is understandable that good people would demand extreme action in the name of bringing it all to a halt. The tragic reality is that escalation by the U.S. and NATO will not achieve that, certainly not without grave costs, and could lead to an even worse catastrophe for Ukrainian civilians, if not a wider global conflict. In that case, the only beneficiaries will be those who are now winning the war in Ukraine: the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers.

The post U.S. and NATO’s Unprecedented Weapons Transfers to Ukraine Could Prolong the War appeared first on The Intercept.

Faheem Qureshi is one of the names that Spencer Ackerman, author of the new book “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” wants readers to remember. Adham Hassoun is another. A Palestinian refugee, Hassoun was arrested in 2002 for donations he made to Muslim charities in the 1990s and charged under the Patriot Act, a sweeping surveillance law hastily passed in October 2001. After refusing to spy on his community and mosque as an informant for the federal government, Hassoun spent four years in solitary confinement before going to trial, after which he was locked away for a decade and half. After serving his sentence, Hassoun was handed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency that itself owes its very existence to the September 11 attacks. Under President Donald Trump, the third American president to preside over the war on terror, a previously unused provision of the Patriot Act would become the basis for Hassoun’s indefinite detention on U.S. soil. He was, in the words of the FBI, “a casualty of war.”

For Ackerman, the stories of Faheem Qureshi, Adham Hassoun, and others like them were critical to bringing his debut book to life, a reminder of the millions of human beings around the world who were, and continue to be, impacted by the “global war on terrorism” that President George W. Bush declared 20 years ago next month. Fusing history and analysis born out of nearly two decades of reporting, Ackerman makes the case that the Trump years were the logical conclusion of a multidecade borderless war without end. He writes that Trump, then a New York City real estate magnate, was among the first to recognize “the 9/11 era’s grotesque subtext — the perception of nonwhites as marauders, even as conquerors, from hostile foreign civilizations — was its engine.”

Once in office, Ackerman argues that Trump internalized and weaponized the war’s most important lesson of all: “The terrorists were whomever you said they were.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner whose work has appeared in the Daily Beast and The Guardian, Ackerman this year chose to go independent, partnering with an editor to publish his journalism via Substack. He spoke to The Intercept about the disconnect in how the U.S. security state has historically responded to the nation’s oldest, deadliest form of terrorism — that of the white supremacist far right — and its world-altering response to the September 11 attacks. Ackerman recounted how events early on in Trump’s presidency, particularly the reemergence of key figures from the war on terror as top administration officials, motivated him to write “Reign of Terror”; spoke about the people whose stories shaped the book; and shared his analysis of the state of the war on terror today — and where it might go next.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you choose to set the prologue of “Reign of Terror” in Elohim City, Oklahoma — a far-right paramilitary compound that Timothy McVeigh visited in the weeks before the Oklahoma City bombings — in the early 1990s? What was the significance of that place and time to your larger argument?

As I was writing the book, this was one of the first things I saw really vividly, that I felt strongly about — how it needed to proceed both narratively and, accordingly, structurally to bring the critique home.

It is often very hard to see the whole war on terror, because, particularly 20 years on, we don’t tend to think of it as one thing. We tend to think of it as like, there’s an Afghanistan War; there’s was an Iraq War; there’s drone strikes; there’s surveillance; and so forth. So we kind of don’t see the whole corpus.

But a way in which you really can see the whole corpus is when you look at a mass casualty terrorism event perpetrated by a white person. And when you look at the terrorist attack that Timothy McVeigh commits in April of 1995, you see really clearly in the aftermath whom it was acceptable to target and whom it was forbidden to target in a way that prefigures the response to 9/11 in a kind of scary echo.

I wanted those people to be white, because we very, very rarely present the infrastructure of white supremacist terrorism in this country in that same context, with that same understanding.

We start in Elohim City because I was determined to begin this book with a journalistic cliché. I wanted to kind of mirror all of the journalism you have read over the past 20 years where the reporter puts himself valiantly in danger, travels to the terrorist training camp, and watches these people, who he treats almost zoologically, exercise through muddy truck tires and go across monkey bars and so on and so forth — I wanted those people to be white, because we very, very rarely present the infrastructure of white supremacist terrorism in this country in that same context, with that same understanding.

I wanted to take the reader to a part of northeastern Oklahoma where, in plain sight, one of the leading figures of late 20th century, white supremacist infrastructure was allowed to basically exist as his, like, mini, weird, white caliphate.

The response to Oklahoma City entirely leaves out the expansive transformations in law, known as material support statutes, that criminalize association and authorize surveillance on people who are several steps away from an actual act of violence; all of that is immediately on the table after 9/11, when terrorism isn’t white.

“Reign of Terror” is clearly the product of extensive historical and journalistic research. It is also deeply infused with a particular argument. It’s not just laying out the facts, it’s making a case. Give us the origin story of how it came into being.

Basically, like two years into the Trump administration, we had got kind of bombarded with explanations about how Trump came to be, and some of them were compelling, others weren’t, but all of them seem to me kind of incomplete, especially as Trump surrounds himself with all of these figures from the war on terror. But none of that seemed to knit itself up in a lot of the discourse around Trump into anything beyond, like, “Oh, that’s weird. That’s a coincidence.” Or, and this was the liberal discourse, these are the saviors of our respected institutions, coming to the defense of America, aligned against Donald Trump.

I was, through my journalism at the time, very focused on specific, small stories and was kind of constantly encouraged to break news. And when I would get to explanatory sections of pieces I was writing, I would just find those the hardest to write, because I wanted to go very deep on that and not in fact on the news break that I had at the top of the piece and was the whole reason for this anyway. And I couldn’t quite get it right.

I was thinking about how symbiotic Trump’s relationship with the war on terror is, and then I started putting myself in a Nexis hole — like, let’s look at what Trump did and said on and about 9/11, or for the Iraq War, or Afghanistan.

Even when he’s going as primarily “The Apprentice” guy, he’s nevertheless, because he is who he is, finding a way to make himself relevant.

Seeing Kelly constantly portrayed, and trying to portray himself after a certain point, as a bulwark or an obstacle to Trump was just, like, it was astonishing to me.

In going through it, that gave me a more expansive way of thinking about who the people around him were, especially because I’ve reported on so many. Particularly John Kelly, the former Guantánamo commander, who, if you were a defense reporter when John Kelly was at SOUTHCOM, the military command responsible for Central and South America, and you covered primarily Guantánamo, you knew John Kelly as the man who broke a hunger strike and instituted a press blackout and treated reporters as the enemy and gave all of these extremely caustic speeches, talking about how it is a betrayal for people, and this is as late as 2010, to not support the wars.

Seeing Kelly constantly portrayed, and trying to portray himself after a certain point, as a bulwark or an obstacle to Trump was just, like, it was astonishing to me. I remembered at that point, most people don’t cover Guantánamo Bay, so maybe you have a responsibility to tell them.

And then finally, the moment where this book all came together for me was reading accounts of the cells that CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and ICE keep for migrant families, where they’re chilled for as much as a 72-hour stay.

I covered torture, very extensively, military and CIA torture, very extensively, and as soon as I read those accounts, I was taken back to the black site in Afghanistan in November of 2002, where Gul Rahman froze to death, and how there was never any accountability for that. Even though there’s not going to be like a piece of paper that says to CBP and ICE, “Do what the CIA did,” the fact that over time, government bureaucrats in the security agencies learned that there will be no consequence to freezing people in cells, as long as they are the right sort of people, kind of threw “Reign of Terror” together with the quickness.

Speaking of voices who come up again and again in the book: Who is Adham Hassoun, and what role does he play in the history of the war on terror that you tell?

Adham Hassoun is someone who I encountered kind of late in my work on the book, and once I encountered him, I realized I had to tear up so much of it in order to make him a central figure.

He’s someone who the Patriot Act criminalizes, who is convicted ultimately of terrorism charges that have absolutely nothing to do with any act of violence. The ultimate commission of most of what he is said to have done is write checks to banned organizations. All except for one check, which was written shortly afterward, all of the money that he donated to organizations was legal before the Patriot Act, so they retroactively used his charitable donations to refugee causes — this man is himself a refugee — against him. The only reason that even happens is because he refuses to become an FBI informant.

A lot of the presentation of informant work for law enforcement that we tend to get makes it seem like informants are super-engaged citizens who are coming forward to make sure that some disaster doesn’t happen. More often, it is a coercive process based on leverage that law enforcement or a prosecutorial entity has over someone that they can use to generate information about people, rather than necessarily about a crime. And that happens a tremendous amount after 9/11 in Muslim communities, where the FBI, despite its rhetoric, treats American Muslim communities as targets, not people who deserve the protection of the law.

Adham ultimately has the misfortune of having given life advice to a young José Padilla, who he met in a mosque in Miami. Once the Bush administration accused, and later withdrew, the charge that José Padilla was going to set off a radiological bomb, anyone who is in José Padilla’s phone book was in a lot of trouble, and Adham was one of those people.

He got sentenced to 15 years in prison, to include time served. The judge at sentencing notes that the government has not even attempted to connect him to an act of violence, and yet, nevertheless, it was asking for life imprisonment for him. So he serves his entire sentence. He spends the next 13 years in prison and emerges from prison in October of 2017, and Trump is president now.

He’s a Palestinian. He’s a stateless person. He grew up in Lebanon, he came to the United States after the searing experience of having been a young man during the Lebanese civil war. He expects he’s probably headed to Lebanon.

Instead, he is taken to an ICE prison in western New York, near Buffalo. I’m skipping a couple steps here, but basically he learns that he is the first person ever to have Section 412 of the Patriot Act used against him, and Section 412 was one of the major things that civil liberties attorneys in the weeks that they had to object to the Patriot Act raised objections to, because it basically says if someone isn’t a citizen and there’s no place to deport him, the government can imprison him indefinitely, and a senior security official, in this case the Department of Homeland Security secretary, decides every six months to just, like, rubber stamp that or not.

This kept Adham potentially locked up forever, after he had served his criminal sentence. A criminal sentence that, again, only existed because the Patriot Act criminalized what he had already done. And then because he didn’t want to become an informant, he didn’t want to spy on his neighbors and on his mosque. He is in Batavia [New York] and trying, along with some very heroic, local attorneys in Buffalo and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], to contest his sentence and leave — and also trying find a country where he can go to.

We have, at the very minimum, an obligation to remember his name.

An evidentiary hearing in federal court basically makes it clear that the FBI cannot meet its burden in the hearing — which is just like, demonstrate and allow for cross-examination of that demonstration, your assessment of the danger that Adham Hassoun poses that requires indefinite detention as its remedy — and the FBI and the Justice Department get really mad at the judge for making them do that and, in response, basically concede that they can’t do that, but then appeal her ruling.

So now it’s basically the security state racing to establish that this judge cannot constrain their authority to do this.

Instead of losing that battle, or running the risk of losing that battle, in the summer of 2020, the Justice Department said that Adham Hassoun, who it had been arguing was too dangerous to leave a cage, got put on a plane for Rwanda, where he’s been a free man ever since. And I think it is extremely important when going through the war on terror to remember that this happened to real people — people with souls, and people with names — and the war on terror stole Adham Hassoun’s life. We have, at the very minimum, an obligation to remember his name.

What is the state of the war on terror today, and what do you make of this argument that we’re witnessing the birth of a new war on terror taking shape in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, this one targeting conservatives in the name combating right-wing extremists? Is that happening?

I think right now the security state and the Biden administration are feeling around to see what the limits of that are going to be. From my vantage, they seem not, right now, to be seeking new powers — they’re not asking for a new law to be passed for domestic terrorism, at this point. However, very conspicuously, a lot of attention in congressional hearings and congressional testimony from Justice Department counterterrorism figures, FBI counterterrorism figures, and important congressional figures like Elissa Slotkin on security committees, Mark Warner as well, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have kind of focused on pointing to a right-now-not-really-well-established operational connection between right-wing domestic militants and foreign terrorist figures, like sometimes Ukraine, like the Azov Battalion, or something like that.

That has happened conspicuously enough to make it seem like what the early phase of his responses is about is seeing how to manipulate laws against banned foreign terrorist organizations, to find some measure of connection to target these groups without having to do something politically provocative like pass a law and risk a backlash to that. And that is very consistent with the operations of the war on terror. Once these authorities are granted, there are always going to be creative lawyers and creative intelligence officials to shoehorn the circumstances that fit the current security prerogative for targeting. And so I am keeping an eye out for manifestations of that, and if that fails, then we’ll probably come to see what a fallback position looks like. So that’s sort of the phase I think we might be confronting right now.

The post “Obligation to Remember”: Author Spencer Ackerman on the Casualties of the War on Terror appeared first on The Intercept.