“As global power dynamics are being profoundly reshaped, Nick’s work has never been more essential. The Intercept has always questioned mainstream coverage about American military power, and there is no one better than Nick to provide the kind of nuanced, incisive coverage that our readers want and deserve right now,” said CEO Annie Chabel. 

“Nick is a thoughtful, thorough, and curious journalist with deep expertise reporting on U.S. military and national security,” said editor-in-chief Ben Muessig. “I look forward to working with him more closely in 2025.”

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Turse, who is also a fellow at Type Media Center, has written for The Intercept for a decade, publishing more than 150 articles. He was part of the award-winning team that produced “The Drone Papers,” a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. He received the 2022 Military Reporters & Editors Association Award for Best Overseas Coverage for “The AFRICOM Files,” which revealed how the Pentagon undercounts and ignores military sexual assault in Africa. In 2023, The Intercept published a searing four-article exposé about former U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger’s direct role in U.S. attacks on Cambodian villages in the 1970s that were previously unknown to the outside world, based on decades of reporting by Turse, who was the first person to interview victims and survivors in 13 villages that suffered relentless attacks. He received the 2024 Deadline Club Award for Reporting by Independent Digital Media for “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” 

In 2023 and 2024, Turse reported that a 2018 U.S. drone strike in Somalia killed up to five civilians, including a mother and her 4-year-old daughter, and that the Pentagon found no one at fault. Following Turse’s investigation, two dozen human rights organizations and several members of Congress urged then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate the family for the deaths. Turse is a finalist for the 2025 Fetisov Journalism Award for Outstanding Contribution to Peace for this article and several follow-up pieces published this year.

“I am thrilled to be joining The Intercept in this expanded role. Watchdog journalism is more necessary than ever and I can’t think of an outlet more committed to holding power to account,” said Turse. “I’m excited to get started.”

Turse has received a number of honors for his work including a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and an I.F. Stone “Izzy” Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Journalism. He is a two-time finalist for the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting.​​ He has a Ph.D. in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University.

The post Nick Turse Joins The Intercept as Inaugural National Security Reporting Fellow appeared first on The Intercept.

The United States has executed 21 people over the last month in targeted drone strikes off the coast of Venezuela. The Trump administration has so far authorized at least four strikes against people it claims are suspected “narco-terrorists.”

The strikes mark a dark shift in the administration’s approach to what it’s framing as an international drug war — one it’s waging without congressional oversight.

“There actually could be more strikes,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Turse joins host Akela Lacy and investigative journalist Radley Balko to discuss how the administration is laying the groundwork to justify extrajudicial killings abroad and possibly at home.

The Trump administration’s claims that it’s going after high-level drug kingpins don’t hold water, Turse says. “Trump is killing civilians because he ‘suspects’ that they’re smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it’s outright murder.”

Trump has repeated claims, without evidence, that a combination of immigration and drug trafficking is driving crime in the United States. It’s part of a story Trump has crafted: The U.S. and the international community are under siege, and it’s his job to stop it — whether by executing fishermen or deploying the National Guard on his own people. And while the latest turn toward extrajudicial killings is cause for alarm, it’s also more of the same, says Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has covered the drug war for two decades and host of the new Intercept podcast, Collateral Damage.

“The notion of collateral damage is just that: this very idea that, when you’re in war, there are some who can be sacrificed because we have this greater cause that we have to win or this threat we have to overcome. And these people that are being killed in these incidents, they’re collateral damage from the perspective of the U.S. government because Trump clearly doesn’t care,” Balko says.

“There are a lot of parallels between what Trump is doing with immigration now and what we saw during the 1980s with the drug war. There was an effort to bring the military in,” Balko says. “This idea that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security threat — just like Trump has done with immigration, with migrants — this idea that we’re facing this threat that is so existential and so dangerous that we have to take these extraconstitutional measures, this is a playbook that we’ve seen before. It’s a playbook we saw with drugs. It’s the same thing we’re seeing now with immigration.”

Turse adds, “Since 9/11, U.S. counter-terrorism operations have consistently eroded respect for international law, and it’s left Americans pretty much inured to the idea of targeted killings by U.S. forces from Afghanistan to Somalia. And I’m not sure that people see a difference between what’s been done for the last almost quarter-century as part of the war on terror and what we’re seeing today.”

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

Correction: October 27, 2025
In the episode, it is erroneously stated that the conversation took place on October 10; it was recorded on Wednesday, October 8.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.

The United States military attacked another boat in international waters near Venezuela, according to an announcement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth late last week. It’s the fourth reported strike the Trump administration has authorized against alleged narco-traffickers.

Donald Trump: Combating this sinister enemy, we have to put the traffickers and cartels on notice, and we’ve done that. And we’ve put them — a lot of them, we’ve called them a terrorist organization, which is actually a big thing to do.

DT: In recent weeks the Navy has supported our mission to blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water. You see that?

AL: Through these extrajudicial actions, reminiscent of the U.S. covert drone war, the U.S. government has killed at least 21 people. The latest escalations represent a remarkable and illegal turn in U.S. drug war policies. One in which, without evidence and due process, suspects are now simply executed.

Reporter: Are you preparing to take strikes against drug gangs in Venezuela, sir?

DT: We’ll see what happens with Venezuela. Venezuela has been very dangerous with drugs and with other things.

AL: Trump is not just rewriting the rules of the drug war, he’s shredding the Constitution’s most fundamental principle: the requirement that Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war.

DT: I’ve also designated multiple savage drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations along with two bloodthirsty transnational gangs …

AL: Meanwhile, over the last nine months the Trump administration has used that same rhetoric to unleash federal agents — donned in full tactical gear — on the American public to push its mass deportation agenda. And he has deployed roughly 35,000 troops across the country to support that effort.

How did we get here? Well, over the last half-century, the U.S. has been fighting the so-called war on drugs that built the machinery and the legal protections for militarized police we’re now seeing the Trump administration deploy both internationally and in communities across the country.

A new podcast series from The Intercept out this week called Collateral Damage examines the enduring ripple effects of the war on drugs, and the devastating consequences of the bipartisan effort to build a massive war machine aimed at the public. One that is now in the hands of Donald Trump.

Joining me now is the creator and the host of the show Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the war on drugs for more than 20 years.

Welcome back to the show, Radley.

Radley Balko: Thank you. Good to be here.

AL: We’re also joined by Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse, who has been covering the Trump administration’s lethal strikes of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the deployment of U.S. troops across the country.

Nick, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Nick Turse: It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

AL: And just a note, we’re speaking on Wednesday, October 10. [Correction: In the episode, it is erroneously stated that the conversation took place on October 10; it was recorded on Wednesday, October 8.]

Radley, we’ll start with you. The U.S. military strikes of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean that began in September appear to be the first actual formation of the Trump administration’s approach to fighting the “war on drugs.” How far of a departure are Trump’s actions when it comes to these strikes and his posture towards Venezuela compared to how the U.S. has traditionally waged its war on drugs?

RB: There are some common themes from previous foreign policy drug endeavors. The Coast Guard has long intercepted boats in international waters that they suspect of drug trafficking.

One of the episodes of Collateral Damage, of the podcast, that we focus on the case of a Christian missionary and her daughter who were in a plane over Peru. The Peruvian air force in conjunction with CIA contractors shot down this plane, but they’d been doing this for years with Peru and other Latin American countries.

In this case, it made international news and we had congressional hearings because the people on board were white missionaries from Michigan. But this idea of extrajudicial executions when we’re talking about overseas anti-drug operations — that part isn’t so new. I guess in this case, it’s not Venezuela sinking these boats with the assistance of the CIA outside of Venezuela waters.

This is the U.S. military acting on its own without any input — in fact, over the vocal opposition of the country where these people are from. It’s definitely a departure. There are some common themes, but it’s definitely taking everything to a whole new level in terms of executive power and acting with impunity.

AL: Nick, let’s back up just a little bit. Can you tell us more about the strikes in the Caribbean? What do we know about the people on board and what was being transported on these boats?

NT: So the United States has carried out, as you said, at least four attacks on alleged drug carrying boats in the Caribbean in recent weeks, with at least two of the vessels originating from Venezuela. There actually could be more strikes. President Trump seemed to suggest this over the weekend, but notably, the Pentagon refuses to give me a total number. It’s one of the many details they’ve tried to keep secret and I’ve been working to expose.

To be clear, these are drone strikes. They’re conducted by elite U.S. commandos. And they’re targeting supposed drug boats. The president often says that they’re carrying fentanyl. That’s likely not the case if there are drugs on these boats. And these are the types of vessels that used to be interdicted by the Coast Guard. Our self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the fourth strike last week saying that “four male narco terrorists” — that’s a quote — were killed. But he offered no other details on exactly who they were.

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And our colleague Matt Sledge actually dug into this question: Who’s on these boats? And he found that the crews of these types of drug smuggling vessels were, in the words of one federal judge, “completely unsophisticated, desperately poor fishermen or peasants” who he said are recruited into the drug trade.

The prison sentences back that assessment. Since 2018, such smugglers received on average an eight-year prison sentence. So we’re obviously not talking about drug kingpins here. The difference now is that instead of eight years of prison, the sentence is death.

RB: This idea of going after very low-ranking people in these organizations is also not at all uncommon. I actually talked to a federal public defender, or contract public defender, a couple months ago who’s been doing this work since the early ’80s. She told me she had many, many, many clients, more than she could count, who were people who basically [were] cleaning staff or janitors in Colombia where U.S. agents — DEA, other U.S. officials — had gone and arrested them in their home countries, extradited them into the U.S., [and] tried to get them to give people up the ladder. Most of the time they couldn’t because they weren’t high-ranking. And then they would get these five or six-year sentences, and then they’d be deported as soon as they were released. Like she said, this was a very common tactic throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. So we’re adopting the worst practices over the last 30 or 40 years, and then pushing them even further.

AL: Right. And it’s reminiscent of the strategy that we’re seeing both with the National Guard and with ICE deployments creating this justification for immense use of militarized police forces and extrajudicial drone strikes because of this presupposition of this amorphous crime threat, which again, is not necessarily based on fact.

The news of the latest strike came as the administration was also drafting language to justify its actions to Congress, which you reported on Nick. Can you tell us more about this confidential notice? And is it paving the way for the administration to unilaterally — without the consent of Congress — invade Venezuela?

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NT: Sure. I obtained this confidential notice that was sent to several congressional committees last week, and it offers the most detailed explanation of the legal underpinnings offered by the administration for this series of lethal boat attacks in the Caribbean. After stonewalling congressional leadership for weeks, Pentagon lawyers held a meeting with the key staff and then offered up a memo — a notice — that explained that President Trump decided unilaterally that the United States is engaged in a state of what they called “non-international armed conflict,” which makes little to no sense.

AL: I’m sorry — what does that mean? What does that actually mean?

NT: Yeah, it’s a very good question, and one that neither the Pentagon nor the White House seems to have an answer for. Again, they call it a NIAC, or a “non-international armed conflict,” even though they are at the same time saying they’re attacking Venezuelan drug boats in international waters.

RB: Who aren’t armed, at least from what we know, right? Haven’t been armed.

AL: Right.

NT: Exactly.

AL: They’re armed as [in] describing the United States in this situation, I assume.

NT: They’re the only armed belligerent in this. And they are in this state of non-international armed conflict with what they call “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. And they’ve been pushing this idea of DTOs for a couple weeks now in classified briefings to Congress.

We actually exposed the use of this designation a few weeks back. It’s an extremely vague phrase, which has previously appeared in government publications, but it lacks a clear definition. And one defense official that I spoke with called the label “meaningless.” And it appears to be so. And for weeks, the Trump administration has justified these strikes by asserting on social media that it’s attacking terrorists.

But this notice from the Department of War to Congress offers something more. It’s a legal rationale and an explanation of official policy. Trump has, according to the notice, unilaterally determined that cartels are “nonstate armed groups,” whose transported drugs constitute an “armed attack against the United States.” The notice describes, for example, three people killed on a boat in the Caribbean last month as “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield.

This is a significant departure from what is at least supposed to be a standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs. Typically, law enforcement arrests suspected drug dealers, as opposed to summarily executing them. If you distill it all down, basically, the Trump administration through this notice admits that it’s waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress.

So Trump is killing civilians because he suspects that they’re smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it’s outright murder.

RB: Not to shamelessly plug the podcast, but —

AL: That’s what we’re doing.

NT: Yeah, please do.

RB: But the notion of collateral damage is just that: this very idea that when you’re in war, there are some who can be sacrificed because we have this greater cause that we have to win or this threat we have to overcome. And these people that are being killed in these incidents, they’re collateral damage from the perspective of the U.S. government because Trump clearly doesn’t care. They joke that they might be fishermen who are just trying to earn a livelihood, which is nauseating.

And then even if they were working for the cartels — from the perspective of the cartels, they’re also collateral damage. I mean, cartels don’t care about these people, right? They can find more fishermen that they can pay to smuggle the drugs for them.

Nick has touched on a lot of this, but every single part of this, every single justification for it is just transparently false and ridiculous and an insult to our intelligence. No fentanyl comes to the U.S. from Venezuela. Most of these boats, it’s not clear that they were even coming to the U.S. I know that one was supposed to be going to Trinidad. They aren’t armed. They presented no threat to the U.S. military. We don’t have the death penalty for dealing drugs in the United States, as much as Trump would like there to be one.

We don’t even get a significant amount of illegal drugs from Venezuela. Most fentanyl that does come into the U.S. comes through U.S. citizens at the border. So every single reason or justification that they are laying out for these attacks just is transparently ridiculous. There’s no evidence for any of it.

AL: Are people buying this? I get the sense that the reaction to these strikes, at least in circles of people who are paying attention, is obviously, this is patently ridiculous. But are people buying these arguments?

NT: I think since 9/11, U.S. counter-terrorism operations have consistently eroded respect for international law, and it’s left Americans pretty much inured to the idea of targeted killings by U.S. forces from Afghanistan to Somalia. And I’m not sure that people see a difference between what’s been done for the last almost quarter-century as part of the war on terror and what we’re seeing today. Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump have all undermined or ignored the rule of law by conducting extrajudicial killings and by killing civilians without consequence.

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And I think that’s left us in the place we are today where people hear that the United States took unilateral action and killed suspected so-called narco-terrorists, and they don’t see it as fundamentally different from killing a terrorist in Yemen or Somalia.

RB: There was a report a couple weeks ago that Stephen Miller was the person who had, I don’t know, encouraged or was overseeing these attacks. And that makes perfect sense. And to the extent that, do people care about this? I think you can ask that question about a lot of the policies that Miller’s overseeing, which is, what they are banking on is that most of white middle-class America is not going to bother to look into this or not bother to verify their claims.

When Trump started going after immigrants, people seeking refugee status from Venezuela, when he revoked their protected status, claiming that we were at war with Venezuela, claiming that all these people were Tren de Aragua, Trump’s entire 2024 campaign was basically foreigners are bad, right? When he was asked about his housing policy, his housing policy was, we’re going to deport a bunch of people and that’s going to make more housing available. When he was asked about inflation, it was, we’re going to deport a bunch of people and somehow that’s going to make prices go down, right? Everything was about hating foreigners. And so I think they’re banking on the fact that people don’t care.

That’s not really an answer to your question about whether people do or don’t. I haven’t seen much polling on this. I hope they do. I hope that the reaction that we’ve seen to sending people to CECOT.

AL: Right. CECOT is the maximum security prison in El Salvador that Trump was sending Deportees to.

RB: Right. So I do think there was a significant public backlash against that. I hope we eventually see that here. But you know, again, to go back to the podcast, it took killing white Christian missionaries from Michigan for there to be outrage and headlines and congressional hearings. So unfortunately, I think as long as they’re killing impoverished Venezuela fishermen, it’s going to be hard to get the American public to care

AL: Radley, we actually want to play a clip from Collateral Damage about this.

Richard Nixon: To the extent money can help in meeting the problem of dangerous drugs, it will be available. This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what I have called “total war” against public enemy No. 1 in the United States: the problem of dangerous drugs.

Radley Balko [narrating Collateral Damage]: The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon’s administration and, like Trump’s fight against undocumented immigration, it was predicated on false claims designed to stir up fear and anger, particularly among white, middle- and low-income voters.

Richard Nixon: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States.

AL: How has the legacy of the war on drugs led us here?

RB: I think there are a lot of parallels between what Trump is doing with immigration now and what we saw during the 1980s with the drug war. So there was an effort to bring the military in to fight the drug war. Both Congress and the Reagan administration wanted the Pentagon conducting drug raids — Marines breaking into houses. The main reason that didn’t happen was opposition from the Pentagon itself, which, you know, is a healthy thing. We also saw opposition from the Pentagon itself during Trump’s first term when he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring the military in to put down protests.

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There were still a lot of excesses in the ’80s. We still saw National Guard troops and helicopters invading entire towns and parts of Northern California where they thought there was marijuana being grown. The raid we saw in Chicago and the South Shore of the entire apartment complex that happened fairly often during the drug war. In the ’80s and ’90s, we saw entire public housing projects being raided. We saw some in cases entire city blocks being raided. Those raids were also completely illegal and unconstitutional. The courts had to sort it out after the fact, which I think is probably what’s going to happen in Chicago also.

But this idea that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security threat — just like Trump has done with immigration, with migrants — this idea that we’re facing this threat that is so existential and so dangerous that we have to take these extraconstitutional measures, this is a playbook that we’ve seen before. It’s a playbook we saw with drugs. It’s the same thing we’re seeing now with immigration.

I think the one main difference is that there really was a crack epidemic. We really did see a pretty big increase in crime in the ’90s [and] crack did kill a lot of people. That isn’t the case with immigration. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born people. There is no epidemic of violence in crime related to immigration or the surge in migrants that we saw.

So as ill-considered, racially disproportionate, and unjustified as the war on drugs in the ’80s and ’90s was, it was at least more justified than what we’re seeing now in response to immigration.

AL: Right. And not only is the purported nexus between immigration and crime completely overblown, but basically every study that has come out about the effect of this kind of response to immigration has shown that it has basically no effect on public safety — except for making it worse.

RB: Except for making it worse.

AL: Right.

RB: Yeah. When you arrest people when they show up for their hearings as they’re supposed to do, people stop going to courthouses. They stop being witnesses in criminal cases. They stop reporting domestic violence. They stop cooperating with the police altogether because they’re terrified.

That’s why police chiefs around the country want sanctuary cities, particularly in urban areas because they know how essential it is to get the cooperation from immigrant communities in order to fight crime.

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AL: Radley, as you’ve illustrated in Collateral Damage, Trump has a long history of applauding lethal approaches to eradicating drugs in the U.S. What has Trump said publicly over the years about how he envisions fighting his war on drugs?

RB: He’s praised places like China and Indonesia, which give the death penalty for drug dealing [and] drug smuggling. He praised Rodrigo Duterte, the Filipino president who’s now actually on trial for crimes against humanity with the International Criminal Court for carrying out extrajudicial executions in the name of fighting the war on drugs.

Trump praised Duterte, not just generally or broadly. He praised him specifically for his drug war policy. The very policy that now has him in the International Criminal Court. This is something Trump has always wanted to do. Even he and Miller probably think it’s too far for him to just start summarily executing Americans like Duterte was doing with Filipino citizens. But what he’s doing in the Caribbean is, some version of, I think what he would love to do here if he could.

Break

AL: In Trump’s second term, we’ve seen numerous executive orders broadening the definition of terrorists, designating anyone critical of the administration as terrorists, as well as alleged drug traffickers and dealers. What do you make of these efforts, and do they have teeth? And what are your thoughts on how the administration is deploying this war on terror rhetoric and policies to justify everything from immigration enforcement to drug eradication? Nick, we’ll start with you.

NT: Sure. So the Trump administration is using a rhetorical sleight of hand here. It’s applying the language and the legal framework that the U.S. relied on for the war on terror to kill unspecified and supposed “narco terrorists.” To begin with, the entire war on terror paradigm was, or I should say, is illegitimate.

But even if you buy into the war on terror paradigm this undeclared war in the Caribbean is fundamentally different. The U.S. has not suffered an armed attack as on 9/11. The congressional notice that we mentioned, it doesn’t even identify which groups the U.S. is supposedly engaged in an armed conflict with.

That’s another secret of this secret war. But even those that we know of, like the Venezuelan gang Tren de Araguaa, they’re not organized armed groups that the U.S. could even be engaged in an armed conflict with. There isn’t even some fig leaf, like the AUMF — the Authorization for the Use of Military Force — that was passed after 9/11 that underpins the entire war on terror.

This campaign against boats in the Caribbean relies exclusively on the president making both factual and legal determinations by sheer fiat. As Brian Finucane, a former State Department government lawyer and a law war expert told me, Trump has given himself a “license to kill based solely on his own determinations.”

AL: Radley?

RB: Everything Nick said, but also, a huge part of this is just “Trust us,” right? We don’t have to provide you the evidence for this, that they were actually smuggling drugs. We don’t have to provide you with the evidence that they were working for cartels. And as we know from when they were sending people to CECOT, they were claiming that an autism tattoo was proof of membership in Tren de Aragua, or that a makeup artist who had no criminal history. I think it was the Cato Institute maybe did a study, I think finding like maybe 9 in 10 of the people sent to CECOT had no prior criminal convictions.

They’re asking us to trust us when their track record provides no reason to trust them whatsoever. When members of the intelligence community, I can’t remember exactly what body came back and said that Tren de Aragua was not a state-sponsored gang, that it actually had no affiliation with [Nicolás] Maduro, and the fact that Maduro had taken actions against this gang, Trump fired the intelligence officials that produced that report. So it’s “Trust us,” but we know that they’ve lied in the past, and we also know that they will fire anyone who contradicts what they need to carry out the powers that they want to carry out anyway.

There’s, I don’t even— Kafkaesque doesn’t even quite describe what’s going on. I think Kafka would be embarrassed by what’s happening.

AL: We’re running out of metaphors.

RB: Yeah, right.

AL: I want to talk about how the administration’s grand vision is playing out domestically. Nick, you’ve been reporting on Trump deploying U.S. military forces in cities across the country. Where has the administration sent troops so far? What are they actually doing and what are the implications here?

Nick Turse: President Trump teased or he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act earlier this week to facilitate the military occupations of Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois. And the administration is pursuing military occupations there as they pursue an unprecedented militarization of America.

In addition to the administration’s efforts to occupy those cities, armed forces deployed to Los Angeles in June; Washington, D.C., in August; and Memphis, Tennessee, earlier this month, or it’s going on it right as we’re speaking. Members of the Army, the Navy, Air Force, Marines, the Reserves, the National Guard, they’ve all have been or will soon be deployed under Title 10 authority. That’s federal control in at least seven states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas. The occupation of Washington, D.C., while technically under Title 32 authority or state control, puts Trump in charge of the troops because D.C. has no governor. And there’s a Title 32 deployment to Memphis, and that was welcomed by the state’s Republican governor. Although the city’s mayor, the Democrat, was less enthusiastic about this.

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One of the things that these troops have been doing is burning through a tremendous amount of money: U.S. tax dollars. We broke the news that the D.C. deployment cost about $1 million per day. Trump has claimed that he eradicated crime in the District, which obviously it’s untrue. But it is true that troops there have had little to do in a lot of circumstances. There’s footage of them cleaning up garbage, doing yard work in parks, that sort of thing.

I don’t want to be flippant about it either. A federal judge ruled late last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began in June and is ongoing, was illegal, and it harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers as law enforcement in colonial America.

The judge noted that the occupation of LA is an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is a bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal military forces to execute domestic law. And the judge also noted that Trump has been clear about his intent to turn the National Guard into a national police force with the president as its chief. So it’s a frightening prospect, and it’s fast becoming a reality.

AL: I just want to put this on the record because I was not aware of this until a couple days ago. So when the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles, the administration was very explicit about — whether this was true or not, and obviously it wasn’t true — but they were saying they’re there to protect ICE agents from protest activity. They’re there to police these protests. Now all of these Republican governors are coming out and saying actually they’re there to assist ICE in finding and detaining and deporting people.

Can you walk us through the significance of that? That seems outrageous. It is outrageous, but it’s notable to me that they were trying to give plausible deniability, at least a few months ago, to what the National Guard was doing here, and now they’re being very explicit about it.

NT: Yeah, there’s been two tracks here. The White House constantly uses this language, and recently, over the last week they’ve used the language of insurrection, I think with the explicit intent of eventually trying to invoke the Insurrection Act, which has been used only 30 times or those powers have been used only 30 times since the 1790s.

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It’s usually used in extraordinary circumstances. We’re talking about things like the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. So the administration has said that when they deployed troops to Los Angeles. They said it was to quell a rebellion, when there were just basically muted protests in a very tiny area of Los Angeles. Vice President JD Vance went and vacationed 25 miles away in Disneyland from this area that was supposed to be in a state of rebellion against the United States. So farcical, but they’ve trotted that out.

On the other hand, those troops in LA were also used to invade, alongside ICE, MacArthur Park to roust a children’s summer day camp there and little else. They were used to back up immigration raids outside of the city.

They’ve used twin tracks here, and sometimes they talk about these cities in a state of rebellion because of just a crime problem, and sometimes it sounds like Trump has used the language of war, like it’s an actual rebellion. But when they’re actually performing functions on the ground, it’s often backing up ICE and the anti-immigrant agenda in some way.

RB: Yeah. I would add that crime was going down in all these cities before Trump decided he needed to send them in. There was no rioting. There was some protest in Los Angeles, and I think maybe one car was burned somewhere in the city, which probably happens quite often in this country. It’s not a sign of rebellion.

There’s an old legal doctrine that the 9th Circuit used to have — that the Supreme Court struck down unfortunately — called the Provocation Doctrine. And basically what it said was that if the police violate your rights in a way that makes you retaliate out of self-defense or fear, and then they kill you, even if they had justification to kill you in that particular moment, if there’s a violation of your right to start this chain of events that led to that they did not have qualified immunity, they could still be sued.

I think about that a lot when I’m seeing what’s happening around the country, which is that Trump is sending ICE and Border Patrol and other agencies into these cities basically with aggression. They are roughing people up, they’re separating families. In Chicago, they were pulling naked children out of their homes and zip-tying them and throwing [them] in the back of U-Hauls. Just really horrific stuff. And then when people get angry and protest as this happens to their neighbors, that’s then cited as justification that we need to send in the National Guard because these immigration officers aren’t allowed to do their jobs. And so they’re creating the very circumstances by which they’re then justifying the need to send in the military.

AL: And it’s not just the National Guard. We’re talking about how Trump is creating this national police force. We’ve also seen him massively expand his reach into state and local law enforcement with a 600 percent increase in 287(g) agreements, which allow police to help detain people for ICE. I have a story out on that program this week.

For both of you, how does that piece fit into this larger project to create this national police force under the president’s command?

RB: Yeah, so what he’s doing is, as I mentioned before, there are police chiefs, particularly in cities that don’t want to cooperate with immigration enforcement because it makes it harder to do their jobs. When you go after immigrant communities like this, they don’t want to cooperate with you. They’re afraid of the police. So they don’t report crimes, they don’t testify as witnesses. So what Trump is doing is they’re really pushing these agreements, a lot of times with sheriff’s departments, but the goal is to bring on people to assist who agree with his — basically share his worldview. And share their method of enforcement, which as we saw with the Supreme Court recently in the Kavanaugh concurrence is people who don’t look white, people who speak with an accent, people who congregate at places where immigrants congregate — that’s who we’re going to target.

So it’s basically a way of getting around, anyone in law enforcement who may have moral objections or ethical or constitutional objections. And that’s the same thing with this massive increase in the ICE and Border Patrol budgets. They’re going to start hiring. They’re going to hire people who respond to the pretty blatantly white supremacist social media marketing that DHS is doing now. It’s also going to be people who are looking at these videos of cops beating people up and separating families and shooting protesters in the head with less lethal munitions. They’re now recruiting people who look at those videos and they’re not horrified. They say, that’s what I want to do for a living. Give me the bonus. I’m going to sign up. And so that’s how they are filling out the roster of ICE, which ICE is soon to be one of the largest militaries in the world if you compare it to the militaries of other countries.

AL: And I think this is a really important point that I just want to highlight this idea that there is no room for dissent within— Not that I’m giving it, I’m handing it to police officers for, like having principles. But this idea that there was a time where sheriffs were campaigning on not joining 287(g) agreements. It was pretty much on its deathbed under Barack Obama. And we’ve seen this massive upsurge, not only under Trump’s first term, but his second term, and this intense political pressure on departments that don’t want to comply. There’s been several Republican governors who have sued local sheriffs for refusing to participate in these agreements. And this separation, this idea of separation of powers, or of any sort of ability to not comply with the administration’s demands is becoming more and more farfetched.

RB: Everything is pushing these officers in the direction of more use of force, more abuse, more violations of rights. State and local officers, we hear a lot about qualified immunity and their protected state and local police officers are protected by that when they violate people’s constitutional rights. But qualified immunity is still qualified. You can still, in theory, get beyond it and get into court and sue one of them.

Federal officers have almost complete immunity. In 2022, the Supreme Court basically killed this decision from the ’70s called Bivens, which created a way for people whose rights were violated by federal police to sue those officers in court. The Supreme Court basically just dispensed with Bivens entirely, and qualified immunity doesn’t apply to federal officers.

So there’s really no way to sue a federal police officer no matter what they do to you. There was a case where — I think it was a Federal Appeals Court, but it was relying on Supreme Court precedent — where they agreed upon facts were [that] a federal law enforcement officer framed an innocent person of a crime. That person went to prison in order to protect an informant. The courts agreed with that characterization of what happened and still ruled that there was no way for this person who was wronged to sue. So when we see these social media responses to these videos, “I hope they sue those people into oblivion” — it’s just not going to happen. The only way these officers are going to be held accountable is if the DOJ charges them and prosecutes them. And of course we know that’s not going to happen during this administration.

AL: Right. Nick, I’ll turn to you. I wonder if you could just speak to what all of this means for the future of presidential power and civil liberties beyond the Trump administration. We talked a little bit about the congressional authority to declare war. Obviously Congress hasn’t officially declared war since World War II, but has that authority become obsolete? And what does this mean for future administrations? If we have them.

NT: The Trump administration’s combination of military occupations of American cities, of the deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, the emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, combined with its assertion that the president has a right to wage secret war, and summarily execute those the president deems to be terrorists has left America — and I don’t think this is overstating it — on the precipice of complete authoritarian rule.

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They’ve set the machinery in place. And with Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, at the same time, he’s claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, I think the threat to the rule of law in the United States is nothing short or profound.

AL: Radley?

RB: To a large extent, I think the courts have held, the federal courts, particularly at the district court level, have done a good job of articulating the principles that are at stake here and limiting this administration’s lurches for power. Unfortunately, one court has done a pretty poor job of all of that, and that’s the court that matters most which is the U.S. Supreme Court.

AL: Is there any way to come back from this? Is it in the public interest to dismantle this machinery and how would that even happen?

RB: On the civil liberty side of things, we need people who are as creative and inventive and show the same sort of ingenuity at protecting our rights as this administration has shown to destroying them. There’s been this kind of asymmetrical decency, asymmetrical adherence to the rule of law where one side is trying to do things by the book and the other side is—

AL: Burning it.

RB: Right. I think enough damage has been done at this point that it’s hard for me to see a way back while adhering to the same principles that have been shattered and destroyed.

I think we may have to reset. I think there may be a time when, you know, we need to get things back on track and then we can worry about reestablishing norms and principles.

Yeah, we’re in a bad place. I don’t know how we easily get back from here.

AL: Nick.

NT: These questions are far beyond my pay grade. Someone smarter has got to figure out how to unwind all this if it can be done. I think Radley said it best when he said, people are going to have to get creative. Also, he mentioned the courts. The district courts have put up some roadblocks there.

I think this administration is still susceptible to public opinion. I think people in the streets matter.

RB: Absolutely.

NT: And I think people need to get creative. I’m not sure that protests as usual are going to work, but there are smart people out there and I hope they figure out new ways to throw up roadblocks.

In the future, again, just echoing Radley, I think if things are to be reset, it’s going to mean an assertive Congress. It’s going to mean a new Supreme Court and a president who’s willing to tie her or his own hands — someone far more moral and ethical and principle than we’ve had in that role for some time.

AL: Well, we are going to leave it on that bright note. Thank you both for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

RB: Thank you.

Nick Turse: Thanks very much.

AL: That’s Radley Balko, host and creator of the new Intercept podcast Collateral Damage, and Nick Turse, Intercept senior reporter.

We’ll drop the first episode of Collateral Damage in the feed for listeners to check out.

And that does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.

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Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts at the intercept dot com.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave.

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

Thanks for listening.

The post License to Kill: Trump’s Extrajudicial Executions appeared first on The Intercept.

In the last few days, President Donald Trump has said that the U.S-Israel war on Iran will end soon, after oil prices jumped and the growing regional conflict continued to shake markets. After a wave of heavy bombardments throughout Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised another round, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.” 

“Hegseth has, yes, said that it’s going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they’re delivering that,” Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and journalist, tells The Intercept Briefing. 

“Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war. This particular campaign Operation Epic Fury is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks,” adds Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept. “The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes.” On Wednesday, Trump told Axios the war would end soon because there’s “practically nothing left to target.”

This week on the The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy talked to Majd and Turse about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel war on Iran and the growing number of conflicts the U.S. is engaged in. Senior technology reporter Sam Biddle also joined to discuss how artificial intelligence is being used in various U.S. conflicts.

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“Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying — and AI is great at enabling that — you just increase over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing,” says Biddle. “So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of ‘intelligence’ that these AI companies are really pushing.”

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

Transcript 

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

Sam Biddle: And I’m Sam Biddle, senior technology reporter at The Intercept.

AL: Sam, this is your first time on The Intercept Briefing, correct? 

SB: It is. I’ve been at the Intercept for 10 years. I finally got the call. I’m excited.

Akela Lacy: Welcome, we’re very glad to have you. 

SB: Thank you so much.

AL: On a serious note, as we speak, the U.S. is engaged in war and acts of aggression on multiple fronts from the Middle East to the Caribbean and Central America. You have been doing some really important reporting on how the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence in wars and surveillance around the world.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Claude, an AI tool from the company Anthropic, was used to capture now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which set off a dispute between the company and the U.S. government, and opened the door for Anthropic’s rival to swoop in. The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump has used those same tools in strikes on Iran. Tell us more. 

SB: So what’s been reported is that the Pentagon has made use of a system it has called the Maven Smart System, which is operated by Palantir, the semi-infamous data mining firm. We know based on multiple reports at this point that they’re using the Maven system to essentially accelerate the selection and subsequent destruction of targets on the ground.

This is a way of executing airstrikes at a greater speed potentially, not necessarily more intelligently or with greater accuracy, but I think just faster. And I think people at the Pentagon would probably say, more effectively, more efficiently finding things to destroy and people to kill.

Target selection is a labor-intensive task. If you can have an LLM like Anthropic’s Claude system — we’ve all seen how quickly they can generate a huge wall of text, of questionable accuracy — can bring that same hyper-speed to creating lists of buildings to destroy and people to kill. I think that is proven to be the biggest value — not just to our military, but to militaries abroad as well.

AL: Sam, what do we know about how the Pentagon is using AI tools in the Trump administration’s various wars?

SB: Under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, there has been a huge, very aggressive push to integrate AI really wherever and whenever possible.

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I think that you’re seeing the Pentagon under Hegseth mimic a lot of tech industry rhetoric, which is “we don’t totally understand this technology. We don’t totally know where it’s got to be useful, but we need to use it as much as possible anyway.” I think that you’ve seen DOD under Hegseth be extremely aggressive in the cadence of airstrikes.

This is a Pentagon that believes in killing people. I think, at times, it seems to sort of give itself things to tweet about. This is a political movement and an ideology guiding the Pentagon that I think relishes violence. These AI systems, when you want to blow things up and kill people, these tools can provide a very rapid, turnkey means of having a list of people and places to destroy.

So what we know based on a recent Washington Post report that was discussing the use of Anthropic’s Claude system in Iran, was that it was not just used for target selection, but also target prioritization: Here are the most important targets to attack. Also, something that the Post described as sort of simulating battlefield outcomes. It’s a little unclear what exactly that means. One can imagine just asking a chatbot to basically create a story about how an airstrike could play out. That’s essentially what an LLM does, is generate text that’s plausible based on the inputs. How exactly these simulations are playing out of what value they are, how accurate they are in terms of what might actually happen subsequently in real life is unknown.

To me and for the public, the most concerning aspect of what’s been reported about the ongoing use of these LLMs by the Pentagon is the focus on speed. Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying, and AI is great at enabling that, you just increase over and over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing.

So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of “intelligence” that these AI companies are really pushing. If you blow up a school because Claude told you that it was actually an IED factory or whatever, you could say, “Oh, well, the super-smart computer told me to.”

AL: It was the robot. It wasn’t me.

SB: Exactly. We’ve spent the past several years having the tech industry tell us how ultra-smart, ultra-intelligent these systems are. That’s worrying enough when we’re asking them to write our emails for us and do our homework for us. But again, this is the business of killing people. Mistakes are not just mistakes. I think that is now just the way wars are going to be fought, and that is a very troubling new reality.

AL: Backing up a little bit. There is a fight right now between these companies and the government over how, if at all, their tools should be used. We know that they are being used.

But can you tell us a little bit about what is in dispute here? It also sounds like there’s some talk about guardrails being put in place, but we know that means very little in this context. Can you walk us through that?

SB: So the original controversy here was Anthropic, a leading rival of OpenAI. Some would say they have a better product at this point. They got into a dispute with the Pentagon over selling access to Claude, which is their AI chatbot system, akin to ChatGPT.

AL: But it has a human name.

SB: It does have a human name. Don’t you love that?

The company says that they did not want to permit the Department of Defense to use Claude for domestic surveillance of Americans and for killing people without human oversight. The Pentagon says this is woke nonsense, you’re now banned from doing work with the government —and then OpenAI enters.

AL: I will also note in 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.

SB: And this is where it gets very strange because OpenAI claims to have the same red lines as Anthropic, but somehow was able to seal a deal with the Pentagon.

Both are very muddled when it comes to what they actually refuse to do. They seem to both want to say that, look, we’re not going to do anything illegal and we’re also not going to engage in these acts — autonomous killing and domestic surveillance — which are largely considered legal.

Appealing to the law is no protection against these acts that the companies are saying that they will not facilitate. I wrote in a piece a few days ago, I think, ultimately, without being able to review the actual contract language for ourselves and to have lawyers go through it carefully, it all just comes down to whether or not you trust the corporate leadership of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Pete Hegseth and the White House. It ultimately comes down to what they, what their lawyers decide is legal. We’ve seen White House lawyers say a lot of things are legal: NSA spying, torture, et cetera. So that appeal to the law by these companies is not as reassuring as they want the public to believe it is.

Just one note though: Even though Anthropic’s deal with the Pentagon fell apart, the DOD is still able to use their technology through — it gets a little complicated here — Palantir’s Maven Smart System software, which has Claude in it as a feature, rather than getting it straight from Anthropic.

When you see headlines about Anthropic being banned or being rejected by the military, DOD can still use their software. It’s a pretty nice loophole. So they are still very much in use.

AL: I’ll also mention that the U.S.–Israel war on Iran is also the first example of countries attacking data centers as an act of war, which Sam, you have some reporting coming out on in the future, so everyone look out for that. 

So to recap, the Trump administration appears to be at war with the world. The self-proclaimed “president of peace” has sent U.S. forces jumping from conflict to conflict from Venezuela to Iran to Ecuador and more. As our colleague Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept, tells me on the podcast today, the U.S. has launched attacks in eight countries and killed civilians in two bodies of water — and made threats against five other nations. We also speak with Hooman Majd, an Iranian American journalist and contributor to NBC News, about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, which is ricocheting around the globe. This is our conversation. 

Nick and Hooman, welcome to The Intercept Briefing 

Hooman Majd: Thank you. 

Nick Turse: Thanks for having me on.

AL: Hooman, the Israel–U.S. war on Iran is stretching into another week. A new round of air bombardments hit throughout the country, Al Jazeera reported Monday evening, “We can say this is by far one of the most heavily intense nights in Tehran in terms of air bombardment.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he hoped the Iranian people would oust the regime. The civilian death toll in Iran has reached about 1,300 people. To start, what are the latest developments, particularly over the last few days? 

HM: Last few days, I mean, it’s heavy bombardment. That’s what it is.

Hegseth has, yes, said that it’s going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they’re delivering that. Bombing — whether it was Israel or the United States, I don’t know — but earlier this week, they bombed oil depots in and around Tehran. There was black soot, oily rain falling on people’s heads basically in Tehran.

You’ve got Netanyahu telling people to rise up. Rise up how? Exactly how are they supposed to take control of a government that is so secure right now that it can go through the constitutional process of setting up its three-person council that rules Iran in the absence of a supreme leader, then elects a supreme leader by a majority of ayatollahs in person? Because the actual vote has to be in person and they were not blown up. So they obviously had a secure location to do this. How are the Iranian people supposed to do this? You’ve got the Revolutionary Guards who are very powerful. They haven’t shown any real fracture in their ranks. There’s not been a split. The top leadership is there. The second tier of the leadership is there. The third tier of the leadership is there. How are people supposed to get out and go and take over the government?

It’s insane for someone like the prime minister of another country to say, “We’re bombing the hell out of you, now please rise up and go take over your government.” It defies logic.

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But to answer your question, what’s been happening? It’s just been war. It’s an all-out war. They can call it a special operation. They can call it whatever they want. The Iranians recognize it as war. The death toll is rising among Iranians, but also among the American servicemen and women.

The cost of this war is going up daily for everyone. It’s turning into this kind of — oh, I won’t call it a world war, that would be hyperbole — but way more countries are involved in this other than the U.S., Israel, and Iran.

AL: One of the first acts of aggression in this war was this strikes on this elementary school for girls in the southern Iranian town of Minab, which killed 175 people, mostly children, according to Iranian health offices. Trump blamed Iran for the bombing. But Nick, your reporting, and reporting from the New York Times and others, and new video evidence all suggest that the U.S. struck the school. What did your sources tell you?

NT: Even before footage of a Tomahawk missile landing near the school emerged, I was talking to sources that were refuting claims by President Trump about this being an errant Iranian strike. He apparently seized on talking points that emerged in Iranian monarchy circles. They were spread on social media that this attack on the elementary school was an errant Iranian rocket. Or he just made it up. This is standard Trump behavior.

But my sources — current government official, two former Pentagon officials who were experts in civilian harm, who worked on these issues for the Pentagon for years — said that the satellite imagery showed that these weren’t errant strikes, but they were precision attacks. The angle of the weapon, the precise nature of the strike, the fact that the munitions came straight down from above, the fact that all the strikes in the general area looked the same, including those that hit buildings on the nearby Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base — all this made it crystal clear that this was a U.S. or an Israeli attack.

The fact that it was known that the U.S. carried out strikes in the specific area offered more evidence that America was behind this. And then this video emerged a couple days ago showing a Tomahawk missile landing in the area.

Now, only the U.S., Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands use Tomahawks. Israel doesn’t have them. Despite mis- or disinformation that President Trump peddled during a news conference on Monday, Iran does not have Tomahawks. Any country the U.S. sold Tomahawks to would have to obtain authorization from the State Department before transferring these sophisticated weapons to a third party. The U.K. is not going to sell Iran Tomahawk missiles.

If Iran was somehow able to obtain a black-market Tomahawk — and let me emphasize, there’s no such thing as black-market Tomahawk. There’s no market for these. Iran lacks the technical equipment and the capabilities that are used to program the flight paths of these missiles and to upload the data necessary to the missiles onboard computer. They also need a specialized launcher to fire a Tomahawk.

So Trump’s assertion on Monday that the Tomahawk is some sort of generic munition and that Iran has some Tomahawks — it’s absurd.  The only party to this conflict that’s firing off Tomahawks is the United States.

What’s also notable about this, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was standing right next to Trump when the president claimed that it was Iran that hit the school, and Hegseth would not endorse those comments.

He said there was an ongoing investigation, and he issued a classic non-denial, denial taking Iran to task for targeting civilians. But the fact that he wouldn’t back up his boss who was standing right next to him, I thought was very telling.

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Then I spoke to U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, oversees this war in Iran. They told me that to comment on any of this was getting ahead of an ongoing military investigation — which is precisely what President Trump did. They said it was just inappropriate to do. You don’t often have a military spokesperson say that what the commander-in-chief has just done was inappropriate, but they did so in this case.

HM: Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting, Nick. For Iranians, it reminds them of the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iran air jet killing all passengers — civilian jet — in the Persian Gulf under George Bush Sr. at the time. And denials, denials, denials that it was us. And then, “Well, it looked like an enemy aircraft, so we fired a missile.” George Bush refused to apologize, but the U.S. did finally admit that it was an accidental shooting down of the passenger plane. And did actually end up paying reparations to Iran for that act. 

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It just adds to the litany of complaints or accusations that Iran throws at the United States for how the United States is the aggressor against Iran and not the other way around. There is a point to their claims that the U.S. will start aggression against Iran unprovoked. 

In this particular case, there’s very little evidence, if any at all, that Iran, as President Trump has just said, was about to attack the United States and therefore we had to attack them. There’s literally no evidence. And if they do have the evidence, they really should provide it because the American people at this point are not particularly keen on this war and the approval will probably go down from what it is now, the approval ratings for being at war, as we see more and more damage, as we see gas prices go up further, as we see American servicemen and women potentially lose their lives or be injured. And of course, our allies be continually attacked.

Which by the way, I should add, I don’t know why it’s a surprise to anybody. Iran said this after the last Twelve Day War in June. They said, “Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy; we had restraint this time.” It’s that old joke, no more Mr. Nice Guy. They actually said it out loud, no one’s going to be safe if we are attacked again by U.S., Israel, or both. They said it to the Persian Gulf States. They said it to Saudi Arabia, which is probably the reason those countries were so adamant in trying to get President Trump to not attack Iran because they knew that the blowback would be against them. 

AL: A couple of things I want to just pick up on here. Going to your point on provocation and the idea that the U.S. was somehow provoked to attack Iran. They’ve already shown their hand on this. A couple days after the first strikes you had Marco Rubio blaming Israel for dragging the U.S. into the war. Then Trump is walking that back a couple days later. I think anyone who’s paying attention — obviously, there are a lot of questions about what the communication was here, how much the U.S. was actually goaded into this over Israel. I don’t think it’s a surprise that the neocons in the various administrations have been foaming at the mouth to go to war with Iran for a very long time. So I just want to make that point.

You mentioned this regime change thing. I mean we’ve talked about this when you were last on the show, Hooman. There’s been additional reporting in the last few days, hammering home this idea that that is not on the table right now.

HM: There’s been a million different reasons or rationale given by the U.S. administration for starting this war — bounces back and forth from one thing to another. Just this week, Trump now is saying that Kushner and Witkoff and Rubio, and these guys were telling him we have to go to war otherwise — two real estate people were telling you to go to war? Really? Would any president of the United States say that?

Jared Kushner doesn’t have a job. Has no title whatsoever. Steve Witkoff has never talked about Iran his entire professional life and has no knowledge. I’m not dissing him; I’m just saying he has no knowledge of the nuclear issue. None whatsoever. Probably got a briefing from the State Department, one-hour briefing — this is what enrichment means, this is how they can do this, how they can do that — and gets thrown into negotiations while he’s running back and forth from one negotiation to the Ukraine negotiations in Geneva and taking Jared with him. It’s an insane way to negotiate, but they did it. And so they, and this is what Donald Trump said this week, they — along with Marco Rubio and obviously Lindsey Graham, we know that — were pressing very hard for an attack on Iran, “Iran is the weakest that it’s ever been.” 

According, again, to Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff told him that Iran could build a bomb in two weeks. How Steve Witkoff could even think that when there is no access right now to the nuclear material, let alone bomb making ability of Iran? It’s just beyond belief. So it’s insane. 

The regime changed idea was clearly something that was in Donald Trump’s mind. We go in — I’m sure Lindsey Graham, Bibi Netanyahu, various people were telling him: Look, you did it in Venezuela. It’s not that hard. Look at all the protests in January. These people want to overthrow the government. This is what they want to do. They’re shouting “Down with the regime.” And they were brutally murdered. So all you have to do is just take out the supreme leader and bang, people will rise up. 

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Well, they took out the supreme leader, and people didn’t rise up because bombs were falling on their heads. If that’s all they had done, maybe some people would’ve been coming out on the streets celebrating. There were some celebrations, but they stopped pretty quickly because you keep bombing people. They’re going to care about their own lives, especially since there’s no leader to take over to help overthrow the regime. Trump has already ruled out the former Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. He himself has ruled himself out. He has no operations on the ground in Iran. His name is shouted by people when they protest a little bit because that’s the only name they know. It doesn’t mean that they want the monarchy to return.

Then the MEK, as we know, are absolutely despised by 99 percent of the Iranian people. They have some ground operations in Iran, but again, not enough to overthrow the regime. They’ve been trying for 47 years, and they haven’t been successful.

So talking about regime change is meaningless. Most Iranians understand that. Iranians want the regime changed. That doesn’t mean they want it overthrown, but they want it changed. No question about that. I would argue that there’s a majority, but there’s a minority — quite a strong minority, as we saw even from the images a couple of days ago, of crowds gathering to mourn the supreme leader’s death. So if there’s 10 percent, 20 percent of the population that are diehard supporters of the Islamic Republic, that’s a significant number of people, significant enough — and they tend to be the people with the guns.

[Break]

AL: Nick, in all of this, Iran is not the only country the U.S. is at war with at the moment. Trump also recently launched attacks on Ecuador. What can you tell us about the various countries the U.S. has attacked since Trump came into office this term and other conflicts that U.S. forces are involved in?

NT: Yeah, this is a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, who claims to be a “peacemaker,” who has campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize and founded a so-called Board of Peace but President Trump is conducting wars across the globe at a furious clip. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Trump has conducted more strikes in more countries than any modern president. I’m not sure that’s actually true. It really depends on what you call a strike, what you’re counting. But during his second term, Trump has already launched attacks on Ecuador, two wars in Iran, attacks in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen. He’s attacked civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

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The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 drug cartels and criminal gangs, who, I should add, it won’t name. It’s also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland — I think, inadvertently, caught flack from Greenland — and Mexico. The Trump administration is threatening some sort of takeover of Cuba at this very moment.

There have been at least two attacks inside Ecuador, both of them since the second Iran war started. It’s unclear as to the extent of U.S. involvement in this. A lot of outlets initially reported that the U.S. simply provided intelligence to Ecuadorian forces. I specifically did not. A lot is unclear, but it seems to me that U.S. involvement in raids against so-called narco-terrorist targets was more than just passing along intel.

I believe this even more following a very strange war powers report that the Trump administration sent to Congress on Monday regarding the recent partnered U.S. operations in Ecuador. It says specifically, although present for this partnered operation, the United States ground forces did not come in contact with hostile forces. Mere mention of U.S. ground forces in connection with this operation raises red flags for me. And the fact that the administration actually filed this war powers report with Congress suggests to me that U.S. forces themselves took kinetic action, that it wasn’t just Ecuadorian forces. So I think there may have been U.S. forces on the ground and that the U.S. possibly conducted lethal strikes there, much like the boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean that have killed close to 160 civilians since September.

My sources say that these strikes in Ecuador are the opening salvo of a larger campaign in that country and also elsewhere in Latin America. So I’d stay tuned on that.

AL: I’m just got to list these out for people. You mentioned Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, civilians boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the 24 unnamed cartels and criminal gangs and threats, to Columbia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.

HM: What about Canada?

AL: We haven’t even talked about Canada.

NT: Yes, our 51st state in the making.

HM: Yeah, by force if necessary. 

NT: If necessary, yes.

AL: Going back to Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history.” Can you tell us more about how the U.S. is conducting this war on Iran? What does that actually mean? What does that look like?

NT: Lethal is certainly right, lethal to the Iranian security forces, but also to innocence — men, women, and children. The U.S. has been killing civilians from aircraft for more than 100 years, and lying about it, covering up, trying to explain it away, so that part is par for the course. Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war.

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This particular campaign — “Operation Epic Fury” — is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks. There was a new investigation by Air Wars, which is a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. And it found that the first days of this Iran war saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign.

The moniker “Operation Epic Fury” is ridiculous and bellicose. But there’s some perverse truth to this name because in the first 100 hours of this war the U.S. and Israel said that they struck more targets in Iran than in the first six months of the U.S. led coalition’s bombing campaign of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which was a formidable campaign. 

The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes. It’s going to be a while, I think before the full civilian toll of this war is clear, if we ever really find out. Official Iranian sources say it’s creeping up on 1,500 or more killed, but it may actually be higher. 

While the true rate of civilian harm can’t solely be predicted by the number of targets that are hit, the initial indication suggests it’s been high, and I should add that U.S. targets have been correlated with heavily populated areas. So we have to assume that we’ll come to find out that large number of civilians have been killed and will continue to be killed before this war is over.

HM: The kind of war that is being waged on Iran, generally speaking, the Iranian Red Cross, or Red Crescent in Iran’s case, has been pretty accurate in terms of what they’ve reported. As Nick pointed out, it’s probably under-reporting right now. We do know there’s rubble in parts of the city of Tehran. Tehran, a city of more than 9 million, probably closer to 10 or 11 million people, densely populated, very densely populated.

For anybody who’s been there or even looked at a satellite image, they’ll see you cannot strike a building in Tehran and not kill someone who is unintended, an unintended target. Iran is not making this stuff up. They’re busy trying to protect themselves, trying to fire as many missiles as possible to try to bring an end to this war in a way by causing pain for not just America, but for American allies. 

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A lot of people complain and say Iran is breaking international law by attacking countries that have nothing to do with this war. That’s probably true. It is probably against international law what Iran is doing, but so is the war that the United States and Israel started on Iran. That’s also against international law. So it’s a complete break of the so-called international order.

AL: I just want to add some context for our listeners. You’re mentioning these attacks by Iran on U.S. allies. Since the war began, Iran retaliated against the U.S.-Israel attacks by targeting U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and three sites in Kuwait. Israel has also been attacking southern Lebanon where it says it’s targeting Hezbollah and seizing land, displacing at least 80,000 people so far. Lebanon’s government has now asked Israel to talk and blamed Hezbollah for attacks [on Israel].   

Iran’s strategy appears to be also targeting Israel and Gulf energy sites. Iran blocked oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz and attacked several oil tankers. Energy sites in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman have also reported damage from Iranian drones. Last week, U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, reported that the U.S. had destroyed Iran’s navy, and that there are no Iranian ships underway in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Gulf. But fighting has continued to slow ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 

Last week, President Donald Trump said the war could last weeks. On Monday, Trump now says the war could end very soon after oil prices jumped significantly and this conflict spooked the markets. For both of you, do you think that impact on the markets will actually motivate Trump to end U.S. involvement in the war? 

NT: It’s always difficult to gauge where this administration is at and you know what the president is thinking. This is a wildly unpopular war, and I think the longer it goes on, the more we’ll see whatever bare minimum of public support exists continue to drop. So if Americans continue to feel pain at the pump, I think there is a chance that it could hasten an end to this conflict.

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The trouble is it’s really difficult to gauge what the goals of this conflict were. I’m also not sure what impact public sentiment has on Trump at this point. It may take billionaire friends of his calling him, telling them that they’re starting to feel pain for him to decide to wrap up this conflict. 

On Monday, we heard that the conflict was almost over while the stock market was in session, and then afterward we heard that the war might go on for a week more, or maybe as long as it takes — unclear what that means. It does, at some points, appear the president’s trying to manipulate the markets with his statements.

HM: I would agree with that, Nick. I also would say some of his friends in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and places like that. Qatar just gave him a $400 million plane, and they’re not particularly interested in this war going on.

But what I want to add to this is that Trump may be looking for an off-ramp right now. Obviously, the war’s not going the way he expected. So looking for an off-ramp means the Iranians have to be willing to offer one. They’re very adamant in every interview the foreign minister has given, every X post that one of the other leaders — Larijani, Ghalibaf — make is: We’re not interested even talking to you and let alone a ceasefire. We’re not interested in a ceasefire.

If you look at that carefully, and if you know the Iranians, you understand where they’re coming from since the Twelve Day War back in June, is that this one is really existential. That one wasn’t existential. That one they could show some restraint and then maybe talk to Trump and figure out how to make this nuclear deal. As we know they did, they started talking about it. 

Now it’s like, this is going to happen every six months, if we stop the war. If we go to a ceasefire, six months from now it’s going to be the same thing. Our new supreme leader will be assassinated, and then we have to start all over again. So this time, we’re not going to give him that opportunity.

What it appears they are doing is bringing as much pain as possible so that when Trump, without begging, looks for an off ramp, Iran then says, sure, but I want these sanctions removed. I’ll give you that off ramp, but you’ve got to give me a non-aggression pact, and you’ve got to give me some of these sanctions because I need to fix my country, and I can’t do it with the sanctions you’ve got.

Then it’s a question of whether the U.S. and how Israel factors into this. Trump we know is fine with dictators. He’s totally fine with it. He’ll be totally fine with Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader. The question is really what will Trump do at a point where it appears that the U.S. wants to get out of this war he wants to get out, even if Hegseth doesn’t, and Lindsey Graham doesn’t, but he wants out? Gas is at $6 a gallon in California at that point, $7 a gallon in some places. And people are crying saying, wait a sec, this is not what we counted on. Then Iran is in the driver’s seat at that point. Did he ever think that could ever happen?

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I’m not trying to advocate for Iran’s position. I’m saying they’re playing it well, if you think about it, they are playing it well. It’s like yeah, we’re just got to keep going. It’s fine. We can handle it. Foreign Minister of Iran on NBC News, on “Meet the Press”: Ground troops, bring ’em on. We’re ready. We’re ready for them. They probably are prepared for ground troops.

Turkey doesn’t want this war right on their border. Iraq doesn’t want this war right on their border. Kuwait doesn’t want it, we know. And all the other Persian Gulf countries don’t want it. And I think they’re, all the Persian Gulf countries, in all the other countries are very worried that this is not regime change. And the regime will be in power, and the regime can threaten them again. Everyone will, in my mind, will want an end to this war that includes a strong sense that this won’t happen every six months. And then the question really becomes, what are the Israelis going to do? What’s Netanyahu — how is he gonna sell the end to the war?

AL: We know that on the question of ground troops, Trump has sent conflicting messages saying he hasn’t ruled out sending ground troops into Iran. We also know that seven U.S. soldiers have already been killed in the war, and as we’re recording, news broke that about 140 U.S. troops have been wounded in the war, including eight severely, according to the Pentagon.

Hooman, to your earlier point on the Trump administration’s expectations, as you mentioned over the weekend in Iran, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba, was named his successor. Trump told reporters at a press conference he was disappointed. Briefly, what can you tell us about the new supreme leader? 

HM: He was the second oldest son of the supreme leader who had a few other sons and daughters. Very little is known about him personally because he’s been behind the scenes, but known to be very close to the supreme leader, his closest adviser actually, and very close to the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are the most powerful military force in Iran; and the Basij, who are the paramilitaries force under the IRGC. He is known among Iranians to have basically created that very close connection between the supreme leader’s office and the revolutionary guards. 

One thing we have to remember is that when Ayatollah Khamenei, his father, took over, he was considered a weak supreme leader. He didn’t have the same authority either — political or religious authority — that [Ruhollah] Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic had.

It’s also good to remember that the supreme leader is not the supreme leader of Iran. His title is the Supreme Leader of the Revolution — the Islamic Revolution. And it’s also good to remember that the military force, the IRGC, are not the Islamic Revolutionary Guards of Iran. They’re the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of the Revolution. They’re the guardians of the revolution. So those two, that connection, that tight connection has meant that it’s always been something that any future supreme leader would try to maintain. Since Mojtaba already had that connection, one of his closest people inside the guards is the former intelligence chief for the IRGC.

Mojtaba was known — at least whether it’s true or not, because we don’t know, we can’t tell — [to be] behind the manipulation of votes or whatever you want to call it, to have the second term of Ahmadinejad to be president for a second term. On a personal level, people don’t really know him. Everybody in Iran knows who he is because he’s been talked about for years and years as being the closest person to the supreme leader.

He hasn’t shown up yet. There were rumors that he was killed in the first strike on his father. There were rumors that he’s injured, and if he was injured, I can imagine why he wouldn’t want to be seen as the new supreme leader in a hospital bed, for example, if that’s the case.

How will he command as the supreme leader, if you want to call it that? It’s hard to say, but Netanyahu and Donald Trump killed his dad, killed his mom, killed his wife, killed his sister, killed his niece in one strike, and potentially injured him. He’s not got to be keen on Donald Trump and on the United States, and he’s definitely not going to be keen on Israel either.

He’s also probably quite pragmatic. He’s 56 years old. I don’t think he wants to be assassinated. I don’t think he wants war for the long term. I’m sure he wants to continue this war, as we were talking earlier about Iran’s strategy, to go as long as they can to put pressure on Trump and on all the allies, but I don’t think in the long term he wants to commit suicide of any kind and or anything like that.

But he’s going to be a hard-liner. He’s considered to be hard-line, in some cases, more hard-line than his father. One thing that opens up for him is the fatwa that his father supposedly people talk about as prohibiting the building or use of nuclear weapons as being against Islam. He could arguably reverse that. He could arguably have his own fatwa.

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So I think we’re in a very dangerous place right now in terms of what could happen in the future. Iran could certainly look at North Korea and say nobody’s threatening North Korea and they have missiles — nuclear missiles that can hit California. I think there’s a lot of things we don’t know what can happen in the future, what can Mojtaba do. 

Israel has already threatened to assassinate him or actually said they’re going to assassinate him. Trump has already said he should be careful. He’s not going to last long, meaning the U.S. is also potentially looking to assassinate him. Clearly he’s not got to be running around the streets of Tehran.

He’s only ever been seen in a few photographs, and he only ever comes out in the past publicly for the rallies which celebrate the birth of the Islamic Republic. He’s never given a speech, to my knowledge; he will have to as supreme leader, but he has not done so yet. So we don’t really know — the long answer to that. We really don’t know.

AL: I know you have a forthcoming piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books. I want to ask you, as we’re wrapping here, for your personal hopes for the future and thoughts on where this all goes, speaking as an Iranian exile.

HM: My hopes are always for Iran to be a democratic country, rule of law, have the people — it sounds cliché, but have people have freedom and freedom to choose their own leaders, not to be imposed from outside, not to be bombed, and not to be at war with anyone. And also to not suffer from economic sanctions that make the lives of the people miserable, hardly make the lives of whatever regime is in power miserable. That’s been proven. Regimes don’t change because of sanctions. All it does is immiserate the people. So that’s what I want for Iran. Whether that’s possible or not, I don’t know, but in terms of hope. 

There’s so many different things that can happen. War upends a lot of other kinds of predictions that we may have had in the past. The Iranians certainly thought at the last meeting they had in Geneva between the Iranian Foreign Minister and Witkoff and Kushner, that they thought things were moving ahead and they were going to have a deal.

They were sending their technical team to Vienna for the following week to go through the technical aspects of how this deal was going to work. What we do know, and this is not me, this has been printed and reported on that what Iran was willing to offer the United States was better — far better — than the deal that President Obama was able to make with Iran in 2015, 2016. Trump, we now know, could have taken that and said, I did better than Obama, but chose not to. 

The hope for some Iranians was that with a nuclear deal out of the way, sanctions perhaps being lifted, that the regime would change a little bit, if not completely into something different, but at least loosen up, meet the demands of the people, but that wasn’t to be as we know now.

AL: We’re going to leave it there.

Thank you, Nick and Hooman for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

HM: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

NT: Thanks so much.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Trump’s AI-Powered World Wars appeared first on The Intercept.

LATE SUNDAY NIGHT, police in El Salvador arrested one of President Nayib Bukele’s sharpest critics, Ruth Eleonora López, an anti-corruption attorney who has spent years exposing government abuses. “[She] is one of the strongest voices in defense of democracy,” says Noah Bullock, her colleague and the executive director of Cristosal, a human rights group operating in northern Central America, including El Salvador. 

López, a university professor and former elections official, heads Cristosal’s anti-corruption unit. She has also been an outspoken critic of Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence that has resulted in “arbitrary detentions, human rights violations,” and the imprisonment of people not connected to gangs, according to Cristosal. 

The organization has documented widespread abuses in the country’s prison system. “There’s a clear pattern of physical abuse, and on top of that, a clear pattern of systematic denial of basic necessities like food, water, bathrooms, medicine — medical care in general,” says Bullock. “Those two factors have combined to cause the deaths of at least 380 people” in custody in recent years. That’s a prison system “that’s been contracted by the U.S. government,” Bullock adds. 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Bullock speaks to host Jessica Washington about López’s continued imprisonment and what her work and detention reveals about the Trump administration’s interest in El Salvador’s prison system. Facing vague corruption charges, López has seen her family and lawyer but not yet a judge. 

The U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million to detain immigrants, including about 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men mainly at the infamous megaprison CECOT. “The type of jails and the prison system that the United States has contracted is one of a dictatorship — one that operates outside of the rule of law,” says Bullock. 

But El Salvador isn’t the only country the U.S. is looking to partner with to outsource immigration detention. “Now in addition to El Salvador, the U.S. has reportedly explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 other countries,” says Nick Turse, national security fellow for The Intercept. 

The countries include: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security sent eight immigrants to South Sudan, in defiance of a federal judge’s order, according to court filings.

“Many of these countries,” says Turse, “have been excoriated by not only human rights groups and NGOs, but also the U.S. State Department.” He continues, “Places like Equatorial Guinea, which is a notorious, kleptocratic dictatorship in West Africa — one of the most corrupt countries on the planet; and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is another human rights pariah.”

“ These policies did not leap fully formed from the head of Donald Trump,” says Turse. They have a legacy largely stemming from the post-9/11 counterterrorism policies of the George W. Bush administration. “The Bush administration created this worldwide network of secret prisons and torture sites as part of its global war on terror.”

These are places outside of the jurisdiction of international law — legal black holes. 

“The Trump administration has expanded the Bush and Obama-era terrorism paradigm to cast immigrants and refugees as terrorists and as gang members,” says Turse. “It’s reconceptualized this idea from the post-9/11 era of extraordinary rendition to seek to disappear people to sites … even further beyond the reach of U.S. law.”

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

The post She Exposed Government Abuse. Now She’s Locked Up in an El Salvador Prison.  appeared first on The Intercept.

In September, The Intercept broke the story of the U.S. military ordering an additional strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean.

Since then, U.S. boat strikes have expanded to the Pacific Ocean. The Intercept has documented 22 strikes as of early December that have killed at least 87 people. Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian national, was one of the dozens of people killed in these strikes. His family says he was just out fishing for marlin and tuna when U.S. forces attacked his boat on September 15. On behalf of Medina’s family, attorney Dan Kovalik has filed a formal complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“We’re bringing a petition alleging that the U.S. violated the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, in particular, the right to life, the right to due process, the right to trial, and we’re seeking compensation from the United States for the family of Alejandro Carranza, as well as injunctive relief, asking that the U.S. stop these bombings,” Kovalik told The Intercept.

In the midst of this massive scandal, the so-called Department of War is cracking down on journalists’ ability to cover U.S. military actions. Back in October, Secretary Pete Hegseth introduced major new restrictions on reporters covering the Pentagon. In order to maintain press credentials to enter the Pentagon, journalists would have to sign a 17-page pledge committing to the new rules limiting press corps reporting to explicitly authorized information, including a promise to not gather or seek information the department has not officially released.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks to Kovalik about Medina’s case. Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse and Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at Arizona State University Law, also join Washington to discuss the strikes off the coast of Latin America, subsequent attacks on shipwrecked survivors, and the administration’s response to reporting on U.S. forces and the Pentagon.

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“Americans should be very concerned because President Trump has appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner,” says Turse of the administration’s justification for targeting individuals it claims to be in a “non-international armed conflict” with. “He has a secret list of terrorist groups. He decided they’re at war with America. He decides if you’re a member of that group, if he says that you are, he says he has the right to kill you.”

Leslie raised concerns about the administration’s attempts to erase press freedoms. “It’s just that fundamental issue of, who gets to cover the government? Is it only government-sanctioned information that gets out to the people, or is it people working on behalf of the United States public who get to really hold people to account and dive deep for greater information? And all of that is being compromised, if there’s an administration that says, ‘We get to completely put a chokehold on any information that we don’t want to be released,’” says Leslie. “You just don’t have a free press if you have to pledge that you’re not going to give away information just because it hasn’t been cleared. It just shouldn’t work that way, and it hasn’t worked that way. And it’s frightening that we’ve gotten an administration trying to make that the norm.”

With a president who regularly targets journalists and critics, Turse adds, “What’s to stop a lawless president from killing people in America that he deems to be domestic terrorists? … These boat strikes, the murders of people convicted of no crimes, if they become accepted as normal. There’s really nothing to stop the president from launching such attacks within the United States.”

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

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.

Back in September, President Donald Trump made public that he and his administration had ordered a military strike on a boat in the Caribbean. On social media Trump claimed that members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, were transporting drugs on the vessel.

Reporter: And also the boat that you mentioned yesterday where 11 people were killed. What was found on that boat, and why were the men killed instead of taken into custody?

Donald Trump: On the boat, you had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking. There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. And everybody fully understands that. In fact, you see it. You see the bags of drugs all over the boat, and they were hit. Obviously, they won’t be doing it again.

JW: Since then, U.S. strikes targeting boats allegedly carrying drugs to the U.S. have expanded to the Pacific Ocean. The Intercept has counted 22 strikes as of early December. Those strikes have killed at least 87 people.

Members of Congress from both parties say these strikes are nothing short of extrajudicial killings targeting civilians that do not pose an eminent threat to the U.S. The administration has yet to provide the public any evidence that these boats are carrying drugs or affiliated with drug cartels, which the administration has also designated as “narco-terrorists.”

The family of one of those victims, Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian national, says he was out fishing for marlin and tuna when a targeted strike on September 15 killed him. Attorney Daniel Kovalik has filed a human rights petition on behalf of his family; Kovalik filed the petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And he joins me now.

Daniel Kovalik, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Daniel Kovalik: Thank you, Jessica. Thanks for having me.

JW: Daniel, I want to start with you telling us a little bit about Alejandro. Who was he?

DK: He was a fisherman. He was a father of four children: one adult child, three minor children. He was married, though he was separated at the time of his death. He was close to his parents as well.

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And he was poor. They were a poor family, and they relied on Alejandro to make ends meet through fishing. He was also, by the way, a member of the fisherman’s association in Santa Marta.

JW: What is known about the strike that killed Mr. Medina?

DK: It’s as much as we know about any of these strikes. He was out fishing for marlin and tuna, and his boat was the victim of what the U.S. is calling a “kinetic” strike, which I think essentially means it was bombed and virtually obliterated. The president of the fishermen’s association recognized from the video that it was one of their fishermen association boats that Alejandro would normally use. And of course, Alejandro never came back. That’s what we know about it.

JW: What is the complaint that you’re making?

DK: First of all, we’re bringing it against the United States as a state party to the Organization of American States. They are subject to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is a body of the Organization of American States. And we’re bringing a petition alleging that the U.S. violated the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man — in particular, the right to life, the right to due process, the right to trial. And we’re seeking compensation from the United States for the family of Alejandro Carranza, as well as injunctive relief, asking that the U.S. stop these bombings.

JW: Can you tell me a little bit more about why you filed the petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and what your goal is here?

DK: Yes, so we felt that, at least, at the moment it was the best place to get jurisdiction over the United States because the U.S. is a party to the American Declaration, which by the way, I just note, is the oldest human rights instrument in the world. It was signed in Bogota in 1948; it’s also known as the Bogota Declaration. And the U.S., as I said, a petition can be brought against the U.S. as a country before the Inter-American Commission.

To get compensation from the United States and the U.S. court is very difficult because of sovereign immunity issues. But the U.S. in this case, where the Inter-American Commission has agreed to, essentially, waive those immunity issues. So we felt it was a good venue for us again. And we will be seeking compensation, as I said, and a finding that these killings are unlawful, and we hope that does play a role in ending these killings. That’s really a big goal.

By the way, we have not foreclosed the possibility of a court case. We’re looking into that right now as well.

JW: Can you tell us about the process of bringing the petition to the human rights commission and what’s coming down the pipeline in this case?

DK: It’ll be slow going for sure. But the commission will do their own investigation of the claims, which will include sending questions and queries to me, for example, about our case, but also to the United States. They will ask the U.S. to respond to the petition to give their petition on jurisdiction and on the merits, to maybe give evidence. And so that those will be the next steps is an investigation of what happened here and why.

JW: Switching gears a bit. You were also hired by Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, who the Trump administration has sanctioned and accused of playing a “role in the global illicit drug trade.” What can you tell us about Petro’s case?

DK: First of all, these claims of him trafficking the drugs are completely untrue.

I’ve known Gustavo Petro for 20 years. He’s been a fighter of the drug cartels through his whole political career, including when he was a senator in Colombia. And currently he’s also very active in fighting the drug trade. He’s bombed a number of drug labs. He has engaged in a lot of crop substitution programs, encouraging farmers to go from growing coca — the raw material for cocaine — to growing other agricultural products like food items, and that’s been very successful. He’s reclaimed a lot of land from coca production to, again, legitimate crop production. He’s also engaged in interception of drug boats in the Caribbean, but he doesn’t kill people — he arrests people. He’s confiscated a lot of money, which he’s actually donated to Gaza.

So this is not a drug trafficker, but this is very politically motivated. It’s very clear, given the timing of all this, that the U.S. put him on the OFAC list to punish him. For one, being an advocate, a very outspoken advocate of Palestine. And for making it clear that he was against these bombings of the boats and also opposed to any intervention in Venezuela. That’s what this OFAC list designation is really about.

JW: Petro has also spoken about making cocaine legal. Can you speak to that at all?

DK: Yeah there’s a lot of discussion about legalizing all drugs. You see in the U.S. that we now have virtually legalized marijuana in most places.

Related

Legalizing Cocaine Is the Only Way to End the Drug War

And I think that makes a lot of sense. The Rand Corporation did a study years ago that showed it’s 20 times more effective to deal with drug addiction at home than to try to destroy drugs at their source like in Colombia.

The problem isn’t the drugs per se, but in the case of the United States, you have people who feel they need to be sedated most of the time. And instead of dealing with those underlying problems — of course, all the social programs we have that might alleviate that need and desire are being cut, right?

So there’s a lot of discussion about legalizing drugs so they could be better regulated and frankly, so they could be taxed so the sale could be taxed. You could gain revenue from those again, to deal with drug addiction and other social problems.

JW: Turning back to Mr. Medina’s case, I wanted to see if you had any final thoughts that you wanted to share.

DK: Just that I’ve been asked by a few journalists, “Do you think he was innocent?”

And do you know what my response is that I know that all of these people killed were innocent. You know why? Because where I come from, you’re innocent until proven guilty. None of these people were proven guilty in a court of law, and none of them were even charged, as far as I know, by the U.S. for a crime.

And by the way, even if they had been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, even in a death penalty state, they wouldn’t get the death penalty because drug trafficking is not a capital crime. So there’s nothing lawful about these. There’s no justification for what the U.S. is doing. And again, another journalist from CNN actually said, “How are you going to prove that Alejandro was innocent?”

Again, I don’t have to prove he’s innocent. It’s the U.S. who had to prove he was guilty before meeting out punishment to him, and they never did. So those are the things I’d like people to keep in mind. The other thing is, if the U.S. can get away with this, if they can just murder people, and that’s what it is, murder people based on mere allegations, then none of us are safe.

There’s no difference between what they’re doing in the Caribbean than if a cop went up to a guy on the street in America, in Chicago, for example, and said, “Oh, I think you’re dealing in drugs.” And he shot the guy in the head. There’s no difference. And that’s not a world we want to live in. And we’re starting to live in that world with the ICE detentions.

So we’re fighting not only against specifically these killings or specifically for these families. We’re fighting for the rule of law that protects all of us — and people should welcome that, no matter how they view the drug issue.

JW: Thank you, Dan, for bringing your insights about this case and about what happened to Alejandro to our audience. And thank you for taking the time to speak with me on the Intercept Briefing.

DK: Thank you. I’m a big fan of The Intercept. Support The Intercept, people. Thank you very much. Appreciate you.

JW: Thank you.

Break

JW: Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse broke the story of the U.S. military launching a subsequent attack on survivors of a strike in the Caribbean Sea back in September. According to reporting from Turse, the survivors clung to the wreckage of the boat for roughly 45 minutes before being killed.

These strikes have horrified lawmakers on both sides of the aisles, including Republican Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who expressed his disgust with the attacks during a Fox Business Interview.

Rand Paul: It has not been the history of the United States to kill people who are out of combat. Even if there is a war, which most of us dispute, that a bunch of people who are unarmed allegedly running drugs is a war. We still don’t kill people when they’re incapacitated. People floating around in the water, clinging to the wreckage of a ship, are not in combat under any definition.

JW: Since the Trump administration launched its campaign targeting alleged “narco-terrorists” off the coast of Latin America, it has been laying the groundwork for a U.S. invasion of Venezuela without even the consent of Congress or, again, providing evidence for its claims.

Related

Boat Strike Survivors Clung to Wreckage for Some 45 Minutes Before U.S. Military Killed Them

Congress is now demanding the administration release unedited videos of the strikes to lawmakers, or they will withhold a quarter of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget.

And against this veil of secrecy and war crime allegations, the Pentagon has effectively replaced its seasoned press corps with a new crop of right-wing influencers, including Laura Loomer, James O’Keefe, and Matt Gaetz, who claim to be covering the military but have been accused of acting as a propaganda arm instead of a press corps.

Joining us now to discuss the boat strikes and the Trump administration’s attempts to eliminate critical coverage, are Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse and Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

Nick, Gregg, Welcome to the show.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having me.

Gregg Leslie: Thanks.

JW: Nick, to start, can you tell us about this first strike and why it matters that the United States launched an additional strike against the survivors?

NT: Sure. This initial attack took place in the Caribbean on September 2. The United States attacked what they say are “narco-terrorists,” what’s come to be known as a drug boat.

They fired a missile at this boat. The boat was reduced to wreckage. Basically all that was left was a portion of the hull floating upside down, and there were two survivors of the initial attack. They climbed aboard that piece of wreckage and they sat there for roughly 45 minutes, while they were under U.S. video surveillance.

At the end of that 45 minutes, the United States fired another missile, which killed those two survivors. And then in quick succession, they fired two more missiles in order to sink that last remnant of the vessel. There are a number of reasons why I think it’s notable that there was a follow-up strike here.

First off, there’s a lie by omission behind all of this, and by extension, a Pentagon cover-up. The Intercept, as you say, was the first outlet to reveal that this “double tap” strike took place. And when we went to the Pentagon about it at the time, all we got was an anodyne response. So it’s notable that they wanted to keep it secret in the first place.

We of course went ahead and published, but it took the Washington Post, the CNN, the New York Times months to catch up. The question becomes, why did the Pentagon want to keep it under wraps, and why didn’t they admit this when we first asked?

The Department of War says the U.S. military is in a “non-international armed conflict” with 20-plus gangs and cartels, whose identities it’s keeping secret. And if this is true, if we’re engaged in some sort of secret quasi-war, then a double tap strike to kill survivors is illegal under international law. In fact, the Pentagon’s own Law of War manual is clear on attacking defenseless people. Combatants that are incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or, very specifically, shipwreck are considered “hors de combat,” the French term for those out of combat, or those out of the fight. At that point, combatants have become protected persons. They’re non-combatants at that point, so that’s another reason why this matters. There’s also something viscerally distasteful about killing people clinging to wreckage. It’s a summary execution of wounded, helpless people.

What’s worse is that the U.S. had the survivors under surveillance for 45 minutes and only then executed them. But, I also want to be clear that while the optics of this are especially horrendous, experts say that those follow-up strikes aren’t materially different than the other drug boat attacks. There have been 22 attacks thus far by the U.S. on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

The U.S. has killed 87 people. And experts on the laws of war, former Pentagon lawyers, State Department lawyers who are experts, say that those are 87 extrajudicial killings, or, put another way, 87 murders. There’s no war, there’s no actual armed conflict despite what the Trump administration claims. So these aren’t crimes of war. They can’t be; there’s no war. They’re just murders. The president and the military are conducting murders, and in my book, that’s what matters most.

JW: So the administration has tried to justify these strikes by claiming the men that were killed were narco terrorists. Since your initial reporting, has the White House or the Pentagon provided any credible evidence that the people killed were drug traffickers?

NT: Yeah, they’ve never provided the public with any evidence of this. You’ll recall there was a strike on a semi-submersible craft that left two survivors that the military did not execute. They didn’t arrest them, they didn’t prosecute them. They instead repatriated them to their countries of origin after blowing up their boat and sinking it.

And the question is why? And I think it’s because they didn’t have viable evidence to prosecute. What they have when they target these boats is advanced intelligence, signals intelligence, maybe human intelligence, that is, informants — but they’re not going to disclose those sources and methods in court, so they don’t have a court case.

Now, I don’t know if everyone on board these boats are drug smugglers. It’s a question of what that even means. Is a poor fisherman moving cargo that Americans want, love, and pay big money for a smuggler? I don’t know, but I do believe these boats are transporting drugs. That’s what my sources say.

But that’s beyond the point because these aren’t capital offenses. If the offenders were arrested, tried, or convicted, they’d get eight or 10 years in prison. They wouldn’t face a death penalty, much less be convicted or executed.

Even more of a farce is the legal theory that’s been advanced in a still classified Justice Department finding. And it differs from some of what President Trump and the Pentagon has said in public statements about these killings of supposed narco-terrorists. This classified finding says that the targets of the attacks are not the supposed narco-traffickers. The people on board are, in bloodless military speak, “collateral damage.”

Related

Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People

The government claims that the narcotics on the boats are the lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for the cartels, which the Trump administration claims they’re at war with. And the cartels could theoretically sell the drugs, take the money, and buy arms to engage in this nonexistent war with America. So it’s a farce based on a fiction.

JW: Nick, you touched on this a little bit, but why should people in the United States care about the legality of these strikes? Are there implications for how the government could engage with people it considers even domestic adversaries?

NT: Yeah, I think Americans should be very concerned because President Trump has appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner.

Related

Are You on Trump’s List of Domestic Terrorists? There’s No Way to Know.

He has a secret list of terrorist groups. He decided they’re at war with America. He decides if you’re a member of that group, if he says that you are, he says he has the right to kill you. And Donald Trump doesn’t just have a list of foreign groups either. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the shorthand is NSPM-7, which he issued this fall, he has a secret list of domestic terror groups or, it’s being compiled as we speak, I think. So what’s to stop a lawless president from killing people in America that he deems to be domestic terrorists? If he’s doing this, close to home in the Caribbean or the Pacific. It’s the illegal use of lethal force that should worry Americans.

These boat strikes, the murders of people convicted of no crimes, if they become accepted as normal — there’s really nothing to stop the president from launching such attacks within the United States.

JW: Yeah, that’s really terrifying Nick, and we appreciate you explaining to us what this expanded scope could mean.

And Gregg, I want to pivot a little bit. In the midst of everything that we’re discussing here, the Pentagon has effectively replaced its original press corps with a group of right-wing influencers. Gregg, does that make uncovering the truth here more difficult?

GL: Yeah, it always does, and we see this from a lot of administrations to different degrees, but they all know that controlling the information can get them what they want in the short term. So it’s a reflexive reaction that almost always backfires because people know when they’re being lied to or when they’re having information withheld from them.

What we’re seeing at the Pentagon where, yeah, amateurs are basically the ones reporting to us now, it doesn’t go without notice, so it’s not a good solution. It’s a blatant, blatantly unconstitutional denial of rights. They’re actually keeping people out of covering the Pentagon for the American people because they won’t sign a pledge restricting what they can report on. I think it’s an overwhelmingly improper way to handle a government.

JW: Gregg, I want to push a little bit and ask, we’ve obviously seen reporters outside of the building break stories. Nick is one example, but there are countless others. Does it matter for the Pentagon press corps to actually be inside of the Pentagon?

GL: I think it does, and it’s not just the Pentagon. I’ve seen this at other agencies too, where the U.S. government has an incredible array of experts on every topic, and people who are fundamentally involved in the controversies that we want to know more about. Any official channel of communication never really tells the full story. There’s always somebody who wants to limit that flow of information. So you can always get better information if you know who the people are behind the scenes. And there’s nothing nefarious or wrong with that. You just get better information to tell the American people how their government is operating. So that’s the way it should work. You don’t sit there and wait for press briefings. You go out and find the information, and you can do that better if you’re in the building.

JW: Nick, I want to get your thoughts on this. Does it matter to be in the Pentagon?

NT: You know, it might seem odd coming from someone who’s covered national security for 20-some odd years but never reported from the Pentagon — but I also think that physical access to the building matters.

Maybe I should back up. I never liked the idea of reporters having office space in the Pentagon. I never really thought that reporters should be sharing the same facility. But I firmly believe that reporters should have access to that military facility and every other one, by the same token. And, I’ve been known to grumble some about mainstream defense reporters from major outlets sometimes being too chummy with Pentagon sources, and laundering too many Pentagon talking points, also failing to push back or call out Pentagon lies. But they also get information and tips that you sometimes just will not get if you’re an adversarial reporter outside of the building.

I’ve always thought that there were better ways for folks on the outside and the inside to work together to share information. Sometimes that one or the other couldn’t use, for whatever reason. But I still believe that even failing that, there are people inside the building who can get scoops that I and other reporters outside just can’t. Being in the building can help that, it can help in building rapport.

I’d like to see them get back inside the building. But I also think that maybe this treatment by the Department of War will, in the long run, lead to less reliance on official leaks and maybe finding more dissenters inside the building.

JW: Gregg, I want to go back a second and ask you to talk a little bit more about the pledge. Can you explain for our listeners what the pledge was that outlets were being asked to sign in order to have permission to be in the Pentagon?

GL: It’s not a simple answer to that because it was a massive document they were expected to go through, and the big issue was, they couldn’t print anything that wasn’t officially given to them or officially cleared through Pentagon officials.

And you would have to write in a pledge that, “I understand that I’m in violation of the law if I print anything that comes from somebody that hasn’t been, somebody gives me information that hasn’t been officially cleared.” That’s just such an outrageous comment. It’s not just saying you can’t talk to people, you can’t go outside of this office, but it’s saying, you have to agree that you will only print authorized officially released information — and that’s just not how journalism works or should work.

JW: Outside of the boat strikes, outside of the Pentagon, Gregg, what is the dangerous precedent that’s being set by replacing the Pentagon press corps?

GL: I think it’s just that fundamental issue of, who gets to cover the government? Is it only government-sanctioned information that gets out to the people, or is it people working on behalf of the United States public who get to really hold people to account and dive deep for greater information? And all of that is being compromised, if there’s an administration that says, “We get to completely put a chokehold on any information that we don’t want to be released.” That is not in any way consistent with the American tradition and it just flies in the face of our well-established preference for a free press. You just don’t have a free press if you have to pledge that you’re not going to give away information just because it hasn’t been cleared. It just shouldn’t work that way, and it hasn’t worked that way. And it’s frightening that we’ve gotten an administration trying to make that the norm.

JW: Nick, do you have any final thoughts?

NT: Since the dawn of the republic, the United States military has been killing civilians and they’ve been getting away with it. Native Americans in the so-called Indian Wars, Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century, Japanese during World War II, Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians.

Related

“Obligation to Remember”: Author Spencer Ackerman on the Casualties of the War on Terror

And for the last 20-plus years, Republican and Democratic administrations pioneered lawless killings in the back lands of the planet during the forever wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and on, and on. The details of these wars were kept secret. Civilian casualties were covered up. And now this new extension of the war on terror melded with the war on drugs has come to our doorstep.

We have bogus terrorist designations that are being used to murder people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean, and it could soon occur within the United States. The president has been killing people using the most specious legal reasoning imaginable. And, it makes a classic war on terror as unlawful and murders as it was look almost reasonable by comparison.

So I think Americans should be demanding answers and speaking out about a secret enemy’s list that’s being used to excuse summary executions or to put it plainly murder. And a domestic enemies list that the White House and the Justice Department just refused to say anything about.

JW: Nick, we appreciate your thoughtful analysis. And Gregg, do you have any final thoughts?

GL: Yeah, I think every few years something comes along that reminds us that we need a free press. If things are going too well, people take a free press for a given. They think, “Of course, we’re able to have reporters do what they want.” So in a sense, the bad news can lead to a good effect.

We know that since the time of James Madison, when he said, popular government without popular knowledge is a tragedy or a farce; or perhaps both. Right from the start, we knew that kind of information has to reach the people to have a meaningful democracy.

And as a media lawyer, people get tired of me and other media lawyers saying this kind of access is fundamentally important to democracy, as if we’re saying every incident like this is going to destroy democracy. But in the big picture, they will. When this keeps happening and if this becomes an official policy, it fundamentally threatens how democracy works.

And so I don’t think we’re ever going to overstate the case here. Something like this where you’re actually removing reporters from the Pentagon just truly interferes with how the people of the United States learn about what their government is up to.

JW: We’re going to leave it there. But thank you both so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

GL: Thanks for having me.

NT: Thanks very much.

JW: On Wednesday, the United States intercepted and seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. President Trump bragged about the move, claiming the tanker was the “largest one ever seized.”

It was a shocking escalation in the United States’ aggression toward the country, as Trump increases pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Follow the Intercept for more reporting on this developing story.

That does it for this episode.

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post “Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner” appeared first on The Intercept.

“Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty Book,” Adam Kucharski (2025)

My summer reading was a little unusual this year, because I’m in the middle of writing a book, which is orienting my reading choices (alongside my nagging insecurities, etc.) The book I’m writing is about how our discourses around uncertainty (“these uncertain times” and so on) can risk distracting from some of the more pernicious certainties grounding this grim conjuncture — so I’ve been trying to keep vaguely abreast of the “uncertainty” literature circulating.

Most of it is the very sort of thing I’m arguing against — overtures to unending doubt, which fail to look at what gets held certain, which world-ordering structures get to resist doubt (e.g. borders, property relations, gender binaries), by whom, how, and to what ends. But a very nice, general reader book by mathematician and epidemiologist Adam Kucharski, “Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty,” was a breath of fresh air.

In it, he looks at the historically, materially situated activities and assumptions involved, in fields from law, economics, medicine, statecraft, and more, in establishing proof and certainty. He uses great anecdotes and examples — like the time Kurt Gödel (founder of modern mathematics) in his 1947 U.S. citizenship interview declared that he had discovered the ways a formal fascist regime could be established in the U.S., not by a leader eschewing the Constitution, but relying on its inner contradictions.

I’m particularly thinking it’s a great gift for the vulgar positivists and bewildered liberals in your life, who would never read radical theory on truth production but might listen to a bestselling mathematician and epidemiologist. – Natasha Lennard

“The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking,” Olivia Laing (2014)
I’ve re-read this book several times since it was published, and it never disappoints. “The Trip to Echo Spring” is beautifully written and profoundly idiosyncratic. It is deft literary criticism. But also an amalgam of biographies. And it’s a travelogue. And it’s also a memoir.

The book meanders in and out of the lives of six extraordinary writers — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver — who were also extraordinary drinkers. It lists this way and that, wandering into Laing’s life too. Not every author is up to the task of writing about great writers, but Laing more than holds their own. Try not to salivate when you read this passage: “Click in a cube of ice. Lift the glass to your mouth. Tilt your head. Swallow it.” Try to convince your brain not to paint a picture after imbibing this line: “For years, I’d steered well clear of the period in which alcohol seeped its way into my childhood, beneath the doors and around the seams of windows, a slow contaminating flood.”

You don’t need to be a writer or a drinker to enjoy Laing’s book. But if you do happen to be one, either, or both, it’s an especially lovely book to sip and savor. “I’m taking a little short trip to Echo Spring,” says Brick, a character in Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” referencing his brand of bourbon. The book goes down just as warm and smooth — the literary equivalent of 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle. But the finish is not without bite. All six men were also laid low by drink-induced decline, dementia, and disease.

“I was beginning to think,” Laing writes, “that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world.” It’s easy to disappear into the pages of “The Trip to Echo Spring,” and it’s uniquely satisfying as well. It’s almost as enjoyable as spending a weekday afternoon sipping an expertly crafted Old Fashioned at the St. Regis New York’s King Cole Bar, or at your favorite local bar, or at any old tavern, or on your front stoop.

Almost. – Nick Turse

“Hiroshima,” John Hersey (1946)
August 5 and 9 marked 80 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it’s clear that our collective memory of the horror the U.S. government subjected the civilians of those cities to has greatly diminished. As tensions worldwide increase and the Trump administration waffles on its long-standing security commitments to allies, politicians of countries without nuclear weapons programs, including those of Japan, are reconsidering that stance.

That’s why it is so important that everyone reads John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima.” It first appeared as an article in The New Yorker — taking up the entire August 31, 1946, issue. Hersey’s account following six people who survived the A-bomb exposed the American public to the reality of what their government had done.

I first read it as an undergraduate student in a “Great Books of Journalism” class, and Hersey’s vivid descriptions of the aftermath have stuck with me since. This book is graphic, be prepared for that. But with 35 percent of Americans in June 2025 still saying the bombings were justified, compared to 31 percent who say it was unjustified (the rest “aren’t sure”), we owe it to the hundreds of thousands of people who died or suffered in the aftermath to be uncomfortable. No one should have to suffer like that ever again. – Chelsey B. Coombs

“Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power,” Pekka Hämäläinen
A gripping, if scholarly, take on the Lakotas that treats them as central characters rather than bit players. Recommended reading for a road trip through the Upper Midwest and Great Plains. – Matt Sledge

“The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth,” Andreas Malm (2025)
“What, exactly, is it that ties the state of Israel and the rest of the West so closely together? What explains the willingness of countries like the U.S. and the U.K. to collaborate in genocide? Why does the American empire share Israel’s goal of destroying Palestine?” Malm addresses these questions by drawing a line connecting the destruction of Palestine to the U.S. and the West’s control and the extraction of fossil capital from the region, making the genocide of Palestinians a strategic part of U.S. foreign policy and also a point by which we began and continue to destroy the planet through fossil capital. – Jeehan Mikdadi

“On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer,” Rick Steves (2025)
Anyone who travels knows of Rick Steves, but “On the Hippie Trail” shows a totally different side of him. I loved seeing Rick not as the confident guide we know, but as a young, sometimes awkward backpacker trying to find his place among more seasoned adventurers. As a traveler, I loved this book because it captures that raw, unfiltered feeling of being young, curious, and totally open to the world. It’s part coming-of-age story, part snapshot of a very specific moment in travel history — a time where you could journey over land through Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan; a time when Western backpackers could freely travel through cities like Kabul, mingling with locals and other travelers over hashish and tea. It reminded me of why I love traveling: meeting new people, navigating the unexpected, and letting travel shift the way I see things. It’s not polished or overly romanticized, and that’s exactly what made it feel so real. – Lauren Schilli

“Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes,” Leah Litman (2025)
The summer has become a gloomy period among lawyers, as we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to close out its session and release its final flurry of rulings. How did we get to the point where we refresh our feeds to see what’s left of bedrock constitutional precedent? Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan and co-host of the “Strict Scrutiny” podcast, unpacks the conservative turn on the SCOTUS bench in recent decades, blending legal history with her signature snark. – Shawn Musgrave

Fiction

“The Buried Giant,” Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)
It’s a weird read. While it has a dragon and Sir Gawain, it is not a fantasy as much as an allegory framed like the Arthurian grail stories. I think the book is about deceit and betrayal on a macro and micro scale: entire nations and the people we love. It’s a sad, reflective book, like most of his works. – David Bralow

“Anam,” André Dao (2023)
Ideology is too blunt an instrument for André Dao’s “Anam.” This is one of those meta-novels that uses the process of its own writing to propel the plot, slipping the reader between phases of empire via the narrator’s family research mission to Hanoi, interviews with his refugee grandparents in Paris, and distracted afternoons at Cambridge University, where he’s pursuing a degree for which he’s forced his tiny daughter and unhappy wife to move. At its heart is the narrator’s dead grandfather, a Vietnamese anti-communist who spent a decade imprisoned by the same regime over which the U.S. torched and poisoned the country and still failed to defeat, whose memory forces the narrator to grapple with his own left politics and his dissatisfaction with his family legacy.

Dao confronts that inherently egotistical fixation — a legacy — by having his narrator admit how exploring his family’s past has blocked his ability to prioritize a different extension of the self: his offspring. “How terrible has my pursuit of the past been,” he wonders, “if it has led to the total occlusion of the future?” His wife, the primary caretaker of his child, serves also as chief caller of bullshit: Challenging his patriarchal focus, she questions why the family story revolves around his grandfather rather than his grandmother. All storytelling is revealed as inherently reductive, the choosing of any main character as reliant upon the sidelining of others. Picturing his grandfather chained to the wall in a prison cell, the narrator admits: “I think that the image really is too reductive, victimising, gratuitous — basically that it’s tacky.” But it really happened, he thinks, despite any aesthetic objection, and despite the fact that both the family history and the narrator’s essentially self-centered fixation on it are inconvenient for his politics. “And if that really happened,” he allows himself, “then how can it not be at the heart of things?” – Maia Hibbett

“The Sisters,” Jonas Hassen Khemiri (2025)
This family saga follows the lives of the three charismatic Swedish-Tunisian Mikkola sisters and a shy Swedish-Tunisian boy who grows up alongside them. Across decades and continents, the sisters are haunted by a family curse, while the boy — named Jonas Khemiri, like the author — attempts to reclaim the singular connection he felt to the Mikkola sisters as a child. The novel is told in six sections ranging from a year to a single minute. Through this structure, the author plays with the notion of time and expectations, reveals the identities we adopt and shed, and upends the sanctity of family legacies. It’s an elegant and compelling read, and you won’t even notice it’s over 600 pages. — Celine Piser

“Circe,” Madeline Miller (2018)
I’ve read “Circe” multiple times, including this summer. It’s by the same author as “The Song of Achilles,” which I also loved. The real world can be a little dark, and this book is perfect Greek Mythology escapism. – Jessica Washington

“The Boy and the Dog,” Seishū Hase (2020)
Friends recommended “The Boy and the Dog” after I told them I wanted to make a fictional short film about the adventures my pup would get into: traversing through California landscapes trying to find his way home, making friends both human and furry along the way. Hase’s novel traces the journey of another extraordinary dog, separated from his person after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. 

Known by many names, the dog is steadfast in his search, yet along the way he brings unexpected solace to the people he meets, whose own lives are full of chaos, drama, and the ordinary ups and downs life also brings. As Miwa, one of the book’s distinctive characters observes, “It’s your dog magic, I suppose. Dogs don’t just make people smile. They give us love and courage, too, just from being at our side.” – Laura Flynn

“Operation Shylock,” Philip Roth (1993)
“Martyr!” Kaveh Akbar (2024)
I would like to witness these two writers (or their doppelgängers) hashing it out in a talk-show format — Legacy! Identity! Generational trauma! Unreliable narrators! And of course, martyrdom! — much like the conversations imagined by the “Martyr!” protagonist in his attempts to fall asleep. – Fei Liu

“The Oligarch’s Daughter,” Joseph Finder (2025)
I tore through this. It’s a modern-day spy thriller set in New York that puts a twist on Cold War intrigue. – Akela Lacy

Poetry & Art

“The Essential June Jordan,” by June Jordan (2021)
When reading the poetry of June Jordan, I may be crying of heartbreak, laughing, teeming with rage, and abandoning my desk for the streets to join a protest all at once and in no particular order. Jordan wrote prolifically (28 poetry collections) about themes of love, home, politics, motherhood, and loss. But perhaps what sets her most apart in literary and American history is how truthfully she reckoned with our position in the imperial core. She recognized the United States as a nation built on genocide and slavery, but also as an actor of genocidal horrors on the other Black and brown peoples of the world — from U.S. ties to apartheid South Africa to its unconditional support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine — a politics steeped in unflinching global solidarity.

In her 1985 poem “Moving towards Home,” Jordan intimately embodies this solidarity: “I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian.” And she asks us to undergo a similar reckoning, by first turning toward the comfort of our “living room … where my children will grow without horror,” turning toward ourselves.

Following the U.S. bombing campaign of Iraq, she wrote in her 1997 poem “The Bombing of Baghdad,” which I read as a prescient indictment on neoconservatism that continues to color U.S. foreign policy: “And all who believed that holocaust means something / that only happens to white people / And all who believed that Desert Storm / signified anything besides the delivery of an American / holocaust against the peoples of the Middle East / All who believed these things / they were already dead / They no longer stood among the possibly humane.”

When my writing, whether journalism or poetry, feels stuck or stale, reading June Jordan’s poems offers me a path back to myself and toward the urgency of liberation — that is, toward something ultimately affirming of life. In “The Bombing of Baghdad,” she ends her poem with these lines: “And here is my song of the living / who must sing against the dying / sing to join the living / with the dead.” – Jonah Valdez 

Too Negative
Too Negative is a ’90s art zine from Japan. A typical issue is a carnivalesque cavalcade of the Chapman Brothers, Manuel Ocampo, and Joel-Peter Witkin, all interspliced with tabloid grotesquery and vintage medical ailments. The constant confabulatory barrage of de-formation bubbles forth a monstrous in-between sensationalism of both ultra- and non-humanism. Recommended for daily nightly consumption to make the earthly news cycle we’re exposed to more palatable — just go ask Alice’s mangled torso, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs!” – Nikita Mazurov

The post What The Intercept Is Reading appeared first on The Intercept.

Troops from Niger ousted the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, last week. One of the coup leaders had previously received training from the U.S. government, becoming the 11th coup in the region led by U.S.-trained officers. This week on Intercepted, Nick Turse, investigative journalist and contributing writer with The Intercept, joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain to discuss the unfolding events in Niger and the Sahel region. Turse outlines how Africa has seen elevated conflict and instability as the U.S. has increased its military involvement on the continent over the last two decades.

[Intercepted intro theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The Sahel region of Africa has been wracked by instability in recent years, including extremist violence, climate change impacts, and a series of military coups that have deposed democratic governments in six countries.

The latest coup took place last week in Niger, where U.S. trained military officers moved to depose an elected leader who sent the country into chaos.

JS: We’re joined now by Nick Turse, he’s an investigative journalist and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Nick has been reporting on the African continent and the U.S. influence in various African nations for many years. He was in Niger on a reporting trip earlier this year, and has been reporting on that country for a sustained period of time.

Nick Turse, you’ve been on this program many times, and we thank you once again for being with us here on Intercepted.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having me on.

JS: Nick, I want to start with just, basically, a TikTok of what happened in Niger, who the coup leaders are, and the events that led us to this moment. Take us through the timeline and what exactly went down.

NT: Yeah. Just this past week, there was a junta that rose up in Niger. It began with the presidential guard kidnapping the president, basically taking him hostage, holding him for some time. And, while the president was being held hostage, about ten high-ranking Nigerien officers appeared on state television to tell the country that they had deposed the president, that the regime had so bungled the counterterrorist response over the last several years that they were taking charge.

It’s still shaking out as to who the real power players in this junto are but — as I reported for The Intercept this week — one of them is Brigadier General Moussa Salaou Barmou, who is the chief of the special operations forces in Niger, and he’s been a darling of the U.S. government for many years. He was trained in the United States at Fort Benning — since renamed — but this has been a school for foreign military officers for many years, and also in Washington at the National Defense University. At least those two; likely more.

There are many pictures on U.S. military websites of him embracing U.S. military officers, being involved in U.S. military activities. And, just last month in June, he met with a three-star commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Niger at a large U.S. military base there. So, he’s really wired into the U.S. security matrix.

JS: One follow-up to that. You’re mentioning the U.S. ties of one of the coup plotters, but isn’t it also true that the current government, also, has curried a lot of favor with the United States? The U.S. has viewed it as not necessarily a full-blown client state, but close to it.

So, what’s going on there? Because, also, the Biden administration, even before the coup was officially announced, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken came out, basically warning that no one should attempt to seize power in Niger.

So, what’s happening here, given what you just described about the U.S. training background of at least one of the coup plotters?

NT: Yeah. The United States has viewed Niger as a true counterterrorism bulwark in the region for many years. Niger has become increasingly more important to the United States in the region over the last several years, but there’s been a longstanding relationship, and U.S. taxpayers have sent more than half a billion dollars in security assistance to Niger since just 2012, and the United States has really been pumping assistance, military aid, weapons, sending trainers, advisors into Niger since about 2002, 2003. Right at the beginning of the war on terror.

So, we have a very strong security relationship there, and Antony Blinken, as you mentioned, he came out forcefully about this coup. He had been in Niger earlier this year, talking about just how important that country is to the U.S. security apparatus within West African Sahel and across the continent as a whole.

MH: Can you talk a bit about the conflict in Niger, which the U.S. is participating in as supporting the Niger government. Obviously, this conflict has been going on for some years, but I think it’s very poorly understood by people outside the region, especially in the U.S.. But the U.S. has been very intimately involved, as you said, for quite a long time.

Tell us, briefly, what are the dynamics and the origins of this conflict?

NT: Yeah. As I mentioned, the United States has been involved here since about 2002, 2003, but when they first got involved, there was very little terrorist activity in the region. But, over the period of the last 20 years, there’s been a tremendous rise, and it’s taken place in an area they call Liptako Gourma, a tri-border region where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso all meet.

Basically, there are a number of terrorist groups operating there. Some are Al Qaeda affiliated, some are affiliated with the Islamic state, some are free agents, but they have a very similar playbook. These are jihadists who generally attack on motorcycle. They will roll into villages; generally, they’ll come before attacking, to tell people how they want them to dress, to act.

These are, generally, in these countries, Muslim people, but they want them to ascribe to a more strident version of Islam. They want women to wear the veil, they want men to wear short pants, they want alcohol to be completely verboten. And, if you don’t comply — if you don’t pay Zakat, the Islamic tax — they will come back, and they will come back shooting. And they’ve terrorized villages in these regions and, generally, the militaries of these countries have been unable to protect their people.

The United States has poured security aid in, supposedly to bolster these militaries, to make them more effective in protecting their people. But, every year over the last ten years, the number of terrorist attacks have gone up, the number of civilian fatalities has gone up.

And, basically, the only metric where the United States has been successful is training military officers who are able to overthrow their own governments. They’ve been unable to combat the jihadists in any kind of effective way.

JS: Nick, there’s a lot of pushback against France happening on the African continent, especially in countries where French colonialism reared its ugly head for a sustained period of time, and both the United States and France have troops that are on the ground in Niger. I think, by last time I checked, France has roughly one and a half thousand troops there, and there are more than a thousand — I think 1,100 — U.S. troops. And most of those, as I understand, are stationed at drone bases that are used to carry out strikes, either in Niger or elsewhere.

But talk a little bit about the place that French colonialism holds in, not just Niger’s current day politics, but also in some of the other coups or rebellions that we’ve seen in former French colonial nations in Africa.

NT: Yeah. There’s a great deal of anti-French sentiment in the Western Sahel, in the countries that I talked about — Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali — and the United States has been really wired into the French military response there. [They] aided France in many ways with ISR, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, worked alongside French troops.

But the militaries in these countries and the civilian populations have really soured on the French who, as you mentioned, the colonial relationship there has never really gone away. These are still treated by France as de facto colonies in many ways, French corporations dominate the landscape there, and people see them as very extractive, taking mineral wealth, uranium, you know? And people want these resources back, and don’t think the French should have their hands on them.

And I think the United States has, because they’re so wired in with the French, has taken on some of that colonial sheen. You know, the population sees them as working together. So, that hasn’t benefited the United States.

And I think, also, just the ineffectiveness of the French counterterrorism effort and the U.S. counterterrorism effort over the last 20 years, it’s really soured common people in these countries. And also a lot of military officers, who are now looking elsewhere — Russia, the Wagner group — as a possible solution, because 20 years of the United States and France conducting counterterrorism missions, sending in advisors, sending in special operations forces, training, advising local troops. It just hasn’t worked. The terrorism has just increased, year after year, civilian deaths increasing, year after year.

MH: Nick, you mentioned earlier that this issue of terrorism was less prominent in the region 20 years ago when the war on terror began, but something happened in that time to exacerbate it. Can you explain the dynamics by which it began to increase over the past generation or so?

And, second to that, in a lot of places in the world, jihadist groups tend to exploit currently existing ethnic conflict. Is there a dynamic of ethnic conflict in Niger, in this region you’re talking about, where the epicenter of jihadism is?

NT: Yes. One, when we’re talking about the increase in terrorism, it’s been profound.

Back in 2002, 2003, when the United States first began putting counterterrorism funds into Niger, the State Department counted something like a total of nine terrorist attacks in sub-Saharan Africa. I mean, a tremendously small number. Last year, in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger alone, there were more than 2700 terrorist attacks. So, we’re talking about a 30,000 percent increase since the U.S. began its counterterrorism efforts. So, it’s a tremendous increase.

And you mentioned the ethnic conflict, local dynamics. Yeah, it’s very much the case. Actors like Al Qaeda and ISIS have been able to play on this. There’s an ethnic group that spans all three countries, sometimes called the Fulani, sometimes called the Peul, and this group has been marginalized, really, since colonial times, when the French colonized the region. And this group has been really kept out of government positions. They’ve wanted a place in the military, have been kept out of that, and they’re generally Islamic herders.

Some of the other groups are Christian groups that have had a preferred place in the government and in business. And just the changing dynamics in the country, economics, climate change, all these things have affected these Peul herders. And because they are then recruited due to this dissatisfaction with the government by these terrorist groups, the governments in these regions generally assume that all Peul are terrorists, and treat them as such. So, they abuse these communities, they commit atrocities there, they arrest and disappear men, and this drives the Fulani herders further towards the terrorists.

So, again, it’s outside. The U.S. counterterrorism model has helped to feed this by empowering these militaries more, allowing them to target these communities further, and just ramped up the terrorism in there. So, it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy and, really, an endless cycle and spiral of violence.

JS: You know, this coup happens at a really interesting time in not just world affairs, but also in African affairs. It happens, as you have this Africa summit taking place in St. Petersburg, Russia, one of the stated purposes of the conference was the continued liberation from colonialism and neocolonialism. This coup happens while you have Russia’s war continuing to rage in Ukraine.

You mentioned earlier the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin, when this coup happened in Niger, was actually, I think The New York Times described him as hovering on the margins of the conference on Africa in St. Petersburg. But he praised the coup, Prigozhin did, and actually suggested that he could send his own armed fighters to help. And, of course, the Wagner Group — and you’ve reported on this for The Intercept — the Wagner Group is already entrenched in several African nations, including in Mali, in Mozambique, and elsewhere. They also serve as the presidential guard for some military juntas.

Talk more about Wagner and Prigozhin in Africa, and specifically what they might want out of Niger. Because Wagner, like many mercenary companies, often tends to operate in the economy of natural resources. And so, looking, just in a surface way at Niger’s natural resource wealth, it seems quite clear what one of the motivations would be.

But talk a bit about the broader posture of Wagner in Africa and, specifically, what they might want out of Niger.

NT: We haven’t seen that Wagner is involved in Niger yet, but you can look to neighboring Mali to get an idea of what the playbook might be. And there, Mali was — like Burkina Faso before it, and Niger — dissatisfied with the current state of counterterrorism in the country. And, in all these countries now, you’ve had military officers rise up, all of them have been U.S.-trained military officers.

But, in Mali, even though we trained that officer, he brought Wagner group in, and my understanding is that Wagner is paid $11 million a month for trainers and advisors, but, really, they’re troops on the ground who are conducting military operations. And they also have been given access to mineral resources, specifically artisanal gold mines, which there are a lot of in the Western Sahel.

So, there’s great mineral wealth to be had there, and this has generally been their playbook. They want to get their hooks into these mines, and it’s a tremendous profit center for them, and it’s an opportunity for them to burnish their image and just expand their reach.

As you mentioned, they’re in several places on the continent: Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali. And it looks like Prigozhin is interested in going to Niger and, depending on how the United States and France respond to this, I think they’re worried about driving Niger into the arms of Wagner. And I think it’s going to be a very delicate dance by the United States to condemn this coup but use every possible method to keep their influence there, and to keep some sort of aid going, and keep Niger in the U.S. counterterrorism column instead of Wagner.

[Intercepted mid-show theme music.]

MH: You mentioned Wagner has been active in some of the neighboring countries, including Mali, in the region.

Can you tell us a bit about what we know about the conduct of Wagner in these conflicts? I know Human Rights Watch and some local journalists have done reports on some of the impact of Wagner operations. How may that model, which you described, be applied to Niger if it does come into play?

NT: You know, as I’ve reported recently for The Intercept — and this was off some stellar on the ground research by Human Rights Watch — Wagner has been accompanying Malian troops into the field and committing some exceptionally heinous atrocities.

They’re going into areas where terrorist groups are active, but targeting the civilian populations there. So, they will come in by helicopter, land in a village, round up the men. They’ll go house to house and loot these homes. Generally, it’s just a few Malian troops, but mostly Wagner forces. The people who are being attacked, some of them call them Wagner, some of them call them Russians, some of them call them just white soldiers, but they don’t speak French, and they’re a new type of force with new types of tactics.

And these men are generally rounded up and taken away. Human Rights Watch shared some video footage with me of villagers who went out and found the men from that village that had been disappeared. And the camera takes you out into a field, and it’s littered with bodies. Some of them have been shot, some of them have had their throats slit. In most cases, it looks like the men were bound before they were killed. So, these were summary executions by Wagner forces.

And this seems to be the Wagner playbook, they’ve done this in the Central African Republic as well. But some really brutal methods, and it’s a worry that this will again repeat itself in Niger, but I think it’s certainly a possibility.

JS: In your assessment, given that you follow this conflict quite closely, were there gaps in what Human Rights Watch reported? And are there, not discrepancies, but are there differences in the way that you can tell that Human Rights Watch approaches the crimes, or alleged human rights violations, or extrajudicial killings of individuals, where the perpetrator is a Russian-backed force versus a U.S.-backed force, if you get what I’m saying?

Were there inconsistencies there, or double standards at play? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but just give us an assessment of how you think Human Rights Watch and others approach these kinds of questions, when it’s the case of a Russian-backed mercenary firm committing the crimes versus U.S. proxies.

NT: I think that groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty; I mean, they do good work, but sometimes the framing of the issue can see a difference there. Though, I should say, in some cases they hit it harder when it’s Russian-backed.

Now, generally, the U.S. at least keeps a lower profile when it heads out with its local proxies in the region, and we generally don’t have the same type of reporting on that, it often doesn’t come to light. Human rights groups, generally back off to some degree when they’re talking about U.S. proxies, and really pushing the line that these are U.S.-trained forces. And some of it owes to the fact that the United States is able to keep these missions secret.

We know in Niger, for example, the United States have run something called 127-Echo programs there for years, and these went on under the radar for a very long time, until October of 2017, when there was an ambush by Islamic State forces of U.S. troops. [They] killed four U.S. soldiers, two of them Green Berets, wounded a couple more U.S. troops, and killed a number of Nigerien proxies who were with them.

The United States came out and said this was an advise and assist mission, but really what it was and what came to light was that this was the United States operating under Section 127E of the U.S. Code, which allows U.S. forces to employ local Nigerien forces as proxies in the field. They’re doing the United States’ bidding, they’re out there to achieve U.S. aims.

But rarely do these come to light. So, we know there are a lot of atrocities by Nigerien forces. Were they accompanied by the United States during these? You know, it’s often impossible to tell. The United States has played such a strong role in backing Nigerien forces over the years, there’s a good chance the United States is involved in one way or another, and this is something that often doesn’t come through in reports by human rights groups. Often, I think, because they don’t have the visibility on it, but it’s something that, at least, could be raised more in these reports, in the same manner that they would raise when it comes to Russia or Wagner group.

MH: Nick, given your breadth of experience across the region, you’ve actually connected the dots in a very interesting way about the relationship, incidental or intentional, between U.S. training of militaries and this wave of political instability in coups which have taken place across the Sahel region and beyond in Africa. I think The New York Times actually had a story the other day, noting that there have been coups from one coast of the Sahel to the other over the past few years; a pretty remarkable string of unrest.

So, I wanted to ask you: is there causality between this training relationship, in the sense that something benefits the U.S. in having this political instability? Or is it more a product of a lack of control or incompetence on the part of U.S. policymakers? On what sides do U.S. interests lie?

And, secondarily to that, how are these coups all related to each other, if they are? It seems like this geographical proximity has some sort of salience, but what is that? How is the region’s instability infecting other countries?

NT: Yeah, I’ve noticed, since this coup, there’s been a tremendous number of security analysts, Western security analysts on Twitter, folks that parrot the U.S. line. They’ve attacked my coverage, saying that I’m claiming there’s causation here, that there’s causality that the United States either — there’s something in U.S. training that makes these folks overthrow their governments.

And I don’t claim causation in the way that I think they want to frame the reporting. And, in fact, I think that the way they frame it is actually much more damning.

You know, they say that the United States floods the region with money and trains tremendous numbers of officers. When you break that down and think about it, the amount of money that’s been pumped into these conflicts and how poorly they’ve gone… I mean, it doesn’t speak very well for U.S. training, and it doesn’t speak very well for U.S. advising for the counterterrorism paradigm that we’ve sold to these countries.

And, it’s true. I mean, many, many officers across West Africa have gotten U.S. training, and not all of them overthrow their governments. But I think the case is that the United States isn’t able to control how this training is used. It doesn’t seem to be effective in any type of way for its stated purpose: counterterrorism, making these countries safer. But the officers that it’s trained there, it doesn’t seem to have had an impact when it comes to laws of war, when it comes to democratic principles, and these are things that the United States always stresses that they are imparting on their trainees across the region.

So, yeah. I think, at least, it should give U.S. policymakers pause, and say, this doesn’t seem to be effective in any of the ways we’ve wanted it to be. We’ve used the same paradigm for the last 20 years. Maybe we need to rethink at this point. Maybe it’s time to think about another way forward, because 20 years of counterterrorism assistance, billions and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars pumped into the region has just left us with coups now by 11 U.S.-trained officers.

You know, again, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but the metrics are exceptionally bad.

JS: Yeah. And, I mean, you also have the entire duration of modern U.S. history. You mentioned one of the coup plotters being trained at Fort Benning, and just to remind people, it used to be known as the U.S. Army School of the Americas. You had string after string after string of military officers from Central Latin America who came to the United States and received training at what was then called the School of the Americas, who, not only committed human rights abuses while they were members of U.S. client state militaries, but also then joined paramilitary groups, or became assassins.

The people that assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 in San Salvador, the Archbishop of San Salvador, the group that assassinated him included individuals that were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. That also has been replicated in African nations, and in Asia, and elsewhere, where you have foreign military officers who’ve received extensive and advanced training from the United States then go on to commit heinous human rights abuses, or antidemocratic regimes come to power with graduates of U.S. military training.

And I think that, to an extent, I saw some of the criticism being levied at you, Nick. I think a lot of it is really baseless because, just to point to the most obvious, I mean, history is on your side in your analysis here. And it is not just fair game to point out the U.S. role in training people that go on to commit human rights abuses or engage in antidemocratic putsches around the world, but also to ignore it, or to just preemptively say that this isn’t a data point we should look at is a totally intellectually dishonest exercise.

Oftentimes, people who are levying that kind of criticism at people like you are the very people who have to be forced to acknowledge that the U.S. played any role whatsoever in any of the events that have taken place around the world. So, I would just completely set that aside, but I think it opens a door for a different sort of a nuanced conversation or question to you, and that is to explain, post-9/11, why the U.S. started taking increased interest in African nations — and particularly Niger — and what the past almost 23 years of so-called counterterrorism strategy have looked like on the African continent. There’s, of course, drone strikes, but that’s not the entirety of it.

This has been the heart of a lot of your reporting over the past two decades on Africa, and I think it would be great if you just walk people through, how did we get to this point where the U.S. was using Niger and other African nations in the way it has used them since 9/11?

NT: Sure. I mean, just after 9/11, the United States looked out on the world and just made a decision that, basically, they would look to places that they considered the ungoverned spaces, places where they thought that terrorism could take hold. This was just a theory that you would have to flood these areas with security assistance, get U.S. advisors on the ground, create a counterterrorism regime. And they did this in place after place, area after area, in Africa.

And, generally, there were no transnational terror groups in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time; even Al Shabaab was still a glint in the eye of the Islamic Courts Union. There were none of the threats that they were so worried about. 20 years later, U.S Special Operations Command Africa counts about 50 transnational terrorist and militant groups on the continent.

So, you’ve had a tremendous increase over that time. And, again, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I think you can look at the way that the United States has structured its aid, how it’s bolstered this counterterrorism mindset that has turned localized conflicts into regional conflicts, that has taken, what were local problems between ethnic groups and their governments, and internationalized them by creating openings for transnational terror groups to come in and recruit.

Just in almost every context you can look at where the United States has put real counterterrorism dollars into real significant numbers of U.S. troops, the conflicts have all worsened for the countries involved. And, especially, for the people that are living in these conflict areas. Things have just gotten exponentially worse over this time.

And you mentioned drone strikes have been one part of this, mostly in Somalia, earlier on in the war on terror and in Libya. That’s subsided, at least for the moment, but the United States has put a lot of boots on the ground. Small numbers, but a lot over time, and they cycle these special operations teams in and out of these countries. And Niger has been one, as I mentioned, where they used this shadowy 127E authority, 127-Echo.

Again, this is small numbers of U.S. commandos on the ground working alongside Nigerien forces, who they use as proxies to fight, kill America’s enemies on the continent. They’ve done this in country after country. They do it in Somalia, they’ve done it in Cameroon, in Burkina, in Mali at one point, and in Niger. We had a small window into those types of operations due to the debacle in 2017, but one thing that came out of that — as I said, U.S. Africa Command said that this was an advise and assist mission, that this was a complete fiction. And an investigation by a three-star U.S. general found that Nigerien forces had had no input in the planning process or the decision to execute these missions.

What the U.S. said were advise, assist, accompany, were more like U.S. direct action missions, and “direct action” is a special ops euphemism for strikes, raids, other offensive missions. And this has been what’s been going on in the continent in secret for more than a decade now. The United States is running teams of Navy SEALs, Green Berets in, and conducting offensive operations.

These are wars by another name that, generally, the American public doesn’t know about, and this has been a major portion of counterterrorism strategy on the continent.

MH: So, given this unrest in this very critical region — obviously, Sahel’s became a zone of great power competition, China and Russia both have a presence there; and some of China, maybe you can enlighten our readers about.

But I wanted to ask: given the U.S.’s very military focused role in the Sahel over the past generation, could you give us a sense of what may be a more constructive policy? The U.S. obviously has been training these military officers and setting them loose, and they’ve been, in many cases, either ineffective or actively agents of destabilization in the region.

Is there a better way that the U.S. could support the people of the region and the governments, as opposed to the current course they’ve taken, which has caused so much havoc?

NT: Generally, I think these questions are above my paygrade and are better served by smarter people than me. I try not to give prescriptions on these things.

But I think that to start, at least, U.S. lawmakers should be taking a really hard look at this long and sordid history of U.S. intervention there, and ask some really pointed questions of the State Department and U.S. Africa Command.

Generally, in testimony before Congress, AFRICOM gives up some talking points, there’s some predictable questions. No one asks the hard questions, or tells them that they need to come up with metrics to show that 20 years of counterterrorism efforts have helped in any way, and I think they’d be hard pressed to do that. So, I think, as a start, that needs to be done.

These countries, generally, I think the unrest is driven by poverty and by the governments that we’ve been supporting that have driven people into the arms of terrorists. So, I think a greater focus on humanitarian aid, not only suspending aid when coups happen, but when you have year after year, decade after decade, reports of governments that are abusing their populations, sending militaries out, committing atrocities, and driving terrorism, that the United States needs to take action in these ways. Cut off aid before we have 20 years of ineffectiveness and a military uprising.

So, I think those are some places where, at least, that there could be a start.

JS: Nick, just one follow-up. Murtaza had mentioned China and great power competition. Can you comment a bit on the difference in approach between the United States and China in the Sahel, and how these countries both have tried to assert their influence or economic or diplomatic power?

NT: The United States has spent the last 20-plus years with this counterterrorism whack-a-mole strategy, and China has really pushed a soft-power approach. I think the Chinese have been very effective at what they’ve done.

The best example that always comes to mind, and it’s in the Sahel, in Mali: a few years ago, the United States had given Mali a large sum of money through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which is an economic aid the United States supplies to African countries. And it was for a major construction project, and the U.S. casted about looking for a U.S. firm that would carry out this work, the building project, but there were no U.S. corporations that were interested in going to Africa and building this big public works project.

Eventually, the company that was hired was a Chinese firm, state-connected. So, it was U.S. taxpayer dollars but, when Malians looked at this project, they saw Chinese on the ground, they saw Chinese writing on it, they assumed it was a Chinese project.

I mean, I think it’s emblematic of how things have gone. The U.S. is putting the money out there and China’s able to take the credit. I mean, they’ve eaten our lunch over and over again in circumstances like this, and this one was one of the more egregious, but it shows that China knows how to play the game on the continent, and the United States is flailing about, I would say, in a rather ineffective manner.

JS: All right. Nick Turse, thank you so much for joining us once again here on Intercepted.

NT: Thanks so much for having me.

MH: That was Nick Turse, an investigative journalist and contributing writer for The Intercept.

[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, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and definitely leave us a rating or a review wherever you find your podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

If you want to give us feedback, you can email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Intercepted is going to be on hiatus for a few weeks, but we will be back in September. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Niger Mutiny: Another U.S.-Trained Military Officer Led Coup appeared first on The Intercept.

“We had to leave because of the drought and the conflict,” said Ebow, 25, referring to the current offensive by the Somali government against the terrorist group al-Shabab. “We had no food. Our livestock is dead.” Their first night at the camp, Ebow and three of her children slept in a makeshift shelter. When we spoke on May 10, they were waiting for their own small wood-and-plastic-tarp bivouac there.

The Horn of Africa is experiencing a historic drought, one of the worst in six decades. A drought and famine in 2011 and 2012 killed a quarter million people here. Somalia, with the help of international donors, has averted a famine this year, but the current drought is of the same magnitude or worse than 2011, Mohamed Moalim, an adviser with the Somali Disaster Management Agency, told The Intercept. Most of the country is still facing acute food insecurity, while the risk of famine stalks rural areas and internally displaced people, or IDP, camps like this one.

The drought is compounded, ironically, by catastrophic flooding. Almost the entire population of the central Somali town of Beledweyne was displaced due to flash floods this month. Twelve days later, the water had still not receded, leaving critical infrastructure inundated and roads impassable and delaying the arrival of humanitarian aid.

A long-running conflict against al-Shabab involving the Somali government and a host of international military forces, including the United States, Turkey, and the African Union, has also led to widespread displacement. The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies found that, in 2022, al-Shabab attacks increased by 23 percent and fatalities caused by militant Islamists spiked 133 percent, a record level exceeding the total in 2020 and 2021 combined. From January through mid-March, when Ebow was driven from her home, there were at least 630 acts of conflict-related violence in Somalia, with more than 230 reported fatalities in Lower Shabelle, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Last Friday, al-Shabab fighters attacked an outpost of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia in Bulamarer, about 80 miles southwest of Mogadishu. Al-Shabab claimed that the coordinated assault, including suicide bombs, killed 137 Ugandan troops. The African Union acknowledged the attack but did not comment on its losses. U.S. Africa Command was drawn into the fighting and, according to a press release, “conducted an airstrike against militants in the vicinity of the ATMIS forward operating base” that reportedly “destroyed weapons and equipment unlawfully taken by al Shabaab fighters.”

The combination of conflict, drought, and floods drove more than one million people from their homes between January 1 and May 10.

The combination of conflict, drought, and floods drove more than one million people from their homes between January 1 and May 10, a record rate of displacement for the nation. “These are alarming figures of some of the most vulnerable people forced to abandon the little that they had to head for the unknown,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director Mohamed Abdi.

All of these overlapping crises have left Somalia in a desperate situation. In 2011, four million Somalis were in need of food; by last year, that number had risen to 6.7 million, more than one-third of its total population of 18 million. This year, roughly the same number are facing acute food insecurity, while about 6.4 million are unable to access sufficient water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. Some 5.1 million children require humanitarian assistance, out of 8.3 million Somalis in need. Last year, drought killed about 43,000 people in Somalia. United Nations and Somali government projections place the potential death toll between January and June of this year at 135 people per day.

Ebow and her children are among 3.9 million people who are now homeless within the country’s borders, while another 700,000 Somalis are displaced abroad. With insecurity rising and the drought killing off livestock, Ebow said, people were streaming out of her village. The Intercept heard the same from more than a dozen other recently arrived IDPs in the camp. Narifa Hussein Mohamed, an administrator who oversees al-Hidaya, said 400 people arrived in the first week of May. When I visited, they were doubled up with neighbors, sometimes eight or 10 people — mostly women and children — in rickety shelters that look fit for no more than two or three. 

As IDP camps go, al-Hidaya is better than many in countries marred by conflict. It is laid out in a coherent fashion and has potable water and an open-air school for children. But privation is still the rule here; accessing water is a challenge, and nourishment, like hope, is in short supply. “These people need food, clothes, mattresses, shelter from the rain,” said Mohamed. “They also need work or some training so that they can make money, have an income.” Al-Hidaya is just one of hundreds of makeshift sites on the outskirts of Mogadishu where exhausted people on the run from war, want, and withering weather have found meager shelter.

Ebow — scrunched up on the dusty ground, cradling her baby — said her family is now divided. Her husband and four other children were too sick and weak to travel, so she had to leave them behind. She hoped to find some work to help pay their way to join her, but the sum involved — perhaps as much as $100 — is so far out of reach as to be impossible. Most Somalis live on less than $2 per day.

Women and children in IDP camps in Mogadishu and the town of Baidoa, about 140 miles northwest of the capital, have turned to begging in the streets, housecleaning, shining shoes, or selling khat — a leaf that, when chewed, offers psychotropic effects — to support their families. Nearly 90 percent of respondents to a recent U.N. survey on how the drought is affecting children said that kids are engaged in hazardous work, with about 18 percent involved in sex work.

Amina Sidow, 40, arrived at al-Hidaya from Lower Shabelle with her five children just days before we talked. She said this year’s drought was the worst she had ever experienced. “In 2011, there was some assistance. The cows got very skinny, but they didn’t die,” she told The Intercept, sitting outside her tiny, jury-rigged home: several scraps of frayed plastic tarp, layered and stretched taut over a frame of bent tree branches. “Now all our animals are dead. We’ve lost everything.”

Water shortages have led to increased disease among livestock — even among camels and goats, which are usually more resilient than cows — low birth rates, decreased milk production, and deaths. This leads to a lack of vital nutrition, such as milk and protein, especially for children. Even when livestock aren’t dying, their decreased health and weight have led to reduced value at market, hurting household incomes. Herds often take five years or more to rebuild after catastrophic shocks, and many pastoralist and farmer households had yet to recover from a drought in 2016 and 2017 when the current one began in October 2020. Numerous IDPs at al-Hidaya said they had lost all their animals to the drought or had sold them off, suggesting extremely lean years to come for many of the displaced.

“Climate change is causing chaos,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on a visit to Somalia in April, noting that the country has experienced an unprecedented run of five consecutive insufficient rainy seasons. “Poor and vulnerable communities are pushed by the drought to the brink of starvation, and the situation can get worse.”

“We want to help ourselves. But right now, we need someone to help us.”

For Sidow, whose husband died six months ago, “worse” is hard to imagine. “We have no means to build a proper shelter. No materials,” she said, raising her hands and then dropping them in her lap. “We need water. We need food. We want to work, to be productive, but what can we do? We want to help ourselves. But right now, we need someone to help us.”

The post Climate Change and Conflict Are Wreaking Havoc in Somalia appeared first on The Intercept.

Vice President Kamala Harris wrapped a historic tour of Africa last week, where she positioned the U.S. as a reliable and trustworthy security and economic partner. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain is joined by investigative reporter, Nick Turse, to discuss his latest reporting on U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa. Since the war on terror was launched, the U.S. government’s ventures in Africa have been more focused on military aid than economic support. Harris’s trip comes after a decade of China investing in infrastructure and critical resource mining throughout the continent and the administration’s concerns over the growing influence of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group. But America’s 20-plus years of counterterrorism support in the region hasn’t resulted in better security. In that time, terrorist groups have risen and U.S.-trained African officers have attempted at least nine coups, eight of which were successful. Hussain and Turse discuss the impact of U.S. military involvement and the influence of other foreign powers.

[Intercept theme music.]

Murtaza Hussein: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussein.

Vice President Kamala Harris: I am incredibly honored to be with you here in Ghana. And to the people of this incredible continent, to the people of Ghana and to all the young leaders with us today—students, entrepreneurs, activists, advocates—it is my extraordinary honor to be with you.

Last week Vice President Kamala Harris wrapped a historic tour of Africa. Harris started off her three-nation visit in Ghana.

Vice President Kamala Harris: As President Joe Biden said at the U.S.-Africa Leader Summit last December. We’re all in on Africa. We are all in.

Harris’ visit comes after a decade of China heavily investing in infrastructure throughout the continent and in critical resource mining.

And her trip comes after another major foreign power, Russia, has also set its sights on growing its influence in Africa.

Vice President Kamala Harris: So then what does it mean that the United States of America is all in? It means that the United States is committed to strengthen our partnerships across the continent of Africa, partnerships with governments, the private sector, civil society, and all of you. Partnerships based on openness, inclusiveness, candor, shared interests and mutual benefits. And to be clear, America will be guided not by what we can do for our African partners, but what we can do with our African partners. [applause]

During her weeklong visit, which also included Tanzania and Zambia, Harris announced plans to boost economic investment and trade, as well as plans to open a plant to process minerals needed for electric vehicles.

In February, Jose W. Fernandez, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, echoed the U.S.’s push to position itself as an economic ally to African nations. At the Indaba Mining Conference in South Africa, he spoke about the U.S. being an economic partner to trust:

Jose W. Fernandez: The partners will evaluate how they plan to avoid worsening environmental degradation and social inequality and how they can involve local communities not only is this the right thing to do but we also believe that this will result in stronger investment returns and this is why we must lead a race to the top.

The U.S. interest in Africa is not new, but recently, it has been more focused on military aid and training rather than economic investment. Over the last twenty plus years of the war on terror, the U.S. military footprint on the continent has grown tremendously — and it has had devastating consequences that are little understood or acknowledged.

JoyNews: [sounds of gunshots] The U.S Special Operations Command Africa conducted Flintlock 2023 from March 1 to 15 in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire in a digital press conference on the purpose of Flintlock, commander of the U.S Special Operations Command Africa Rare Admiral Jimmy Sands said the U.S is focused on the threat of AlQaeda’s continued expansion through the Sahel.

Flintlock is an annual training sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, or SOCAFRICA. Since 2005, the program has provided tactical training to “exchange best practices,” according to Rear Admiral Milton “Jamie” Sands.

But a recent Pentagon report has found that, “The Sahel [which includes 11 African countries that sit between the Sahara Desert and the tropical south] now accounts for 40 percent of all violent activity by militant Islamist groups in Africa, more than any other region in Africa.”

Our guest today recently asked Admiral Sands about the Flintlock trainings and how they’ve undermined the very mission of the program.

Moderator:  Our next question, we’ll go live to Nick Turse of The Intercept.

Nick Turse: Admiral Sands, thanks for taking questions today.  Last year you told me that SOCAFRICA training always focuses on the importance of democracy and civilian oversight, but former Flintlock attendees have conducted at least five coups since 2015.  Did you take any specific steps to ensure that Flintlock 2023 attendees don’t do the same? And if so, what were these?

Rear Admiral Milton “Jamie” Sands: Yes, Nick —Again, thanks for the question and hello. This is a concern, and really during any — and a consideration with any partner in any training or engagement.  Flintlock, as I’ve said, really focuses on respecting the rule of law, respecting and learning the law of armed conflict, and on civil control over the military.  As we work with our partners, we emphasize the importance of our shared values.  This really has been consistent and we continue to focus on this and really increase our focus on this.

Specifically as you asked, Nick, what – what have we done now, how is it different this year, I would say that while we always focus on the rule of law, we’ve really developed a much more thorough plan and integration for effects on that.  So we’re looking not just at our coordination with our partners on rule of law but also our coordination with our partners on integration with the police forces, on integration with a whole-of-government approach to tackling some of these challenges.

But I think that we remain, obviously, concerned.  We remain focused and committed to partners with shared values to the United States and our allies.

I’m now joined by Nick Turse, contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting on national security and foreign policy, and no better person to speak with about the impact of the U.S.’s military presence in Africa.

Nick, thanks for being here.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much, it’s great to be here.

MH: So, Nick, you’ve been covering US military operations in Africa for many, many years, and one of the few reporters to do it on such a consistent basis. It’s a region of the world where there’s relatively less coverage, and many people don’t know what the extent or scope of the US military presence in the region is. Can you talk a bit, very broadly, about what AFRICOM is in the context of the US military. And what it does in Africa?

NT: Sure. AFRICOM—or US Africa Command—is the umbrella, US military command, they call it a geographic combatant command that’s responsible for the entirety of Africa, except for Egypt, which is in the domain of CENTCOM, And AFRICOM was established in late 2007, became operational in 2008. And, in that time that it’s been in Operation, AFRICOM has built an archipelago of military bases across the northern tier of Africa, stretching from the east to the west, and they run military operations all across the continent. We’re talking everything from run-of-the-mill training missions to direct action, special operations missions; that’s commando raids, drone strikes, and the like.

MH: Do we have a sense of which countries the US has a military presence in Africa under the aegis of AFRICOM, and what countries they’re carrying out the operations that you alluded to just now?

NT: AFRICOM has a presence — what they call a “footprint” or “base posture.” So, an actual physical base in about 15 countries across Africa. The countries with the largest US presence at the moment would be Djibouti, where the US has its one lone acknowledged military base, which is Camp Lemonier. They have a series of outposts in Somalia. These were shut down, for the most part, at the end of the Trump administration; they’re being built up under the Biden administration right now. And then, in Niger, in West Africa, the US has a robust presence with several military bases and a CIA outpost as well.

MH: So, you’ve reported quite extensively about specific operations and strikes and attacks and so forth, and the aftermath of them, and corruption and other illicit activities in and around this military footprint as you described it. I think a lot of people don’t actually understand what the mission is of AFRICOM in the region. Like, who are they fighting? Who are they, ostensibly, that they fight? You said 15 different countries, too, and what unifying threat justifies being there for 15 different countries? Or what is the war that AFRICOM currently is there to fight, and who is on the other end, ostensibly, of these strikes and raids and so forth?

NT: Yes, this is— I mean, I think, in many respects, you can think about Africa as ground zero of the now nameless US War on Terror. You know, the Pentagon talks a good game about moving on to a near-peer conflict; you know, great power competition. But, in Africa, the War on Terror goes on unabated. This is really, it’s been going on now for more than 20 years. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US was casting around for places to fight the War on Terror. They looked around the world and they happened upon the idea of ungoverned spaces or under-governed spaces. Places that they saw as blank spaces on the map where terrorism might flourish.

Now, if you look at US military literature from around the time of 9/11—2000, 2001, 2002—you find that the Pentagon wasn’t able to actually name one transnational terror group in Sub-Saharan Africa. But, nonetheless, they started pumping counterterrorism funds into what they considered to be potential hotspots in Africa. So, Somalia, and also in the west, in the Sahel region of West Africa. And, in the time since, there’s been a great flourishing of terrorist groups, militant groups on the continent.

Again, at the time of 9/11, they weren’t able to identify any. Now, they identify about 50 different terrorist groups or militant groups operating on the continent. In East Africa the primary enemy that the United States is fighting would be Al-Shabaab in Somalia and a small ISIS affiliate there. And, in the west of Africa, in the Sahel region—specifically Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali—the US has targeted ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates in that region.

MH: I wanted to break down and ask you about some specific countries you’ve done extensive reporting on the consequences of US military actions; in particular, Niger, where you’ve done some really important reporting recently. Obviously the US government’s there ostensibly under the framework of the War on Terror to help the Niger government fight Islamic extremist groups in the country. What has the impact been of that war, and do you know anything about the local dynamics, which have led it to be yoked into the War on Terror?

NT: In West Africa—specifically the Sahelian region, where the countries of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali meet, the Tri-Border Region—there’s been a tremendous uptick in terrorist activity, especially over the last decade. But, over the last 20 years, the United States has focused on this area, and pumped more than $500 million in counter-terrorism funds, security assistance, into Niger, specifically. And Niger now hosts the largest and most expensive drone base run by the US military in Africa. In the city of Agadez, it was built at a price tag of more than $110 million, and it’s maintained to the tune of about 22, $30 million each year. It’s a surveillance hub and a linchpin of US security architecture in the region.

You know, the United States has had a difficult time with its allies in the region. There’ve been a couple coups in neighboring Burkina Faso, which has caused the United States to dial back some of its security assistance there. The government in Mali also succumbed to a coup, and since then has distanced itself from the west and embraced the Wagner group and Russian security assistance.

So, Niger has become ever more important to the United States as the primary place where it can fight terror in the region. But, you know, if you look at the metrics, they’ve all gone in the wrong direction. The United States began providing counter-terrorism assistance to Niger in 2002. At that time, there were only nine terrorist attacks in all of Africa, according to the State Department. Last year, the number of violent events in the Tri-Border Region—Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso—reached close to 2,800, according to the Pentagon’s own statistics.

So, this is a jump of more than 30,000% over the last 20 years. While correlation doesn’t equal causation, we’re looking at a tremendous uptick in terror attacks; also in fatalities, from over the same years that the United States has made this area a counter-terrorism focus.

MH: Well, it’s interesting, because what you’re describing very similarly tracks US military operations; the correlation between increase of terrorism and more military operations in the Middle East. Obviously, there was political destabilization triggered by many of those wars, and so forth. But, as you said, Africa or parts of Africa have become terrorism hotspots during the time that the US has been there operating ostensibly to fight terrorism for two decades now.

So, you know, kind of awkwardly, the US—also through AFRICOM, as I understand—provides military training to partner militaries in Africa. Or local governments who are allied with the US will send their officers to the US for training. And we see this in other parts of the world, too, in Egypt and Pakistan, and other places where the US wants to have close ties with governments, where the state is relatively weak, but the military is strong. They will cultivate military leaders or young officers who will go on to become leaders in their armies and have a relationship with them going forward.

Now, as you’ve reported, it’s a very, very interesting story in The Intercept. In Africa, many US trained leaders have gone on to take very important political roles in their country when they go back, including embarking on coups, at times, in their countries to depose leaders, civilian leaders, and put themselves in place.

Can you talk a bit about the coup history of US military trained officers in Africa and how it’s played out in recent years?

NT: Yes. This is something that’s come to the attention of Congress recently, because there’s finally been some questions asked. The United States last month just wrapped up its signature special operations counterterrorism exercise. It’s called Flintlock. And you know, this Flintlock operation has been going on now since 2005. Flintlock attendees have conducted at least five coups in the last eight years and, since 2008, US trained officers have attempted at least nine coups and succeeded in at least eight, across five West African countries: Burkina Faso three times, Guinea, Mali three times, Mauritania, and The Gambia.

So, in a perverse way, this might be the most successful of all US military engagement on the continent, because it’s the one area that you can point to where the US has shown real results. Not the results that the United States want to brag about, but they embraced officers who have been militarily successful in one way, and that’s in overthrowing their governments. And, in many cases, democratically elected governments.

MH: You mentioned earlier that part of the reason that the US was compelled to get involved in Africa—and militarily through AFRICOM—was the idea of weak states or ungoverned zones being a threat anywhere in the world where terrorist groups could potentially form and so forth. One thing that I’ve found in other parts of the world—and I’m curious in your take of reporting on the ground in Sub-Saharan Africa—is that a lot of times the US gets looped into local ethnic rivalries which maybe had no relation to transnational terrorism but get put into that framework, either while the US is there or because the US is there, as a means of galvanizing people against one another or against a foreign presence.

Can you talk a bit about the countries—I was thinking very much in Niger, for instance—what is the ethnic dynamic in the country, and how much is that pre-existing to the US presence there? And how has the US played in? Have they taken sides between ethnic groups and deemed it the war on terrorism?

Because I also get the impression that the US is not very sophisticated in its understanding of the dynamics of various parts in the world. And I’ll say this for Iraq and Afghanistan, where they didn’t really know the tribes, they didn’t know the religions or ethnic groups, but they kind of got involved. Is the same sort of naivete or indifference also manifesting in US military operations in Niger and other countries?

NT: Yeah, I think that’s very much the case. You see this across the Sahel, very much so in Niger, also in neighboring Burkina Faso. The ethnic group, the Fulani—they’re also known as the Peul—they’re seminomadic Muslim cattle herders and, across the region, they have long-standing grievances with their governments. There’s been government neglect of their communities, a lot of socioeconomic want in the community, and the communities have been stigmatized in many ways. Tagged as, as terrorists, the stigma has further marginalized them, encourage abuse by government troops, and also encouraged recruitment by terrorist groups preying upon these grievances.

And if you talk to US military personnel in the region, there doesn’t seem to be an understanding of this. But, again, as you said, in Iraq and Afghanistan there’s a great deal of naivete when it comes to an understanding of longstanding ethnic grievances. And, you know, the US has thrown its support behind the government in Niger, pumped a tremendous amount of money into quote-unquote “professionalizing” these security forces. But, if you talk to the Fulani or Peul community, they’ll tell you that security forces are often used as ethnic militia for ruling elites. And I don’t think the United States has ever understood this in any kind of real way, that their security assistance really fed terrorism throughout the region, and specifically in Niger.

There was recently a UN report that showed that the number one reason for people joining terror groups across Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and five other Sub-Saharan African nations, was due to socioeconomic marginalization, and also from government abuse, abuse by security forces. And, this is something that the United States doesn’t seem to have an appreciation for, or any kind of remedy for.

MH: Yeah, I was skeptical if the US invaded Iraq with the understanding of difference between Sunnis and Shias, or invaded Afghanistan without understanding the ethnic differences in the country. That they would devote or understand, in our Africa, would they devote less resources to understand even better the tribal differences and ethnic differences which may come into play. So, I’m not too surprised to hear that, unfortunately.

This brings me to the next question: in these conflicts, the US has been taking the side of states, so they take the side of the Nigerian government, or the Niger government, or the Somali government, and they are arrayed against these ethnic groups, which may sometimes be joining terrorist organizations, or pledging allegiance to them sometimes in defense against the government, or what they see as government abuses. In the context of these wars, which the US public has not paid very close attention to, are there particular abuses or instances of civilian casualties which you’ve reported on, which you think are quite egregious but have not risen to public attention?

NT: Yes, most definitely. And I should make some distinction here as well, that the US military, the Pentagon, doesn’t seem to have a very good appreciation of this. AFRICOM itself never seems to understand these dynamics. But, if you read the state department’s most recent analysis of human rights in Niger, it was released just last month, it catalogs a tremendous number of abuses, including credible reports of arbitrary and unlawful killings by the government. It says very explicitly that the armed forces are accused of executing persons who are suspected of fighting with militants, with terrorist groups, and it catalogs also torture, arbitrary detention, unjustified arrests, life-threatening prison conditions, and also rampant impunity among the security forces.

Now, this hasn’t dissuaded the State Department from also throwing its full-fledged support behind the government in Niger, but there is an appreciation of this, that these abuses are going on, the US just hasn’t acted on it. One of the most egregious that I discovered in my reporting was— It was something that was actually brought to light by Niger’s own national Commission on Human Rights. They investigated allegations that in 2020 during just a one-week long military operation, 102 civilians had disappeared from one of the areas that Niger security forces were operating in during a counterterrorism operation. And they did an on-the-ground investigation, which is very odd for Niger; there aren’t a lot of fact-finding missions that go on in these areas that they call, Zone Rouge, or Red Zones, terrorist hotbeds. And this National Commission found 71 bodies in six mass graves. Human Rights Watch went in afterward, they discovered an additional six mass graves with 34 bodies. And this was just in the space of one week that these killings were carried out.

So, you know, it shows the type of operations that are going on. And, again, this was just one circumscribed area, but these operations are going on on a regular basis in the east of the country, and also in the far west of the country, and I wouldn’t be surprised that if more investigations were carried out, that you would find more evidence of killings of this nature, because it’s certainly the type of thing that I heard about from witnesses and survivors in these areas.

MH: One particular country I want to ask you about, which I think that there’s some greater degree of US public attention to among other Sub-Saharan African countries or countries in the Horn of Africa, is Somalia. So, presently, the US is engaged in an armed conflict in support of the Somali government against Al-Shabaab. You mentioned earlier that under the Trump administration that presence was wound down, but now it’s being ramped up a bit. Can you talk a bit about what the US government is doing in Somalia, or what the goal of this mission is, to support the government, and what the contours of it are today?

NT: Sure, and this is one of the longest standing US conflicts in the world; one of the longest standing in Africa, it’s been going on for the better part of 20 years now. The United States has a robust presence in Somalia, several US bases where the United States operates drones, some of them armed. They conduct airstrikes in the country in support of the Somali government, and that government is in the midst of a major counterinsurgency campaign right now primarily against Al-Shabaab, the preeminent terror group there.

The United States does a lot of training. It’s built forces in the country, some of which the United States uses as proxies; one is Danab, or “Lightning Brigade.” There’s also a force called the Puntland Security Force that was built by the CIA and then transferred to military control as surrogates for the United States, under a program called or authority known in US code as 127e, or 127 Echo. This authority allows the United States to hand-select an indigenous force, arm it, train it, advise it, and send it out in the field to conduct missions for US policy aims, which may or may not align with that of the host government. It’s a very shadowy program.

The operations are classified, but the United States has used it to an astonishing extent in Somalia.

MH: So, you described a very expansive network of bases and military operations spanning many different countries across a huge territorial space in Africa. Do we know anything about the budget expenditures on AFRICOM’s presence in these countries? And how can we ballpark the figures in terms of how much US taxpayer money is being to pursue these various different conflicts in the continent?

NT: It’s a very good question and one that’s very difficult to answer. To take the example—we’re just talking about Somalia—there is actually no good budgetary information on the full extent of US expenditures in Somalia over the last 20 years. Only about six years of the last 20 has the United States had a detailed counterterrorism budget for Somalia that you could parse and figure out exactly how much is being provided. These are closely held secrets. Just to take Niger as an example: since 2012, US taxpayers have shelled out about $500 million for security assistance there. In neighboring Burkina Faso, close to $1 billion over the last 20 years. And that gives you an idea of the type of money that we’re talking about.

But, you know, a full accounting doesn’t exist, and it’s just a black box when it comes to the Pentagon’s budget.

MH: So, this brings me to another issue, which has been in the news quite a bit recently, which is the presence of another power in Africa, which is Russia. The New York Times had a story about Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group being stationed in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the Central African Republic. And doing something a little bit similar to what you’re describing in AFRICOM’s presence in partnering with local governments to fight their defined enemies, with the difference being that they’re specifically doing it for cash payment, and acting effectively as mercenaries for the government in a much more straightforward way than the US military is.

What can we say about the involvement of foreign governments—other than the US—in the region? And thinking of Russia and Wagner Group, but also France and other countries which have a colonial presence, and seek to maintain that today?

NT: Yeah, especially in West Africa, the French have had—as you said there, with the colonial power in the region—they’ve had a major military presence. And I think it’s, in great extent, the failures of the French and the US counter-terrorism efforts over 20 years have really opened the door to Wagner and Russian influence in the region. You know, after all this time, after all this money spent, the metrics have gone so far in the other direction that governments and peoples of these nations have become fed up. They’ve cast around for someone, another partner, and Wagner has been there.

You know, I wouldn’t classify Wagner as a positive influence in the region. They have been implicated in a great deal of, abuses, atrocities. This is something that you hear US officials talk about quite a bit recently. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Where Wagner has been present, bad things have inevitably followed,” and he made the case for the United States being the solution of this, and said that the United States had to show that it could deliver results.

But, as we’ve been saying, the US already has a two-decade record of counterterrorism engagement in the region, and you could say that exactly what Blinken did, that bad things and overall worsening security have been the hallmarks of those years. You know, there’s a reason why Wagner’s been invited in, and I think, to a great extent, it’s been US, and also French failures.

MH: You know, you’ve kind of been a roving reporter in Africa for quite some time now, and you’ve been covering these US military operations, or the context around the operations, to degree which very few other US reporters have done in the past two decades. Do you see a disconnect in terms of the extent of US military involvement in Africa, and the level of awareness or discussion of it back in the United States?

NT: Most definitely. I mean, it’s always been very difficult to get Americans to show any interest in the US military operations and activity in Africa. I think, you know, this has allowed the United States to operate with a great deal of impunity on the continent. There’s very little oversight, accountability, because the American public just isn’t engaged. And, you know, I think most Americans have a difficult time finding any of these countries on a map, let alone trying to figure out what might be going on there. They don’t pay attention to the news coming out of Africa.

And perhaps the only time that this is really been on the radar for most Americans was in 2017; this was also an operation in Niger. There was an ambush of US troops near the village of Tongo Tongo. Four US service members were killed, two others injured. And, following that, you had a number of key US senators even saying that they had no idea that US troops were operating there. These included members of the Senate Armed Services, the people in America who should most know what the United States is doing in Africa.

So, I think when there’s that level, or the lack of awareness of this among people who are supposedly overseeing it, you know, it’s not a surprise that most Americans don’t know about it, but I think it’s been to the detriment of America, and, most certainly, Africans in these nation.

MH: You know, actually one thing I also want to ask you too, it’s very interesting— At the start of our conversation, you mentioned that AFRICOM encompasses all of Africa except for Egypt. Can you talk a bit about The AFRICOM operations in North Africa outside of Egypt? Obviously, there are governments there—Tunisia, Algeria, Libya—which, you know, culturally and politically, they have differences from Sub-Saharan Africa. What is the nature of the AFRICOM presence in those countries, and what type of conflicts are they involved in there?

NT: Yeah. You know, the United States has had heavy engagement in North Africa for a long time. Tunisia has actually been a real hotspot for the program that I mentioned earlier, the Authority 127 Echo. For years, the United States had commandos on the ground operating with Tunisian counterparts in what can only be described as combat, ground combat, against Al-Qaeda affiliates in that region. And, you know, this was also in 2017, the United States was engaged in a firefight on the ground in the Kasserine Mountains in Tunisia. AFRICOM still won’t admit that that’s where this operation took place; the only thing you can get them to say is that it was in North Africa, but it was very much in Tunisia. And it’s indicative of the type of operations the United States has been able to conduct in secret, because there hasn’t been a great deal of oversight.

The United States is heavily involved in fighting in Libya for years, starting with the Civil War to oust Muammar Gaddafi back in 2011. The United States spearhead the NATO bombing efforts in the country and, in the years after that, had a robust presence of commandos on the ground for many years. Then US forces were pulled out for a few years in the late 2010s, but, I understand there’s now a US presence on the ground and a base in Libya again. At one time there was something like four or five; there’s at least one right now and, I think, a growing US special operations presence in the country.

During the Obama administration the United States also conducted a tremendous number of airstrikes, hundreds of airstrikes against an ISIS affiliate who was operating in Libya; this was one of the primary spots of US drone war in Africa. That’s wound down in recent years, but there’s still a great deal of US surveillance flights over the region, ISR intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance. So, North Africa is still a major source of concern and engagement for Africa.

MH: Nick, can you talk a bit about other great power involvement in Africa, particularly with regards to China? China obviously has been looking to Africa for a source of resources, they’ve been investing in infrastructure in various African countries, and the US has—rhetorically, at least—evinced the desire to confront China’s presence in various parts of the world, including in Africa in recent years. Can you talk a bit about what China’s doing there that we know, and then how we’ve seen the US respond to it?

NT: Sure. I think you’ve seen, when you compare and contrast US engagement in Africa with China’s, you can’t travel anywhere in Africa without seeing Chinese presence, but the Chinese have gone very much the soft-power approach. And they’ve pursued economic engagement, economic partnerships. You know, oftentimes, it seems to be to the detriment of countries, but one thing that you can’t argue with is that the Chinese have a bold, robust presence.

You see large projects—airports, major road infrastructure projects, that type of thing—and, you know, the United States, its engagement on the continent very much seems to be this counter-terrorism whack-a-mole. One example that’s always struck me was that the United States has a forum of economic engagement called the Millennium Challenge Corporation, where it attempts to compete with China in infrastructure building projects.

A few years ago in Mali, the United States gave the Malian government a major grant for an infrastructure project, for building a stadium, but there were no US corporations that were interested in actually fulfilling this contract, so it eventually went to a state-run Chinese firm. So this was American taxpayer dollars but, on the ground, people who saw the stadium being built saw that it was a Chinese company, Chinese workers, it looks like a Chinese project. And I think this is one of the ways that the United States has been beaten by China on the continent, even when the United States has found inroads, the Chinese have been able to use it for their advantage.

MH: And, you know, in Niger and other countries, obviously there are quite rich deposits of certain resources, like uranium and so forth as well too. Have we seen any economic competition between foreign powers over access to these resources? And, I’m very curious, actually, related to that, the interest of colonial former colonial powers like France in the region. Like, why do they want to maintain a footprint? And why, besides terrorism, might the US be interested in the region and having some presence there?

NT: You mention uranium in Niger. Now, this is exceptionally important to France. You know, the French nuclear power industry relies on uranium from Niger. Obviously France has a vested interest, and it’s one of the reasons why they’ve had such a continued robust presence in the Sahel, in Niger, specifically. You know, the United States, there are some US firms with economic interests there, but US companies have been interested. Generally, they’ve lost out, and haven’t been the beneficiaries of this, so, in many respects, the US investment in Niger, if it ever pans out, it might be very good for France. But, for US firms, I don’t think that there’s a real economic advantage to it, even if it did work, which it hasn’t over the last 20 years.

MH: The US has taken a position of winding down the war on terror around much of the Middle East in the last couple years, and pivoting towards Asia or other parts of the world where they feel that there are more pressing geopolitical concerns. So, we’ve seen less active involvement in the Middle East, and talks of drawing down from residual bases and so forth, but in Africa it seems like the story is quite different. How do you see the trajectory of the US military in Africa going? And can we expect broader and more deployments and activities in the future?

NT: Yeah, I think, very much so. And as I said earlier, I think the War on Terror has really gone on unabated in Africa. We’ve heard pledges from the White House, the Biden administration, of ending forever wars. But, you know, Africa seems to have been left out of this. While I think there’s been an uptick of US commandos sent to other theaters in addition to the Middle East, Europe, and the Pacific, AFRICOM still gets a large percentage of the  amount of special operations forces sent around the world. And there seems to be a renewed emphasis on North Africa, West Africa, and also the Somali Theater, that the Biden administration has increased troop numbers in each of these areas.

So, I think you’re going to see the US War continue there, and very possibly at an uptick.

MH: Nick Turse, thanks for joining us on Intercepted.

NT: Thanks so much for having me.

MH: That was Nick Turse, a contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting on national security and foreign policy. His most recent story for The Intercept is titled: “AFRICOM Chief to Congress: We Share “Core Values” With Coup Leaders.”

And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept.

José Olivares is the lead producer. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is editor-in-chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted. And definitely do leave us a rating or review — it helps to find us.

If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. That’s podcasts@theintercept.com. Thank you so much for joining us.

Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussein.

The post U.S. Counterterrorism Efforts Destabilizing African Nations appeared first on The Intercept.

“The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me,” says Jordan Uhl of Donald Trump’s Tuesday evening State of the Union. This week on the Intercept Briefing, co-hosts Uhl, Akela Lacy, and Jessica Washington disentangle Trump’s nearly two-hour-long speech so you don’t have to. 

“This is who these people are. In some ways, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it,” says Lacy, in reference to Trump talking about kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “It is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.” 

Washington adds, “The whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech.”

The co-hosts also dissect the Democratic Party’s official response to the State of the Union, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger.

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

Transcript 

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl, Intercept contributor and co-host of this podcast, joined by my co-hosts.

Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

JU: Akela, Jessica, it is late. We just sat through — endured, rather —nearly two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union and the multiple responses. We’ll get into some of what will surely be the main takeaways from this speech, but in a word or a few words, what are both of your initial reactions to tonight’s State of the Union?

JW: My word is “long.” I don’t think it needs an explanation.

AL: This is not a word, but I kept having an image in my head of villains in a superhero movie, standing around, laughing at what they’ve accomplished. [laughs]

JW: No, but you’re totally right because that one line about the food stamps. So there was this line from the very long speech that we’re describing where Donald Trump says that, he — I can’t remember exactly what word he gave. 

AL: “Lifted off.” I think he said “lifted off.”

JW: Lifted off.

AL: Yeah.

JW: Lifted off 2.4 million people from food stamps as like an economic accomplishment. And that does give like Disney villain in a very specific way.

AL: “Dark” — dark is my one word.

JU: Yeah, that was certainly one way to frame plunging millions of people into food insecurity. And of course that was an applause line.

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My takeaway would be the weaponized contrast. One thing I thought was a significant departure from past State of the Unions was how Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points. Now in the state of the union’s past, of course, the opposition party for the most part remains seated, but tonight felt like a slight departure from that partisan tradition where he singled them out. Repeatedly pointed out that they weren’t standing and clapping, and even on some points remarked how he was surprised that they even clapped. 

Trump delivered his last [joint session of Congress] address a year ago in a very different environment, coming off winning the presidency for a second time and major GOP wins that year. Things aren’t so rosy this time around. What do you both think has been the biggest change for Trump? What was the primary obstacle that he needed to clear or try to spin in tonight’s speech?

JW: There’s a lot that he had to clear up. I think there’s his loss on tariffs, obviously he’s still smarting from that, now saying that he’s going to do it anyway. A little bit confusing on what he means by that.

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I think his “anti-war” agenda that he’s been trying to spin himself as very anti-war is difficult when he just did what he did in Venezuela and when we’re watching the preparations for a very likely strike on Iran. So he’s got a lot that he has to spin because he’s tried to create this image of himself as anti-war, as good on the economy — and those things are not panning out even remotely close to what he’s promised.

AL: And the Epstein files blowing up in his face. There was reporting today that apparently DOJ scrubbed allegations against Trump sexually abusing a minor, and we have some Democrats, I think Rashida Tlaib was yelling at him during this to release the Epstein files. And this is high on many Democrats’ mind, but obviously not that he would address this, but that’s in the background here. Not even in the background, it’s in the foreground right now. 

And then, yeah, his approval ratings are lower than they were at this point in his first term. His disapproval ratings, I would say are higher, and his approval is about the same. 

And there are two very different stories being told about the economy right now. Obviously, Democrats are — we’ll get to the response later — but trying to focus on affordability issues. And you have Trump pretty much making a mockery of that and trying to throw that in their faces while claiming that everything is fine and dandy when we know very clearly that it’s not, people have lost their health care, are paying exorbitant amounts just to get through on a day-to-day basis. 

And I feel like this didn’t really come through. If you haven’t been paying attention, and you might have just been watching the State of the Union for pleasure — which I don’t know many people who are doing that — but he was able to get the One Big Beautiful Bill. As Jessie mentioned, the tariffs are falling apart. That was another major part of his economic agenda. 

But you also have Republicans who are saying that they’re not necessarily going to go through with his pressure to have them codify tariffs or codify any of these other things into law. And this is not a “Let’s hand it to Republicans” moment, but they have also broken with him on Epstein in very small numbers. But not everything is hunky dory with him and the Republican caucus right now as well.

JU: I think any Republican opposition in Congress to another attempt to institute tariffs isn’t out of concern for those costs being passed on to the consumer. It’s simply out of fealty to corporate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, their donors.

That’s where he would meet opposition, not out of any purported concern for their base. And like you’re saying, there are two different stories about the economy. He’s bragging, similar to Pam Bondi in the Epstein hearing, about the Dow hitting 50,000. He’s bragging about the stock market.

Donald Trump: The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year.

JU: Those gains rarely affect the average working person. And then on the other side, you have “60 Minutes” reporting that SNAP and Medicaid benefits are facing the biggest federal funding cuts in history.

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Another part of the speech that stood out was the focus on militarism. Along those lines on these funding cuts for these social safety net programs, we’re seeing a massive uptick in military spending. He’s committing to 5 percent of GDP in our military spending. And we saw a report over the past few days from Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that said a requested $500 billion increase in military spending is slowing down the budget process because the military doesn’t even know how they would spend that additional $500 billion.

So I’m curious, from both of your perspectives, how do you think this lands in the minds of the average voter? Granted, like you said Akela, who’s watching this for fun? But we live in a shortened attention span economy where people will see clips, and surely some of these narratives will filter out. So when they see him bragging about the economy saying it’s robust and strong, meanwhile they’re looking at their bank accounts and they see a totally different story but ratcheting up military spending, how does this land?

JW: Yeah, I think that kind of stuff backfires. I think you’re talking about kind of two separate but connected things, which is military interventions, which we know are unpopular with a lot of, even the Republican base, a lot of Trump’s base is uninterested in that.

And then there’s also — which is the same mistake that the Biden administration made — which is telling people what the economy looks like for them. And I interviewed members of the Biden administration during the presidential election. And something that they kept saying was, people feel great, the economy is strong, people are doing fine. And people didn’t feel that, and they didn’t vote that way. 

And so I think they’re going to run into the exact same problems that every administration runs into, when they’re campaigning on their accomplishments, which is, it actually has to match up with how people are feeling economically, and the indicators just aren’t there.

I also listened to Summer Lee’s rebuttal for the Working Families Party, and this was something she brought up really directly. And I think this is something that has been talked about in our politics a lot recently, which is, we have money for bombs overseas, but we don’t have money for health care. We don’t have money to actually provide a good life for our citizens. And that’s something that Summer Lee brought up. They’re trying to distract you with all these different issues when the real problem is we’re giving money to corporations, we’re spending money on bombs, and we’re not spending money feeding people as Donald Trump himself pointed out. And we’re also not spending money on people’s health care.

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Summer Lee: Don’t let anybody tell you we can’t afford it. We somehow find endless money for ICE, for private prisons to warehouse Black and brown people and for bombs to be sent abroad. But we’re told health care and childcare are too expensive. And when we begin questioning those priorities, the powerful try to divide us once more. But that old playbook is losing its grip.

AL: I was reading some reporting in Punch Bowl on Tuesday that Republicans were talking about how they wanted Trump to frame this military spending. This is talking about him wanting to increase Pentagon funding by 50 percent. And they’re like, we don’t want him to sit to say the number $1.5 trillion. We want him to talk about it as a percentage of GDP and how it compares to past decades of military spending. Basically so it doesn’t sound as bad, but they also want him to frame it as what we’re doing to modernize the military and counter threats from our enemies around the globe.

Which we did hear him, reverting to this, what is a theme for him, painting this image of himself as a strongman, like policing the world while also telling everyone that he’s not policing the world and he’s the president of peace. So it’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.

But to their credit, Republicans are at least acknowledging openly that you have to frame this in a way that makes sense to the American public, whether it’s accurate or not. And I think that is the one thing that if you’re someone who is already giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and you listen to this, that sounds good, right, on its face?

JU: Yeah. It’s much more abstract when you’re talking about percentages of GDP than a $1 trillion-plus military budget.

JW: You guys can’t forget that he ended the war in the Congo, though. That was a key accomplishment from the speech. [laughs]

JU: Oh, who could forget? Where were you?

AL: Can we talk about the Venezuela thing? Because that —

JW: Please,

AL: Freaked me out to my core. Like jokingly, let’s not forget about our buddy Venezuela, when you kidnapped the fucking president, and JD Vance and Mike Johnson are behind him, like, laughing. I don’t know, that moment for me was just so blatantly, this is who these people are. In some ways, yes, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways, they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it. And it is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.

JW: Yeah.

JU: Yeah. Not just that, but the deliberate reckless killing of fishers. Yeah, that was a laugh line. Yeah. Oh, we decimated their fishing industry, and you get hardy laughs from the Republican caucus.

DT: We have stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea. You probably noticed that. [Laughter]

We very seriously damaged their fishing industry. Also nobody wants to go fishing anymore. [Laughter]

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JW: The Intercept’s reporting, which we’ve done a lot of great reporting on this from Nick Turse. But we’re talking about these strikes where people were clinging, dying with no relief. Just like these strikes are horrific, if you read about them the strikes have now passed over 150 dead. So just to keep that in mind for the laugh line there.

JU: The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me as yet another departure from past State of the Unions, and we saw that also in how they talked about the Somali population in Minnesota. Trump made, if you want to call it a joke, that once they crack down on Somali fraud in Minnesota to a sufficient extent, we will balance our budget. And this served as a segue to brutal crackdowns in our cities, the deliberate targeting of certain populations in places like Minneapolis and St. Paul. And what was also interesting to watch in this part of the speech was the vocal opposition from Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Talib. Now, what were both of your reactions during this part and what stood out to you?

AL: What really stood out to me beyond the disgusting racism was the fact that he telegraphed that they’re going to do this in other states. At the end of that whole thing, he was like, oh, the number of this fraud is much higher in California, Massachusetts, and Maine. Places where he’s also been sending ICE. There’s been ICE agents terrorizing people all over those states and ramping up operations in Maine, particularly after Minneapolis. So that was alarming.

DT: There’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota. Where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that, and California, Massachusetts, Maine, and many other states are even worse.

This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe. So tonight, although started four months ago, I am officially announcing the War on Fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance.

AL: We’ve been talking about this and doing a lot of reporting on this, but a perfect and fully disturbing example of how the racist conspiracy theories that incubate in the far-right corners of the internet, become policy like that in this administration. And where like where this whole thing came from is a far-right influencer who started peddling this online. Chris Rufo picked it up and a couple months later, ICE agents killed two people in Minneapolis. 

Like these are the consequences of this. And I think people understand that is directly linked to what he’s doing with ICE. This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens. 

JU: Chris Rufo, of course, for those unfamiliar, is with the Manhattan Institute and has been a key player in nationalizing right-wing controversies and culture wars, specifically the rights fight against “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — initiatives among other “hot-button issues.” He really does have a significant and outsized ability to shape narratives on the right.

AL: And while we’re talking about DEI, there was raucous applause to Trump saying we ended DEI. I think that was the most applause that I heard the whole time. And like, people were cheering. 

JU: Kitchen table issue. 

AL: You can also thank Chris Rufo for that.

JW: To your point, the whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech — not all of it, but large sections of it. Particularly when he says that Somali pirates are coming to commit fraud and also to ruin the culture. The cultural elements of the ways he was talking about Somali people, I think are some of the most kind of clearly racist elements.

But I have been just thinking about the State of the Union in the light of Trump posting that really racist image of the Obamas, because in some ways he’s broken the racism barrier is the way I would think about it is that he’s done something so blatantly racist in our culture. And just to be clear, I’m referring to the photo, sorry, the AI image that he posted on Truth Social of the Obamas as apes. So he’s already broken this racism barrier. So there is almost no point. to a certain extent, in even talking about him saying that Somali people are ruining the culture, the kind of Hitler-esque things that he said before about immigrants poisoning the blood — there is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. And so this white national speech, it just makes sense. It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.

AL: It just makes me so upset because each of these things are issues where Democrats ceded so much ground in the beginning that like allowed him to just be like, OK, actually yeah, now we’re just doing racist stuff because you guys let us get really far on immigration and claiming this was a problem and claiming there were people flooding in. 

They’re like, some people are ruining the culture, not quite in the way that you’re saying it. Some people are creating all this crime problem, not quite in the way that you’re saying it, and like that being their strategy to win back voters is like to cede ground on these issues effectively. And it just makes me really mad when I think about it for too long. That’s what you saw in my eyes.

JW: On that point, I do want to talk about his anti-trans rhetoric. Speaking of Democrats ceding ground on issues, Donald Trump brought a Liberty University college student at one point, who he had brought as a guest, to make this point about transgender children, essentially. And so he had said that a school had enabled her to transition, which had then led her to run away and be kidnapped and sex trafficked. Now the mom and this girl are suing multiple entities that they hold responsible, including the school. But Donald Trump really used this moment to try and fearmonger against trans children.

This kind of idea on the right that they’re going to kidnap your children and make them trans — I think this is really an issue where we’ve seen a lot of Democrats cede ground. Obviously there was the infamous Seth Moulton comment about not wanting his kid, his young daughters, to play with males — referring to trans children that they would potentially be playing soccer with, trans girls. 

So we’ve seen Democrats really cede ground on this issue and say it’s fair that people have these concerns. It’s fair that people are scared about their children being kidnapped and turned trans — which is not a thing that’s happening.

But it’s really just this massive ceding of ground. We’ve seen obviously outlets like The Atlantic, the New York Times have obviously really contributed to this paranoia. And it’s legitimizing this fearmongering that Republicans have invested millions and millions of dollars, and it’s doing the work for them instead of actually talking about this issue directly or not just throwing trans kids under the bus is another option. So that’s my little rant.

AL: I’ll also just add one thing on that, I am not a fan of Abigail Spanberger. She’s a moderate and she’s an ex-CIA agent. We’ll leave it at that. But the fact that she delivered the Democratic response after winning a gubernatorial election, in which her Republican opponents repeatedly tried to bait her on trans issues and weaponize this issue against her — We did some reporting on that, talking with analysts about how her win was an example of Democrats sticking to their values on this issues is not necessarily a liability. I can’t speak to her record throughout Congress on this stuff, but at least in charting the path for midterms for both parties tonight and the Democratic response, I just thought that was interesting, that like after doing this whole dog-and-pony show over trans stuff, like they picked someone who stood firmly on that to give the response.

JW: I will also say anecdotally, so I’ve been covering the Senate primary race between Seth Moulton and Ed Markey, and I would say anecdotally, people are still really upset about those comments that Seth Moulton made about trans children.

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And so there’s this idea that there’s only political upside to throwing part of your base and parts of your base that your base also cares about, right, even if they aren’t a large part of your voting block. I think there is a political penalty for that that Democrats don’t see, and I think that’s true with immigrants. That is true on issues related to transgender people. They only see the upside of winning over this kind of mythical moderate and they never seem to see the downside, where you lose people who actually thought that you supported their values.

[Break]

JU: One of the other areas on the topic of ceding ground that I’m really fascinated by that Trump talked about in this speech were his purported desires to ban private equity in Wall Street from buying single-family homes and his calls for Congress to pass a ban on congressional stock trading. Now the devil’s in the details with these sorts of things and with the stock trading ban further reporting shows that he opposes a version of this bill that would also apply to himself, the White House and the judiciary.

Then while he says he wants to stop Wall Street and private equity from buying single-family homes, he’s calling on Congress to do that. And similar to the expected opposition from Republicans in Congress on tariffs at the behest of corporate interests, I expect similar opposition on this. But in rhetoric alone, I do think those are two things that resonate with the average American. What did you both make of those two points tonight?

AL: It’s one of those things where he knows what to say. He knows to say the right thing. Less than 1 percent of the population is going to be like, is this true? Maybe that’s ungenerous, but you know what I mean. Democrats, on the flip side, tangle themselves up in the these particular issues, not only because they’re doing the thing that’s bad, like they’re doing insider stock trading, they’re siding with corporate landlords and fighting or doing everything they can to not really do anything on housing, but they’re so afraid to say something that isn’t poll tested that again, they’re ceding ground to him on this when he’s clearly lying and enriching himself and doing all these things that would negate this behind the scenes, particularly for himself, as you’re saying. 

But the fact that Democrats are also hypocrites on this doesn’t really work because they won’t say the thing. It’s not that hard to go toe to toe with him. It’s actually very simple, but you’re so concerned about making sure that you’re not turning off again, this middle of the road person, that you don’t take this low-hanging fruit. 

And like you saw Elizabeth Warren standing up. This is the only part that they panned to her during this. I don’t know if she stood otherwise, but she was like pointing at him, being like, what about you? OK, let’s get that. Let’s get that in the response. Let’s get Abigail Spanberger hitting that on the head.

JW: Yeah. To your point, Akela, in her response for the Working Families Party, Summer Lee brought up the fact that Democrats are hamstrung by their commitment to corporate donors.

SL: The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. On one side are millions of working people demanding bold action, lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for all. On the other side are corporate donors and consultants who are terrified of upsetting the very interests that rigged this economy in the first place.

JW: You cannot be sworn to the American public, sworn to working people and to their benefit, and also sworn to corporations that we cannot bring down MAGA while also making billionaires comfortable. And I think she’s really poking at that weak center point of the Democrats that you keep mentioning, which is that they are unwilling to, I think there’s both the issue of everything needs to be tested, but they’re also unwilling to throw off the shackles of corporate money, corporate interests.

JU: And to add some context to Trump’s investments, specifically Dave Levinthal in NOTUS has a piece from December 23, 2025, where he wrote that Trump has invested tens of millions of dollars into corporate and government bonds, including those of companies and local governments his administration’s decisions could affect according to a new financial disclosure. So it’s not just that he’s enriching himself off of dealings with other governments, dealings with other oil Gulf state figures. He’s also making money in the market and his own decisions influence the performance of those investments. So of course, he’s going to oppose applying a stock trading ban to himself.

But I also want to go back to Spanberger and the Democratic Party’s decision to pick her to deliver the official response. Like you said Akela, you’re not necessarily a fan, she’s extremely moderate, we’ll say, former CIA official. What do you think this says at a time where we’re seeing surprising flips in state legislatures in red states, massive swings in favor of Democrats, poll numbers for Trump in the tank, you’re seeing Trump voters, some of Trump’s loudest supporters switch? They’re changing their tune entirely. They’re criticizing him over his handling of the Epstein files, of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies’ presence and actions in cities across this country. That seems like a window where they can shift things more to the left, but here they rolled out Abigail Spanberger. Does that send up a red flag for you going into the midterms?

AL: I’m of two minds about this because you can’t ignore the fact that she just won her race and that Glenn Youngkin was the governor of Virginia. For a while, Democrats thought they had it in the bag. She was openly talking about her win in her response, pointing to the fact that they had Republican voters, Independent voters, Democratic voters, this big tent. And that’s important in a state like Virginia.

Is that a roadmap? Is that what’s going to help them win back the house? Wild card Senate even might be up for grabs. Republicans seem really concerned about this. I don’t think so, but I do think, again, the fact that she didn’t see it on some of these “cultural war” issues in her last race is a positive sign. Do I think that means that’s how Democrats are going to play this? Absolutely not.

I’ll also mention that Abigail Spanberger was a pretty big recipient of corporate PAC money while she was in the House and during the 2023 to 2024 cycle. AIPAC was her top single donor. So these are all issues that we know have lost Democrat support and mixing that with a couple of things that are positive and helped her win her election, I don’t think that’s enough to get them where they want to be.

I was not shocked at all that they pick someone like Abigail Spanberger. They typically pick a moderate. I was pleasantly surprised, I would say, because the bar is on the floor, the fact that she was saying Trump is not telling you the truth, talking about the fact that he’s enriching himself, talking directly about the impact that him unleashing federal agents on U.S. cities has had.

Abigail Spanberger: In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does. He lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted, and he offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse. He tries to divide us. He tries to enrage us to pit us against one another, neighbor against neighbor. And sometimes he succeeds.

And so you have to ask who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress? Somebody must be benefiting. He is enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented.

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AL: She didn’t say this explicitly, but shortly after being sworn in as governor, she said Virginia law enforcement was going to stop cooperating with ICE. These are things that we know are moving Democrats. And so whether that translates into the whole party getting on board with this, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. But it wasn’t like, didn’t Elissa Slotkin give the response one year? And I just remember sitting there and being like, this is worse than the State of the Union, and I didn’t feel that way coming out of this. So what does that mean? I don’t know.

JU: I guess that’s good.

JW: That was a ringing endorsement from Akela [laughs]: The speech didn’t make me feel like it was worse than the two-hour speech we all just listened to from the president.

AL: Sorry, the thing that pissed me off the most about Abigail Spanberger’s speech, I will say, and I think this gets to the heart of the issue, was that she’s in Virginia, she’s in Williamsburg where I went to college. So I understand sort of the nerdy allusions to what our Founding Fathers would’ve wanted.

But she was using this like trite device to be like, Trump is ruining the America that our Founding Fathers wanted for us. And we could sit here and talk about all day how stupid that is. But that is like the model: It’s just like third-grade patriotism — a couple of jabs here and there, and we’re going to get everyone back on board. Again, I just don’t think it’s enough.

JW: Like you said, I’m not at all surprised that they picked her. They want a moderate. It obviously looks good for the Democrats to have a woman combating Trump. So that’s clearly part of the calculus as well. Spanberger did just win her election, flip the governor’s mansion, if you want to call it that. But with Spanberger’s election, you also have to keep in mind the context of Trump and what he did to the federal government.

He decimated the economy of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The massive layoffs, the anger at Trump in this area is astounding, so it’s not at all shocking, frankly, that she would win in this exact moment. Is that something that can be replicated throughout the country? Are they feeling the same direct impacts of Trump? I think in some ways, they are. When you look at SNAP cuts, when you look at cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, when you even just see videos of the violence happening in cities from ICE. But it doesn’t have that same direct impact, and so I don’t know if she’s as exciting [for] somewhere that’s not Virginia.

JU: As we wrap, we’re all exhausted. We’re fed up. What was the bright spot tonight for both of you? Was there a funny moment?

JW: This is not necessarily funny, but it made me think of a funny joke, when he brought out the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Now, they’d also had this kind of video stunt where the team had also been hanging out with Kash Patel, the FBI director; they had Trump on the phone where he made a joke about, I’ve gotta invite the women’s hockey team [or be impeached] — which, by the way, declined.

But the only thing that kept going through my mind was that this was terrible hockey PR. And “Heated Rivalry” had worked so hard to get us all into the spirit, to get all of us woke people who are too woke for hockey into it, and they’ve just tarnished the reputation of hockey. Once again, it can’t recover.

JU: Akela, what about you?

AL: I’m somewhere between the communist mayor of New York City, his little homage to Zohran Mamdani, who he’s obsessed with, and I just think it’s funny. And said again, I don’t like his policies, but I like him a lot [laughs] which honestly probably applies to like more than 75 percent of people outside of New York in his age demographic. They’re like, there’s something about this guy, I like him.

Either that, or this is just my brain being broken, because this made me laugh — this is not funny at all, but the response was funny — when he was like, “This should have been my third term.” And in the audience, you hear — I heard — like a mixture of what sounded like “Awww” and like boos. And I was just like, yeah, that sums it up pretty much.

JU: Someone did yell out “Four more years,” which is —

JW: Oh, great.

JU: Disconcerting. I’d say mine was, again, not funny subject matter, but the reaction was funny when he was talking about Iran yet again, trying to escalate tensions there, making not-so-veiled threats. Credit to the camera people and the control room for the event because somebody wisely fixated their camera on Lindsey Graham, who looked like he had reached another plane — like just the bliss that was so visible on his face throughout his body did make me laugh, as horrifying as it is. And that one was mine.

AL: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

JU: Yeah. Good Lord. I want to thank you both for suffering through this with me, and hopefully we saved the listeners two hours of their precious lives.

JW: Thanks, Jordan. 

AL: Thanks, Jordan.

JU: That does it for this episode. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

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

Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl.

The post Rambling Man: Trump’s State of the Union  appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2002, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife attended an elegant dinner party hosted by Barbara Walters. Other participants included Time editor Henry Grunwald, one-time ABC Chair Thomas Murphy, and Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC “World News Tonight.”

At one point in the evening, as New York magazine recounted, Jennings addressed Kissinger and asked him, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”

Kissinger did not respond. However, Grunwald informed Jennings that this inquiry was “unsuitable.” Walters, who considered Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” later said, “I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment. [Kissinger’s wife] Nancy reacted very strongly and hurt.”

There are several notable things about this.

First, the people at the top of American society absolutely love Henry Kissinger. He is their beloved compatriot, and they are anxious to protect his delicate feelings.

Second, Jennings sincerely believed that Kissinger was a war criminal and, unusually, was willing to say this in private. Yet he didn’t have the courage to say this in public, to his audience of tens of millions of Americans. Presumably he then would no longer be invited to these sorts of parties.

Third, Kissinger’s fancy, famous, rich pals will not exactly dispute that Kissinger is a monster. Rather, bringing it up is an embarrassing social faux pas, like, say, mentioning how everyone knows that your buddy is cheating on his wife, who is sitting next to you. Why would you want to spoil the mood just when we’re all feeling toasty from the Chambertin Grand Cru and having such a lovely time?

Think of how Kissinger lives, ensconced in the silken embrace of wealth and power, when you read Nick Turse’s new reporting on his actions while in office. Kissinger, it turns out, was responsible for even more misery and death in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia than was already known — which is truly saying something.

At the top of the pyramid, Kissinger enjoys endless banquets and oceans of acclamation. During the Nixon administration, Kissinger was beloved by Hollywood, often literally. He spoke at the 1996 funeral for a less prominent war criminal, Thomas Enders, an event also attended by David Rockefeller (John D.’s grandson, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank), Paul Volcker (chair of the Federal Reserve who said, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline”), Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (an Argentinian billionaire), and Gustavo Cisneros (a Venezuelan billionaire).

At the height of the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney reported that “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by.” Hillary Clinton referred to Kissinger as “a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” (Clinton rearranged her schedule giving an award to designer Oscar de la Renta so both she and de la Renta could attended Kissinger’s 90th birthday.) In 2014, he attended a Yankees game with noted humanitarian Samantha Power, who later received an award both named after and presented to her by Kissinger.

He served on the board of the fraudulent company Theranos with Jim Mattis, the Marine Corps general who’d go on to be Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, and George Shultz, who was secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. Kissinger joked that he didn’t ask questions of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, because “We were all afraid of her.”

This week, the Washington Post granted Kissinger’s son David — president of Conan O’Brien’s production company — space to tell us that to enjoy his 100th birthday, Kissinger is participating in “centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.” One of the kickoff events was held at the Yale Club in Manhattan:

Then consider those down at the bottom of the pyramid: the Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Timorese, Pakistanis, Latin Americans, and many more, whose lives and bodies were torn to shreds by Kissinger. (The “many more” here includes U.S. soldiers, whom Kissinger referred to as “dumb, stupid animals to be used.”) Here is what Turse writes about one such person he met while reporting in Cambodia: 

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

But Meas Lorn will never, ever get an answer. Turse describes an encounter with Kissinger when he was able to pass her inquiry along:

When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

“Play with it.” It is bracing indeed to understand that the people who run this country find this kind of human being charming and delightful. It makes you wonder if there are any killers from history who they would not celebrate, assuming the killers had conducted their slaughter with the aim of keeping America’s elites rich, warm, and safe behind a phalanx of guns.

The post Henry Kissinger, History’s Bloodiest Social Climber appeared first on The Intercept.

An Intercept investigation, years in the making, reveals previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the conflict in Cambodia and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain talks to Nick Turse, an investigative journalist and contributing writer for The Intercept, about his work to uncover the mass violence Kissinger ordered and oversaw in Cambodia while the U.S. carpet-bombed the country between 1969 and 1973. Turse’s investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields,” is based on previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks in 13 Cambodian villages so remote they couldn’t be found on maps. Their accounts reveal new details of the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war.

“It was very hands on. Kissinger was picking where bombs would be dropped in Cambodia,” Turse says. “The authentic documents associated with these strikes were burned and phony target coordinates and other forged data were supplied to the Pentagon and eventually Congress.” Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.

[Intercepted intro theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I am Murtaza Hussain.

Ted Koppel: The consequences in Cambodia were particular – no, no, no, were –

Henry Kissinger: This is a program that needed doing. Because I’m going to be a hundred years old.

Ted Koppel: Right.

Henry Kissinger: And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step.

MH: There is perhaps no man more emblematic of the dark side of American empire than Henry Kissinger. 

This week, the former Secretary of State, whose role in grotesque human rights abuses across Asia and Latin America has made him a figure of revulsion to millions, will mark his hundredth birthday. Though Kissinger has never been held accountable for atrocities he committed as a powerful U.S. official during the Cold War, that has not stopped journalists and historians from documenting and uncovering the long list of crimes for which he is responsible. And that list is still growing, even today.

Nick Turse, a contributing writer and investigative reporter for The Intercept, has spent decades researching and writing about Kissinger, including in the book, “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.” Nick has published a new trove at The Intercept of previously unreported evidence showing hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and that remain almost entirely unknown to the American people.

Nick joins me now to talk about Kissinger and his foreign policy legacy. Welcome to Intercepted, Nick. Great to have you back. 

Nick Turse: Thanks for having me on. 

MH: So, Nick, first: can you start by telling us a bit about your work? In 2013, you published a book about war crimes and survivors in Vietnam and Cambodia, and interviewed the victims of many U.S. attacks, during the period of the U.S. War in that region. How did you develop an interest in this issue, and what led you towards the subject matter?

NT: Yeah, this goes back a long way. It began when I was a graduate student many, many years ago at Columbia University. I was working on a project on post-traumatic stress disorder among U.S. Vietnam veterans. I used to go down to the National Archives on a regular basis to find documentary materials to match up to interview material that we had, to place a veteran at a specific time, a specific place in Vietnam, to verify what they were doing at the time.

And on one of these research trips to the National Archives, I was searching for several different data sets of documents, and I came up empty on every one of them, and I knew I couldn’t go back to my boss empty handed. So, like many historians before me, I threw myself on the mercy of an archivist there and said, “I have to have something to bring back. Is there anything you can think of that would help me out here?” And he asked me a question that ended up changing my life: he asked me if I thought that witnessing war crimes could cause post-traumatic stress.

I told him that was an excellent hypothesis. I asked what he had on war crimes. And, within an hour, he had delivered to me about 30 archival boxes filled with the U.S. military’s own investigations of massacres, murders, assault, mutilation — horrific crimes committed by U.S. military personnel. And, also, these allegations were made by recently returned veterans or currently serving U.S. military personnel. They were collected by a secret Pentagon task force, and that launched me on my research.

That was about ten years of work going through those documents, writing a dissertation from them, and then – with The Los Angeles Times and, later, on my own – going to Vietnam to track down witnesses and survivors to get the fullest sense I could of these cases.

MH: Many of our listeners probably have some understanding of Henry Kissinger’s role in the U.S. War in Vietnam and broader Southeast Asia during the period of the Cold War. But, you know, he’s turning 100 years old this weekend, and every generation needs to have a bit of a refresher, or at least underlining some of the key points of his involvement in some of the war crimes we’ll be talking about, and which you wrote about in your recent story.

Can you tell us in brief a bit — for those who may not know, or those may want to be reminded – who Henry Kissinger was during this period, and what role he played in the White House’s war policy in Southeast Asia?

NT: Henry Kissinger served as President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor. And Kissinger was – by his own admission, if you listen to him talk about the war, read his writings on it – the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia; that’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

It was unprecedented, before or since, for a national security advisor to have this type of sway, to wield this much power, but he really achieved almost co-president status alongside the actual president Richard Nixon. So, Kissinger was uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, and destabilized that country, laying the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed.

For people who don’t know the story: Nixon had won the White House promising to end America’s war in Vietnam but, instead, he expanded the conflict into neighboring Cambodia. Fearing a public backlash and believing that Congress would never approve an attack on a neutral country, Kissinger and his deputy Alexander Haig hatched a plan.

A month after Nixon took office in 1969, they came up with an operation codenamed “Menu” that was kept secret from the American people, from Congress, and even top Pentagon officials, via a conspiracy of cover stories, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged airstrikes in Cambodia as occurring in South Vietnam.

There was a colonel named Ray Sitton who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he would bring lists of targets to the White House for approval. Kissinger would tell him, “Strike here, strike there,” it was very hands-on. So, Kissinger was picking where bombs would be dropped in Cambodia, and then Colonel Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command.

And, then the authentic documents associated with these strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were supplied to the Pentagon and, eventually, Congress.

MH: So, a kind of interesting detail of history is that Richard Nixon himself wanted an honorable end to the war in Vietnam, or his political career responded to the frustrations of many Americans with the way the conflict was going. And, in many of his public statements, he seemed to reflect those frustrations, and talked about the need to end the war.

I want to play a clip for you, it’s from the 1968 presidential campaign ad for Richard Nixon. And here’s the clip:

Richard Nixon: Never has so much military, economic, and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively as in Vietnam. If, after all of this time, and all of this sacrifice, and all of this support, there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership, not tied to the policies and mistakes of the past. I pledge to you, we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.

MH: A lot of Nixon’s rhetoric around this time reminds me a bit of Iraq War-era U.S. politicians who often reflected or spoke about Americans’ frustrations with the Iraq War, and the war on terrorism, generally. And yet, they didn’t seem to be able to deliver any promise of winding it down, or bringing it to quote-unquote, “an honorable conclusion.”

So, in the case of Nixon, I’m very curious. After he was elected on this promise, what happened thereafter which halted any attempt to end the war? And can you tell us about Kissinger’s role in the prolongation of the war and, particularly, in his position as National Security Advisor to Nixon?

NT: Yes. You know, Nixon came to office, as we heard in the clip, promising peace with honor. But, really, what Nixon and Kissinger at his side did was expand the war, from Vietnam into Cambodia. There had been limited, U.S. covert actions in Cambodia. There had been numerous airstrikes, but nothing like what would follow.

You know, Kissinger, along with Haig, designed this secret bombing that went on at Cambodia beginning in 1969. It was carpet bombing, B-52 strikes. A tremendous tonnage of bombs dropped on a neutral neighbor of Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger also launched a process known as “Vietnamization,” where they would allegedly turn the war over to South Vietnam. This led to, also, a ground invasion by South Vietnamese of Laos. It led to the Cambodian Incursion, which was U.S. and South Vietnamese troops invading Cambodia, but they avoided that particular language, called it an “incursion.”

So, in every aspect, Nixon widened the war. And, you know, if he was truly interested in peace with honor, I mean, they could have wound up the war when he first took office. Instead, about the same amount of Americans died under Nixon’s watch as had died from 1965 till 1969, when he came to office.

So, prolonged and expanded the war, is really how it turned out in point of fact, although his rhetoric often talked about achieving peace, and also turning the war back over to the Vietnamese.

MH: So, Nick, another person who, like you, spent a lot of time in Cambodia going over the legacy of this conflict was Anthony Bourdain, who you also quote in your recent story. The late chef and television host wrote in his 2001 book: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag, sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a glossy new magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia, the fruits of his genius for statesmanship, and you’ll never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševi?.”

NT: I included the Bourdain quote in my article, because I thought it was exceptionally eloquent. It’s very difficult to put it any better. I certainly understand where he was coming from in this.

You know, I traveled through the borderlands of Cambodia talking to people, and the trauma that they experienced during those times, during the war, is profound. And it’s something that, you know, even though they survived the bombing, you had to then live through a genocide by the Khmer Rouge. But the visceral response to the bombing had never left these people. They were still exceptionally traumatized, and they had so many questions for me, because they didn’t understand why this had happened to them.

They weren’t involved in the Vietnam War in any way, it was exceptionally foreign to them. These were rural farm folk who, you know, they didn’t understand what was happening. One day, helicopters just appeared in the skies over their homes. They’d never seen machinery like this, they didn’t know what it was, you know?

It just came out of the sky, and they didn’t know what to make of it. And then, very soon, the machine guns opened up and rockets were fired. And they didn’t have any frame of reference for what was happening, or why. And these were the questions that they asked me.

You know, when I think about the Bourdain quote, I also think about one particular case that I found in the U.S. records that really drives home what the American war meant for Cambodians. In one case that I chronicle – and this one is from U.S. records – Americans shot up a village with helicopters using machine gun fire and rockets. Then U.S. and allied South Vietnamese forces landed and looted the village. An American officer stole a motorbike and hauled it onto a helicopter.

But there were two dozen wounded Cambodian civilians on the ground, including children. The Americans saw, in particular, one young girl, she was shot and bleeding. Some of the Americans wanted to take her for medical care, but the officer who dragged a Suzuki motorbike onboard the helicopter said, “negative,” that they were weighed down by the bike and they had no room.

So, this little girl, maybe about five years old, shot, in desperate need of medical care, was left to die, so that he could bring back this looted motorbike and then present it to his commanding officer.

You know, when you read accounts like this, and you listen to testimony of Cambodians who lived through these types of events, it’s perfectly understandable where Bourdain was coming from, and the visceral reaction that he had.

MH: You know, Nick, I think a lot of people – well, some people will know this but, for background for those who don’t know – obviously, the U.S. was involved in a very intense war in Vietnam, but how did that war expand to Cambodia, and what was the background to U.S. involvement in Cambodia, which Kissinger was such a strong advocate for?

NT: So, from the very earliest days of the Vietnam War, long before most Americans knew that the country was at war in Vietnam, the war led across the border in Cambodia. There were quote-unquote, “accidental airstrikes.” There were also covert cross-border raids. The first airstrike, I think, that I remember finding in the records, was in 1962. Most Americans think that the Vietnam War began in 1965.

But, you know, there were these various incidents throughout the 1960s in Cambodia – covert cross-border raids, errant air attacks, or maybe ones that weren’t so errant – but it was very small scale. And, officially, the United States treated Cambodia as if it was neutral. But both the United States and their foes in Vietnam — the North Vietnamese and revolutionaries in the South — used Cambodia in various ways, and the war bled over, but it was exceptionally different once Nixon took office in 1969.

As I mentioned, Henry Kissinger and his deputy Alexander Haig designed this so-called “secret bombing,” these high-impact B-52 strikes in border areas. The idea was to attack enemy sanctuaries, North Vietnamese troops, Southern Vietnamese guerillas who were using Cambodian territory.

For years, Henry Kissinger said that the U.S. wasn’t bombing Cambodians, they were bombing North Vietnamese in Cambodia. And he told the U.S. Senate this during hearings in 1973. But, decades later, in one of his books, there’s a footnote that says he admits that the United States killed 50,000 Cambodians in the bombing. This was a question that I had for Kissinger, that I took to him. You know, how could you not be bombing Cambodians and kill 50,000 of them?

So, there was this major expansion of the war once Kissinger had become its architect, as far as the bombing goes. Then, instead of just cross-border raids, Nixon and Kissinger planned this Cambodian incursion. Which, you know, it was a euphemism for an invasion by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. Again, the idea was to attack enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia.

The Nixon White House was obsessed with this idea of something they called COSVN or, the terminology at the time was “The Bamboo Pentagon.” The idea was that the South Vietnamese guerillas had something akin to The Pentagon in the United States. Americans have this problem, the American military, they can’t conceive of anyone else operating in a different fashion than they do.

You know, the high command of South Vietnamese guerillas was likely several guys with a radio. But, you know, the U.S. military was looking for some sort of massive base complex with an array of officials in it. And the idea was that they could find this place, capture or kill all the people in it, and destroy the South Vietnamese revolutionary effort.

All they did was just push North Vietnamese troops back further into Cambodia, destabilize Cambodia, and set the stage, eventually, for the Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia. The U.S. War, expanding into this neutral nation, completely destabilized it, and ultimately undermined U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia.

MH: So, Nick, one of the things I found very impressive about your reporting, and I found quite unique when reporting on stories which are often treated as historical interests, whether they’ve been addressed or not in any other fashion, is that you’ve surfaced some really new information in the story, in the form of documents and transcripts.

Can you tell us a bit about your reporting and what you uncovered, and how it shed more light on Nixon/Kissinger’s role in Cambodia?

NT: You know, I think the main takeaways of this story, the reporting from the ground at Cambodia and also the documents, they show that Henry Kissinger is responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known. The exclusive archive that I was able to put together offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war, and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people.

This includes previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks, and it reveals new details about the long-term trauma that’s born by survivors of the American war there.

And, yeah, I was able to get this material by traveling to Cambodia. I searched the borderlands with Vietnam, looking for villages that were mentioned in U.S. military documents. I was carrying binders filled with photos of U.S. helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, asking villagers to point out the military hardware that killed their loved ones and their neighbors. My interviewees were uniformly shocked that Americans knew about attacks on their villages, and that one of them had traveled across the globe to speak with them.

You know, I’ve spent a career reporting in far flung conflict zones – South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Somalia, on and on – and I’m used to challenging reporting but, even though Cambodia was no longer a war zone when I went there, it was a real challenge. Just finding the villages was difficult work.

We would roll through thick, unruly forests, and rubber plantations, and rice fields, and then turn off paved roads onto red dirt paths, looking for villages that were unknown even to local officials. These tiny border villages weren’t on maps. Oftentimes, the names had changed since the early 1970s, so younger officials didn’t know the older names. But, if you actually found the village, people there didn’t know the new name.

You know, there was one village in the military documents that I had, it just had a phonetic spelling, something like, “Moroan.” There was no village in Cambodia called Moroan, but there was one called Morone. The trouble was, nobody knew how to get there. So, you know, we got fairly close, and spent two days driving around local roads, asking for directions, going this way and that. And, eventually, we turned off onto a red dirt track that ended up dead-ending to just a footpath, and walked about a mile or so, and found a village of simple wooden homes on stilts, and found the village chief.

I pulled out my documents. I described a particular attack that happened on May 1st, 1970, when U.S. helicopters attacked the village, killed 12 civilians, wounded five others. And the documents noted that, after the assault, the survivors fled the village, to a place called Con Tut.

And, in all the Cambodian border villages I visited, focusing on a lone attack from the U.S. documents just left people baffled. They’d endured so many airstrikes, so many attacks by helicopter gunships, that one attack never stood out to them. But, you know, as I was describing it, the date, the village chief gestured towards the far edge of the village, and he said, many people died in that area at that time. And then he said, afterward, the people left this village for another called Con Tut. So, I knew I had the right place.

And that’s how the reporting went. A lot of driving around, trying to triangulate locations from these decades-old, fractured, and imperfect information. And in each instance I came searching for one violent incident but, in almost every case, I heard accounts of relentless attacks, and years and years of trauma.

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MH: You know, one thing I’ve noticed from reporting in areas where conflicts have taken place previously — sometimes years or even decades, but the survivors are still there — is that the trauma and memories really do linger, and leave a very indelible mark on the people who continue to live in those areas. Family members were lost or wounded, or merely were witness to what took place in their communities.

Can you tell us a bit about the interviews you had with these Cambodian survivors, and the legacy that this violence has left on their communities?

NT: The trauma that people experienced during the war was palpable, and whenever I went to one of these villages and talked to people, I would tell them that, you know, I knew that it was very, very difficult subjects talk about. And I understood if they didn’t want to delve into that history, but that, if they were willing to, I wanted to listen.

And you could see it in the face of people, and if you do this kind of interviewing, this kind of work, you can see the signs of decompensation, and people re-experiencing trauma, and, you know, as a reporter, as an interviewer, try to manage that as best as possible. Give people a chance to take some time, process it.

But, generally, even people who had a difficult time talking about this, at the end, you know, they would thank me. One, it’s part of the culture, but two, you know, people would go further, and say that they were grateful for the opportunity to speak about this. That, you know, they had lived through all of this trauma, and then the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed.

And because they stayed in these villages with all the same people, they all experienced it, it wasn’t something that they revisited. And after all those years of war and trauma, they weren’t eager to at the time. But yeah, they never had a chance to really process it or talk about it. And they said that my showing up and asking about it gave them an opportunity to, you know, finally – you know, it was, in many cases, I think, an excuse to talk about these things, confront them, bring them back up, and share these memories. With an outsider like me, but also with each other.

And, generally, there would be a lot of children from the village who would crowd around, and I asked my translator, who was with me, was it appropriate to have the children there listening to this? And he and the adults there thought it was. That the children didn’t know these stories, you know? People in the village just didn’t bring these things up, but they thought it was important for their children to hear about it.

And, because I would bring binders with photos of American aircraft, they could point out to them what each aircraft did, and their memories of it. This one flew exceptionally high, this one at a middle level, this right above the rooftops. And explain what life had been like during the war, and how they’d lived through it.

MH: I want to pivot back to talking about Henry Kissinger, specifically in his role and his legacy related to Cambodia.

But, before I do that, one thing I want to ask you very quickly about two particular incidents you reported on in your story. One was a looting incident of a village that took place in Snuol, Cambodia, in 1970. Another was a bombing attack in Neak Loeung, Cambodia, which took place three years after that.

For the case of this looting, it’s very interesting, because there was some reporting about at the time, if you look back in The New York Times and a few other places, it was somehow documented that this took place by the U.S. media contemporaneously. But the reporting was sort of – I wouldn’t say antiseptic, but it sort of just raised questions without pointing fingers, per se. It was like a neutral report about what, objectively, seems to be a very grave crime.

And, likewise, the bombing of this village as well. You know, it was so many villages bombed at this time, and the attention given to it did not seem commensurate in the U.S. press to the actual human impact on Cambodians.

Can you talk a bit about these two incidents? Just, first, what took place, specifically? And then, if you had any context or perception of how deep the impact was on these people, and how different it was from the U.S. press reporting at the time that existed.

NT: Yeah. The case that you mentioned, the looting of Snuol. Now, that was, as you say, it was reported at the time. What I think my story brings to bear is that there was an official U.S. military investigation of this, basically because U.S. troops were caught looting red-handed. The commander on the scene, someone that I talked to for the story, named Grail Brookshire. He was a colonel at the time, he retired as a one-star general.

He came out and told television crews who made it to Snuol as part of the Cambodian incursion – they went to this town – that his troops, unequivocally, were not looting. And these television crews had shot footage of U.S. troops smashing open Cambodian shops, stealing alcohol, soda, batteries, radios. They stole a motorbike from that area, too. I think farm equipment, like a tractor, tied it to a tank and hauled it out of there. It was clear at the time that the U.S. was lying about this, the military was lying to the press, even though U.S. troops were on camera looting this village, this town.

But what hasn’t been reported on is that the results of this U.S. military investigation, it was a complete whitewash. Or, rather, they said that looting took place, but instead they shifted the blame to civilian reporters who were on the scene, and said that if any looting took place, it was the reporters there.

And, you know, there’s absolutely no basis for this, it’s just conjured out of nothing, they were just looking for someone to blame. And they didn’t appear to have interviewed anyone but high-ranking U.S. military personnel.

One person they could have talked to – and one that I did talk to – was a man named Jack Fuller who, at the time, was serving in the Army and working for Stars and Stripes, the venerable U.S. Military newspaper. He was in Snuol, and his report in Stars and Stripes documents this, the looting taking place and U.S. soldiers carrying out this looting. They apparently never thought to speak with him.

I called him up – he’s passed away in the time since I spoke with him – but he laughed when I told him the allegation that was in the U.S. military documents. He said he saw no reporters on the scene looting, and he found it farcical that reporters would need to steal alcohol, since he said civilian reporters had easy access to it, it was cheap and available, and he’d never seen anything like that. So, I mean, that’s, I think, the main takeaway of my reporting on the looting of Snuol.

The bombing of, of Neak Loeung, that also was heavily reported on at the time. This was a case where a Cambodian town was hit by a devastating B-52 strike. Due to an accident or carelessness on the part of an American bombardier in one of these B-52 Stratos Fortress aircraft, 30 tons of bombs were dropped right on this Cambodian town, they hit the downtown squarely, and it was devastating.

I spoke to a survivor, someone who was living on the outskirts of Neak Loeung, who lost relatives there, and she told me that she had experienced her house shaking from bombing before, but this, she said, was like nothing else she had ever experienced. It was devastating.

And, yeah, the U.S. had no way to cover this up at the time, they tried to manage the story as best they could. And they came out and said that 137 Cambodians were killed in this, and that they were going to pay reparations to them, about $400.

It really wasn’t a lot of money. A lot of the people that died were the sole breadwinners for their family, and $400 was about four years’ salary for Cambodians at the time. So, you lost the lifetime earnings of someone and got a four-years’ term. What I found, the two major findings of my reporting, is that this was actually a tremendous undercount of the number killed. The U.S. actually knew that they had killed or injured many more people. The number was about 85 percent higher than the official number that they announced, but they kept this a secret.

They also paid out far less money to the Cambodian survivors than they had publicly announced. In classified State Department cables, I found that they paid about only half the amount. About $218 was paid to the survivors of this airstrike, even though they had announced that they’d paid $400.

So, you know, I found two major lies where the U.S. had manipulated the press and the public, and had kept the secret for decades.

MH: You know, I’m sure it’s something that you encountered, and it’s part of the difficulty of reporting and creating a robust historical record in areas where the U.S. carries out military operations, but, you know, it’s underdeveloped civil service and press and statistics, generally.

But what can we say, what do we know about the number of people who were killed in Cambodia during the period that this Kissinger-directed military operation was taking place? Is there an accepted figure, or a ballpark figure, or are there figures out there which you believe are not representative but commonly believed? What can we say about, uh, the actual scale?

And the reason I ask the question, too, is because we’re looking back on Kissinger’s legacy. And oftentimes when we think of the great criminals – no other word to put it – in history, we think about the number of people they killed, and oftentimes we have to estimate that. But I was curious, Nick, of your perspective, if there is one we can grasp onto. What was the actual human toll, in numbers, of people who lost their lives as a result of these operations?

NT: Yeah, I mean, it’s very difficult. I spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around this, speaking to experts on it.

You know, there are numbers that range from the one that Kissinger gave, which is an exceptionally lowball estimate of 50,000 Cambodians killed. Which, you know, he takes some responsibility for. And there are estimates that range as high as half a million Cambodians killed by the bombing, which I think is probably on the high side.

What I ended up coming up with as a conservative estimate, and it’s not my estimate, it’s by Ben Kiernan, formerly the Director of Genocide Studies at Yale University, and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. Air Campaign in Cambodia. He estimated that as many as 150,000 civilians in Cambodia were killed during Kissinger’s tenure, that Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks that killed 150,000 civilians or so.

Put that in context. That’s six times the number of non-combatants that are thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, during the War on Terror, according to an estimate by Air Wars, the UK-based airstrike monitoring group. So, you know, I think that’s a fair estimate, and 150,000 civilians, it might be a little bit low.

I talked to Greg Grandin, who’s a biographer of Henry Kissinger, and he estimated that, overall, Kissinger – who helped prolong the Vietnam War, facilitate genocides and Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, accelerated civil wars in southern Africa, and also supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America – had the blood of about 3 million people on his hands in total. So, when you’re talking about the biggest criminals in modern history, this is a significant number of civilians that Henry Kissinger bears significant responsibility for their deaths.

MH: You write in your story, actually, that Kissinger helped prolong not just the Vietnam War, but also helped facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh, accelerated civil wars in southern Africa and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. Of course, a whole episode about Kissinger’s crimes beyond Southeast Asia would take quite a bit of time to go over, because of the breadth of them.

But it’s interesting that, despite this very well documented track record – which I think is not really disputed by many people about Henry Kissinger’s legacy of human rights abuses – he’s still a member in good standing, even quite respected, of the U.S. foreign policy community, for lack of a better term. And, not only that, he was celebrated contemporaneously to many of these events.

In 1973, some of our listeners may know Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And, in 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He’s still pretty much a regular, or is considered a wise elder of the foreign policy circuit. Hillary Clinton said that he was one of her mentors.

Can you speak a bit, given how much you know intimately about Kissinger’s actions and the human consequences of them, of what you make, or how you interpret, these efforts to not just sanitize, but actually glorify his career and legacy?

NT: Yeah, Henry Kissinger is the ultimate political survivor, you know? And you can go back to the Nixon White House. Almost that entire White House was consumed by the Watergate scandal, but Henry Kissinger was able to come out unscathed and, actually, was lauded at the time, and was not only held over by Gerald Ford, but promoted then, to Secretary of State. So, you could see that Kissinger has, has, has found ways to survive, and a lot of that has been through courting the press.

You know, Henry Kissinger had always, for lack of a better term, manipulated the press. Had contacted key members of the press behind the scenes, drew them in, became a trusted source. And he was able to, for decades, just massage and manipulate his public image, and sell this idea of a great statesman, a great thinker.

And, you know, he was able to convince the media and the public that he was an exceptionally wise man, and able to brush off and dismiss claims even though these allegations of war crimes have dogged him.

When confronted, he generally shakes these things off. He will, when asked to address crimes, he’ll say that it’s actually those who call him a war criminal that are the problem, have the problem. That they are using this terminology in ways that demean and diminish the idea of war crimes, and he just dismisses it out of hand. And so many in the media elite have bought into this, and that it’s overblown or hyperbole, but I imagine that most of these people have never gone out and talked to, visited the people that Henry Kissinger’s actions have affected so intimately.

MH: Yeah. That’s interesting, you mentioned that he’s crafted this image of himself as this great foreign policy thinker, whereas his track record, actually, in foreign policy accomplishment seems to be very mixed at best, and very, very poor on human rights concerns. I actually read a few of his books, and I found that the vast majority of them were quite basic, and I didn’t find that he was quite the genius that he made himself out to be.

But I digress. You actually spoke to, or you attempted to speak to Mr. Kissinger some years ago, and to confront him about some of these very, very negative and dark aspects of his record. What was his response, and what was that encounter like?

NT: I confronted Henry Kissinger about my findings back in 2010, just after I had reported in Cambodia. You know, it wasn’t easy to get to him. Kissinger isn’t a shrinking flower, but we don’t exactly run in the same social circles. You could find him at black-tie dinners, and Tony restaurants, and invitation-only events, but I had a real tough time getting to him.

You know, I’d call Kissinger Associates, the international consulting firm where he was the chairman, but he was never in. I emailed his representatives and it always went unanswered. I sent an interview request by certified return-receipt mail, but it went unacknowledged. I tried to gain an audience with him any way I could think of.

I have a PhD from Columbia University, and I was on faculty there at the time, and I requested permission to sit in on a lecture of his at Columbia, but one of the heads of the seminar series that was sponsoring his talk told me that Kissinger’s office had given explicit instructions not to allow any outsiders in. I would call his offices once a week, and they always told me that he wasn’t adding interviews to his calendar, he was writing a book. And then, a couple weeks later, I’d see the Financial Times or some other publication run an interview with him. So, I knew that he was specifically ducking me.

So, I came up with a plan. There was a state department conference on the Vietnam War back in 2010, and Kissinger was giving a keynote address, so I knew he’d be out in the clear and I’d have a shot. I decided I’d do an ambush interview.

And he gave a talk there, it was vintage Kissinger. I will always remember that he said that the great tragedy of the Vietnam War was that Americans lost faith in each other. You know, this is a war that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but this sort of tells you the Kissingerian mindset.

After he finished his talk, he took questions, so I was able to ask him one, publicly and on the record. I asked him to square public comments that he made to the U.S. Senate in 1973, that the U.S. didn’t bomb Cambodians, with the admission found in one of his books that his war had killed 50,000 Cambodians. And, you know, I said, “How can you kill 50,000 people, if you’re not bombing them?”

And, you know, Kissinger is a pro at obfuscation, and he responded with a wall of words that was designed to misdirect the audience and confuse the question. And I kept following up, but he had the advantage of having a microphone, and mine was taken away. You know, I couldn’t let it end there.

So, after the talk, I rushed down, and pushed myself into a scrum of Kissinger sycophants who were there waiting to shake his hand and take photos with him. And I’ll never forget, there was a guy in front of me, a State Department historian who had been listening to recordings that Kissinger had made while he was in the White House. And he told Kissinger that it was so sexy – those were his words – to listen to him, that the recordings had such sex appeal.

And when I got to Kissinger, I was the next one up, and it got less sexy real fast. And I took another shot at getting an answer from him. And, you know, I pressed him about the substance of my question, that Cambodians were bombed and killed, and he became visibly angry, and he asked me what I was trying to prove.

And, you know, I’ll never forget. He said – it was such an odd phrase – he said, “play with it,” to me. “Have a good time.”

But I still couldn’t let it go. So I asked him to answer the question that one of the Cambodian survivors had asked me. It was a woman named Mis Lauren, who had lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack, and an uncle and cousins to other attacks. And, for decades, this question haunted her. She said to me, “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked us. Why did they drop the bombs here?”

You know, Kissinger was the architect of this American war, and I asked him to answer her question. But he came back to me with a sarcastic reply, and he said “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” And he stomped his cane on the floor, and he stalked off, left the auditorium. And, the next two days, at the conference, I never saw him again. That was it, you know?

He was lucky, because the Cambodians in the villages I visited didn’t have the luxury of such an easy escape.

MH: So, Nick, Kissinger is about to turn 100 this week, and he remains a figure who was never held accountable for his many crimes. He remains someone who’s consulted by U.S. elites when they have questions about political and military strategy in the present day. He’s far from a pariah among the U.S. policymakers.

What can we say about the legacy of Kissinger? Not just in the areas where his own actions and views impacted people directly, but also in the later conflict, when he was not in government, particularly the War on Terror conflicts. How did his own ideas or ways of doing business, ideas of how to use U.S. military force shape and influence wars more closer to us in the present?

NT: I think my reporting in this story, the interviews and the documents, demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives. A failure to protect civilians, to conduct post-strike assessments, to investigate allegations of civilian harm, and to prevent this damage from occurring again and again.

There’s also this consistent failure to punish or hold U.S. personnel accountable, from those in the field who carry out attacks, to those at the highest level of government, like Henry Kissinger. These policies not only obscured the true toll of the American war in Cambodia, but they set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and beyond.

I spoke with Greg Grandin, the author of “Kissinger’s Shadow,” a biography of Henry Kissinger. And he said – and this is something I agree with – that you can trace a line from the secret bombing of Cambodia to the recent and current U.S. wars. He mentioned that the covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. And the way he put it is that it’s “the perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.” So, I think this is the legacy that we’re talking about when we talk about Henry Kissinger.

It’s all the people that he killed in Cambodia; 150,000 as a conservative estimate. And then, his legacy is also all the lives that have been lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, during the 20-plus years of the War on Terror. In many ways, he facilitated all the carnage that came after.

MH: Nick, there’s so much more we could say about Kissinger and his terrible legacy, but we’ll leave the conversation here for today. Thanks for this excellent piece, and thanks for joining us today on Intercepted. 

NT: Thanks so much, Maz. 

MH: That was Nick Turse, a contributing writer for The Intercept, and an investigative reporter focusing on national security. His latest series on Henry Kissinger can be found on theintercept.com.

[Intercepted end-show theme music.]

And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. 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.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Henry Kissinger’s Bloody Legacy appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by an overwhelming sense of chaos. Every week the U.S. finds itself in a new crisis of the president’s making. The war in Iran and the broader Middle East is stretching into its fourth week, as the administration prepares to send thousands of troops to the region for a possible ground invasion. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to allegedly assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply the most minimal of reforms to ICE. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

“It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle,” Nikhil Pal Singh tells The Intercept Briefing. “They smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something.” The professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War” joins host Akela Lacy in a conversation about protests and movement-building in the latest Trump era.

Trump “said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home,” says Singh. “The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost.”

“What we saw in Minneapolis and in Chicago and other places is almost like a really spontaneous emergence of that civic energy where people are basically like, ‘No, this is not OK in my city,’” says Singh. With the upcoming nationwide No Kings protests on Saturday, Lacy brings up the challenges of protesting under the second iteration of the Trump administration, and whether it’s fair to question the efficacy of protests at a time when they’re being met with paramilitary forces.

“We’ve lived through a period where the protests against the war in Gaza were pretty brutally suppressed by the Democratic Party and by the very institutions that the Trump administration is trying to destroy,” notes Singh. For there to be long-term meaningful change during this increasingly hostile environment to dissent or opposition, big alliances are needed, including with parts of the Trump coalition, he says. “Those kinds of cross-class alliances that cross the parties that are oriented around what we might call left economic populist politics and anti-war politics are going to have to be built.”

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

Transcript 

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

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing with Akela. 

AL: I don’t know about you, Jessie, but I honestly feel like I’ve had constant whiplash the past few months. Maybe it would be helpful for our listeners if we start with just breaking down exactly where we are right now in the world. I’ll do a quick recap. 

We are, as many people know, in a full-blown war with Iran after being told for years that that would effectively mean the beginning of the end. The U.S. has killed more than 150 people in boat strikes around the world and successfully kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife. Trump has consolidated the nation’s largest paramilitary police force and unleashed it on U.S. cities and now airports. The number of people being detained by ICE is at an all-time high. Federal agents have killed two protesters, and more than a dozen other people have died this year alone at the hands of ICE.

At the same time, prices are soaring. The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent, in case you missed that, which I certainly did. The government is still partially shut down, and Trump and his allies are still withholding documents from the public on Jeffrey Epstein.

And in case anyone forgot, we’re knee-deep in a midterm cycle that’s seen unprecedented levels of dark money and efforts by corporate lobbies to influence elections. So how are you feeling about all of this? How are you processing all of this? 

JW: Yeah, it’s a lot to process as a journalist and a person in the country.

The way that I’m thinking about this is really in the context of protests, and whether or not we’re going to see a real resistance to the Trump administration emerge. Obviously, what we’ve seen in Minneapolis has been a real resistance to their efforts from everyday people. What I’m thinking about now is just how can we exist in this society and push back against some of these really awful things, when there’s so much repression of protests and of activism in general, and of journalism? 

AL: The conventional wisdom for moments like this is that this is when the opposition should theoretically be at its strongest. Is that the case right now? What is the opposition right now, and how are regular people responding to this, and is it having any effect? 

JW: Yeah, we can talk about poll numbers. Certainly Donald Trump is historically unpopular, so we are seeing people react in that way. But I think we have to take into account the real ways in which the Trump administration, but also the Biden administration — and if we’re going to talk about college protests — university administrators really clamped down on college campus protesters, on protest in general. And we’ve seen the indictment of protesters in the Cop City case; we’ve seen the indictment of protesters in the case in Chicago, where we saw Kat Abughazaleh indicted. So there’s a real risk to protest.

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I mean, we interviewed Momodou Taal on this very podcast, a Cornell student who had to flee the country in order to escape being detained by the Trump administration because of his actions on college campuses. So there’s real fear.

I think there’s also real movement organizing. We’ve seen it in Minneapolis, we’ve seen it in even deep-red places like Hagerstown, Maryland, which I’m interested in talking a little more about.

There’s certainly still activity, but there’s a lot of fear and a lot of that fear is understandable.

AL: Jessie, you mentioned the Cop City case, and I think those indictments were obviously an effort to intimidate those protestors. I will just note that a judge dismissed most of the charges against them, but the Georgia attorney general is trying to appeal that dismissal. So the intimidation tactic continues, whether or not the charges were dismissed.

JW: No, I think that’s a really good point that a lot of the early intimidation we’ve seen of protesters has been unsuccessful in terms of actually getting them detained and locked up. We’ve also seen many of the students who were detained by the Trump administration for protesting have since been released or have fled the country and are no longer within the administration’s grasp. But nonetheless, it still has this chilling effect on protest on college campuses, but obviously across the country when people have to worry about whether or not they’re going to end up in prison for trying to protect their neighbors, I think that becomes a really difficult decision for a lot of people. 

AL: Specifically on this question of protest or how communities are responding to the increasing state violence that we’re seeing, you’ve been doing some reporting on a rapid response ICE watch group in a red county in Maryland. Is that right? 

JW: Yes. I have been covering the potential development of an ICE facility in technically Williamsport, Maryland, but the closest, largest city would be Hagerstown. But what’s been really fascinating about this story — the ins-and-outs of how this warehouse is going to become habitable for human beings is a large part of what I’m focused on. But we’ve seen in this county, which is Washington County, where the warehouse ICE facility would exist — it’s this deep red county where they’re trying to build this ICE warehouse, and you’ve actually seen massive resistance. 

So first, I would really point to this Hagerstown Rapid Response group. There’s this group that emerged really in the wake of what they watched in Minneapolis. They saw the successful ICE observers and ICE watches that were going on in communities in the Twin Cities, and they wanted to build something similar to that. So they developed the Hagerstown Rapid Response. 

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But over the course of developing their group, they realized that there was this ICE detention facility that was going to be potentially built in their community. So they really organized these pinpoint protests against the county commissioners where they live. So they’ve held weekly protests outside of the county commissioner’s office, but they’ve also worked to surveil the warehouse. They have drones they have used to get images to send out to the press, to the public, to really raise public awareness about this issue.

So we are seeing people in communities, even in conservative communities, really coming together and finding ways to protest and organize against ICE and against the Trump administration. 

AL: We touch on all of this and more with our guest today, Nikhil Pal Singh, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War.”

Nikhil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing 

Nikhil Pal Singh: Thanks for having me. 

AL: Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by this overwhelming sense of chaos. As we speak, the war in Iran and the broader Middle East stretches into its fourth week. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to — it’s unclear exactly how — assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply even the most minimal of reforms to ICE. 

Meanwhile, Trump is minting a new coin with his face on it, continuing to renovate the White House, and his sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a lot to keep up with. You’ve written that the question facing the American public today is less about whether what we’re seeing is unprecedented and more about what purpose the chaos serves, and how we respond to it. But what effect has this constant whiplash had on the public and its ability to organize or to respond?

NS: It’s a good question, and it’s where I began the piece that I wrote. You didn’t even mention “Operation Total Extermination” in Latin America and Ecuador, which Nick Turse wrote about this week. And of course, the signs that insiders have been trading on information in Trump’s tweets, making directional trades against them in the oil market and in the futures markets.

AL: Right. 

NS: It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle. The term that the Trump administration likes to use, and Pete Hegseth’s favorite term, is “kinetic action”: We’re moving fast and breaking things all the time and showing and asserting our dominance over every situation. Those of us who try to comment upon this, report on it, analyze it, are always trailing behind it, trying to keep up, trying to make sense of the next thing — it does induce a state of whiplash. It does induce a state of paralysis by design.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to try to think about: How do we create a broader framework to understand what’s happening? Not a framework that tries to say this all makes sense, or it has some rationality, because there is a substantive irrationality to all of this, but I do think there is a method in their madness. And that method is really about keeping us off balance.

It’s about allowing them to continue to raid the Treasury. It’s about destabilizing the institutions that create a sense of organization, order, coherence within our society that then allows them to have more room to maneuver, at least within the short term. It’s hard to say what the long term’s going to look like, because everything they do has a short-term calculus associated with it.

I think the long term looks quite grim for them and for us, especially if we can’t get a handle on this. I think that’s part of what we need to try to understand. We need to almost not take a step back, but balance ourselves against the impulse to constantly be shaken and reactive in relationship to everything that they do and the next thing that they do and the next thing that they do.

I will say, as a last point in this opening, that I think in the Iran war they might really have met their match. That smash and grab, which has essentially been the mode right? “We’ll seize Maduro. We’ll send an ICE team into Minneapolis.” Of course, they met their match in Minneapolis too, and we can come back to that.

AL: Yeah, we will. 

NS: But they smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something. That is going to have long-term consequences for many, many, many of us, and political consequences for them that they’re not going to be so easily left behind. 

AL: This is a great segue into what I wanted to ask you about.

So for our listeners, we’re talking about this essay you wrote for Equator magazine in January, really central to which is the idea of “Homeland Empire” that you write about. This notion — which is linked with your last point about the long-term ripple effects in Iran and beyond that we can’t necessarily account for yet — this notion that you cannot understand Trump’s project if you separate the realms of the domestic and the foreign.

That what we’ve heard for years about the U.S. turning its global wars back on its own citizens is happening now. That it’s more than a disturbing phenomenon. It’s a symptom of this broader rot at the core of U.S. institutions, which Trump is an outgrowth of. 

You write, “Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: Call it ‘Homeland Empire.’”

What is the utility of that specific framing, and what does it tell us that we don’t already know or understand about Trump?

NS: I do think that the concept of the “homeland,” which really comes into focus in the global war on terror. And there’s a great book by Richard Beck called “Homeland,” which has been really important for me. It’s suggested that national security and the security complex needed to be in some ways reshored.

You have the development of the Department of Homeland Security, which is a massive government reorganization, creating a whole new government department that you might even think of as being on par with the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II. So there’s the beginning of a reorientation institutionally in terms of policy. Of course, [George W.] Bush frames it in a very telling way. He says, we have to be able to fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here. That’s still within the old model, even though the model is shifting. 

It’s the old model which tells us Americans are going to be safe as long as we keep our power projection and fighting the enemies and the bad guys all around us. That idea that there are threats everywhere, and that the United States has this global mandate and remit to fight them — that really does go back to the end of World War II and the Cold War. So there’s a long arc of that thinking. But what begins to shift in the global war on terror, and partly because of the attacks of 9/11, is this sense that the homeland is actually under a real threat. That it actually can be attacked. It can be destabilized.

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Now, that doesn’t just come out of 9/11. If you think about the period since the end of the Cold War, the search for new enemies dissipates. If you’re as old as I am, you remember when they were promising a huge peace dividend. Of course, the wars in the Middle East immediately begin to ratchet up. But the other thing that begins to ratchet up is the war on crime and the war on migrants. If you track the government spending — that precedes the origins of the Department of Homeland Security — on the prison complex and on the border–control complex, those are also going through the roof. They’re being imagined, again, in terms of this primary sense that Americans are being rendered insecure by street criminals, by migrants coming across the border, and now also by terrorists who might infiltrate. 

If you remember back to the war on terror period when Bush was fighting in Iraq, some Republican congressmen then were already running ads saying terrorists and migrants were essentially the same thing — that brown people coming across the border wanting to do us harm. So the idea that the terrorists, the migrant, the criminal represent this new nemesis that is actually now much more proximate, that has been building up for a long period of time. It’s been helping to produce spending streams, funding streams, institutions. And Trump has cemented it into a single ideological complex.

One of the things Trump was very, very clear about, even though he promised that he was going to be a peace president and wind down the wars and the forever wars, not be involved in overextension of American power overseas, et cetera, et cetera, which he numerously described as foolish, reckless — even though he did support the Iraq War, let’s not forget that.

He also said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home. He began to imagine bringing the fight home through the framework of a mass deportation campaign through the idea of making what was already a paramilitary organization in a sense — Customs and Border Protection, but more or less confined to the border — bringing that into the interior of the country. Adding huge amounts of funding to DHS to build up an immigration police with paramilitary characteristics.

We’ve seen the results of that over the last year. The idea is that it’s only the illegals who are being governed violently or the only the criminals. They’re always careful to say that, but that’s actually not how it’s played out at all. The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost. 

AL: Right. The end result is the expansion of state power and state violence.

NS: Right. 

AL: So this brings us to Minneapolis. We’re seeing this massive escalation of state violence at home and abroad, while the public is also weathering increasingly difficult economic hardship, which is being exacerbated again by the war in Iran.

That is the same issue that many people argued posed such an obstacle to former President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, and what brought us a second Trump term, right? 

NS: Yeah. 

AL: This economic hardship issue, this is the time that you would expect the height of mobilization by the opposition. While we’ve seen massive public opposition to ICE raids. We have “No Kings” protests; there’s another one planned for this weekend. But we’ve also seen the state deploy intense violence in response to that opposition, obviously killing two protesters in Minneapolis. 

Do you think that the state’s response has effectively crushed whatever opposition has come up? Whether the answer to that is yes or no, where does the opposition go in this increasingly hostile environment? 

NS: I think it’s a good question, and it’s definitely one that I’ve been mulling over. We would all like to see the streets filled with people again like 2020. I do think Americans have proved more attuned to violence at home and violence against their own neighbors and in their own neighborhoods. I think that’s been amazing and inspiring. 

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It really gives the lie to what the Trump administration professes when JD Vance says something like, anybody would be uncomfortable, having someone next door to them who speaks another language. It’s actually not true. Actually Americans, even in small towns, even in rural spaces, have grown accustomed to living alongside people who are very different and figuring out how to either live and let live, or sometimes even more affirmatively, to cooperate, to play soccer together, to be in civic organizations, to go to church.

I’m not saying the United States isn’t still a segregated country, or that there isn’t racial animus or distrust or any of those things. But I think we really underestimate the degree of ordinary comity among people.

Obviously what we saw in Minneapolis and in Chicago and other places is almost like a really spontaneous emergence of that civic energy where people are basically like, “No, this is not OK in my city.” These might even be people who have sensitivities and anxieties about unauthorized migration, which is a legitimate issue to debate. But the violence and impunity and lack of due process and disruption is offensive to people. We’ve seen the results of that in public polling data. We see it in the ways in which people act on the streets. 

I think wars overseas are more difficult for people in the United States. They feel more distant. The propaganda is so thick. You’ve been told for decades that Iran is some alien power that is irrational and in search of a nuclear bomb that might be eventually fired at like New York or something. It’s absolutely worthless propaganda, but it does its work. It’s very, very tied into the protection and safety of Israel, which is the most heavily propagandized topic in the U.S. foreign policy realm. People don’t really know what to think. And it doesn’t seem to affect them in the immediate sense — especially when you’re bombing from the sky and using remote warfare.

But now they’re really at a crossroads. They are amassing troops in the region. If American troops start going into combat situations and getting killed, you’re going to see people start to pay a lot more attention as gas prices rise, as the cost of everything increases.

Trump is going to be bedeviled with all the problems that Biden faced because people are going to feel that very profoundly. People who, as you say, are living paycheck to paycheck who are struggling to make rent, for whom a $1 increase in the price of gas when they have to commute two hours each day is actually a huge amount of money on a weekly basis. Trump owns that.

So they’re extremely reckless people, and I have to think that politically they will pay a huge price. They already are. As long as we — that is, those of us who are opposed to this — are able to exercise our civil and political rights both in the streets and at the ballot box. That obviously is going to be a real question. Is repression going to ramp up? Is there going to be chicanery around the elections? I think we can expect both of those things. Then we’re going to see where the balance of forces are. But I don’t think we should interpret the current quietness around the anti-war stuff necessarily as evidence that civic energies and oppositions has been beaten.

AL: To that point, these No Kings protests are taking place around the country on Saturday. Co-founder of the group, Indivisible, which organizes the protest, Leah Greenberg, told The Guardian, “Every No Kings is going to be about the issues that are driving people most at that moment and it’s also going to be about the collective ways in which they begin to harm our democracy.” 

I want to talk a little bit more about the challenges. We touched on this a little bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper in the challenges of protesting under the second iteration of the Trump administration, and whether it’s fair for us as journalists and analysts to question the efficacy of protests at a time when they’re being met with paramilitary forces. I’ve seen some questions about the specific demands of the No Kings protests or lack thereof. I’m curious, what do you make of that? 

NS: I tend to be a little bit on the side of, let a thousand flowers bloom. Anybody who wants to organize something and signal their opposition, that’s great. But I do think the opposition has to be sharpened and has to become more pointed around what the issues are.

I think, by necessity, the anti-ICE protests have become that way. There’s obviously synergies between these different things. People find their ways into different kinds of organization and different senses of action that may not always be strictly compatible with each other.

Again, the anti-war stuff is very specific. We’ve lived through a period where the protests against the war in Gaza were pretty brutally suppressed by the Democratic Party and by the very institutions that the Trump administration is trying to destroy. So the ways universities responded, the ways nonprofits and civic organizations often remained very silent on Gaza, the way the Democratic Party was obviously complicit fully with the genocide in Gaza — all of these things have left a mark on some of the most militant people who were out there in front and who were right, and who were correct in the positions that they were taking after October 7 about the Israeli response and the disproportionality of it, and the mass killing of civilians and the way in which it had the potential to unleash a regional war. And of course, Israel started this regional war three years ago.

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That’s a huge problem for some of these big-tent protest projects, which are very tied into the Democratic Party — a Democratic Party that in some ways we are now engaged in a huge battle over. Israel has split the Democratic Party. We have one side, which is the side I would say that I’m on, that really thinks that there has to be an extremely hard red line around future funding for Israel, around AIPAC and the use of PAC money that is flowing into candidates and races on behalf of Israeli interests. 

This is very divisive because of the way in which it pricks this whole set of arguments about whether it’s antisemitic and so forth, and it’s a real dilemma. But I think we have to be able to win this battle in the Democratic Party. Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves in just another situation where even if the Democratic Party is back in power, it is still like the controlled opposition.

[Break]

AL: I wanted to touch on the same thing basically that happened with Gaza protests, we can map that back onto BLM protests in 2020, which is that Democrats were nominally supportive of this. But when it came down to brass tacks, they were still sending police to crush these protests. Then when it was time to actually pass legislation, at least at the federal level, there was basically like a do-nothing bill that Democrats calculated would pacify this movement for the long term. 

Now we’ve seen that so much of that momentum was basically co-opted or diluted and that all the things that people were calling for in terms of police reform, the evidence that none of that happened, is the paramilitary police that we’re seeing respond to all these protests today.

NS: For sure. 

AL: People still have a bit of that taste in their mouth of OK, even when Democrats were in control or even when these protests seem to be taking off, what was the legislative payoff? I’m curious today, whether we need to be thinking differently about what we are going to count as a positive result of a protest or as an effective protest, whereas we could argue that community resistance in Minneapolis and backlash to the agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti led to in some ways DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Officer Greg Bovino losing their jobs, while there’s still been very little change to DHS policy. So I wonder how we value those outcomes — those cosmetic outcomes versus long-term legislative change and knowing that the Democratic Party that we have is the one that we have? Does that alter the calculus with these protests or should it? 

NS: When you think back to BLM, you could say they helped Biden win 2020, even as then, it not only translated into the very anemic policy wins, but then also there was a belated or delayed backlash, which exploited some of the weaknesses of the movement itself, of course. The ways in which it had already had some of these problems internal to it around leadership, around nonprofit funding, around internal corruption and so forth, and the sidelining of grassroots protests — that really going back to Ferguson — really emerged out of direct community action and need based upon the experience of being under police occupation. 

We have to be able to learn from these cycles. I don’t think the lesson necessarily is that protest is ineffective or irrelevant. Protests are going to happen. We live in what my dear old friend who passed away last year, Joshua Clover, called the “age of riots.” People are under stress. A lot of this emerges very spontaneously. There’s obviously a viral environment that allows people to gather in outrage — the outrage is palpable throughout the society. It crosses left and right. 

Public opinion is what they like to call thermostatic. It can change and switch very quickly. We haven’t really been able to figure out on the left how to harness that and develop that for a more ambitious and large scale transformation. To harness it for a larger-scale transformation, we really have to be able to start thinking across different kinds of divides. That would be my view. 

The modalities of certain kinds of identity politics have not served us well, ultimately. The hierarchies of oppression have not served us well, especially when they’re advanced by people who are not actually interested in economic redistribution or anti-war politics. It’s quite easy and we’ve all encountered this, someone who will talk about priorities of anti-racism or anti-sexism or homophobia or whatever else. But actually basically just has mainstream Democratic Party politics at this point. So the Democratic Party succeeded in harnessing and appropriating protest energies that legitimately came out of the experience of people who are being racially brutalized. But people being racially brutalized — and this is something that, someone like even [Martin Luther] King, understood very well at the end of his life — need a big alliance to be able to make any real change in this country. 

That big alliance is actually going to involve an alliance with poor white people, many of which who have been part of the Trump coalition, and have been hailed by a certain Trumpian politics. I’m not saying all poor white people. But those coalitions, those kinds of cross class alliances that cross the parties that are oriented around what we might call left economic populist politics and anti-war politics are going to have to be built. 

In my view, there’s really not much hope for us without building those without some root through mass politics that allows us to change the dispensations of the political reality we live under, which, for all the ways in which people talk about polarization, there’s a lot of bipartisan consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats around war, around economic policy, around taxes around monopolies, around feeding donor interests and around a willingness on both sides to use a culture war polarization discourse to keep their own base close while not really doing much for them. Unless we can really demystify that and really think about solidarity and alliances even with people we don’t necessarily agree with on everything or even like very much. 

AL: This is something we’ve been talking about in our newsroom as well, like this bipartisan consensus on these issues, even when it’s coming from the conservative movement, like with people like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or even Megyn Kelly particularly criticizing the war in Iran and Israel’s influence. Sure, you can say that’s interesting, but I think the more instructive approach to thinking about something like that is OK, what do we take from this? Are people doing that because it’s politically expedient for them or because they’re trying to appeal to their base, or because they’re actually looking for a way to advance some counter policy at the national level? I feel like every other day I see news about the fact that these Republicans are breaking, but it’s like OK, does that actually matter? 

NS: I want to be really, really, really clear about this. I think it’s a really important point to be clear about. 

AL: Yeah. 

NS: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Kelly, Candace Owens. I’ll leave Marjorie Taylor Greene on the side. I’m not sure, something about the sincerity of her conversion convinces me a little bit more for whatever reason.

AL: Interesting. OK. Yeah. 

NS: These are odious people. These are reactionaries. These are people who actually would want to advance many of the same policies that Trump is advancing, particularly around deportation and mass incarceration. But who knows? President Tucker Carlson might preside over the final war against Iran.

Trump was anti-war until he was pro-war. Once these guys get hold of the machinery of state, which is what interests them, they’re absolutely interested in prosecuting a vision of the country that does not include people like us. That is deeply and profoundly hostile to democracy. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to the poor. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to immigrants and people of color. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to women. There’s no question in my mind that that’s true and that we shouldn’t be paying much attention to their antagonisms towards Trump and the splits within MAGA, except in so far as those become tactically useful.

What I’m talking about when I say, public opinion is thermostatic, people who voted for Trump, who are working class and poor and stressed, don’t necessarily have an absolutely ideologically sealed and impenetrable view of the world, that those are the people that have to be admitted as possible parts of a bigger coalition. 

My model there would be Zohran Mamdani going out into Queens, the day after Trump was elected, and talking to people who voted for Trump and trying to figure out why and trying to say that he could offer something different. That to me is really different than saying that the Megyn Kellys of the world, these cynical influencers, are people that like we should take any sucker from.

AL: That we need in our coalition. 

NS: Or that we need in our coalition. No, I think and I’m absolutely not saying that we don’t continue to draw really hard red lines around certain things. You’re not allowed to be racist, you’re not allowed to be sexist. Like these are not acceptable positions. 

I don’t want to get back into an argument about whatever cancel culture and all of that, but that has been not useful ultimately, for our side, like we have to be able to be people who can allow an internal differences in dialogue, even over issues that are really contentious and painful to people and allow people to move forward and grow. That’s how you develop solidarity. That’s how you build it. 

AL: I’ve spoken to people on the left who think that it’s a good idea to go on Tucker Carlson’s show because he reaches all of these people and I think we have to be able to differentiate between having an inclusive tent and allow for growth and allow for change. The difference between that and enabling people who will betray you when it’s convenient for them. And I think that’s difficult in some ways. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule, but I do think it’s frustrating to me that I see so many people like, “You gotta hand it to these people for coming out against the Iran war.” Do we? I don’t know that we really have to do that. 

NS: It’s a super tough question, and I don’t think anybody has a single clear program for how to deal with it. I remember back to when people on the left were condemning Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan. I remember thinking at that time Bernie should go on Joe Rogan. 

Joe Rogan has some terrible attitudes and some terrible views and some very misinformed conceptions of the world. Maybe in an ordinary sense too, as a reactionary, the reactionary guys I like grew up with in New Jersey who I played soccer with or whatever. Just normal reactionary opinions that you encounter, if you talk to ordinary people. He’s like that and that’s why he’s popular. So should Bernie go on there and talk to him? I thought so, and a lot of people really condemned Bernie back then. I think that was when we were in a much more stringent cancel culture mode. 

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Now would I say the same thing about Tucker Carlson? No, because I think Tucker Carlson has serious political ambitions and is actually like a master manipulator of media. That’s my call, that’s how I would judge it. Somebody else might judge it differently.

I don’t think it’s super easy. I feel like we have to believe in the possibility of building bigger coalitions through dialogue, through change, through struggle sometimes. Yet I think the questions you’re asking and the way that we will pose these questions in public, we should be very clear about what we think.

AL: I’ll close with this question. I’m going to quote your wonderful essay one more time. For Equator, you write that the future is really up to the leadership of the opposition that Trump has turned America toward, “the vulgar, predatory, racist, great-power conflicts of old. He does not transcend history, but affirms what [Stephen] Miller calls its ‘iron laws.’ Reversing this will require something more than a return to normalcy, particularly as the American security state tends to be accretive – recent history suggests that it only metastasises. A more profound and comprehensive democratic renewal and reconstruction is needed.”

What does that mean? What does the democratic renewal and reconstruction entail? Who is involved and what are they doing? 

NS: I think we’ve been talking about it. It’s clearly going to have to be at multiple scales. There’s a civic scale to all of this, a local scale to all of this, that I’m seeing in New York City where I live, and extremely, heartened by it. It also has its limits.

There’s a national electoral scale. Our government, which accesses billions and billions of dollars of our tax money to do all kinds of terrible things with it. We have to be able to transform and change that. A lot of people I know have given up on electoral politics altogether, but I don’t see any way to not work also at that scale.

So to me it’s always we’re all always thinking about something like a dual power struggle, like a struggle within civil society and civil society organizations, and a struggle to actually affect the dispensations of our government. For me, primarily right now, that is the struggle inside the Democratic Party to change what it is to make it a true opposition party in the current moment, to make it a party that will really actually try, actually, not try, but succeed in constructing a real majority for the kinds of policies that we would support, which would involve shrinking the defense budget, which would involve something like Medicare for all, which would involve investments in the ordinary things people need to live and work in this country, including various kinds of social insurance, including transportation, including energy.

There were some elements of this in the Biden program. I think it’s really clear how those went off the rails, particularly in the foreign policy arena. The foreign policy arena often does derail domestic reform in the United States. That’s why we need to think of these things together. 

So I have an analysis, for what it’s worth. I don’t really have a program because we’re so far — it feels like we’re so far — from being able to affect the change that we need. That leads a lot of people to say “Well, let’s do the best we can. Let’s win this race or that race and maybe eke out another bare majority.” But I think every time we do that — and I think those of us who have lived long enough through enough political cycles see this — every time we do that, we’re left with something that’s just a little bit shittier.

AL: [Laughs]

NS: Now with Trump, I think we see that the bottom is potentially going to drop out here, Americans are going to be poorer after this war. They’re going to be more stressed, they’re going to have fewer resources, they’re going to be more afraid. The challenge then is going to be even greater politically because the ability of politicians to exploit these kinds of stresses and anxieties is obviously immense, particularly in this media ecosystem that is now essentially owned by billionaires and manipulated through algorithms. We really face a serious challenge. We have a lot of decentralized power, but we haven’t really been able to figure out how to get hold of some of the real levers of power in this country. 

AL: The evergreen story of the left. 

NS: Yes. 

AL: Nikhil, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you for joining us. This was a wonderful discussion. 

NS: Thanks for having me, Akela. I really appreciate it.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

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

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Protesting the Smash-and-Grab Presidency With Nikhil Pal Singh appeared first on The Intercept.

Built at a price tag of $110 million and maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million each year, AB 201 serves as a Sahelian surveillance hub that’s home to Space Force personnel involved in high-tech satellite communications, Joint Special Operations Air Detachment facilities, and a fleet of drones — including armed MQ-9 Reapers — that scour the surrounding region day and night for terrorist activity. A high-security haven, Air Base 201 sits within a 25-kilometer “base security zone” and is protected by fences, barriers, upgraded air-conditioned guard towers with custom-made firing ports, and military working dogs.

The trappings of security can, however, be illusory. Late last year, in the shadow of this bastion of American techno-militarism, four men in a pickup truck carried out a daylight armed robbery of defense contractors from the base and drove off with roughly $40,000 in U.S. taxpayer money. U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, did not report on or publicly acknowledge the theft from Australian-based Austability, a subcontractor apparently working with U.S. defense giant Amentum.

“It is troubling that an affiliate of a major U.S. contractor is unable to provide basic security, even for payroll funds, while traveling near a major U.S. base,” wrote William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a defense contracting expert. “It is indicative either of lax security procedures or an especially dangerous environment close to a sensitive U.S. facility — or both.”

Neither AFRICOM nor U.S. Air Forces Africa provided answers to questions about the robbery prior to publication. “We have nothing further to add,” Timothy S. Pietrack, the deputy chief of AFRICOM Public Affairs, told The Intercept.

On November 3, 2022, Nigerien private contractors carrying the payroll of fellow Nigeriens working at Base Aerienne 201 drove a silver van through the Tadress neighborhood near the western edge of the base, not far from a shisha café and a field where local youths play soccer. Less than a mile from the base entrance, they were overtaken by a tan pickup truck filled with three or four men. A gunman in the bed fired an M-80, a Chinese copy of the venerable Soviet PKM machine gun, according to a U.S. contractor working at the base; the other bandits were reportedly armed with AK-47 assault rifles. A few shots later, the attackers had stolen two bags containing about 24 million West African CFA francs, or $40,000.

Mohamed Ibrahim’s fada — a group of men who regularly sit, talk, and drink tea together — meets next to the shisha café and had a front-row seat during the heist. “They followed the van in from the city, and once they were in the open, they passed in front of the van and opened fire,” he said. “They shot a few bullets. The van stopped and one of the bandits got out and grabbed the bag of money. And then they were gone.”

A spare account of the armed robbery was reported by the Agadez-based newspaper Aïr Info, and basic elements of the crime were confirmed by a local police official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. Additional details were supplied by a U.S. contractor who was not authorized to speak to the press and a video of the last moments of the heist, filmed by a man at the shisha café, that was widely shared via WhatsApp. A day after the attack, local law enforcement arrested the man who shot the video, Ibrahim said. “I have no idea who told them, but they knew who he was and they said they were arresting him because he posted the footage on social media,” he told The Intercept.

Photos published by Aïr Info show that the contractors drove what appears to be a silver Toyota HiAce van bearing the logo of Austability, whose self-described mission is to support the “continued war against terrorism and related transnational serious organized crime.” Last year, Austability announced that it had won AFRICOM contracts to provide dining facility and custodial services, as well as the transportation and delivery of bulk water at Air Base 201. Austability and its president and CEO, David Khandan, did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

“With this project Austability will support Amentum/PAE and the Air Force Contract Augmentation Program (AFCAP) in their mission,” the company announced in a March 2022 press release, referring to a prime contractor formed last year when Amentum acquired another top firm, PAE. The latter company originally inked a nearly $37 million deal with the Air Force “to provide installation support and sustainment services to the 724th Expeditionary Air Base Squadron in Agadez, Niger” in 2021 that is set to run through September 2026. Last year, after Amentum raked in $3.3 billion, the publication Washington Technology ranked it as the 12th largest U.S. government contractor.

Amentum would not clarify the nature of its relationship with Austability, although contractors at Base Aerienne 201 characterized the latter company as a subcontractor of Amentum. “We don’t disclose our subcontractors due to competitive sensitivities, unless it’s a requirement by the customer,” Chanel Mann, Amentum’s senior manager of marketing communications, told The Intercept by email. But official U.S. government contract data shows that Austability received numerous “sub-awards” at Air Base 201, through the now Amentum-absorbed PAE, for pest control, grounds maintenance, pickup trucks, a Chinese-made street sweeper, and various undefined “consumables.”

After the contractors withdrew money from the bank, one of them shared the information with a WhatsApp group of close to 200 people.

Neither Pietrack, Khandan, nor Mann responded to detailed questions about the robbery or its aftermath, but some with ties to the base suggested that poor operational security may have played a key role. The U.S. military contractor who was not authorized to speak with the press told The Intercept that after the Austability personnel withdrew money from the bank to make payments, one of them shared the information with a WhatsApp group of close to 200 people. “Everybody knows he has the money and where he is going,” the contractor told The Intercept. “I saw the WhatsApp. I had three friends who lost their money that day.” It reportedly took a month for those whose pay was stolen to be reimbursed.

Few in Agadez understand the purpose of the drone base or what Americans do there. They know only what they see, smell, and hear: the towers, walls, and fences; clouds of dust from speeding military vehicles; smoke from the burn pit; and the buzz of drones above their heads. The rest is a mystery.

The Nigerien government and AFRICOM have helped to fuel this uncertainty by withholding substantive information about U.S. operations. “The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger and we remain committed to helping our African partners to conduct missions or operations that support and further our mutual security goals and objectives in Africa,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept by email.

“The Americans have drones, they have planes, they have sophisticated equipment,” Liman Ahar Fidjaji, the president of an Agadez-based religious center for the prevention of conflict in Niger, told The Intercept. “But it’s not helping.”

“The Americans have drones, they have planes, they have sophisticated equipment. But it’s not helping.”

Residents of the Tadress neighborhood, where the holdup happened, complained of rampant and increasing insecurity, including rapes, assaults, and robberies. They expressed disbelief that American technology could not provide more safety and said the U.S. was doing little to help those living just beyond the base’s borders.

Maria Laminou Garba runs a collective in Tadress that recycles plastic and uses the money to pay unemployed, at-risk youths to gather the recyclables, as well as to subsidize the schooling of orphans in the neighborhood. She noted that while the road to “Base Americaine” was well lit, Tadress lacked electricity. “It’s really dark, so you can’t see and can be robbed or even shot. Trucks loaded with migrants to Libya drive very fast through the neighborhood. They can’t see and they hit children,” she said.

Secrecy, failures to improve the situation for locals, and the seeming inability to protect even their own payroll has led many to question American intentions. This has helped to feed wild rumors, including long-running speculation that Americans are surreptitiously mining gold at the base. “I heard about the gold. Hopefully, it’s not true because I was there and I could have gotten some of that,” one former contractor who spent time in the United States and has a favorable opinion of U.S. involvement in Niger joked. “Still, there’s a saying in French, ‘Il n’y a jamais de fumée sans feu’ — there’s no smoke without fire — and there’s always some little bit of truth in these things.”

Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military embraced a governmentwide trend toward privatization, including an increasing reliance on contractors. Since 2001, Pentagon spending has totaled more than $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors, according to a 2021 report by Hartung and Brown University’s Costs of War project. More contractors than U.S. service members, according to a separate Costs of War report, have died in post-9/11 military operations.

Since 2008, Central Command, or CENTCOM, has published quarterly reports listing the number of defense contractors working on behalf of the U.S. military in the Middle East. At the end of 2022, CENTCOM reported approximately 22,000 contractors in that region, including 7,908 in Iraq and Syria. AFRICOM does not, however, publish an analogous report, and the Pentagon doesn’t keep tabs on contractors working at other geographic combatant commands.

“We can’t know exactly who is getting paid and who is profiting because we don’t know where the money is going. It comes down to subcontracting that is not transparent and having very little oversight,” said Heidi Peltier, a senior researcher at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and the director of programs at the Costs of War project. Government reports, lawsuits, and investigations by inspectors general have found that 30 to 40 percent of contract spending through the Defense Department is generally wasted or lost to fraud, corruption, or other abuses, Peltier noted.

In December, local police announced the arrest of “15 armed bandits” and implied that the men who robbed the contractors were among them. But none of the stolen money was recovered, according to contractors at the base, who were unsure if those thieves were actually arrested.

AFRICOM’s 2020 posture plan, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, lists the “protection of U.S. government personnel and property” as one of six key gaps or risks on the continent. That same year, an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that the “Air Force did not construct Air Base 201 infrastructure to meet safety, security, and other technical requirements established in DoD, Air Force, and USAFRICOM directives.”

Fidjaji, the religious leader, is skeptical of U.S. aims in Niger and America’s commitment to enhancing security in Agadez and beyond. “It’s really serious that they got robbed right outside the base,” he said, noting increased insecurity not only in the badlands north of the outpost, but even in town. “If the bandits had an RPG and aimed it at the base, then I’m sure the Americans would have seen it and reacted,” he explained, using the shorthand for a rocket-propelled grenade. “The Americans have sophisticated tools. Drones are flying overhead every day and every night. But there are guys circulating in the streets around here with weapons. Why is that?”

The post Less Than a Mile From Drone Base, Bandits Stole Bags of U.S. Tax Dollars in Broad Daylight appeared first on The Intercept.

The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s first year back in office has been the brutality of his deportation machine and his administration’s numerous attempts to upend due process. Back in March, the Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador. Ábrego Garcia’s legal status protected him from deportation to his home country for fear of persecution.

“I think most Americans are intelligent enough to recognize that everybody deserves due process,” says Ábrego Garcia’s attorney Benjamin Osorio. “There’s a process. They get a jury of their peers. And the same thing in immigration: This guy had a lawful order protecting him from being removed from the United States, and the government violated that.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Osorio about Ábrego Garcia’s case. After months of being shipped around detention centers, he is free and fighting deportation orders from home with his family. “I think the courts have probably never seen more immigration habeases in their life.” says Osorio. “In the habeas sense, I would think that Kilmar’s case has had a lot of effect in the immigration practice.”

Ábrego Garcia’s story epitomizes the unlawfulness and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda and for that reason his story has become a political flashpoint. But what’s less understood is the scale and scope of fulfilling the administration’s vision of mass deportation.

A new investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research called “Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” maps out a vast web of companies that make up the rapidly growing deportation economy, how we got here, and the multibillion-dollar industry driven by profit, political power, and a perverse incentive structure.

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“The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 was a pivotal moment. It was a major restructuring of immigration, and that was also a point at which the framing of immigration went from more of a civil matter to more of a national security concern,” says Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare. “And with that transition, the amount of money and contracts began to flood in.”

Gauri Bahuguna, deputy director of research at SITU, adds, “It was in the Obama administration where the detention bed quota comes in, and that’s really the key unit of measurement that drives this particular part of the immigration enforcement industry, is ‘How much money can you make per detained individual?’”

“Even though the bed quota is gone formally from the law there, it still exists in contracts with companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group,” says Bahuguna. “There is payment for detaining a certain number of people, whether or not the beds are occupied, and then the perverse incentive to keep those facilities filled because there’s an economies of scale.” McBride underscores that the current immigration system is “treating people as these products and units and to maximize profit.”

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

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.

The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s second term so far has been the brutality of his deportation machine, from masked agents tackling people in the streets to shipping people off to prisons in far-flung countries.

The Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador back in March. But last week, a judge’s order finally freed him.

Kilmar Ábrego Garcia: [Speaking in Spanish]

Interpreter: I stand here today with my head held up high.

AL: That’s Ábrego Garcia speaking at a press conference after his release, joined by advocates and an interpreter at his side.

KG: [Speaking in Spanish]

Interpreter: Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws, and I believe this injustice will come to its end.

AL: Ábrego Garcia is now back in Maryland with his family and is continuing to fight deportation orders. His story epitomizes the unlawfulness and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.

Joining me now to update us on Ábrego Garcia’s case is one of his lawyers, Benjamin Osorio.

Benjamin, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Benjamin Osorio: Thank you.

AL: Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — custody last Thursday. To start, can you tell us how he’s doing since his release?

Benjamin Osorio: He’s pretty tired. I don’t know if you saw when he went to go check in with ICE that morning, it looked like he hadn’t slept. I think he’s exhausted from the whole process. He’s bounced around from being deported in March to detained at CECOT — obviously, he’s much happier to be out of CECOT and back in the United States. But then, re-detained again, briefly out for a weekend, back in ICE detention, and then now out.

He’s ecstatic to be with his family, but at the same time, I mean, he’s still limited in what he can do and obviously still facing federal charges.

AL: During the press conference when he spoke after his release, during the segment where an advocate and a pastor are speaking, you can see him visibly getting emotional. It seemed like he was tearing up. Has this episode changed him?

Benjamin Osorio: I didn’t know him before, so it’s hard to say whether it’s changed him, but again, somebody having been through what he has been through, I don’t know how it could not. At this point, if I was him, I would just want resolution to everything and not be in detention.

AL: Back in March, Ábrego Garcia was detained by ICE in Baltimore, as you’ve mentioned, and then within a few days he was sent to CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador. What can you tell us about his experience in CECOT?

Benjamin Osorio: Well, it’s been reported, so this isn’t anything confidential or of that nature. But he was taken off the plane and beaten — that’s sort of their welcome greeting — was beaten as he was taken off the plane. And then their heads were shaved.

They were basically beaten on a daily basis, from what it sounds like. They were put on their knees for long periods of time, and if you passed out, you were beaten. They were not allowed to go to the bathroom — many of them urinating on themselves, defecating on themselves.

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He would talk about, in the middle of the night, you would hear people screaming out for help and nobody doing anything. The lights on 24/7 — blinding lights. Sleeping on all metal beds: no sheets, no pillows, no nothing like that. So it doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience.

AL: How did that compare to his experience at the ICE detention facilities that he was shuffled around to?

BO: He’s been segregated from everybody else, so not the same group housing that you would typically find in ICE. But being in solitary and only interacting with other individuals for certain hours of the day also has a detrimental effect on your morale and psyche.

AL: Of course, yeah.

BO: ICE conditions aren’t good, but again, better than CECOT.

AL: Can you remind us, for people who might not know the full story, from the beginning of this ordeal, what happened to him? What was the process? Why was he moved to these different centers, and what happened there?

BO: Since he’s been back in the United States, he was paroled back in when he was brought back in. He’s been shuffled back and forth between both immigration and criminal custody. So that’s been one of the reasons that he’s been moved back and forth. He was taken out to Tennessee, staying in a Putnam County Jail there, while they were arraigning him on the federal charges and then figuring out whether he was going to be released on bond.

Once he was released on bond, he was then re-detained by Baltimore [Enforcement and Removal Operations] and then taken down to Farmville [in Virginia]. The judge in the federal district court case had ordered him to be kept within 200 miles, and then they transferred him from Farmville to Moshannon detention center [in Pennsyvlania]. And that’s where he was released from recently.

AL: Can you talk a little bit about the legal strategy of these dueling, federal attacks against him — both on the immigration front and the criminal front — and how that complicated his situation?

Benjamin Osorio: I guess, let’s talk about the three-front war, right? So he’s got an immigration case, which is pending before the immigration court.

He then also has the habeas case, which — even though he’s out now — continues because of some of the things that have happened in the immigration case that’s taking place in the federal district court in Maryland. And then he’s got the criminal case taking place in federal district court in Tennessee. So he’s got a criminal defense team working on the criminal case.

He also has us, who are partnered with Quinn Emanuel working on the district court litigation. And then he has us just working on the immigration court litigation.

So it’s kind of messy, but what he was granted before is called withholding of removal. Typically before the Trump second administration, you were not seeing these third-country removals that you’re seeing now.

So if you won withholding of removal, they can’t remove you to your home country, but they can remove you to a third country. So let’s say that he has this protection from El Salvador, they were not supposed to have been able to send him to El Salvador, but they could send him to Mexico, to Honduras, to Guatemala as part of these third-country agreements. They could do that.

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He would be a very visible candidate for them to try to go after to do that. We feel that we also were fighting the immigration case to try to normalize his status, get that back reopened, and adjust his status. Now when they paroled him back into the United States, they also created some new immigration options for him as well, potentially applying for asylum because he’s back within one year of having entered the United States, but also he’s married to a U.S. citizen.

So now that he has a lawful entry back into the United States, he could potentially adjust status through her. So it’s messy. And obviously, the government has put the full force of DOJ and DHS behind it to try to make an example of him.

AL: You mentioned like his particular circumstances made him the perfect target for this administration and what they’re trying to do.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that and how his case became a flashpoint in this administration’s immigration policies. This was the case that finally pushed Democratic senators to say, “We’re going to go and visit these detainees,” people who have been removed. Why did that happen?

BO: I think most Americans are intelligent enough to recognize that everybody deserves due process, right? There’s a reason that if somebody that we all know goes and commits a murder, they still get a trial. We don’t summarily execute them unless they’re a danger to the police officers arresting them or anything else like that. There’s a process. They get a jury of their peers.

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And the same thing in immigration: This guy had a lawful order protecting him from being removed from the United States, and the government violated that. And so the Constitution is designed to protect us from the government. And so here is the government violating somebody’s due process, violating the Constitution.

And I think that’s why people cared about it. I don’t think it was necessarily about Kilmar, or his specific person — or it’s not about whether Kilmar is a good guy or a bad guy. It’s about, the government owes a responsibility to do the right thing,

AL: The order to release Kilmar — a federal U.S. district judge in Maryland said that federal authorities lacked a legal basis for continuing to detain him. Has his case changed anything in your view, as far as how judges are handling other similar cases, or how the administration is approaching targeting people like Kilmar?

BO: Yes. The federal district courts probably are not fond of how many habeas we filed. But there’s been a change in bond rules too. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this. In September, there was a case that came out from the Board of Immigration Appeals called Matter of Yajure Hurtado, and it basically tries to change the rules to make so many people ineligible for bond.

Because they were trying to change the rules without actually going through Congress to change the law — which actually governs statutes and mandatory detention and who’s eligible for bond — we started filing a ton of habeases. And so I think the courts have probably never seen more immigration habeases in their life.

Like I said, they’re probably sick of it, but at the same time, they’ve been great and fast-acting on these habeas. Sometimes a habeas, a normal habeas, could pin for a while. But they’ve been great on ordering either the immigration courts to hold a bond hearing and find a head jurisdiction or beyond that ordering these people released. So in the habeas sense, I would think that Kilmar’s case has had a lot of effect in the immigration practice.

AL: What’s next for Ábrego Garcia after his release? Obviously, you mentioned his pending cases.

BO: It’s hard to say. We’re still in the middle of briefing both before the immigration side of things, both at the immigration court level because the immigration judge just issued a new order the other day, and then also before the Board of Immigration Appeals.

And then because of some of the acts that the board and the IJ have taken — the immigration judge — have taken, now Judge [Paula] Xinis has ordered an additional briefing on the [Temporary Restraining Order] right now in federal district court.

Look, I was shocked. People were asking us when we first started if we were going to be able to bring him back. And then I was kind of shocked that Xinis found that he didn’t have a removal order. It’s not something I would’ve predicted in the beginning. But then when there was that hearing a couple weeks ago, and she was talking about there not being a valid order because he was ordered removed to Guatemala.

I mean there’s been a lot of different turns here. I think it’s hard to predict what ultimately happens. Like I said, if I’m him, I just want to be out and I want to be with my family, and if that means it’s in Costa Rica or whether that’s here in the United States as long as I’m not detained, I would be happy.

AL: Any final thoughts? One thing I would ask maybe if you want to elaborate on is this idea that it doesn’t really matter what kind of person it is when we’re talking about these cases. Like, what matters is the statute and the constitutional protections that are here. And that’s completely at odds with how the administration has framed all of this — that the people it’s going after are criminals who deserve whatever’s coming to them. I think that’s an important distinction, but if there’s any other point that you touched on that you want to elaborate on?

BO: I just think it’s funny. I hear different officials go on TV and they say, we’re going after the individuals who are breaking the law, or we’re going after the individuals here who are here unlawfully. But there have been many cases where they are making the people unlawful.

So when they take away Temporary Protected Status from people from Haiti and Sudan and from Venezuela, these countries that have ongoing crisis in them, they made them undocumented. And when they say that we want people to do things the right way — look, Congress passed Section 208 [of the Immigration and Nationality Act] and made asylum a lawful pathway. Asylum is a lawful pathway to get status here in the United States.

Now, if Congress wants to change the laws, that would be well within their right to do. But until they do that, their attempts to block asylum-seekers and their attempts through different regulatory changes or through the Board of Immigration appeals to whittle away asylum and go after victims of domestic violence — I don’t know, to me, that’s not the American way, and it’s sad that our government is targeting some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society.

AL: What else is on your docket right now?

BO: It’s pretty crazy, the number of detentions has obviously picked up pretty significantly, and that’s sort of my specialty, is detained removal.

It’s just very sad because I see so many families — and families of people with U.S. citizen spouses and families of people with U.S. citizen kids — getting ripped apart. People always ask me, they say, “Why don’t people just do it the right way?” I have friends who are not immigration lawyers or, I’m from Georgia, I have a lot of friends who have maybe very different views on immigration than I have, and they’re like, “They’ve been here for 20 years. Why haven’t they fixed their status?” And I’m like, “Our immigration system is broken. I don’t think you understand like how complicated it is for somebody who’s been here 20 years.”

Even if they have a U.S. citizen spouse, if they have more than two entries, they might be subject to a 212(a)(9)(C) and be subject to the “permanent bar.” That means they have to stay outside for 10 years — away from their U.S. citizen spouse, away from their U.S. citizen kids.

And then I have other things, where people are active members of this community. I have a family I represent that the U.S. citizen spouse works for a local school board, and they have two small U.S. citizen kids. And it’s sort of complicated, but at one hearing where the judge was ordering him removed, even though we won later on appeal and he’s still here — a 7-year-old girl’s coming up to me. And I have 6-year-old twins. So she’s about my kids’ age, and she’s asking me, “When is Dad going to come home?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

And so I just think people don’t understand like how much damage we’re doing to future generations of Americans. I don’t think people understand how much damage we’re doing to the economy. I don’t think people understand how much damage we’re doing to the American brand here.

AL: Thank you so much for taking the time, Ben. We know you have a lot on your plate, so we really appreciate it.

BO: Thank you.

AL: After a quick break, we’re going to zoom out and talk about exactly who is profiting from the Trump’s deportation agenda, and take a closer look at what has become a rapidly expanding and lucrative industry. We’ll be right back.

Break

AL: Welcome back to The Intercept Briefing. The militarization of U.S. borders and immigration policy is a project that’s been long in the making.

Bill Clinton: We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of law.

George W. Bush: We’re going to get control of our borders. We’re going to make this country safer for all our citizens.

Barack Obama: Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws.

Unknown: President Obama has deported more undocumented workers than President Bush did.

Donald Trump: And we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.

AL: The violent immigration raids we see in communities across the country today could not have happened without the bipartisan efforts of past presidents — those who paved the way for an insatiable immigration bureaucracy and an unhinged administration ready to take it over.

As of November, ICE is detaining more than 65,000 people, a historic high, according to The Guardian. Under the guise of protecting national security, officials have transformed U.S. immigration over the last two decades into a cash cow for private corporations. Today, Trump’s deportation machine takes up more than half of all federal law enforcement spending. And Trump’s marquee spending bill raises that to 80 percent.

Democratic senators just released a report that found that the Trump administration diverted $2 billion in Pentagon funds to target immigrants, as our colleagues Nick Turse and Noah Hurowitz reported earlier this month.

A new investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research maps out this vast web that comprises the deportation economy: how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a rapidly growing multibillion-dollar industry shaped by private profit, political power and a perverse incentive structure. Joining me now to talk about this industry are some of the folks behind the project.

Tyler McBrien is the managing editor of Lawfare, a nonprofit publication covering law, national security, and foreign policy.

Tyler McBrien: Thanks for having me, Akela.

AL: And we’re joined by Gauri Bahuguna, a computational designer and deputy director of research at SITU Research, a visual investigations practice in Brooklyn, New York.

We’ve worked with SITU on reporting on reconstructions of police responses to protests, it’s great to have you on.

Welcome, Gauri.

Gauri Bahuguna:  Thank you for having me.

AL: To start, for both of you, what drove you all to do this project? What did you feel was missing from the public’s understanding of how the system works?

GB: This project actually began as far back as 2023, and at the time we were interested in expanding the notion of immigration enforcement beyond the border. So at the time we were looking at the various, the physical, the digital, and the political infrastructures that create this everywhere border, so to speak.

And from there, obviously, the election last year was a huge point for us to track and study. The industry part came up in our research of how and why this immigration enforcement seems to be a growing hot- button issue.

TM: What we are trying to do with this project is to make visible an entire system, as much as that’s possible. All the facets of the immigration enforcement economy — be it detention, deportation, surveillance, and interdiction — because I’m sure listeners can relate, the past year has just been this feeling of jumping from fire to fire. And you can easily miss the forest for the trees.

We wanted to highlight not just these big-name companies that people will be familiar with — the Palantirs, the Googles, even maybe the GEO Groups, the private prisons — but also smaller companies that do food service or IT services that make up these web of contracts for ICE and DHS.

AL: Tyler, that’s a good segue because we know that this is obviously a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s agenda, but there’s been a bipartisan effort to build up this machine since long before he first took office, which really accelerated when George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and ICE after 9/11. But what other figures helped drive that expansion prior to Trump? How did we get to where we are today?

TM: The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 was a pivotal moment. It was a major restructuring of immigration, and that was also a point at which the framing of immigration went from more of a civil matter to more of a national security concern. And with that transition, the amount of money and contracts began to flood in because of this “higher echelon” issue of national security versus civil enforcement.

Related

A Legacy of Corruption and Abuse: The Post-9/11 Immigration Megabureaucracy

2002 was a pivotal moment, but like we said, it was building before that. We really try to convey that in the videos — of having not only Trump on the campaign trail promising the biggest deportation campaign in history, but also dating back to Bush, of course to Bill Clinton, and before.

Just to also back up, the framing that we wanted to put forth was that of the military–industrial complex, and throw out this provocation that we may be seeing an immigration–industrial complex following the same dynamics.

AL: Gauri, can you talk about the main ways that this deportation economy operates?

GB: It was in the Obama administration where the detention bed quota comes in, and that’s really the key unit of measurement that drives this particular part of the immigration enforcement industry, is “How much money can you make per detained individual?”

Related

Private Prison CEO on ICE Contracts: We’re a Better Deal Than El Salvador’s CECOT

And for now, even though the bed quota is gone formally from the law there, it still exists in contracts with companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group, where there is a minimum quota that ICE must fulfill in order to be in contract with these companies. And any detainees above that minimum guaranteed daily population, they get discounts on.

So there is payment for detaining a certain number of people, whether or not the beds are occupied, and then the perverse incentive to keep those facilities filled because there’s an economies of scale.

TM: This is another, I think, motivation behind the project is to highlight not only the ideological and political motives of the current immigration system — think Stephen Miller’s vision — but also the profit motive driving this perpetual system. And the upshot of it is something that Gauri just touched on, which is treating people as these products and units and to maximize profit there.

AL: Can you talk more about this incentive structure and who is profiting?

Like you mentioned, everyone knows Palantir, GEO Group, CoreCivic, and you mentioned there’s some other names that people may not be as familiar with playing a significant role there. But yeah, I’m curious to hear more about who is actually profiting.

GB: The main profiteers are those large private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, because ICE has different kinds of facilities that range from completely owned and operated by ICE to agreements with the marshals, and then completely contracted detention facility centers.

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The Private Prison Industry Looks Forward to Soaring Profits Thanks to Trump’s Budget

And because of the pricing structure offered by these private companies, it is the lowest price per night per detainee in private detention centers. However, ICE will often work with local and state governments, who then subcontract out to these private companies to detain populations. So what happens is that almost or close to 90 percent of all of the detainee population are held in private prisons because it just makes that much more economic sense.

TM: As Gauri said the biggest ones are the private prison contractors. I think the biggest single contractor is GEO Group, which listeners will probably be familiar, but they’re also smaller firms. In surveillance, we have the big names like Google, Palantir, Clearview, but there are also smaller companies, like BI2 Technologies. There are investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard.

In the video, we have this map that shows just this web of companies. But I think what was really interesting in doing this project was to come to realize that this analogy between the military–industrial complex and the immigration–industrial complex was sometimes not so much an analogy as just the extension of one into the other.

So some of these firms are the same. You have Northrop Grumman, where you have big weapons manufacturers. You have gun manufacturers that are also benefiting.

AL: Because they’re arming the guards?

TM: Exactly. And arming for some of the immigration raids, so for example, Operation Midway Blitz.

AL: Does the incentive structure that you were talking about, Gauri, does that have the potential to limit future avenues for policy change on immigration? And is that already happening? Like the idea that the incentives are built around the fact that this economy already exists and it needs to continue existing or else it’ll be bad for the economy, and does that make it harder to unwind this machine?

GB: That’s an interesting question. I think because these are being detailed in the contracts themselves, I would imagine, it is something that could be addressed and there could be safeguards against having these types of quotas. Because again, it is just another expression of the detention bed quota, and they did successfully get that repealed.

AL: But the idea that like, even though they repealed that, it’s still part of this structure. Like, the economy is operating with a mind of its own, like outside of the policy sphere.

TM: I think that’s the dynamic that we’re warning that is already happening and will continue to happen and further entrench.

So if you think about detention, for example, which is the first chapter of the video that we put out. Often companies like GEO Group will have idle facilities that were just a red line on their balance sheet. And now there’s this huge incentive to get these idle facilities up and running — fill the beds.

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And then the way that it can become entrenched in that community, for example, is then that creates some jobs. And it’s this perverse choice between an economic boon to the local community in some small way versus not having those jobs. And so, you can see how these incentives — these just pure economic incentives — can just keep driving the machine as you said.

AL: This is obviously very linked to the broader phenomenon of mass incarceration in the U.S. and the push and pull over cutting the number of people that we have behind bars outside of the immigration system. Did that come up at all in this project? Are there characters or actors who play a major role in building up the carceral system who also play a role in this system? We know private prisons, GEO Group and CoreCivic, are a big part of this, but obviously they don’t incarcerate the majority of people in the U.S. But I’m curious how this came up, if at all, during your research and how you think about the nexus between the U.S. prison system and immigration detention.

GB: Yeah, absolutely. They’re so closely tied together because GEO Group, their facilities are both, again, they’re private prisons and also immigrant detention facilities. I believe some of the private prisons were then converted into detention centers. And now because there is this tipping point where there’s just so much more money in this immigration enforcement, you see other actors [are] moving toward that.

I also just wanted to note that the myth really that it creates jobs for local people was something that we found to be not necessarily true in our research. And one of our colleagues actually took a road trip through America and visited a lot of these towns that were in close proximity to these facilities. And because of the stop-and-start nature, so sometimes they would be filled, so the detention center was operational, so there were a few jobs given out. Then it would shut down, so they would all lose their jobs immediately. And more recently, with the immigration detention facilities, because of language requirements, they were not even hiring people from the neighboring towns.

So it’s not even that there was a direct benefit to the community.

AL: That’s really interesting. Did they interview people who lived in the town or where, who were they talking to?

GB: Yes, pretty much people in the local watering hole. This is the facility that is also mentioned in the video in Michigan, one of the GEO Group idle facilities that was just recently opened, and I believe it’s the largest immigration detention center in the Midwest. So he was speaking to a lot of people in small towns around that detention center, and they all expressed similar sentiment.

AL: I also just want to touch on this idea that ICE and CBP have really exponentially increased the amount of power and influence that they have over not just immigration policy, but our government in general.

There’s been so much great reporting on just how much money has been diverted from other parts of the government, or how many agents have been diverted to these agencies to sort of power this machine.

But I wonder, can you talk about that phenomenon? Like, these two small agencies that were intended for a very particular purpose have pretty much become the face of the government at this point.

TM: Yeah, I guess I don’t want to overstate something that I said earlier about the profit motive and the economic factors driving all of this/ That’s a fear, and something that we’ve been seeing that is driving policy. But of course the political and the ideological motives are also driving this.

You see this in the national security strategy that was just released by the administration — that border security and controlling immigration is the national security threat. So you see it elevated in the political arena as well. And then it’s not just the administration. You have Congress to thank for the exponentially higher billions that are flooding into DHS and ICE, who can then award the contracts to these companies.

GB: It’s the result of decadeslong lobbying campaigns, right, to push for these harsh immigration laws. So I think there’s definitely the political angle, and also because of how CBP and ICE are allowed to operate, which is slightly different from other law enforcement agencies; they have a lot more leeway. Border Patrol, for example, they have a 100-mile radius within the U.S. border, that they can stop people without a warrant and just question them. I think these types of extra powers make it easier for the conversion or the misappropriation of a military force, so to speak.

TM: And just to add one point to what Gauri said about lobbying. If you take GEO Group, for example, their PAC, according to FEC filings, was the first to max out donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

AL: On this point about this being part of the national security strategy and this lobbying apparatus, this is also a strategy that Trump and his allies want to push beyond the U.S. and into Europe, for example. Can you talk a little bit about that, how the Trump administration is essentially lobbying to export this around the world, export this system around the world?

TM: Yeah. I can speak to one aspect of this. Take the video that we put out on detention. We broke it down into three ways in which the detention economy works. One is permanent facilities. We talked a lot about private prisons. One is temporary or soft-sided facilities. But the third that we cover — as a sort of form of outsourcing or contracting — is “alternative jurisdictions,” as we call it.

So think El Salvador, CECOT. Think the talk about detaining migrants at Guantánamo Bay. And then of course the system of deportation, these third-country removals, these are transactional often in nature, in terms of what a country would economically benefit very often from receiving migrants from the United States.

We wanted to expand the idea of what a contract could be or what this transaction could look like beyond just the U.S. government and a private company in the US. It’s really more expansive than that.

AL: Can you talk about how you compiled this project? I know a lot of the information was public or open source, but tell me about your approach. Where did you start?

GB: So the first step was to identify who are the main actors within this economy. And that was identified through looking at the budgets and the contracts that you mentioned. This is open-source information.

And then after that, we really wanted to understand further how this is exploding as a way. So I think looking for the details within the contracts that really jumped out, like the tiered pricing, for example. And then moving into now, how do you put this all together and visualize it? And I think that’s where we started being a bit more experimental with our research. And so one example is the parametric tool that we use to visualize deployed resources, which is one of the soft-sided detention facility contractors.

So just trying to visualize what detention at this scale means because I don’t think that’s something that is particularly present in most of the conversations. So it was a combination of trying to find and really parse through these government contracts and all of this jargon. And then translate it into a way that was, again, paints this picture of it being beyond the border and located to other geographies within the United States.

TM: On this parametric tool. I think Gauri and some of her colleagues at SITU really helped understand projections and what these big numbers and big promises would actually mean.

What that gets at is just the reason for contracting in the first place. The government just doesn’t have the capacity to find, detain, and deport the numbers of people that they are setting as a goal. And sometimes not even the single facility or single company that are contracted to do something can do it, which means that there likely will be more contracts and more money going into it.

So I think that’s one thing that the SITU team really helped me visualize at least, was, what do these massive numbers mean and what will they continue to mean?

AL: Tyler you brought up Stephen Miller earlier. Obviously we’re going to have to talk about him at some point. Top White House adviser Stephen Miller is widely recognized as the brains behind Trump’s deportation agenda. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had this great piece about his vision earlier this week. He wrote, “Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post-World War II era.” I really encourage people to go read this because they interview Miller’s family members and go into like this book that his family member wrote about the immigration apparatus, like when they came to the U.S. Anyway, very interesting.

But can you guys talk about Miller, his vision, and how that’s coming to life under Trump’s second term — and how that deviates or doesn’t deviate from lthe post-9/11 vision of this system?

TM: I haven’t read the piece, and I can’t believe you’re asking me to crawl into Stephen Miller’s mind. [laughs]

AL: Sorry, someone has to. [laughs]

TM: I would go back to what I was saying in the past answer, where the way to achieve the scale at which Stephen Miller wants to deport and relocate people again is only achieved through a massive expansion of contracts. And that’s why the funding bill was so material to this.

AL: You’re talking about the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

TM: Exactly, yeah. So I think Stephen Miller and even the Trump administration as a whole can announce that they want to hit these benchmarks, but it’s then these contractors who come in.

GB: Yeah, I agree with what you said but also wanted to acknowledge the very prominent white nationalist undercurrent of his vision.

AL: Yeah.

GB: And I think that we can see that play out in how the language of how to describe migrants is very dehumanizing, “illegal aliens.” And it’s just rife with xenophobia in every news coverage.

Related

You Should Stop Calling Immigrants “Migrants”

And I think that is moving the country toward a more, or less tolerant overall perspective of what migrants are and specifically which migrants are “good” and worthy of being in this country. And I think that is probably the most scary part of his vision coming to life.

TM: Yeah, it’s a great point. We were constantly asking ourselves what part of this system we have today is continuity and what part is rupture. And I think to Gauri’s point, I mean that the rupture is just the destruction of any sort of refugee program, save for white Afrikaners from South Africa, is just a nakedly, racist policy. I think there’s just no other interpretation.

AL: You’ve both mentioned this capacity issue — Miller and Trump have these quotas that incentivize these policies, but maybe don’t have the capacity to fulfill that vision, even though they’ve been very successful at it so far. But this brings up this notion that I heard a lot prior to Trump’s election. Policy people and reporters who cover immigration were saying, “Not that this is overblown, but take it with a grain of salt because there is no capacity to do what they’re saying that they want to do.” We’re obviously seeing that not really be borne out right now. But even if there isn’t capacity to achieve their goals, does it matter because of how much they’ve already been able to do? Obviously by diverting money, resources, and agents from all of these other departments, but despite all the handwringing over capacity, like this is still obviously happening in full force.

GB: I don’t think it matters that much both for the base that they’re trying to appeal to and also the corporations and individuals involved in this large scale operation. What happens is that yes, it’s completely impossible for them to meet the targets they’re setting for themselves, but in doing so, they create like an urgency and that’s when more of these regulations start to dip and drop.

[White House border czar] Tom Homan, for example, has already been calling to reduce the detention standards in ICE facilities, if it’s not permanent facilities, and we go into the tents. And then within the tents again, how much more can you pack in so you squeeze more profit, reduce the living conditions of these places, and then you have a lot more to show for that’s closer to this target, but whether or not they ever reach, it doesn’t matter to the people affected.

AL: Right. I want to mention another piece that was recently published. Above the Law published this story about ICE, perhaps, inadvertently, posting a “watchlist” of immigration lawyers. We know the administration routinely attacks its perceived enemies, including immigration attorneys. What do you make of that and how the administration has gone after the legal system to power its agenda?

TM: Yeah, I think it’s a clear attempt to reduce the friction that they face in the immigration system. And often that friction is happening in the courts. Some of the biggest administration immigration stories of the year have been about these high profile deportation cases. Kilmar Ábrego García, for example, Mahmoud Khalil, of course. You’re seeing the strategy deployed across other issue areas too. It’s the flip side of the capacity — they’re building out capacity while also trying to reduce the barriers, and most of the barriers are legal ones.

AL: Right.

GB: Even just in the geographic distribution, it’s again, trying to set up these obstacles for accessing legal counsel. So that’s very intentional, right? They’re extremely rural areas where most of these facilities are. It’s very difficult for people to be in touch with lawyers in facilities like Alligator Alcatraz; there was no access at all.

So I think there is this both contempt and disregard for the law, but also intentional fear of limiting access.

AL: Given where we are today and how big this deportation economy has grown and how deeply it’s spread its tentacles into all of these other sectors that we’ve touched on, is it possible to unwind this and what would that take?

TM: It’s such a hard question. Like I said earlier, we throw out the analogy to Eisenhower’s military–industrial complex farewell speech. I think it’s safe to say that his warning went unheeded, and the military–industrial complex only increased exponentially. Which is one of the reasons we wanted to shift this new warning that, you know, maybe it will be heeded this time.

But it is worrying to me because I think you contrast the current moment to the first administration, first Trump administration, where there were sometimes successful worker-organized protests, for example, especially at tech companies. After contracts with ICE were made public, workers came together to protest and sometimes those contracts were canceled. I feel like you’re not seeing the same dynamic here. There is, I guess, some power in the consumer base and if consumers are made aware of companies or investments that they are a part of that are also being used to detain and deport people often illegally, then perhaps there’s some sort of pressure point there.

AL: And this reminds me, we didn’t even talk about this. The first anti-ICE protests that we saw under Trump [this term] brought the first National Guard deployment that we saw. And now I feel like people don’t even really — he’s deployed the National Guard to so many cities that people don’t necessarily connect that to that being an effort to tamp down on opposition to this deportation machine.

GB: That actually connects quite well to what I’m about to say, which is I am a little skeptical about whether the toothpaste can be put back into the tube just because of how deep these roots have gotten into every part of our daily lives. And so the first pieces were about detention, and we’re going to do one on deportation and interdiction. Then the final one is a data surveillance piece. And I think that is really, that’s where so much money — like far beyond what the deportation and detention is estimated.

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I think this data surveillance piece is what will ultimately also impact citizens most directly, right? It’s being tested on migrants and then slowly, as you mentioned with the National Guard, it just creeps into daily life and becomes normalized. So I think just because of the, and we see that the large tech companies are also embedded into this administration, so I just feel like we’re moving towards a very dark point of no return.

AL: Thank you for using the toothpaste and the tube analogy, because I think that is a perfect analogy for this. It’s not only impossible to do, but it’s very messy. Thank you both for joining me on the Intercept Briefing. This has been a great conversation on a depressing topic, so we really appreciate it.

GB: Thank you.

TM: Yeah, thanks so much for having us.

AL: We’re going to add a link to the SITU and Lawfare series in our show notes and on our website. Really encourage you all to check it out. It’s fantastic work and more to come in 2026, so hopefully we will talk more about that then.

That does it for this episode.

Before we go, a quick note: We’re taking next week off. In our place, we’ll feature an episode of The Intercept’s new series, Collateral Damage, hosted by investigative journalist Radley Balko. And we’ll be back with a new episode the following week.

Thank you for showing up every week for The Intercept Briefing. This show exists because of you — our listeners and readers of The Intercept. If you believe in the work we’re doing, you can support us at theintercept.com/join. Every contribution, whatever the size, keeps independent journalism alive.

If you value what you’re hearing, leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen. It’s one of the most powerful ways to help new listeners discover the show. And if you have story ideas for the new year or want to share feedback, reach us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

Happy holidays, and happy new year.

The post Deportation, Inc. appeared first on The Intercept.

I watched Willie’s eyes dart about like they were following a mosquito. I had come for a simple background briefing, the type of service that U.S. diplomats have provided to journalists since time immemorial. The meeting at the U.S. Embassy had been confirmed, by phone and email, and the chief spokesperson had even promised to buy me a coffee. Now Willie, a member of the embassy’s security team, wanted me to disappear.

The head of Willie’s department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, is a vocal advocate for press freedom. “The United States’ commitment to freedom of expression, freedom of the press, is unwavering, and it’s unwavering because it’s the bedrock of a healthy democracy,” Blinken said at a “freedom of expression roundtable” on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last fall. Here in Niger, the U.S. State Department portrays itself as a staunch defender of journalists, funding programs to teach the basics of the craft to aspiring reporters and bloggers, providing training for established journalists, and even handing out awards on World Press Freedom Day.

Willie’s commitment to press freedom seemed less than unwavering. So I told him that if he wanted to remove me — a U.S. citizen, taxpayer, and journalist — then he should have at it. But Willie demurred. It wouldn’t be him, he warned. “I’ll give you to the top of the hour — 10 minutes,” he said, referring to 10 a.m. “Then I’m going to come out again. And if you won’t leave, we’ll go to the host nation.”

I took it as a threat. I assumed Willie — a State Department security official — had also read his department’s latest human rights report on Niger. The assessment had certainly made an impression on me. So had a conversation with a local journalist just a week before. That reporter had written the wrong thing and wound up in a cell too small for him to stand up or lie down in. Was that what Willie, this tough-talking American with a receding hairline, wanted me to fear?

Close Relationship

Niger and the United States have a very close relationship. The U.S. provides this Sahelian nation with bucketloads of humanitarian, economic development, and military aid. The U.S. sends trucks, armored vehicles, surveillance aircraft, and transport planes. It builds military bases here and flies drones from them. It trains, advises, equips, and arms local troops. The U.S. has even sent its own soldiers to fight and die in Niger. But the U.S. isn’t blind to the fact that Niger’s government harasses members of the press, activists, and human rights defenders. It jails the innocent. It lumps civilians in with terrorists and kills them both.

I came to this West African nation to report on the security situation and the U.S. military’s role in the country. Before I even arrived, I reached out to the embassy to hear the official U.S. perspective. During the first week of January, I began corresponding with Stephen Dreikorn, the embassy’s director of public diplomacy. By week three, we had exchanged numerous emails and WhatsApp messages, and I had the distinct feeling that Dreikorn was stringing me along until my trip was through. Day after day, from one week to the next, he was continually seeking “clearances” from Washington.

I’ve written extensively on U.S. military operations and security assistance across the continent, including an investigation of U.S. counterterrorism failures in neighboring Burkina Faso and coups by U.S.-trained officers in the Sahel. It hasn’t won me many fans in the U.S. government, and I assumed that was why I was getting a polite brush-off.

But Dreikorn came through toward the end of my trip. “We are good for 10:00 a.m.,” he wrote in an email the evening before, also affirming that Col. Nora Nelson-Richter, the defense attaché, would attend. I quickly confirmed the briefing in a phone call and thanked him for all his efforts.

But the next morning, three hours before the sit-down, Dreikorn called the meeting off. In a text and email, he blamed Washington. I replied that I expected him to keep his word and that I’d be at the embassy for the briefing. When I arrived at 9:30, walking onto the embassy grounds until I reached a hardened security entrance with locked doors, the local staff tried to shoo me away. When I made it clear that I wasn’t going, they said someone was coming to talk with me. I assumed Dreikorn would have the courage to give me the brush-off to my face. But I was wrong. Instead, Willie arrived with his threat of calling in the “host nation.”

Niger’s Abuses

The State Department doesn’t pull punches when it talks about Niger. “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by or on behalf of government,” reads their most recent assessment. In 2020, for instance, Niger’s National Commission on Human Rights investigated just a weeklong military operation in which 102 civilians had disappeared. They discovered no less than 71 bodies in six mass graves, which Abdoulaye Seydou, the president of the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy and Development, or shortened to REPPADD in French, said were the result of executions by Nigerien security forces.

To be fair, foreign journalists are not typically the targets of extrajudicial executions. Instead, noncombatants are generally killed in border areas where Niger’s military is waging a counterinsurgency campaign. But arbitrary and targeted killings are just one of the many abuses meted out by Niger’s security forces. You don’t need to look hard to find the stories. I’ve reported from many countries with abusive governments — Burkina Faso, the Congo, and South Sudan among them — but have rarely encountered so many sources who wished to remain anonymous. People wanted their stories told, but fear of the government’s wrath was pervasive and kept them from going on the record. “They can do anything,” one human rights defender told me.

In Niger, journalists are judicially harassed, brought up on charges, and jailed. Activists are arrested and do hard time. Ali Idrissa Nani, a prominent human rights activist and the head of a television and radio network, was imprisoned in 2018 for his involvement in a peaceful demonstration demanding budgetary transparency from the government. He says that the only reason he served just four months was the intervention of Oxfam and several U.S. senators who, in a letter he shared with The Intercept, called upon the State Department to pressure the government of Niger to reaffirm its commitment to human rights and halt the prosecution of those “exercising their democratic rights.”

In Niger, journalists are judicially harassed, brought upon charges, and jailed. Activists are arrested and do hard time.

Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, the publisher, owner, and editor of Aïr Info, a newspaper with an affiliated radio station in the northern town of Agadez, has been regularly harassed and abused by the government. “When I was starting out, they tried to buy me off. Then they threatened me with arrest, with prison, with torture,” he explained. As the only independent media outlet reporting on a rebellion in the region in the late 2000s, his newspaper was closed for four months over articles allegedly “undermining the morale of troops.” His radio station, he said, was shuttered for four years. Arrested by plainclothes police while attempting to board a flight to Paris for a professional seminar, he was held for months and transferred from one remote prison to another. “They accused me of being a rebel and locked me in a cell where I couldn’t stand but also couldn’t lie down,” he said, confirming that worse had occurred but that he would not go into details. “In our culture, we don’t talk about these things. But what I experienced should never be spoken about.”

In late January, after criticizing the bombing of a gold mine near the town of Tamou by the Nigerien military that killed civilians and traveling to the region to gather evidence, REPPADD’s Seydou was charged with “publishing information likely to disturb public order” and arrested. The charge was dropped, but as he tried to leave the courthouse, he was again arrested, this time on suspicion of complicity with the burning of miners’ sheds in Tamou. The public prosecutor claimed these fires were set to incriminate the Nigerien army and “back up the claims that there had been massacres.” Seydou was then transferred to a high-security prison.

“If they want to kill you,” Nani said of the government, “they put you in jail.”

In Niger, prison alone can be a death sentence. “If they want to kill you,” Nani said of the government, “they put you in jail.” The State Department says the same, specifically calling attention to the fact that conditions in Niger’s prisons are “harsh and life threatening due to food shortages, overcrowding, inadequate sanitary conditions and medical care.”

The Deadline Came and Went

Back outside the embassy’s security entrance, the 10 a.m. deadline came and went without a reappearance by Willie. A Nigerien police vehicle appeared in a nearby parking lot; it eventually departed. Another arrived later but would also drive off without incident. All the while, I wrote WhatsApp messages to Dreikorn and emailed him, copying Nelson-Richter, the defense attaché, reminding them of our appointment and that I was waiting.

As my neck and forehead turned from pale to pink, I noticed a familiar face. Willie must have left through another exit, but now I saw him hugging the wall, making for the closest door to get back into the embassy.

“Hey,” I called to him, followed by a sarcastic comment that he pretended not to hear. As he tried to sneak through the entrance, I moved toward him and called out again.

With his hand already gripping the door handle, Willie made the mistake of looking up and mustered a “what’s that?”

“That’s the longest 10 minutes ever,” I said, referencing his earlier threat.

“Oh yeah,” he replied. “Well, if you’re gonna keep waiting then, uh — that’s, well, your prerogative right now, so —”

As I got closer to him, Willie slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind him, and disappeared into the embassy compound.

I called Dreikorn again and again over the next two days. He never answered or telephoned back. But as I buckled my seatbelt on the plane to fly home to the U.S., I checked my email to finally find a message from him. I had to give Dreikorn credit. He had executed one of the most egregious acts of official gaslighting I’ve ever experienced — and that’s saying a lot.

Hey Nick,
I saw you called.  Off the record, DC’s response is for you to contact mediainquiries@state.gov.  Requests from non-Nigerien outlets generally go through colleagues back at the Department.
Thank you for understanding.
Best,
Stephen E. Dreikorn
Director of Public Diplomacy and Spokesperson
U.S. Embassy | Niamey, Niger
B.P. 11201 Rue Des Ambassades

(Note: Providing information “off the record” is subject to an agreement between a journalist and a source and does not occur with a unilateral decree from the source.)

The post U.S. Embassy in Niger Threatens a Pesky American Journalist and Then Backs Down appeared first on The Intercept.

In the courtyard of her family’s tree-lined compound in a well-to-do neighborhood in Niger’s capital, members of Miriam’s ethnic group had been describing jihadist attacks on their historic community in a rural region to the north. Now, the six or seven men wearing tagelmusts — a combination of turban and scarf worn by Tuareg men to provide protection from sun and dust — were also glued to their phones as chimes announced incoming texts and calls. Voices on the phones sounded panicked. There were gunshots, and a familiar roar rumbled through the desert scrubland 100 miles away. At any moment, relatives warned, they expected an attack by the “motorcycle guys.”

Over the last decade, Niger and its neighbors in the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have taken the notion of the outlaw motorcycle gang to its most lethal apogee. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on “motos” — two to a bike, their faces obscured by sunglasses and turbans, armed with Kalashnikovs — have terrorized villages across the borderlands where Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger meet. These militants, some affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State group, impose zakat, an Islamic tax; steal animals; and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians.

Jihadist motorcyclists, Miriam reminded me, had thundered into the village of Bakorat on March 21, 2021. As described afterward by one of the survivors, the motos “swept into the village like a sandstorm, killing every man they saw. They shot one of my uncles in front of me. His 20-year-old son ran to save him, but he perished as well. We found them, slumped over each other.” Attacking in overwhelming numbers and with military precision, the jihadists executed men and boys while looting and burning homes. “They attacked the well like it was a military objective, opening fire on the dozens of men there. As they killed, I heard the attackers saying, ‘This is your time … for working with the state,’” another survivor told Human Rights Watch. “I collapsed, seeing the carnage … my father, my brothers, my cousins, my friends lying there, dead and dying.” Human Rights Watch said more than 170 people were massacred near Bakorat and Intazayene villages and nearby nomad camps that day. Miriam and her relatives put the number at 245.

As we sat in the courtyard, it all seemed to be happening again.

U.S. Military Aid

In 2002, long before motorcycle attacks became commonplace in the tri-border region of the Sahel, the United States began providing Niger with counterterrorism assistance. The U.S. flooded this country with military equipment, from armored vehicles to surveillance aircraft. Since 2012, the tab to U.S. taxpayers is more than $500 million and climbing, one of the largest security assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, Niger hosts one of the largest and most expensive drone bases run by the U.S. military. Built in the northern city of Agadez at a price tag of more than $110 million and maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million each year, Air Base 201 is a surveillance hub and the lynchpin of an archipelago of U.S. outposts in West Africa. Home to Space Force personnel, a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment, and a fleet of drones — including armed MQ-9 Reapers — the base is an exemplar of failed U.S. military efforts in this country and the wider region. With terrorism skyrocketing in the Sahel while the U.S. pours hundreds of millions of dollars into security assistance, base construction, and troop deployments, this drone outpost — built to enhance security in the region — can’t even protect its own contractors and the U.S. tax dollars that keep it running. Less than a mile from the base’s entrance, as The Intercept recently reported, bandits conducted a daylight armed robbery of base contractors and drove off with roughly 24 million West African CFA francs late last year.

U.S. troops in the country also train, advise, and assist local counterparts and have fought and even died — in an ambush by ISIS near the village of Tongo Tongo in 2017. Over the last decade, the number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Niger has jumped more than 900 percent from 100 to 1,001. Niger has seen a proliferation of U.S. outposts that includes not just the huge drone base in Agadez, but also another one in the capital, at the main commercial airport. You can sit in a departure lounge and watch drones land and take off.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum and decried the growing regional influence of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group. “Where Wagner has been present, bad things have inevitably followed,” said Blinken, noting that the group’s presence is associated with “overall worsening security.” The U.S. was a better option, he said, and needed to prove “that we can actually deliver results.” But the U.S already has a two-decade record of counterterrorism engagement in the region — and “bad things” and “overall worsening security” have been the hallmarks of those years.

Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism assistance to Niger. Last year, the number of violent events in Burkina Faso, Mali, and western Niger alone, reached 2,737, according to a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. This represents a jump of more than 30,000 percent since the U.S. began its counterterrorism efforts. (Wagner has only been active in the region since late 2021.) During 2002 and 2003, terrorists caused 23 casualties in Africa. In 2022, terrorist attacks in just those three Sahelian nations killed almost 7,900 people. “The Sahel now accounts for 40 percent of all violent activity by militant Islamist groups in Africa, more than any other region in Africa,” according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

The impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on Nigeriens has been enormous.

Last year, an estimated 4.4 million people experienced dire food insecurity — a record number and a 90 percent increase compared to 2021. Between last January and September, almost 580,000 children under 5 suffered from wasting. This year, the United Nations estimates that about 3.7 million Nigeriens, including 2 million children, will need humanitarian assistance. Many of those in need are also the most difficult to reach due to insecurity.

It’s worth noting that in 2002, when the U.S. began pumping counterterrorism funds into the country, the overall food situation was described as “satisfactory” and undergoing “progressive improvement,” according to a food security monitoring agency set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Banning Motorbikes

As quickly as it began, the telephonic flurry of rings and chimes that took over Miriam’s courtyard in Niamey ceased. I heard later that one motorbike was spotted — and that the gunfire may have been shots from the local self-defense group at the rider of that moto.

To Miriam and her relatives, shooting at someone for riding a motorcycle sounds completely prudent. This mindset meshes with a parade of government policies instituted in the tri-border region and the far east of the country, near Lake Chad, where the terror group Boko Haram has been a persistent menace.

Niger and its neighbors have intermittently imposed emergency measures, including the banning of motorbikes. Local markets have also been closed because authorities say that terrorists use them to purchase supplies. There have been other restrictions on people’s movement, the purchase of fertilizer, and fishing — all in the name of counterterrorism. Violating these strictures may brand you as a terrorist or sympathizer. Your ethnicity may too. People in this compound, just like those in the Nigerien government, will tell you that while many jihadists are ethnic Peul, all Peul are not jihadists. They also say there is no ethnic component to this conflict. Peul leaders disagree. They say they’re the victims.

A week later, I’m in a different compound in another part of town to meet two men who want their stories told. As we sit in a darkened room, I ask if it’s OK to use their names; they shoot each other worried looks. “The military will come find us. They’ll say, ‘You talked to the journalist,’” said a man in a white tagelmust as his colleague in a blue turban nodded. It’s a common fear here. People are afraid of their U.S.-backed government, so while they gave me their names and those of their villages, I can only call these men “Puel community leaders.”

“The emergency measures just impoverished people. The jihadists kept their motos. They were able to purchase supplies. They eat and drink. They do whatever they want. But average people lost everything.”

“The emergency measures just impoverished people. The jihadists kept their motos. They were able to purchase supplies. They eat and drink. They do whatever they want. But average people lost everything,” the man in white explained. “There’s a 6 p.m. curfew, but it takes two days by moto to travel to the health clinic. People are dying because they can’t get treatment.” The man in blue explained that the closure of markets meant finding a car — another major expense — to drive to Mali. “So instead of paying 10,000 CFA for a sack of millet, you pay 50,000 CFA,” he said, referring to the local currency, West African CFA francs. “There’s a lot of hunger.”

Predominantly seminomadic Muslim cattle herders, ethnic Peuls across the Sahel express discontent with government neglect of their communities. Many say they have been tagged as terrorists, and the stigma has further marginalized them and encouraged abuse by government troops. “They arrest people without cause,” said the leader in white. “Peul youth laid down their arms and wanted to join the state security forces or form a militia, but the government rejected the offer.”

Hassane Boubacar, a colonel major — a rank between colonel and general — and an expert on radicalization detailed to the Nigerien prime minister’s office, agreed that socioeconomic issues are key drivers of terrorism. “The jihadists do what the state fails to do and provides services that the government fails to provide,” he said. “The people in these areas are very poor, and the jihadists have a lot of money to pay them from illegal activity, like drug trafficking.”

A recent U.N. Development Program report on terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa found much the same. Drawing on interviews with 2,200 people in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and five other African nations, UNDP discovered that roughly 25 percent of voluntary recruits cited job opportunities as their primary reason for joining terror groups. Only 17 percent mentioned religion. The report found that most who joined extremist groups grew up “suffering from inter-generational socio-economic marginalization and underdevelopment.”

As a disaffected minority, the Peul have been the prime focus for recruitment by Islamist militants, even as Peuls are often victims of jihadist attacks. “They say, ‘The Peul are terrorists,’ but the terrorists terrorize us,” said the Peul community leader in the white tagelmust. “They steal our animals. They kill our family members.” At the same time, Peul are also a prime target of arrests, abuse, and attacks by Nigerien security forces.

Nearly half of those interviewed for the UNDP report said a specific event pushed them to join militant groups, with 71 percent citing human rights violations, often at the hands of state security forces. According to the report, “in most cases, state action, accompanied by a sharp escalation of human rights abuses, appears to be the prominent factor finally pushing individuals into [violent extremist] groups in Africa.”

Col. Maj. Boubacar was dismissive of reported Nigerien atrocities. “Sometimes, we’re accused of human rights violations,” he said. “But we pay a lot of attention to allegations.”

The U.S. government doesn’t agree. A State Department analysis of human rights in Niger released last month cited significant abuses, including credible reports of arbitrary and unlawful killings by the government. “For example, the armed forces were accused of summarily executing persons suspected of fighting with terrorist groups,” reads the report, which also details arbitrary detention, unjustified arrests of journalists, life-threatening prison conditions, and rampant impunity among the security forces.

In 2020, for example, Niger’s National Commission on Human Rights investigated allegations that 102 civilians had disappeared during a weeklong military operation. “There have indeed been executions of unarmed civilians and the mission discovered at least 71 bodies in six mass graves,” said Abdoulaye Seydou, the president of the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy, and Development, which took part in the investigation. “It is elements of the defense and security forces which are responsible for these summary and extrajudicial executions.” Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that an additional six mass graves containing 34 bodies were also uncovered nearby.

Last fall, the Nigerien military also bombed a gold mine during a counterterrorism operation. While the government claimed that only seven people died, locals said many more civilians were killed. After Seydou spoke out about it, he was charged with “publishing information likely to disturb public order” and arrested. The case was dropped, but as he attempted to leave the courthouse, Seydou was again arrested, cited for “creating false evidence to overwhelm” the Nigerien military and sent to a high-security prison.

Direct Operations

As with allies the world over, from Cameroon to Saudi Arabia, human rights violations haven’t deterred the U.S. from supporting Niger’s government. Hang around the airport in Niamey and you’ll see a parade of white faces, tattooed arms, and goatees. Waiting for flights in and out of the country, you hear talk of the trials and tribulations of Veterans Affairs medical care. When discussing their seats on the plane, it isn’t 23D but 23-Delta. “What are you teaching?” a paunchy contractor with a Southern accent and a goatee asked a younger man with an artfully groomed beard traveling with a group of Americans who, it turned out, were providing instruction on battlefield medicine.

When asked what U.S. troops were doing in Niger, U.S. Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan offered a boilerplate response: “The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger and we remain committed to helping our African partners to conduct missions or operations that support and further our mutual security goals and objectives in Africa.” What are those “missions or operations”? The most famous came to light in October 2017 when ISIS fighters ambushed American troops near Tongo Tongo, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others.

AFRICOM told the world that a small group of U.S. troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. In truth, the ambushed team was working out of the town of Ouallam with a larger Nigerien force under Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging regional counterterrorism effort. Until bad weather prevented it, that group was slated to support another team of American and Nigerien commandos based in Arlit — a town 700 miles northeast of the capital — attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, a so-called 127e program that allows U.S. forces to use local troops as proxies.

A 2018 investigation by then-Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier found that AFRICOM’s advise-and-assist story was a fiction. “Missions described in this report and executed by Team OUALLAM and Team ARLIT were driven by U.S. intelligence, planned entirely by U.S. forces, and directed and led by [U.S. forces]. Nigerien forces had no input in the planning process or the decision to execute the missions,” he explained. “Advise, assist, and accompany operations that Team OUALLAM and Team ARLIT were conducting … more closely resembled U.S. direct action than foreign partner-led operations aided by U.S. advice and assistance.” Direct action, to be clear, is a special ops euphemism for strikes, raids, and other offensive missions.

Cloutier wrote that U.S. commandos in Niger “are planning, directing, and executing direct action operations rather than advising Nigerien-led operations.” Is this still the case? The official answer is no. But the official answer used to be that these were “advise-and-assist” missions. It took a tragedy that couldn’t be suppressed for the truth to slip out.

Commandos, however, don’t only conduct clandestine raids. When I happened to encounter three men who said their names were Cam, Chuck, and Brock at Agadez’s Ministry of Justice headquarters, they were on a different kind of mission. Cam sported a shiny lavender dashiki-style top — they call it bazin here — with an embroidered placket and matching lavender pants, dark wraparound sunglasses, a backward black baseball cap, and a beard that would satisfy the Taliban. He said he hailed from Colorado and had been in-country almost eight months. Chuck had more conventional facial hair, wore a green Fjallraven cap, a blue Osprey Daylite shoulder sling strapped tight to his chest with one radio or satphone carabineered to it and another walkie-talkie clipped to his pocket. Brock wore a black and gray ballcap, a polo shirt and khakis, a hand-held radio clipped to the right front pocket, and had a haversack strapped to his back.

While the U.S. spends significant time and money training, advising, and assisting Nigerien troops, Americans also devote substantial resources to courting government officials and building influence with local elites.

Cam said he was on a farewell tour and had a gift for the top local prosecutor. It highlighted another facet of American efforts in Niger — one that plays out across the globe whenever Americans sit down for an awkward cup of tea with, or provide Viagra to, some local chieftain they hope to win over. While the U.S. spends significant time and money training, advising, and assisting Nigerien troops, Americans also devote substantial resources to courting government officials and building influence with local elites.

When I spoke with him recently, Mohamed’s tune had dramatically changed. He had gone from a vocal critic to an ardent believer. “In the beginning, they didn’t have anything to do with me,” he said of the U.S. military in Agadez. “Now, the Americans come here every two weeks, every month. They were here just yesterday. We exchange information about security issues,” he gushed. “I’m very pleased with the relationship.”

AFRICOM ignored questions about their relationship with Mohamed, but it seems clear that the U.S. military decided to court this formerly critical local leader. Mohamed showed me a certificate, commemorating a 2021 drone mission and bearing the logo of Special Operations Command Africa, presented to him by his American friends. But it didn’t stop with press-the-flesh attention and meaningless keepsakes. After Mohamed told the Americans about a nagging medical condition, he said that they brought him to the drone base in Agadez where he was treated by a U.S. doctor.

Drones and Hope

While the base may come up short as a surveillance and security bastion, it has had an undeniable impact. If you’re a local elite like Mohamed, the Americans apparently invite you in and provide you with free medical care. But if you’re living on the outskirts of the facility in the hard-scrabble Tadress neighborhood, it’s a different story.

To most in Tadress, Air Base 201 is a mystery. “We don’t know what they do there,” said several women in a rough-hewn compound a short distance from the outpost. The only tangible impact of the U.S. military on their lives, they told me, were the cracks that formed in their mud walls due to huge transport planes that shook their homes as they passed overhead.

Maria Laminou Garba, 27, runs a recycling collective in Tadress that pays unemployed youths to gather recyclables and subsidizes schooling for neighborhood orphans. When there were only Nigeriens at the base, Garba could make a little money selling them food. When the Americans arrived, she said she was no longer welcome. With permission from the mayor of Agadez to collect plastic in that section of Tadress, she approached the base with her young employees, hoping to gather discarded water bottles. But Garba quickly grew scared of the guards’ guns when a booming voice from a loudspeaker told them to leave.

The U.S. military touts good works in Tadress, like rebuilding a primary school. “I’ve heard about them helping, but I’ve never seen it,” said Garba. The U.S. also publicizes opportunities for locals to sell trinkets at craft bazaars at Air Base 201. “People from town get to sell stuff,” Garba told me, referring to Agadez proper. “They’re not from here.”

Garba and a local leader — the chef de quartier of Tadress, Abdullah Bil Rhite Chareyet — led me to a reservoir near the outskirts of the base where locals use the water to make mud bricks. But the site is also, they explained, a danger to children. “A 6-year-old child drowned here a few years ago,” said Garba. “Every year, someone dies here.” Last year, a 17-year-old girl became the latest victim, she and Chareyet told me.

Chareyet meets with American military personnel from time to time. They asked him to look out for suspicious activity — most notably sightings of Toyota Land Cruisers. (A Land Cruiser pickup truck apparently carried out the 2021 armed robbery on the outskirts of the base.) The Americans gave him a phone number to call in reports.

In 2021, after years of requests from the village chief for American assistance, Chareyet, Garba, and other local leaders met with a U.S. officer and his interpreter at this same spot. The American, they said, pledged to install a fence around the reservoir and post a guard, to protect local children. Chareyet showed me photos of him with the American. AFRICOM refused to comment on the man’s identity, but a U.S. contractor working at the base, who was not authorized to speak with the press, examined the images and verified that the man pictured was a civil affairs officer who had since left Niger.

Chareyet had hoped that the Americans would honor their word. But six months later, when I visited the site, there was no fence. Chareyet said the Americans had not been back. “I thought they would build the fence like they said,” he told me. Garba shook her head, adding, “The Americans gave us false hope.”

The post After Two Decades of U.S. Military Support, Terror Attacks Are Worse Than Ever in Niger appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S.-trained officers have led seven coups and coup attempts in Africa over the last year and a half. This week on Intercepted: Investigative reporter Nick Turse details the U.S. involvement on the African continent. U.S.-trained officers have attempted coups in five West African countries alone: three times in Burkina Faso, three times in Mali, and once each in Guinea, Mauritania, and Gambia. Turse offers the stories behind the coups, details about clandestine training efforts, and a look at the sordid history of the U.S. military’s involvement on the continent. He examines why most Americans have no idea what their tax dollars have wrought in Africa and the broader implications of failed U.S. counterterrorism policies being implemented repeatedly, in country after country.

[Solemn, low music.]

[Sounds of a young officer reading a statement about the government coup in Burkina Faso.]

Nick Turse: Fourteen men sit or stand behind the television anchor’s desk. One young officer, reading aloud in French, begins to tell the country of Burkina Faso that their constitution is suspended. Borders have been closed. And the entire government has been dissolved.

A coup had taken place.

[Military officer continues reading statement.]

NB: Another man, to his right, wearing a red beret sat proudly – looking straight at the camera. The young officer introduced him:

Officer [in French]: Lieutenant-colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

NT: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, Burkina Faso’s new leader.

Damiba took power on January 24, after deposing the democratically-elected president. He was sworn in as the new president just last week.

Burkina Faso is all too familiar with coups. Since its independence from France in 1960, coups and coup attempts have taken place again and again.

While many have watched these events unfold in West Africa, few actually recognize where some of these coup leaders come from.

Many, it turns out, are trained by the U.S. government.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

NT: I’m Nick Turse, an investigative journalist, author, and contributing writer at The Intercept. For 11 years, I’ve been reporting on Africa. From the U.S. drone war in Somalia, to civil war in Libya, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and ethnic cleansing in South Sudan, I’ve traveled across the continent to report on atrocities, civil wars, and crises. But my main beat is reporting on U.S. military operations in Africa.

In the past year and a half, there have been seven coups and coup attempts in Africa. But what many people haven’t focused on is how the U.S. government has direct links to many of them.

I recently reported at The Intercept that since 2008 U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups, and succeeded in at least eight in five West African countries alone: Three times in Burkina Faso; three times in Mali; and once each in Guinea, Mauritania, and the Gambia.

U.S. training and support to the region flows through the State Department and Africa Command, an arm of the Department of Defense, in charge of military operations across the continent. 

Over the years, I’ve revealed the existence of low-profile military bases, secret eavesdropping operations, and clandestine missions, exposing just how far the U.S. government’s tentacles spread across the continent — much farther than one might think.

[Low, contemplative music.]

NT: The coup in Burkina Faso was only the latest in a string of coups. Pointing to the worsening security situation in the country, Damiba – the most recent coup leader – led elements of the military to take control of the country ousting former President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. As shots rang out in the streets and on military bases in late January, the United Nations spoke out against the violence:

Stephen Dujarric: The Secretary General is following developments in Burkina Faso with deep concern. He’s particularly worried about the whereabouts and safety of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, as well as the worsening security situation following the coup carried out on January 23 by sections of the Armed Forces. The Secretary General strongly condemns any attempted takeover of government by the force of arms. He calls on the coup leaders to lay down their arms and to ensure the protection of the physical integrity of the president and of the institutions of Burkina Faso.

[Sounds from Damiba’s swearing-in ceremony: a drum line and music procession.] 

NT: Damiba seized power and was later sworn in as interim president of the nation. Damiba assured the country that security and peace would return. But there’s been precious little of it in Burkina Faso of late. In the past few years, extremist Islamist groups have made headway in the country, and the violence has only worsened.

DW News: Security Forces have clashed with protesters in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou. Tensions have been rising over the government’s failure to rein in terrorist groups. Militants linked to Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State have killed thousands of people.

France 24 English: Between 2016 and 2018, the jihadists mainly hit Ouagadougou, the capital. On January 15, 2016, a double attack targeted a restaurant and a hotel. It left 30 dead and dozens injured.

NT: Damiba led a small, relatively-unknown group called the “Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration” to overthrow the democratically-elected Kaboré. Damiba is also a highly-trained soldier, and much of his training came from the U.S. government.

Damiba participated in at least half a dozen U.S. training exercises, according to U.S. Africa Command.

In 2010 and 2020, he participated in an annual special operations training program known as the Flintlock exercise. In 2013, Damiba was accepted into an Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course, a State Department-funded training program. In 2013 and 2014, he attended a U.S.-sponsored Military Intelligence training engagement for African officers. And in 2018 and 2019, he participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil Military Support Element in Burkina Faso.

And he’s hardly alone.

[Sounds of revolution: car alarms, the indistinct murmurs of a huge crowd shouting, an explosion.]

NT: Back in 2014, a revolution took hold of Burkina Faso.

France 24 English: After 27 years in power, President Blaise Compaoré resigns as president of Burkina Faso. His attempt to amend the Constitution allowing him to run for a fifth consecutive term sparked a massive popular uprising; over 1,000 demonstrators broke into parliament and national television offices demanding the president’s resignation, and it was later dubbed the black spring of Burkina Faso.

Al Jazeera English: Protesters fell like flies when soldiers started shooting at them. The day after the protest, Compaoré fled to neighboring Ivory Coast, ending his 27-year rule. 

Newscaster: Now, the head of the National Assembly should take over and announce elections in the next 30 to 60 days.

NT: A U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Yacouba Isaac Zida seized power, and established a transitional government. Just two years earlier, he had attended a counterterrorism training course at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, sponsored by the U.S. Joint Special Operations University. He also attended a military intelligence course in Botswana, financed by the U.S. government. The next year, in 2015, another coup overthrew Zida’s transitional government.

France 24 English: On Wednesday, RSP forces stormed the presidential palace taking Michel Kafando and two other ministers hostage. The next day, Lt. Col. Mamadou Bamba declared the end of the transition regime.

Al Jazeera English: The United Nations has strongly condemned the coup and the African Union is giving coup leaders until Tuesday to restore the transitional government or face travel bans and asset freezes.

NT: General Gilbert Diendéré led that coup. He had not only taken part in a U.S.-led counterterrorism exercise, but also served as a literal advertisement for it. Diendéré appeared in an official U.S. Africa Command photo addressing Burkinabè soldiers before their deployment to Mali, in support of the 2010 Flintlock exercise.

[Light, quick guitar music.]

NT: Since 2005, the U.S. has pumped billions of dollars in security assistance to promote quote-unquote “stability” in West Africa. And since the 2000s, the United States has regularly deployed small teams of commandos to advise, assist, and accompany local forces — even into battle. The U.S. has provided weapons, equipment, and aircraft; it offers many forms of training, advising, and assistance via Special Operations Command Africa, which focuses on enhancing the counterterrorism capabilities of West African nations.

At the very same time, coups by U.S.-trained officers have become an increasingly common occurrence in West Africa. Last summer, for example, American Green Berets arrived in Guinea to train a special forces unit led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya, a young officer who had also served in the French Foreign Legion.

In September, members of Doumbouya’s unit took a break from their training with U.S. commandos, stormed the presidential palace, and deposed the country’s 83-year-old president, Alpha Condé.

France 24 English: Unknown to his compatriots when he first appeared on national television, Mamady Doumbouya is described as discreet. Since 2018, the lieutenant colonel has headed Guinea’s Special Forces, an elite unit that leads the fight against terrorism. It was created by the president he deposed, Alpha Condé. 

NT: Doumbouya soon declared himself Guinea’s new leader. 

Officially, the U.S. military is operating in Africa to — and this is a quote — “help negate the drivers of conflict and extremism.” 

Basically, after 9/11, the US scoured the globe for so-called weak states and ungoverned spaces, places where violent extremism could take root. But the problem was completely theoretical. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the United States didn’t even recognize any terrorist organizations before 2001. 

But that didn’t stop America. Special Operations Forces were dispatched to Somalia in 2002, followed by security assistance, more troops, contractors, helicopters and drones, and it never stopped. By the late 2010s, the U.S. had almost 30 military bases scattered across the continent. U.S. commandos had seen combat in at least 13 African countries, and the number of terrorist and militant groups had grown from zero to nearly 50. 

U.S. operations are designed to promote stability, and tamp down conflict and extremism. For more than 20 years, this has been the rationale of pouring money into countries like Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, in the Sahel region and beyond. 

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the premier Pentagon research institution devoted to African security, recently issued a report. In it they said, there had been a 70 percent increase in violent events linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel and that this propelled a new record of extremist violence in Africa in 2021. That’s directly from the Pentagon. 

They went on to say: “this continuous and uninterrupted escalation of violence involving militant Islamist groups in the region since 2015.” 

It’s really hard to imagine a more dismal assessment. I think it’s in everyone’s interest to promote peace and stability in Africa. But the U.S. military hasn’t shown any ability to achieve these aims through its policies. 

For the last 20 years, the U.S. has engaged in a version of counterterrorism Whac-A-Mole through airstrikes, commando raids, and the export of U.S. counterterrorism strategies to partners and allies all across Africa. Now, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but the metrics are bleak in the places where the U.S. has made its most concerted and well-funded efforts. 

Terrorist groups, terrorist attacks, civilian fatalities, they’ve all spiked in the Sahel. Coups by U.S.-trained officers are rampant across West Africa; a two-decade-old quasi-war in Somalia is, at best, a stalemate, while Libya is, more than a decade after U.S. intervention, still a nearly failed state. 

[Light, contemplative wind instruments play.]

NT: When I was reporting in Burkina Faso in 2020, I wanted to better understand the government that U.S. taxpayers, like myself, were supporting there. So I spoke with people who had watched their family members marched away by Burkinabè soldiers, only to later find their loved ones lying in fields or on roadsides, with their hands bound, shot through the back of the head.

These were civilians who were executed on the suspicion that they were aiding terrorists, often only because they belong to the quote-unquote, “wrong ethnic group.” 

I also spoke with Simon Compaoré, who had previously overseen key components of the Burkinabè security forces as interior minister and was, at that time, the president of the People’s Movement for Progress, which was then the ruling political party, the government supported by the United States. His job was akin to the head of the Democratic National Committee in the United States. 

I hit him with some hard questions about reports of these extra-judicial killings. I expected typical denials. Instead, I got a fairly frank admission that some of the reports were true. And what he said after really stunned me: 

“We have to do everything to make sure we keep the morale up,” he said, of the soldiers who are carrying out those targeted killings. “We’re doing this, but we’re not shouting it from the rooftops.”

He was telling me very bluntly, that murder was a morale booster, but they just wanted to keep it under wraps. You don’t often get this kind of honesty from politicians about atrocities by their own soldiers, nor clear evidence of just who U.S. tax dollars are supporting and what those troops are doing.

[Music with low, steady drum beats.] 

NT: Back in 2015, I reported on how the U.S. had deployed Special Operations Forces across the continent, where nearly 50 terrorist groups were operating. But the Pentagon refused to name more than just a handful of the groups they were fighting. 

One of those countries where terrorist groups were operating was Mali. It’s also a country where U.S.-trained officers have repeatedly overthrown the governments they were sworn to serve. And like in Burkina Faso, there have been three coups in Mali by U.S.-trained officers just the last decade, and it all began with another U.S. military mission gone awry. In 2011, a U.S.-backed uprising Libya toppled longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Al Jazeera English: The Eastern city of Benghazi calls for Muammar Gaddafi to be brought to justice.

ABC News: It has been 10 days since Mr. Obama ordered U.S. forces into combat in Libya. Nearly 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched more than 1,600 airstrikes.

NT: As his government, Tuareg fighters serving Gaddafi looted the Libyan regime’s weapons depots, traveled to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that country.

Al Jazeera English: The Tuareg rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, has declared an independent state in northern Mali. They’re calling it Azawad. In a statement on their website, the group said the decision was irreversible.

NT: The government in Mali was hapless. So Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, received intelligence training in Arizona, and underwent infantry officer basic training in the State of Georgia, took matters into his own hands. He overthrew his government’s democratically elected government.

Al Jazeera English: Captain Sanogo is reaching out to politicians and religious leaders to gather support for his military coup against President Amadou Toumani Touré.

NT: After his coup, Sanogo even offered America credit for his success.

“America is a great country with a fantastic army,” he said afterward. “I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.” 

Sanogo was later accused of torturing and killing soldiers who opposed him, and he was eventually arrested after the coup. He was never convicted. 

More recently, in 2020, Col. Assimi Goïta headed the junta that overthrew the Malian government. Goïta had worked with the U.S. Special Operations Forces for years, participating in training exercises, and attending a Joint Special Operations University seminar at Florida’s MacDill Air Force Base.

DW News: Leaders of a military coup in the West African nation of Mali say that they will enact political transition and fresh elections within a reasonable time. This, after Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta announced his resignation just hours after being detained by armed soldiers. 

BBC News: The United Nations Security Council has condemned yesterday’s coup. They’re urging the soldiers involved to return to their barracks without delay.

NT: U.S. officials disavowed their former protégé and condemned the coup. After overthrowing the government, Goïta stepped down and took the job of Vice President in a transitional government tasked with returning Mali to civilian rule. But nine months later, just last year, in fact, he seized power again in a second coup.

[Austere piano music.]

NT: For 20 years, the U.S. military has waged quasi-wars as part of the War on Terror, all across the African continent. And there’s been a tremendous human impact.

As I’ve said, correlation doesn’t equal causation. But the metrics are exceptionally dismal. As the U.S. has sent in commandos, built up military bases, trained African soldiers, and pumped in countless hundreds of millions of dollars, every indicator has gone in the wrong direction: The number of terrorist attacks, terrorist groups, coups, and overall instability has all risen.

And then there’s the human costs. The Pentagon’s Africa Center just reported 4,800-plus fatalities stemming from terrorist attacks on the Sahel in 2021. That’s 17 percent higher than the year before. And this followed a 57 percent increase in 2020. There are now more fatalities linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel than any other region in Africa. 

On top of this, there are now 3.5 million people displaced by violence in the Sahel, 2.5 million of them in Burkina Faso alone. This is all to say that suffering is immense. And worse, it’s increasing. There are now roughly 18 active militant Islamist groups operating on the continent, up from just five in 2010. 

According to the Pentagon’s Africa Center, the number of violent events across the continent has jumped more than 1,800 percent from 288 in 2009 to 5,500 last year, according to the Africa Center’s analysis. 

From my experience, I’d wager that most people in Africa have no idea what the U.S. military is doing on the continent, or in their countries. In many nations, the U.S. maintains an exceptionally low profile, and keeps their missions under wraps.

For example, I spoke with some well-connected military officials in Burkina Faso about what American forces were doing in their country, and they were shocked — so much is unknown. So the question that needs to be asked is: Do ordinary people across Africa have the right to know what the U.S. military is doing in their country? Do they have a right to this information so they can evaluate the results and hold their own governments accountable? Until now, most haven’t been given that opportunity.

U.S. government shadow wars in Africa continue. Two weeks ago, the world watched in horror as Russia invaded Ukraine. And U.S. government officials wasted no time denouncing the violence.

President Joseph R. Biden: Within moments — moments — missile strikes began to fall on historic cities across Ukraine. Then came the air raids, followed by tanks and troops rolling in.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: This is shameful. The numbers of civilians killed and wounded. The humanitarian consequences will only grow in the days ahead.

NT: But just two days earlier, the U.S. carried out its own military intervention, not in the neighboring country, but halfway across the globe. It was an airstrike in Somalia.

This was the first U.S. airstrike in Somalia in 2022. But one of more than 200 since 2007. And although President Biden has placed limits on drone strikes outside of war zones, U.S. Africa Command still had the authority to carry out the strike. Africa Command, also known as AFRICOM, claims that three terrorists were killed as a result of the strike. Is it true? It could be. But I’ve learned to take what AFRICOM says with a grain of salt. 

I’ve heard that three times that number of people died in the fight that day. Were they all terrorists? It’s hard to know the truth. When these wars are mainly fought in the shadows. The U.S. makes its own rules when it comes to war. It’s been that way for more than 150 years, when some other countries do what we do, it’s aggressive and illegitimate. It violates international norms. When we do it, it’s sound policy conducted with the utmost care and discretion. This, of course, is the very definition of American exceptionalism.

The CIA has a term called blowback, the unintended and unwanted side effects of its operations. These are the implications of having such widespread military involvement by the U.S. government.

A 2011 war in Libya, for instance, looked like an easy win. It helped to oust a cruel dictator, it cost no American lives, and it was heralded as a model for American warfare in the 21st century. But 11 years later, Libya is still a failed state, with so many dead and far more displaced due to constant conflict and crisis there. 

That war, in turn, destabilized Mali, and Niger, and then Burkina Faso, upending millions of lives with no end in sight. And now, that violence is creeping further south into previously peaceful places like Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Togo. 

Most Americans have no idea what their tax dollars have wrought in these far-off places, the chaos they’ve generated, the suffering that’s resulted. Those are the implications of failed U.S. counterterrorism policies being implemented again and again in country after country. These policies mean millions of people’s lives are upended, ended, or wrecked. And all of it? Courtesy of the U.S. government.

[End credits music.]

NT: And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted. Follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast.

Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. José Olivares is lead producer. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. And Rick Kwan mixed our show. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

And I’m Nick Turse.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted so you can hear it every week. And definitely do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much. 

Until next time.

The post U.S.-Trained Officers Have Led Numerous Coups in Africa appeared first on The Intercept.

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of attacks that have never before been publicized and that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger’s tenure in the White House. When questioned about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents — assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S. National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. The documents also provided a rudimentary road map for on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia that yielded evidence of scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been reported to the outside world.

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

The incidents detailed in the files and the testimony of survivors include accounts of both deliberate attacks inside Cambodia and accidental or careless strikes by U.S. forces operating on the border with South Vietnam. These latter attacks were infrequently reported through military channels, covered only sparingly by the press at the time, and have mostly been lost to history. Together, they increase an already sizable number of Cambodian deaths for which Kissinger bears responsibility and raise questions among experts about whether long-dormant efforts to hold him accountable for war crimes might be renewed.

The Army files and interviews with Cambodian survivors, American military personnel, Kissinger confidants, and experts demonstrate that impunity extended from the White House to American soldiers in the field. The records show that U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments.

Together, the interviews and documents demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives: failing to detect or protect civilians; to conduct post-strike assessments; to investigate civilian harm allegations; to prevent such damage from recurring; and to punish or otherwise hold U.S. personnel accountable for injuries and deaths. These policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia but also set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.

“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands

All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In 1973, during his Senate confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, Kissinger was asked if he approved of deliberately keeping attacks on Cambodia secret, to which he responded with a wall of words justifying the assaults. “I just wanted to make clear that it was not a bombing of Cambodia, but it was a bombing of North Vietnamese in Cambodia,” he insisted. The evidence from U.S. military records and eyewitness testimony directly contradicts that claim. So did Kissinger himself.

In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)

At a 2010 State Department conference on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia from 1946 through the close of the Vietnam War, I asked Kissinger how he would amend his testimony before the Senate, given his own contention that tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians died from his escalation of the war.

“Why should I amend my testimony?” he replied. “I don’t quite understand the question, except that I didn’t tell the truth.”

“Anything That Flies on Anything That Moves”

One night in December 1970, Nixon called his national security adviser in a rage about Cambodia. “I want the helicopter ships. I want everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them,” he barked at Kissinger, according to a transcript. “I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters. … I want it done! Get them off their ass. … I want them to hit everything.”

Five minutes later, Kissinger was on the phone with Gen. Alexander Haig, his military aide, relaying the command for a relentless assault on Cambodia. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?”

Two years earlier, Nixon had won the White House promising to end America’s war in Vietnam, but instead expanded the conflict into neighboring Cambodia. Fearing public backlash and believing that Congress would never approve an attack on a neutral country, Kissinger and Haig began planning — a month after Nixon took office — an operation that was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even top Pentagon officials via a conspiracy of cover stories, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged airstrikes in Cambodia as occurring in South Vietnam. Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.

Kissinger, who went on to serve as secretary of state in the Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In the decades that followed, he has continued to counsel U.S. presidents, most recently Donald Trump; served on numerous corporate and government advisory boards; and authored a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he came to the United States in 1938, amid a flood of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he continued on to an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954. He subsequently joined the Harvard faculty, working in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs until 1969. While teaching at Harvard, he served as a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before his senior roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations. A believer in Realpolitik, Kissinger heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.

Through a combination of relentless ambition, media savvy, and the ability to muddy the truth and slip free of scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and government functionary into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. While dozens of his White House colleagues were engulfed in the swirling Watergate scandal, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger emerged unscathed, all the while providing fodder for the tabloids and spouting lines like “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership cannot be exonerated for committing genocide on the Cambodian people, said Kiernan, the Yale scholar, but neither can Nixon nor Kissinger escape responsibility for their role in the slaughter that precipitated it. The duo so destabilized the tiny country that Pol Pot’s nascent revolutionary movement took over Cambodia in 1975 and unleashed horrors, from massacres to mass starvation, that would kill around 2 million people.

Kaing Guek Eav (known as “Duch”) who ran the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s, made the same observation. “Mister Richard Nixon and Kissinger,” he told a United Nations-backed tribunal, “allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities.” After he was overthrown in a military coup and his country was plunged into genocide, Cambodia’s deposed monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leveled similar blame. “There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia,” he said in the 1970s. “Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.”

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, and Chile to East Timor, Laos, and Uruguay. But Hitchens reserved special opprobrium for Kissinger’s role in Cambodia. “The bombing campaign,” he wrote, “began as it was to go on — with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect.”

Others went beyond theoretical indictments. As a teenager, Australian-born human rights activist Peter Tatchell felt greatly affected by the U.S. war — and war crimes — in Indochina. Decades later, believing that there was a strong case to be made, he took action. “It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go,” he told The Intercept by email.

“It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go.”

In 2002, with Slobodan Miloševic, the former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on trial for war crimes, Tatchell applied for an arrest warrant at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957, an act of Parliament that incorporated some components of the laws of war as defined by the 1949 Geneva Conventions into British law. He alleged that while Kissinger “was National Security Advisor to the U.S. President 1969-75 and U.S. Secretary of State 1973-77 he commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” Judge Nicholas Evans denied the application, stating that he was not “presently” able to draft a “suitably precise charge” based on the evidence Tatchell submitted.

When the arrest warrant was denied, Tatchell tried to engage international humanitarian organizations to help or take over the case, he told The Intercept, but they “did not see it as a priority.” He tried unsuccessfully to contact potential American witnesses and engage U.S. human rights groups.

But Tatchell maintains that Kissinger should still have his day in court. “I believe that age should never be a barrier to justice. Those who commit or authorise war crimes should be held to account, regardless of their age,” he wrote, “providing they have the mental capacity for a fair trial, which I understand is the case with Kissinger.”

Five Decades of Impunity

Kissinger and his acolytes frequently cast blame for the American war in Cambodia on the North Vietnamese troops and South Vietnamese guerrillas who used the country as a base and logistics hub, while giving short shrift to U.S. involvement there. “What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards,” wrote former Kissinger aide Peter Rodman. But three years earlier — long before most Americans knew their country was at war in Southeast Asia — U.S. “bombs hit a Cambodian village by accident … killing several civilians,” according to an Air Force history. And the “accidents” never stopped. Between 1962 and 1969, the Cambodian government tallied 1,864 border violations; 6,149 violations of its air space by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces; and nearly 1,000 civilian casualties.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

In 2010, I traveled to Cambodia to investigate decades-old U.S. war crimes. I searched the borderlands, looking for villages mentioned in U.S. military documents, carrying binders filled with photos of Cobras, Loaches, and other aircraft, asking villagers to point out the military hardware that killed their loved ones and neighbors. My interviewees were uniformly shocked that an American knew about attacks on their village and had traveled across the globe to speak with them.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict, the war was a shock and a horror.

For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have documented systemic killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity extending from the drone pilots who slay innocent people to the architects of America’s 21st-century wars in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan — which revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people — finally forced the Defense Department to unveil a comprehensive plan for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian casualties. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks a concrete mechanism for addressing past civilian harm.

The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.

I share some responsibility for the delay in publishing these accounts. For 13 years — while I was reporting on drone strike victims in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and civil wars from Libya to South Sudan — survivors’ accounts from Cambodian villages like An Lung Kreas, Bos Phlung, Bos Mon (upper), Doun Rath, Doun Rath 2, Mroan, Por, Sati, Ta Sous, Tropeang Phlong, Ta Hang, and Udom were lodged in my notebooks. Other projects and imperatives, coupled with the vagaries of the news industry that doesn’t always view past atrocities as “news,” kept them there.

When I conducted my interviews, in 2010, the life expectancy in Cambodia was about 66 years. Many of the people I spoke with — their ages in this article pegged to the date we spoke — are likely dead. Few in these rural villages had cellphones 13 years ago, so I have no way to reach them. But their accounts remain vibrant and the horrors they recounted have not diminished. Nor has their pain necessarily passed on with them from this world. We know from Holocaust survivors, for example, that trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on — along with the architect of that country’s agony.

Memories of Atrocity

Crossing a bridge over the Mekong River, I sped into the Cambodian countryside, along highways where SUVs passed tiny carts pulled by tiny ponies, motorbikes loaded with sheaves of bamboo or brightly colored textiles or baskets of squealing pigs, and ancient flatbed trucks piled high with rough-hewn, ochre bricks. I rolled through market towns of open-air butcher shops and wooden stalls selling cases of motor oil or motorcycle helmets or child-sized bags of rice or cases of Angkor Beer. I raced past thick, unruly forests and rubber plantations and rice fields where you could spot lines of water buffalo loping, single file, along the paddy dikes. Finally, I turned off the pavement onto a path of rutted, red dirt, looking for villages unknown even to the local police. At the end of one of these dusty, pitted trails, I found a hamlet straddling the border with Vietnam.

The air in Doun Rath was dry and musty during the day and punctuated, in the late afternoon, by the comforting smell of cooking fires that wafted up to wooden homes built on stilts to maximize air circulation on sweltering days like these.

I came looking for members of a ravaged generation who had survived both the American war and the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed. One of them, Phok Horm, spry and 84 years old at the time of our meeting, with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, told me: “Bombing was very common in this area. Sometimes, it happened every day. Sometimes there were dive bombers. Sometimes, the aircraft with the legs of a lobster would fly over and shoot at everything.”

Vietnamese guerrillas operated in the nearby forest, Phok and fellow village elders recalled. They came to Doun Rath to buy supplies from residents already living hard lives, growing rice and selling it across the border in Vietnam, before the war flooded the hamlet with refugees from other bomb-ravaged Cambodian villages. But the guerrillas generally weren’t present during the attacks. “Many people here were shot,” said Chneang Sous, who was in his 20s during the conflict. “Most of them were Cambodian.”

When the shooting started, villagers would scatter, running for the uncertain protection of paddy dikes and, as the war dragged on, subterranean bunkers that families dug beside their homes. Min Keun, a teenager in 1969, remembered the regular intrusion of “lobster legs” in the skies over the village. “People would panic. They would run. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they would be killed,” she recalled. “There was so much suffering.” Min and others remembered helicopters firing on fleeing villagers. Water buffalo and cattle were repeatedly machine-gunned. At night, the helicopters’ bright search beams lit up the darkness as they hunted for enemy forces. Bombs might fall at any time.

Around 1969, Phok’s husband was caught in the open during a “bombardment” and hit in the neck with shrapnel. He hung on for seven days before succumbing to his wounds. Chneang recalled an instance when an American Huey gunship popped up from behind a tree line, forcing villagers to bolt for safety. The helicopter raked the area with machine gunfire, killing his aunt and uncle. Nouv Mom told me that his younger sister was gravely wounded in a 1972 bombing. Vietnamese guerrillas arrived after the attack and took her away for medical treatment, but his family never saw her again. All told, survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks.

In nearby Doun Rath 2, former village chief Kang Vorn said residents led a simple life before the war, growing rice, beans, and sesame seeds. They began to see Vietnamese guerrillas around 1965, but the bombing didn’t begin until about 1969. Vet Shea, a one-eyed woman, recalled that the attacks intensified as time went on. “Sometimes we were bombed every day. Once, it was three or four times in one day,” she said. She herself survived a helicopter attack targeting farmers working in the nearby fields. “I ran flat out when I saw it,” Vet told me. “One person was wounded. A few others died.”

Thirteen elders of Doun Rath 2 did their best to recall the names of the dead. “Nul, Pik, Num, Seung,” said Sok Yun, an 85-year-old who relied on a weathered walking stick, as she ticked off the names of four villagers killed when their bomb shelter collapsed under a direct hit from an airstrike. Vet said her aunt was slain in another attack. Tep Sarum was just a teenager when a bomb hit his aunt’s house, killing her. Mom Huy, 80 years old at the time of our interview, said deaths and injuries from the bombs were common, while Kang, the former chief, estimated that at least 30 villagers were wounded by airstrikes but survived.

Just how many people in and around Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 were killed by Nixon and Kissinger’s war was already lost to history when I visited. The U.S. documentary record is quite sparse, but it does exist. On the night of August 9 and the morning of August 10, 1969, according to an Army inspector general’s report, a U.S. “Nighthawk” helicopter team — consisting of one Huey, equipped with a spotlight and high-powered M-60 machine guns, and a Cobra gunship outfitted with a powerful Gatling gun, rockets, and a grenade launcher — was operating in a so-called free fire zone near the South Vietnamese border with Cambodia.

The previously unreported investigation reveals that while only some members of the helicopter crews mentioned sporadic ground fire that night, they all agreed that lights were seen in “living structures.” Helicopter crew members claimed that radar operators told them they were over South Vietnam, but the radar operators said otherwise. One of them, Rogden Palmer, speaking to investigators about the Huey commander, said:

[H]e told his Tiger bird (the cobra accompanying him) that he thought he saw a light. At this time I advised him that he was close to the Cambodian border, and he rogered my transmission. Night Hawk and Tiger started circling … about the same time I advised him that he appeared to be over the border. I don’t remember if he rogered my transmission, but I beleive [sic] he did. At one time I told him he was over the border.

Apparently undaunted, the Huey focused its searchlight on the houses and the Cobra gunship commenced a firing run, blasting three of what the Pentagon documents referred to as “hooches” — shorthand for civilian dwellings — with machine gunfire and rockets filled with “flechettes,” tiny nails designed to tear through human flesh.

The U.S. investigation determined that the helicopters “did engage a target in the vicinity of the Cambodian border which could have been the village of Doun Rath.” The survivors in Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 didn’t recall this particular incident, emphasizing that attacks were so common for so long that they blended together. The report concluded that the “aircraft commander exercised poor judgement [sic] in engaging a target under these circumstances.” The inspector general, however, recommended that “no disciplinary action be taken,” and until I arrived decades later no one, apparently, had tried to investigate what actually happened in Doun Rath.

Fifty years on, most U.S. attacks in Cambodia are unknown to the wider world and may never be known. Even those confirmed by the U.S. military were ignored and forgotten: cast into history’s dustbin without additional reviews or follow-up investigations.

On January 6, 1970, for example, five helicopters breached Cambodian airspace and fired on the village of Prastah, killing two civilians and severely wounding an 11-year-old girl, according to an Army inspector general’s summary report. That perfunctory review found that helicopter gunships from the 25th Infantry Division had fired on enemy forces, who allegedly withdrew into Cambodia. The inquiry determined that the “gunships continued to engage and rounds did impact in Cambodia.” As to the question of civilian casualties and property damage resulting from the attack, the report stated only that “it was possible that civilian personnel … could have been struck by fire from the gunships and some crops could have been destroyed.” There is no indication that anything was done to compensate the survivors.

In the early evening of May 3, 1970, a helicopter circled the Cambodian village of Sre Kandal several times, scaring villagers and forcing them to flee, according to a formerly classified Army report. The file states that witnesses said a “helicopter of unknown type circled their village several times. They became frightened and started to run, at which time the helicopter allegedly fired.” According to Cambodians who the U.S. military encountered just after the attacks, three people suffered burns when a home was set ablaze in the attack and one person was wounded by shrapnel. One of the burn victims, his name likely engraved in the hearts of his Cambodian relatives but otherwise lost to history, later died.

“Everything Was Completely Destroyed”

Less than a month after Kissinger and Haig began planning the secret bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. launched Operation MENU, a callously titled collection of B-52 raids codenamed BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK, DINNER, DESSERT, and SUPPER that were carried out from March 18, 1969, to May 26, 1970. The attacks were kept secret through multiple layers of deception; Kissinger approved each one of the 3,875 sorties.

Survivors say that living through a B-52 bombing is unimaginably terrifying, bordering on the apocalyptic. Even within the confines of a deep, well-built bomb shelter, the concussive force from a nearby strike might burst eardrums. For those more exposed, the earth-shaking strikes could be extraordinarily lethal.

One morning, at the end of a busted dirt and gravel road near the Vietnamese border, I found Vuth Than, 78 years old at the time, with a shorn head of bristly gray hair and a mouth stained red with juice from betel nut, a natural stimulant popular in Southeast Asia.

Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,” Vuth Than told me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It was so terrible. Everything was completely destroyed.”

Exposed by North Vietnam’s Hanoi Radio and confirmed by the New York Times in May 1969, the secret bombing of Cambodia was officially denied and unknown to the public and the relevant congressional committees at the time. Congress and the American people were kept so deep in the dark that on April 30, 1970, as he announced the first publicly avowed U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia to strike at suspected enemy base areas, Nixon could baldly lie, telling the country: “For five years neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.”

It was only in 1973, during the Watergate scandal, that the secret bombing allegations came to the fore, prompting the first effort to impeach Nixon on the grounds that he had waged a secret war in a neutral nation in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Eventually, that article of impeachment was voted down in the name of political expediency. In the face of the other charges, however, Nixon resigned from office.

“That was in essentially unpopulated areas and I don’t believe it had any significant casualties,” Kissinger told me at the 2010 State Department conference, titled “The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975,” when I questioned him about the bombing. It was effectively the same reply he offered British journalist David Frost during a 1979 NBC News interview in which Frost charged that Kissinger’s Cambodia policy set in motion a series of events that would “destroy the country.” Kissinger stormed out of the studio after the taping and Frost quit the project, alleging interference by NBC, which was then also employing Kissinger as a consultant and commentator. NBC later released a transcript of the interview but allowed Kissinger to amend his comments through an attached letter to NBC News President William Small.

“We did not start to destroy a country from anybody’s point of view when we were bombing seven isolated North Vietnamese base areas within some five miles of the Vietnamese border, from which attacks were being launched into South Vietnam,” Kissinger told Frost. In typical fashion of seizing on discrepancies and muddying debates, he accurately denied Frost’s contention that Base Area 704 was bombed — a mistake stemming from a typographic error in a Pentagon document — during the secret B-52 attacks, noting that “base area 740” was actually attacked. He said recommendations of targets were accompanied by a statement “that civilian casualties were expected to be minimal.”

There were in fact 1,136 civilians living in Base Area 740, according to the Pentagon; a formerly top secret Air Force report, declassified decades after the Frost interview, noted that only 250 enemy forces were present there. An Army document I discovered in the National Archives also notes that the military was aware that civilians “were wounded/killed by B-52 strikes in Base area 740” between May 16 and 20, 1970, around the time of the SUPPER attacks. According to the confidential case file, those slain and injured were “Montagnards,” members of an ethnic minority whose “hamlets were not accurately reflected on commonly used maps.”

“I Was the Only Survivor of My Whole Family”

In 2010, the village was officially known as Ta Sous, but to its inhabitants it was still known by its name during the American war: Tralok Bek. “Every house had a bunker during the war. But during the day, if you were out tending to the cows, your life might depend on a termite hill and whether you could hide behind it,” Meas Lorn explained. “Planes dropped bombs. Helicopters strafed. Many people died,” said Meak Satom, a gray-haired man with a gold tooth. A B-52 strike in 1969 killed about 10 people, including a young friend, he recalled.

While I interviewed locals about the many attacks that occurred there during the war, Sdeung Sokheung said little. But when I brought out a binder filled with photographs of many different types of American aircraft, she zeroed in on an F-4 Phantom. Pointing at it, she said that as a girl, she had witnessed the bombing of Ta Hang village, about eight kilometers away, by that type of plane.

After finishing our interviews in Tralok Bek, I traveled winding dirt roads, past stunted bushes and the occasional thin, tan-colored cow, until we reached an area of dry, rock-hard rice paddies and towering palms. A few minutes later, in a rustic wooden home, I found 64-year-old Chan Yath, a woman with a substantial head of dark hair and teeth stained from chewing betel nut. I asked if there had been a bomb strike in the area during the war. She said yes; a family had been nearly wiped out. The lone survivor, she explained, was her cousin, An Seun. A younger woman was dispatched to find An and, 20 minutes or so later, we saw her — a tiny, aging mother of 10 — ambling along a narrow paddy dike path leading to the rear of Chan’s home. “During the time of a full moon,” said An, referring to a Buddhist holy day, she was off visiting her grandfather’s house. “At around 10 a.m., an airplane dropped a bomb on my home. My parents and four siblings were all killed,” she told me with wet eyes and a catch in her throat. “I was the only survivor of my whole family.”

During these same years, the U.S. was also conducting clandestine, cross-border ground operations inside Cambodia. In the two years before Nixon and Kissinger took over the war, U.S. commandos conducted 99 and 287 missions, respectively. In 1969, the number jumped to 454. Between January 1970 and April 1972, when the program was finally shut down, commandos carried out at least 1,045 covert missions inside Cambodia. There may, however, have been others, ostensibly launched by Kissinger, that were never disclosed.

From January to May 1973, between stints as deputy assistant to the president for national security and White House chief of staff, Al Haig served as the vice chief of staff of the Army. Retired Army Brig. Gen. John Johns told me that during this time, he was in Haig’s office at the Pentagon when an important call came in. “I was briefing him on something, and the red phone rang, which I knew was the White House,” Johns recalled. “I got up to leave. He motioned me to sit down. I sat there and heard him tell them how to cover up our intrusions into Cambodia.”

Johns — who had never before revealed the story to a reporter — was relatively sure that Haig was referring to past covert actions, yet did not know if the operations were made public or who was on the other end of the phone line. But Kissinger was responsible for many of the cross-border missions, according to Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council. “A lot of the time, he was authorizing the ongoing covert excursions into Cambodia,” he told me. “We were running a lot of covert ops there.”

“How Could the People Escape?”

After two days of driving local roads asking for directions, I turned off a highway onto a red dirt track that cut through lush farmland and finally spilled into a border village of simple wooden homes amid a sea of variegated greenery. During the war, these houses had looked much the same, said village chief Sheang Heng, a wiry man with calloused hands and bare feet wearing a loose dress shirt that had once been white. The only real change was that corrugated metal had replaced most of the old thatch and tile roofs.

In 1970, when Sheang was 17 years old, this village was on the front line of America’s Cambodian incursion. Halfway around the world, at Kent State University, members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during a May 4, 1970, protest against this new stage in the war. While that massacre received worldwide attention, a larger one in Sheang’s village three days earlier went unnoticed.

On May 1, 1970, helicopters circled the Cambodian village of “Moroan” (an American’s phonetic spelling of the name) before opening fire, killing 12 villagers and wounding five, according to a formerly classified U.S. document that, until now, has never been publicly disclosed. After the assault, another helicopter landed and carried off the injured; the survivors fled their village to another named “Kantuot,” located in a neighboring district.

There is no village in Cambodia named “Moroan,” but the hamlet near the Vietnamese border where I located Sheang was, he said, called Mroan. As in the other Cambodian border villages I visited, focusing on a lone attack cited in U.S. military documents left residents baffled, given that they had endured many airstrikes over many years. Still, when asked about the date, Sheang gestured toward what is now the far edge of the village. “Many died in that area at that time,” he recalled. “Afterward, the people left this village for another named Kantuot.”

Sheang and Lim South, who was 14 years old in 1970, said that many types of aircraft battered Mroan, from helicopter gunships to massive B-52 bombers. As Sheang — who lost his mother, father, a grandfather, a nephew, and a niece, among other relatives, to airstrikes — told me about the relentless attacks, his eyes reddened and went vacant. “The explosions tossed the earth into the air. The ‘fire rocket’ burned the houses. Who could survive? People ran, but they were cut down. They were killed immediately. They just died,” he said, trailing off as he moved to a far corner of the room and slumped to his knees.

Each survivor told a similar story. Lim’s sister and three brothers were killed in bombing raids. Thlen Hun, who was in her 20s in the early 1970s, said her older brother was killed in an airstrike. South Chreung — shirtless in dress pants with a vibrant orange krama, the traditional Cambodian scarf, around his neck — told me that he had lost a younger brother in a different attack.

Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.

Sheang and Thlen said that about half the families in Mroan — some 250 people — were wiped out by U.S. attacks. They led me to the edge of the village, a riot of foliage in every shade of green that sloped into a depression, one of several remaining nearby bomb craters. “About 20 people were killed here,” said Sheang gesturing toward the crater. “It used to be deeper, but the land has filled it in.” Thlen — slim, with graying hair, her brown eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint — shook her head and walked to the crater’s edge. “It was disastrous. Just look at the size,” she said, adding that this hole was just one of many that once dotted the landscape. “How could the people escape? Where could they escape to?”

The Stolen Suzuki and the Girl Left to Die

The results of Nixon’s December 1970 telephone tirade and Kissinger’s order to set “anything that flies on anything that moves” were immediately palpable. During that month, sorties by U.S. helicopters and bombers tripled in number. Soon after, in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.

How many similar killings occurred will never be known. Cover-ups were common, investigations were rarely undertaken, and crimes generally evaporated with the fog of war. But there were ample opportunities for mayhem and massacre. In the two years before Nixon took office, there were officially 426 helicopter gunship sorties in Cambodia, according to a Defense Department report. Between January 1970 and April 1972, there were at least 2,116. In January 1971, Congress enacted the Cooper-Church amendment, which prohibited U.S. troops, including advisers, from operating on the ground in Cambodia, but America’s war continued unabated. Evidence soon emerged that the U.S. was violating Cooper-Church, but the White House lied about it to Congress and the public. “As long as we didn’t set our foot on that ground, we basically weren’t there, even though we did missions there every day,” Gary Grawey, an Army helicopter crew chief who flew daily missions in Cambodia during the spring of 1971, including the May mission that killed the young girl, told me.

“They attacked that village,” Grawey said, noting that both the South Vietnamese and American troops shot up the hamlet. “They were shootin’ and they didn’t even know who they were shootin’ at,” he recalled, adding that the victims were “women and children,” just “regular villagers.”

It started at half past noon on May 18, 1971, according to an Army investigation file and previously unreported summary documents produced by a Pentagon task force in 1972, when three U.S. helicopters — a “hunter-killer team” conducting a reconnaissance mission — skimmed the treetops inside Cambodia. The team came upon a village where they spotted motorcycles and bicycles that, according to crew members’ testimony, were suspected of being part of an enemy supply convoy. Hovering above, the Americans tried to motion for people on the ground to open packs on the vehicles. When the villagers instead began moving away, the highest-flying helicopter fired two incendiary rockets, a numbingly common tactic to draw out enemy personnel who might be hiding nearby. While the crew of one of the helicopters reported taking isolated ground fire, no Americans were killed or wounded, nor were any enemy personnel or weapons ever found.

According to a confidential report discovered in the U.S. National Archives and published here for the first time, the high-flying helicopter then “rocketed and strafed the buildings and surrounding area with approximately 15 to 18 rounds of high explosive rockets and machine gun fire.”

Capt. Clifford Knight, pilot of the “low bird,” said that his gunner shot an apparently unarmed man, clad in civilian clothes, who was “trying to run away.” The gunner, John Nicholes, admitted it, noting that the killing took place after the initial rocket barrage.

Capt. David Schweitzer, the “high bird” commander, testified to rocketing and strafing the area and calling for the insertion of South Vietnamese, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, troops to search for suspected enemy forces. According to a summary of the testimony of Grawey, the helicopter crew chief who ferried an elite ARVN Ranger team and an American captain, Arnold Brooks, to the village:

CPT Brooks and the ARVN Rangers acted “hog wild” when they deplaned, shooting up the area although they received no return fire. … [H]e did observe 5 to 10 Cambodian personnel that appeared to be wounded, but that he did not know if they were wounded from air or ground fire.

Decades later, Grawey reconfirmed details of the incident in an interview, noting that, as the ARVN deployed from the helicopter, he told Brooks that “he was not to get off my bird.” But Brooks, whom Grawey described as “gung ho,” pulled rank and ignored him. Brooks — who he said was carrying a non-regulation “machinegun” — started shooting indiscriminately.

Davin McLaughlin, the commander of a replacement “low bird” that was called in when the first helicopter ran short on fuel, similarly noted that the South Vietnamese met no resistance and, according to the documents, “grabbed what they could.” A summary of the testimony of his gunner, Len Shattuck, in the investigation file adds:

The ARVN Rangers appeared melodramatic when they were inserted and in his opinion fired excessively in the area. … He stated that there were approximately 15 wounded personnel in the area and that he observed 2 males 50-60 years of age, and one female 8-10 years of age, that appeared to be dead.

In a 2010 interview, Shattuck told me that he didn’t fire a shot that day and stressed that he only saw one section of the village. What he saw there, however, stayed with him. “We came into a smoking village,” he said. “I witnessed dead bodies. I witnessed some wounded people that appeared to be civilians. … We didn’t evac[uate] anybody.” Shattuck remembered the little girl as even younger than indicated by his testimony, just 3 to 5 years old, and that she was covered with blood. “She was pretty badly shot up,” he recalled.

As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents. Brooks acknowledged his service in Cambodia during a telephone conversation and asked for a formal interview request by email. He did not respond to that request or subsequent ones.

Agness, according to an Army investigator’s summary, said that he received “a radio request to evacuate a wounded girl [but] denied on instructions of CPT Brooks since he was fully loaded with the ARVN Ranger team, a motorcycle and he was low on fuel.” The stolen Suzuki was presented as a gift to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Carl Putnam, who was later seen tooling around base on it, according to the investigation documents. The Army concluded that the wounded girl, left behind for the sake of the Suzuki, died.

Furious, Gary Grawey resolved to report Arnold Brooks. “I was really pissed at the time,” he told me. “I said I would report him, which I did.” A previously unreported final status report on the “Brooks Incident,” contained in the files of the Pentagon war crimes task force, concluded that allegations of excessive bombardment, pillage, and a violation of the rules of engagement had been “substantiated.” While no enemy weapons or war materiel were found in the village, according to the report, civilian casualties “were estimated at eight dead, including two children, 15 wounded and three or four structures destroyed. There is no evidence that the wounded were provided medical treatment by either U.S. or ARVN forces.”

Putnam and a direct subordinate were issued letters of reprimand — a low-grade punishment — for their “actions and/or inactions” in the case. (Putnam died in 1976.) While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.

Backing the Genocidaires

When Henry Kissinger hatched his plans for the secret bombing of Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge numbered around 5,000. But as a 1973 CIA cable explained, the Khmer Rouge’s recruitment efforts relied heavily on the U.S. bombing:

They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda. … The [Khmer Rouge] cadre tell the people … the only way to stop “the massive destruction of the country” is to remove [U.S.-backed junta leader] Lon Nol and return Prince Sihanouk to power. The proselyting cadres tell the people that the quickest way to accomplish this is to strengthen [Khmer Rouge] forces so they will be able to defeat Lon Nol and stop the bombing.

The U.S. dropped more than 257,000 tons of munitions on Cambodia in 1973, almost the same amount as during the previous four years combined. A report by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that “the intense American bombing in 1973 increased the cumulative number of refugees to nearly half of the country’s population.”

Those attacks galvanized Pol Pot’s forces, allowing the Khmer Rouge to grow into the 200,000-person force that took over the country and killed about 20 percent of the population. Once the regime was in power, the political winds had shifted and Kissinger, behind closed doors, told Thailand’s foreign minister: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” He then clarified his statement: The Thai official should not repeat the “murderous thugs” line to the Khmer Rouge, only that the U.S. wanted a warmer relationship.

In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.

That same year, Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”

In 2001 and again in 2018, the late chef and cultural critic Anthony Bourdain offered sentiments shared by many, but rarely put so eloquently:

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic.

In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he ducked investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and quickly leaving Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths in Cambodia or anywhere else.

“Play With It. Have a Good Time.”

“To spare you is no profit; to destroy you, no loss” was the cold credo of the Khmer Rouge. But it could just as easily have been Kissinger’s. In 2010, I followed up with Kissinger, pressing him on the contradiction in his claims about only bombing “North Vietnamese in Cambodia” but somehow killing 50,000 Cambodians, by his count, in the process. “We weren’t running around the country bombing Cambodians,” he told me.

The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates otherwise, and I told him so.

“Oh, come on!” Kissinger exclaimed, protesting that I was merely trying to catch him in a lie. When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

Cambodians in villages like Tralok Bek, Doun Rath, and Mroan didn’t have the luxury of such an easy escape.

The post Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

It was near midnight on June 1, 2015. Ashwaq, her husband, and five children were in the backyard of their half-built house in the northern Iraqi town of Hawija. The night sweltered with an oven-like dry heat during an Iraqi summer in which temperatures could soar to 120 degrees in the daytime. Hawija was under ISIS occupation, which meant the entire town had been cut off from electricity, in addition to the general brutality of political rule by the radical group. There was no escape from the temperature except to go outside where a breeze might cool the air.

Far above Ashwaq and her family, a Dutch F-16 fighter jet released a bomb that whistled down to hit a car-bomb factory in the center of Hawija’s industrial district. The F-16’s mission was coordinated by the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS and was planned by the U.S. military. From 2014 to the present day, between 8,000 and 13,000 civilians have died as a result of bombing by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, according to the monitoring organization Airwars; the coalition only acknowledges the deaths of 1,417 civilians. At the height of the bombing in 2017, as the coalition bombed tightly packed urban areas like Mosul, at least 9,000 civilians died, according to The Associated Press. Yet only one civilian received compensation, although the U.S. military did distribute a limited number of condolence or “ex gratia” payments — which are voluntary payments and not an admission of legal liability — reportedly to the families of around 14 victims.

ISIS had stored an estimated 18,000 kilograms of explosives in the factory, which stood in the midst of a crowded neighborhood. Even though the strike targeted a bomb-making factory, Pentagon planners did not factor in the casualties that could be caused by the secondary detonations. When the bomb hit the factory, night turned into day. Residents of Hawija likened it to a nuclear explosion. The earth rippled and waves of shrapnel flew through the air, tearing into people’s flesh. Buildings collapsed into rubble. The air turned yellow from the fire and chemicals, and the midnight sky lit up as though it were the middle of the afternoon. Fifty kilometers away, in the city of Kirkuk, people said they felt the ground shake, according to a report on the bombing by the Dutch monitoring organization PAX.

Ashwaq’s home shuddered, the windows shattered, and bricks and masonry crashed to the ground. The pressure and the heat caused the gasoline in the family car to catch fire, and the vehicle exploded just as Ashwaq’s children ran past. The flaming gas from the car struck her 4-year-old son Omar across the face and lit his head on fire like the tip of a match. Omar’s father, Ahmed Abdallah al-Jamili, says he has the image of his son running, his head aflame, engraved in his mind. He and Ashwaq both thought that Omar would die. The couple rushed the child to the nearest hospital in a neighbor’s car. They could barely see as they drove streets fogged with acrid chemical smoke from still-raging fires.

The explosion killed at least 85 people, but the actual number is likely much higher, though impossible to verify. ISIS controlled the hospital and often refused to treat people who were not ISIS sympathizers, let alone issue death certificates. Additionally, Hawija was a way station for people who had been displaced by the war took as they fled ISIS territory to Kurdistan. Many internally displaced families had gathered in the industrial area, and uncounted people were killed when the factory was hit. Their deaths were not recorded because there was no one to identify them. PAX — which has done extensive research into the bombing — recently uncovered the existence of two mass graves, but they were unable to visit the sites and verify the number of bodies.

Even as it slowly became clear that the U.S. coalition was responsible for what happened, the needs of the victims and survivors were placed last because, for the countries responsible for the carnage, the most important priority was avoiding accountability. Families were forced to hear vague mentions of aid without ever being consulted about what they actually wanted and needed. Now, seven years later, a visit to Hawija shows how the crumbs of help that were eventually promised have apparently not been delivered to any useful extent for the victims.

A “Voluntary” Contribution

Two weeks after the bombing, then-Dutch Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis Plasschaert received a classified report from U.S. Central Command that assessed early casualty estimates of 70 civilians as “credible.” A few weeks after that, Plasschaert told the Dutch Parliament that “as far as known at the moment, the Netherlands had not been involved in any instances of civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in Iraq.”

For more than four years, the Dutch government obfuscated its involvement in the bombing until finally Dutch journalists brought the issue to light. The resulting scandal almost toppled the government. By that time, Plasschaert was no longer in the cabinet — she resigned in 2017 after Dutch peacekeepers were killed in Mali. In 2018, she was appointed the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. (A spokesperson for UNAMI told The Intercept that Plasschaert was not available to speak on the bombing.)

For more than four years, the Dutch government obfuscated its involvement in the bombing until finally Dutch journalists brought the issue to light. The resulting scandal almost toppled the government and forced Plasschaert to resign, although she quickly recovered; she is currently the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. (A spokesperson for UNAMI told The Intercept that Plasschaert was not available to speak on the bombing.)

Facing pressure from Parliament and growing public anger, the Dutch Ministry of Defense agreed to provide a fund of 4.4 million euros to Hawija as a “voluntary contribution.” The words were chosen carefully. The Dutch government refuses to use the term “compensation.” Sascha Louwhoff, a coordinating spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, explained that if they had issued direct payments to survivors, the Dutch would be opening themselves up to legal responsibility for the bombing. She stated that the Ministry of Defense had no intention of issuing an apology. As she put it, “We are not accountable.”

The Dutch government divided the fund between the United Nations Development Fund and the International Organization for Migration to invest in “‘electricity supplies, economic activities, job opportunities, and water supplies.” UNDP received $1,757,546 and IOM received $3,604,730. Even though the Dutch government had avoided providing compensation to individual people, its fund turned Hawija into one of the few cases where a coalition member offered compensation to a town that had been damaged.

But this money does not seem to have reached the survivors who need it the most — and has riven Hawija as accusations of corruption divide the community.

Following the Money

Not long ago, I drove to Hawija with Tawfan al-Harbi, the head of al-Ghad: a local NGO that partnered with PAX, the Dutch group, to produce a comprehensive report on the aftermath of the strike, based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. Driving from al-Ghad’s Kirkuk office to Hawija, al-Harbi spoke in a steady stream, with regular interruptions from his constantly ringing mobile phone. He is a bouncy middle-aged man who, despite the 110-degree heat, wore a dapper navy and amber pinstriped suit with a matching amber ring and watch. He pointed to different areas that had been under ISIS control, some of which still suffer periodic small-scale attacks from the remnants of the organization. Al-Harbi was deeply unimpressed with the UNDP and IOM projects, which he said had produced minimal results for the budget they were given.

“The international organizations are like a big box. Money goes to guards, hotels, and a very small part goes to the people affected,” he said.

The outskirts of Hawija burst with rich green crops and low tangled brush. The town neighbors a river, and prior to the ISIS occupation, it was a center for agricultural production. Much of its economy also focused on its industrial neighborhood, which was home to factories, car repair shops, and local businesses. The PAX report estimates that the loss of privately owned businesses, possessions, and houses as a result of the bombing comes to around $11 million.

“The international organizations are like a big box. Money goes to guards, hotels, and a very small part goes to the people affected.”

Despite the UNDP and IOM projects, all it takes is driving around the town to understand that after seven years, Hawija is still deeply scarred by the bombing. Entering the town, a stretch of road is unpaved dirt, while another stretch is freshly laid asphalt, a half-finished lopsidedness that repeats throughout much of the town. A freshly built shop stands next to an empty lot filled with rubble remaining from when the neighborhood was obliterated by bombings during the war.

UNDP and IOM told The Intercept in a joint statement in August that the UNDP project had excavated and installed electricity poles and transformers. They added that they anticipated installing an electrical substation in October. IOM’s project consists of clearing rubble, creating jobs through cash-for-work programs, and rehabilitating shops; IOM said in a separate statement to The Intercept that 259 shops had been rehabilitated, six agricultural projects had gone ahead with clearance from local authorities, and 400 individuals had participated in cash-for-work activities. Both organizations stated they had operated in consultation with the community, but none of the survivors who spoke with The Intercept said they had been consulted. This is consistent with PAX’s report, which sampled a much larger group of survivors who said they had never been consulted on how the funds should be distributed.

The remains of the industrial neighborhood are a mix of activity and vast stretches of lots filled with jagged concrete debris. Workers in yellow hard hats hide from the sun in the shade of one building. They are working on the IOM project, although only a few of them are from the areas affected by the bombing; the salaries paid by IOM are not going to the families who were bombed.

The salaries paid by IOM are not going to the families who were bombed.

Another group of men slap mortar onto gray bricks as they build a fresh wall of a shop; they were commissioned by the shop owner but think he got some of his funding from an NGO, though they are not sure which one. This mixture of funding sources seemed to be common in the industrial zone where some shops had been rebuilt on private funds, some appeared to be using IOM’s money, and some appeared to be halfway in between.

An engineer working at what appeared to be UNDP’s electrical project complained that UNDP and the governorate were fighting, and as a result work was slow. He pointed to a building on the site, a low concrete rectangle, and complained that UNDP had vastly overpaid for its construction. These types of claims are hard to verify but are frequently heard in Hawija, where accusations that the NGOs are misappropriating funds flew swiftly from most of the people I interviewed.

Hawija’s mayor is Sabhan Khalaf al-Jubory, a neat man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. In an interview at his office, he said he had only one demand of the Dutch government: that they discontinue working through UNDP or IOM. He accused UNDP of being party to a corruption scandal and IOM of never informing local authorities about their projects. (In an emailed statement, Zena Ali-Ahmad, the UNDP’s resident representative in Iraq, said, “UNDP Iraq is not aware of any instances of corruption associated with this project.”) Airing his grievances, al-Jubory spoke in a resigned tone that evoked the frustration of knowing that this meeting with an international reporter, hardly his first, would most likely not result in any tangible change for the victims of the bombing. He explained that he understands the Dutch government does not want to take legal responsibility for the bombing, but at the same time, he asked that their funding go directly to the survivors.

“Do a project for the families of the people who were killed without taking responsibility,” he said. He agrees with survivors who say cancer cases soared following the bombing, which they suspect is due to the chemicals released by the explosives. “Many people have cancer,” he noted. “Many people need to leave Iraq to get treatments.”

Saba Azeem, a project leader at PAX and lead researcher on the group’s Hawija report, noted that over the course of PAX’s investigation, they had not observed tangible benefits from the UNDP and IOM projects for the survivors of the bombing. But the Dutch, she realizes, are not willing to consider direct support to the survivors. “If they do take on the responsibility or say they are sorry, that could be admitting guilt, and therefore, I think that would lead to a bigger legal issue,” Azeem noted.

U.S. Intelligence

The strike was planned by the United States military and depended on U.S. intelligence. The targeting of the factory was even approved by Lt. Gen. James Terry, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, according to an Army investigation in 2015. A key problem, however, is that prior to the strike, the U.S. military conducted a “collateral damage estimate,” or CDE, that did not account for damage that might be caused by a secondary explosion.

Late last year, the New York Times published a tranche of military records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act that included a detailed military appraisal of the Hawija strike after it had taken place. An article by The Intercept’s Nick Turse revealed that an intelligence official wrote in the appraisal that CDE methodology “does not account for secondary explosions.” That was the case with the CDE for Hawija — even though, according to Airwars, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had estimated, before the coalition’s attack, that the bomb factory contained around 18,060 kilograms of explosives. As The Intercept reported, when the U.S. Navy detonated a similar amount of explosives in a military test, they registered a 3.9 magnitude equivalent to a small earthquake.

“I do not think that anyone could have predicted the magnitude of the explosion and its effects in the surrounding neighborhood,” a coalition official wrote in the military documents. “Secondary effects are impossible to estimate with any level of accuracy, especially without knowing the quantity and type (s) of explosive material present at the site.”

Despite its involvement, the United States has not offered an apology or individual compensation. This is consistent with U.S. policy that has made compensation for civilians extremely rare. The only legal way for civilians to pursue compensation in the U.S. has been through the Foreign Claims Act, but that excludes compensation for death or injury during combat, making victims of the Hawija bombing ineligible. The only other option would be for civilians to receive voluntary ex gratia payments, but the Pentagon has viewed those payments as a strategic tactic to improve relations between U.S. troops and local communities. As the number of ground troops in Iraq have decreased, so have the ex gratia statements. In 2020, the Pentagon did not issue a single ex gratia payment. The ex gratia policy is now changing to allow for broader payments, but the changes do not apply to harm caused in the past.

This leaves civilians who suffered long-term injuries that require expensive treatment they cannot receive in Iraq with no legal route to pursue compensation from the U.S.

Escaping Hawija

When Ashwaq and her husband arrived at the hospital with their son, the halls were crowded with the injured and the dead. In some ways, they were lucky: Omar’s injuries were so severe that even though the hospital was under ISIS control, it agreed to treat him. Many others were turned away at the door because they had not sworn allegiance to the organization; they were forced to sew up wounds at home or to seek treatment from local pharmacists who were far out of their depth.

The doctors at the hospital did not have the ability or resources to treat Omar properly. Ashwaq and Ahmed begged permission from the ISIS occupiers to leave Hawija so they could get Omar’s injuries treated at a better hospital. They were refused. Twice before, Ashwaq had attempted to escape the town with the children, and each time she had been forced back. (Ahmed stayed behind because men were executed if they were discovered leaving). Fear for Omar’s life forced the family to take desperate measures. They paid a smuggler to get them out of the town. They walked through until they managed to cross into government-controlled territory.

But by the time they got to the hospital in Kirkuk, doctors told them it was too late; Omar should have been treated immediately after the burn to avoid permanent damage and scarring. Omar is now 11, and his face is a mask that twists with white swirling scars. Other children bully him. At school, they called him Abu Tashwy, which translates roughly to the “disfigured guy.” He has stopped going to school to avoid the humiliation.

Ashwaq and Ahmed cannot afford the many operations Omar would need to treat his burns. “I see him and I also become sad,” Ashwaq told me. “I see him and say God willing there will come a day where his face is normal.”

I met Ashwaq and Ahmed in their home, where they served us water and sweet black tea. It quickly became clear that they were accustomed to reciting their story to a parade of foreigners; they had spoken to NGO researchers, Dutch journalists, and Dutch officials. We talked in their home’s yellow-tiled entrance hall, only a few minutes away from the industrial zone by car. The family sat on thin cushions placed around the edges of the mostly bare room, and the other children came in and out, playing with each other as their parents spoke. Omar sat next to his mother, not saying a word.

Ashwaq wore a pale blue dress scattered with pink cherry blossoms. She has thick eyebrows, a heavy gaze, and an air of exhausted resignation mixed with a dogged desire to help Omar. She recounted her story readily, but she also made clear that she has no expectations that her telling of it will result in any benefit to her or to Omar.

“In the beginning, I believed,” she said, “They said to go to this place, and I believed them.” The “they” she refers to appears to be an amorphous combination of NGOs that promised they could help. “But I lost hope, I don’t have any hope remaining. They said they would give me support. Lies. It was lies.”

Ahmed said he has not seen a single benefit from the Dutch fund and neither have any of the families he knows who were affected by the bombing. He said he was never consulted about the fund by any representatives of the Dutch government. A thin, bespectacled man in a light white robe who speaks in a quiet, careful voice, Ahmed attended a conference in Erbil hosted by al-Ghad where he said he met representatives from the Dutch government and spoke to them about how he desperately needed treatment for his son. Referring to the fund of 4 million euros, the Dutch representatives told him that they had already compensated Hawija.

Chemical Injuries

I met with other families in Hawija. All had the same complaint. Foreigners had come and recorded their names and stories, but they had not benefited from the money reportedly flowing into their town. No one had consulted them about how the money would be used, and they believed that it must be disappearing into corrupt pockets.

Yusra Khalaf, 20, was only 12 when the bomb struck. She was sleeping in her family’s entrance hall near the window, and when it shattered, it sent a sharp piece of shrapnel straight into her arm. She tried to go to the hospital but was turned away at the door; her mother had to sew her wound at home. As it healed, her arm began to swell and turn a purpled blue; she does not know what caused the aftereffects, but she suspects chemicals from the bombing.

Her father, Yasser Khalaf Hamed, 47, wore a gray dishdasha and smoked steadily. Yusra wore pink robe and spoke in a soft voice. Her injured arm is swollen and mottled with blue veins; she said that it is heavy and she can barely move it. Like Omar, she suffers from bullying at her school. Even while talking about her injury, she tries to hide her arm within her sleeve until she is directly asked about it. Her father worries this is causing a delay in her studies. “If only they would stop talking about her,” he says. “Her younger sister graduated, and she’s still in school.”

They still live in the house where the bomb struck. Yusra speaks to me feet from where she was sleeping when she was injured. She says she did not want to return to this house.

Ashwaq and Ahmed did receive a small benefit from the coverage their case has received, but not from the Dutch government. Citizens crowdfunded Omar’s treatment and gathered around 7,000 euros. It’s not enough for the estimated cost of his operations, but it’s a start. Yet in order to get the treatment, they need a visa to the Netherlands, and although they applied months ago, they have heard nothing. They wait in limbo, holding on to the slimmest hope that even if they cannot get compensation, the Dutch government will at least grant them a visa. Their expectations are low.

In the meantime, the long-term effects of the bombing stay with them. It’s not just the physical injuries. Ashwaq says she still shakes with fear when she hears planes flying overhead. On the way to her house, I passed an old man standing in the road, apparently lost. It was Omar’s grandfather, who has never recovered.

Correction: November 1, 2022
This story has been updated to note that Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis Plasschaert resigned from the Dutch government in 2017 after Dutch peacekeepers were killed in Mali.

The post How a Rare Effort to Compensate Iraqi Airstrike Victims Failed appeared first on The Intercept.