Biden won plaudits from Democrats when he announced in February that he would end “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” But since then, progressives in Congress have been pressing the administration to explain precisely what that means, particularly how the administration will draw a distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” weapons and operations by the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led coalition.

Forty-one members of Congress asked the administration to clarify what forms of “military, intelligence, logistical, or other” aid the U.S. was providing under President Donald Trump, which of those would continue, and how the administration would define “offensive operations.”

The two-page State Department answer — which finally arrived Wednesday, more than two months after the date by which members of Congress asked the administration to respond — appears to offer no new information. It references the suspension of “two air-to-ground munitions sales and an ongoing review of other systems,” all of which has previously been reported, and fails to address what other forms of “offensive” support have been discontinued, if any, or which arms sales are ultimately likely to go forward.

In a statement to The Intercept, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., called the response a “disappointing non-answer from the Biden administration” and said he would continue to seek further details.

“It’s been months since I pressed them for answers on how they plan to end ‘offensive operations’ aiding the Saudi-led coalition, and what legal authority they have to continue U.S. involvement in a conflict that has not been authorized by Congress — as required under the Constitution,” DeFazio said. “Yet the Saudi blockade of Yemen and the resulting humanitarian crisis continue to linger on with no end in sight. It’s disheartening to receive such a contrived response from the State Department, and I will continue to press for actual answers.”

“It’s disheartening to receive such a contrived response from the State Department.”

The U.S. has supported the intervention by Saudi Arabia and the UAE since it began in 2015. Under both President Barack Obama and Trump, the U.S. has provided intelligence, arms sales, and other forms of logistical support. The Trump administration discontinued mid-air refueling for Saudi planes, but it’s unclear what other support has continued. Defense Department spokespeople confirmed to Vox that the DOD may be allowing U.S. contractors to service Saudi warplanes and some arms sales, including a $23 billion sale of advanced air hardware to the UAE that is expected to continue.

“To protect against the very real threat to Saudi Arabia from aerial and maritime attacks, the United States will continue to support Saudi Arabia with its defense against inbound threats to the Kingdom, its people, and the more than 70,000 U.S. citizens resident in Saudi Arabia,” the State Department letter says.

The conflict in Yemen has led to one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, and aid groups have criticized both sides of the conflict for restricting the free flow of vital goods into the country. The letter emphasizes that Biden is seeking a diplomatic solution to the conflict, noting the administration’s appointment of a special envoy, Tim Lenderking, to seek a diplomatic end to the conflict. Lenderking “continues to engage with our partners in the region and continues to stress that the United States opposes restrictions on the flow of commodities into and throughout Yemen,” the letter says.

Democratic Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey asked Lenderking during an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month whether U.S. military support to the Saudi and UAE-led coalition has been discontinued. Lenderking said that he was “not totally in that information loop” and did not provide an answer. Lieu and Malinowksi sent a follow-up letter asking for clarification, but a Democratic aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told The Intercept that the administration has not yet responded to the query.

(On Friday, after this story was published, Naz Durakoglu, the State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, wrote in a second letter that the department continues to adjudicate contracting requests for U.S. companies to provide “logistics, spare parts, maintenance, and other support for Saudi-led coalition aircraft.” That letter characterized such support as defensive in nature. “These aircraft play an important role in defending Saudi Arabia against cross-border attacks, including an onslaught of armed UAVs,” the letter says.)

California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, another author of the February letter, expressed frustration last month about the administration’s sluggish response. “There is growing frustration among House members and Senators about the Admin response to the blockade and potential continued intelligence and spare parts to Saudis,” he tweeted. “Letters unanswered. Talk on the hill if a [war powers resolution] needed,” referencing past measures directing Trump to end U.S. support for the intervention.

In a statement to The Intercept, Khanna said he would use the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress’s annual defense policy bill, to press the Biden administration further on the issue. “I’m working with Senator [Bernie] Sanders and other colleagues to ensure we use our leverage with Saudi Arabia to end the blockade, end U.S. military support for the coalition, and move toward a peaceful solution that ends the conflict,” Khanna said.

Update: June 2, 2021
This story has been updated to include material from a second letter sent by the State Department after the article was originally published.

The post Congress Sought Details About Biden’s Pledge to End U.S. Support for Yemen War. They Got a “Non-Answer.” appeared first on The Intercept.

In March, Hale pleaded guilty to one charge under the Espionage Act, and he faces up to 10 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced in July, but a federal judge has ordered him incarcerated until then for violating the terms of his pretrial release, according to court records.

It’s unclear precisely what Hale is accused of doing, and court documents show that his lawyers objected to his jailing. Minutes from a hearing last week indicated that the prosecution “seeks continued detention at this time” and that Hale’s lawyers argued that “there [are] no actual violations committed by the [defendant] as alleged.”

An attorney for Hale, Cadence Mertz, declined to explain the reason for Hale’s arrest. “Unfortunately there isn’t any comment we can make,” Mertz told The Intercept by email.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower attorney who has assisted Hale in the past, said in a phone interview that Hale was seeing a court-appointed therapist and that his arrest came as a surprise. “We had goodbye, farewell activities that his friends and supporters wanted to have in this final, very tense time before July,” Radack said. “He didn’t even have time to find someone to take care of his cat.”

Last month, after Hale pleaded guilty, District Judge Liam O’Grady ordered that the conditions of his pre-sentencing release include submitting to “substance abuse testing and/or treatment as directed by Pretrial Services.”

According to his 2019 indictment, Hale enlisted in the Air Force in 2009 and was assigned to work for the National Security Agency. He deployed to Afghanistan in support of the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2012, and was responsible for “identifying, tracking, and targeting” high-valued terror suspects.

As part of his plea agreement, Hale admitted to leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. Other reporters have alleged that the documents were used in an eight-part series about drone strikes published by The Intercept. The series raises questions about the accuracy of strikes, targeting procedures, and special operations’ expanding footprint in Africa.

After the series ran, the Obama administration committed to further transparency for the drone program, including releasing an estimate of the number of “noncombatants” killed outside war zones like Afghanistan between 2009 and 2015. Civil liberties groups praised it as a step forward, though the administration’s figures were much lower than some independent groups had estimated.

The Intercept “does not comment on matters relating to the identity of anonymous sources,” Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed said at the time of Hale’s indictment.

“These documents detailed a secret, unaccountable process for targeting and killing people around the world, including U.S. citizens, through drone strikes,” Reed noted. “They are of vital public importance, and activity related to their disclosure is protected by the First Amendment. … No one has ever been held accountable for killing civilians in drone strikes.”

The post Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Jailed Ahead of Sentencing appeared first on The Intercept.

Biden made the commitment in a February address, but he also promised to help defend Saudi Arabia from missile attacks and “threats from Iranian-supplied forces,” an apparent reference to assaults by Houthi rebels fighting the Saudi-backed government of Yemen. That left many members of Congress questioning how the administration would distinguish between offensive and defensive military support.

Forty-one progressive members of Congress wrote to Biden asking him to clarify what forms of support he had discontinued and which Trump-era arms sales would be deemed “relevant” to offensive operations. The letter requested a response before March 25, six years to the day after a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched their intervention to defeat the Iranian-backed Houthis. The intervention was supported by the United States, and both the Obama and Trump administrations provided weapons, intelligence, and, until 2018, mid-air refueling support for Saudi aircraft.

But almost two weeks after the deadline, the administration still has not responded to the letter. A spokesperson for the State Department referred The Intercept to the White House. A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“Months after enjoying an initial public relations victory by announcing an end to U.S. involvement in offensive Saudi actions in Yemen, the Biden administration has yet to offer any specifics on the nature of previous or current American participation in the Saudi-led war,” said a Democratic aide with knowledge of the letter, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Although the letter expressed support for the administration’s decision, it also asked for a detailed account of what role the Trump administration was playing in the war when Biden took office, which activities would be discontinued, and how the United States would support a diplomatic resolution.

“Congress has repeatedly invoked its constitutional war powers authority by voting to end unconstitutional U.S. participation in this war,” the letter said. “We seek to ensure that the Biden-Harris Administration’s Yemen policy will adhere to the limitations sought by majorities of Congress in the numerous bipartisan votes on this subject.”

The missed deadline comes as many of the same members of Congress are looking for ways to press Saudi Arabia to end its blockade of Yemen. After years of war, Yemen is suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, and aid groups have criticized both sides for impeding the flow of needed goods.

In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud denied that there was any blockade, saying, “There is a mechanism with the United Nations to allow ships to enter, and the mechanism is continuing to be applied.” But an investigation by CNN in March found that Saudi warships had held up more than a dozen boats that had been cleared by U.N. inspectors to dock in the vital port city of Hodeidah.

A letter sent Tuesday by Democratic Reps. Debbie Dingell of Michigan, Ro Khanna of California, and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin urged the Biden administration to do more to pressure the Saudis to lift the blockade.

Biden is struggling to recalibrate the U.S.-Saudi relationship in a way that satisfies the kingdom’s critics in Congress while preserving the longtime alliance.

“We strongly support a comprehensive political settlement that addresses all aspects of the conflict, including a nationwide ceasefire, currency stabilization, and payment of government salaries,” Tuesday’s letter says. “At the same time, a U.S demand to end the blockade must occur independently of negotiations.”

Both letters are a sign that Biden is struggling to recalibrate the U.S.-Saudi relationship in a way that satisfies the kingdom’s critics in Congress while preserving the longtime alliance. On the campaign trail, Biden promised that if he were elected, he would “make [Saudi Arabia] in fact the pariah that they are.” As president, he has been far more cautious in his dealings with the kingdom.

This is not the first time that Congress has expressed frustration. In February, after a long-awaited intelligence report found that the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, commonly known as MBS, members of Congress criticized Biden’s decision not to sanction the Saudi leader.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the decision, saying the administration believed that it could hold MBS accountable while preserving “room to work with the Saudis on areas where there is mutual agreement.” But the Democratic-led House Foreign Affairs Committee voted last month to approve a bill that would prohibit MBS and other Saudi officials involved in the killing from entering the U.S.

The post Months After Biden Promised to End Support for Yemen War, Congress Still Has No Details appeared first on The Intercept.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is reexamining worldwide troop deployments, and the administration is taking a hard look at global counterterrorism operations. Biden’s team is also reviewing the Trump administration’s peace deal with the Taliban and the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, which Biden, like Barack Obama before him, has promised to close. Meanwhile, a Pentagon task force is reviewing China policy, and the State Department has paused arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates “to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives, and advances our foreign policy,” Secretary of State Tony Blinken said last month.

The highly publicized reviews indicate Biden’s desire to distance himself from Donald Trump and, to a lesser degree, to distinguish his policies from those of the Obama administration in which he served. They are also a sign that one month into his presidency, many of Biden’s most important national security decisions are still in front of him.

That is partly a result of Biden’s slow start as president. Even after it was clear that he had won the election, the Trump administration held up the transition for weeks. The Defense Department in particular paused briefings in December, citing a “mutually agreed-upon holiday,” which the Biden transition disputed.

The flurry of reviews, along with early moves such as Biden’s decision to strike an Iranian militia outpost in Syria last month, have left progressives struggling to evaluate his emerging policy. Biden campaigned on ending “forever wars” but appears poised to keep troops in Afghanistan beyond the May 1 deadline negotiated by Trump. In Somalia, however, Biden has yet to conduct an attack — a major departure from the Trump years, which saw a record-setting number of airstrikes in a conflict that has raged nearly as long as the Afghan war. While Biden has been criticized for failing to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally accountable for dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s death, his decision to halt U.S. support for offensive operations by Saudi forces in Yemen is a significant departure from both Trump and Obama administration policy.

Biden’s strike in Syria, a response to attacks by Iranian-backed militias on U.S. military targets in Iraq, has been criticized as proof that his White House prioritizes the use of military force over diplomacy. But the administration’s decision to leak details about the strike, including that Biden called off a second attack in an effort to spare civilians, seems calculated to signal restraint. Senior administration officials told the Wall Street Journal that the strike was meant to let Iran know that the United States would respond to attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq, but were adamant that they were not seeking to escalate tensions and had sent an unspecified confidential communique to Tehran as well. “We had a pretty coordinated diplomatic and military plan here,” an anonymous administration official told the Journal. “We made sure the Iranians knew what our intent was.”

The strike may not have had the desired effect, however. Less than a week later, a barrage of rockets hit an Iraqi base used by U.S. forces. No U.S. service members were hurt, but an American contractor died of a heart attack. The Biden administration “may feel a need to respond,” Pentagon officials told the New York Times.

For the better part of two decades, the United States has turned large swaths of the globe into a battlefield without borders, engaging in ground combat or air attacks from Burkina Faso to Yemen, Tunisia to Somalia. Substantive changes to these policies might upend the national security paradigm that has come to define the American way of war in the 21st century. Biden recently pledged to work with Congress to repeal the post-9/11 authorizations for the use of military force that have been employed to justify military operations across the globe for the last 20 years — often against groups that didn’t even exist in 2001 — although the White House offered no specifics on what, if anything, might replace them.

Perhaps no review will have a more significant impact on national security policy over the next four years than the administration’s comprehensive reexamination of Trump-era rules governing counterterrorism drone strikes and commando missions outside of conventional war zones. This reexamination of attacks in countries like Yemen and Somalia, first reported by the Daily Beast, offers Biden an opportunity to differentiate his administration from those of Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush. When Biden was vice president, armed drones were a relatively new technology. But since Obama left office, countries like China, the UAE, and Turkey have built up their armed drone capabilities, and the remotely piloted weapons have been used in Syria, Libya, and last year’s Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict. U.S. drone policy is arguably more important than ever in terms of setting the tone for their use globally.

U.S. drone policy is arguably more important than ever in terms of setting the tone for the use of armed drones globally.

The administration is reportedly still gathering data about drone strikes outside of war zones under Trump, and Biden has issued “interim guidance” centralizing decision-making in the White House. But the review will determine whether such strikes should require White House approval, as they did during the Obama administration, or whether the responsibility will be outsourced to the Defense Department or the CIA, as it was under Trump.

If American drone strikes continue in places like Yemen and Somalia, Biden will be the fourth president in a row to use them outside of declared U.S. war zones. Now, more than 18 years after the CIA conducted its first drone strike in Yemen in 2002, national security experts as well as human rights and civil liberties groups see in the review an opportunity to limit and reevaluate whether the U.S. should conduct those strikes at all.

“If the government is going to be killing people around the world on an indefinite basis, they ought to at least be transparent with the American public as to why they’re doing that, what the standards are that guide those operations, and what the results of those operations are,” Luke Hartig, a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the Obama White House told The Intercept. “This is an opportunity to ask some hard questions about where the U.S. should have forces deployed, how frequently they should be conducting operations, and whether there are alternatives to the use of force that they should be considering.”

Early in his first term as vice president, Biden pushed a “counterterrorism plus” strategy in Afghanistan that prioritized an aggressive drone campaign and use of Special Operations forces over a large influx of U.S. troops. Some saw it as an initial template for the use of these tactics in Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere. 

The Obama administration dramatically escalated the use of drone strikes during his first term, even killing a small number of U.S. citizens in Yemen, like radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and later his estranged 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Awlaki. From January 2009 to January 2013, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism counted a minimum of 59 U.S. strikes in Yemen.

“Any review of that policy and efforts to tighten the restrictions to better protect civilians is very welcome,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA. “Outside of war zones, the U.S. government should not be using lethal force unless it’s absolutely necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life. That’s required by international human rights law, and it’s unfortunately not the standard the Obama administration adopted.”

The review would not be the first attempt to create internal limits on drone strikes. In 2013, after facing criticisms from civil liberties groups, the Obama administration unveiled a policy guidance that set a standard of “near certainty” about the identity of targets when launching strikes outside of recognized U.S. war zones.

“[Counterterrorism] actions, including lethal action against designated terrorist targets, shall be as discriminating and precise as reasonably possible,” the guidance said. “Absent extraordinary circumstances, direct action against an identified high-value terrorist (HVT) will be taken only when there is near certainty that the individual being targeted is in fact the lawful target and located at the place where the action will occur. … Direct action will be taken only if there is near certainty that the action can be taken without injuring or killing non-combatants.”

But despite the near-certainty standard, the Obama administration went on to make some high-profile mistakes. Six months after announcing the rule in December 2013, U.S. drones struck a vehicle convoy in Yemen. Initial leaks to the press suggested that there may have been Al Qaeda members in the cars, but a subsequent investigation by Human Rights Watch found that the drones had struck a wedding party and killed at least 12 people and wounded six others.

Later, in January 2015, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan killed two aid workers, one American and one Italian, both of whom had been kidnapped by militants. The mistake led to Obama taking the rare step of declassifying the operation and apologizing to the families of the victims; the administration later paid out money to the Italian worker’s family.

“A review of the drone program is certainly what’s needed. But that review needs to be a real review — not one that simply asks whether we should go back to 2016 and policies as they were under President Obama.”

But the Obama administration never embraced the same standard of accountability for Yemeni or other victims of drone strikes or their family members. After Obama’s public apology to the Western aid workers’ families, his administration was sued by Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni man whose nephew and brother-in-law were killed in a 2012 drone strike. Faisal asked for $1 and a public apology from Washington, but the Justice Department fought the case right up until the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016, and it was dismissed the following year.

“Faisal’s case highlighted the hypocrisy in the program,” Jennifer Gibson, a human rights lawyer with Reprieve who assisted with bin Ali Jaber’s case, said in an email. Obama had been right to apologize to the aid workers’ families, she noted, but “the U.S. has never issued the same apology to Faisal or any of the hundreds of other families who have lost innocent loved ones to this program.”

But in key regions outside of active war zones, Trump’s drone campaign was more aggressive than the shadow wars waged by Obama. In Somalia and Yemen, the most important American battlefields beyond Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, attacks skyrocketed during the Trump administration.

In Somalia, there were 32 declared airstrikes over eight years under Obama, while the number of attacks jumped to 205 during Trump’s single term, according to data compiled by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The reasons center around a reported March 2017 decision by Trump to designate parts of Somalia as “areas of active hostilities,” removing Obama’s near- certainty standard that strikes would not hurt or kill noncombatants. While the Trump White House refused to explicitly confirm or deny this, retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa at the time of the change, previously told The Intercept that the “burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically.” That change, he added, led the United States to conduct airstrikes that previously would not have been carried out.

Similarly, during Obama’s second term, there were 138 confirmed or possible U.S. actions in Yemen, according to an October 2020 Airwars analysis. That same report concluded that there had been at least 230 alleged or confirmed U.S. ground or airstrikes in Yemen between Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and last October— 196 of which Airwars confirmed or assessed had occurred with high confidence.

After four years of such escalations under Trump, a rollback to Obama era-levels of attacks outside of war zones would be welcomed in some quarters and treated as a return to national security normalcy. Other experts are calling on the Biden administration to do more, but remain skeptical that a complete reevaluation of counterterrorism policy is actually on the table.

“A review of the drone program is certainly what’s needed. But that review needs to be a real review — not one that simply asks whether we should go back to 2016 and policies as they were under President Obama,” Reprieve’s Gibson told The Intercept “The review as reported has all the hallmarks of doing just that.”

The post Biden’s War Policy Offers Chance for Change — or More of the Same appeared first on The Intercept.

The move, which included visa restrictions against 76 Saudi nationals who “have been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas,” is a sign that the Biden administration wants to maintain a cooperative partnership with Saudi leadership. But it will likely anger human rights activists and members of Congress who have argued that the crown prince should be held personally accountable for the operation that led to a Saudi journalist — who was also a U.S. resident — being killed and butchered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden called Saudi King Salman, and a readout of the call from the White House said Biden emphasized that “he would work to make the bilateral relationship as strong and transparent as possible.” Last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called MBS, who is also Saudi Arabia’s defense minister. The readout of that call did not mention Khashoggi but said that Austin “underscored Saudi Arabia’s role as a pillar of the regional security architecture in the Middle East.”

The New York Times reported on Friday that “a consensus developed inside the White House that the price of that breach, in Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.” But during his presidential campaign, Biden took a harsher line: When asked by Andrea Mitchell in a November 2019 primary debate how he would hold Saudi officials accountable for Khashoggi’s killing, he said, “I would make it very clear we were not going to sell more weapons to them, we were going to make them pay the price and make them the pariah that they are. There’s very little social redeeming value of the — in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”

The four-page intelligence report that was released Friday contains few details about the grisly killing but lays blame firmly at the feet of MBS. “We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” the report says. It added that MBS had “absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations” and that he had likely created a culture of fear within the country’s security establishment.

“At the time of the Khashoggi murder, the Crown Prince probably fostered an environment in which aides were afraid that failure to complete assigned tasks might result in him firing or arresting them,” the report says. “This suggests that the aides were unlikely to question Muhammad bin Salman’s orders or undertake sensitive actions without his consent.”

The Biden administration, rather than taking direct action against MBS, instead announced sanctions on Gen. Ahmed al-Asiri, the former deputy head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, as well as the Rapid Intervention Force, several members of which were part of the team that killed Khashoggi. Al-Asiri is a close ally of the crown prince, but the New York Times reported shortly after Khashoggi’s death in 2018 that Saudi leadership was developing a plan to blame the killing on him.

The Biden administration’s approach, while not as forthright as critics of MBS would like, nonetheless stands in sharp contrast to former President Donald Trump’s messaging about the killing. Trump denied that the intelligence on MBS’s role was clear, telling reporters, “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” Trump later bragged to journalist Bob Woodward that he had helped MBS evade accountability, saying that he “saved his ass.”

In a statement, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the report was long overdue and the administration should take further steps towards accountability. “It should not have taken this long for the United States to publicly share what we knew about the brutal murder of a U.S. resident and journalist and this report underscores why Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repeated claims that he was either unknowing or uninvolved in this heinous crime are in no way credible,” Schiff said. “The administration should take further steps to diminish the United States’s reliance on Riyadh and reinforce that our partnership with the Kingdom is a not a blank check.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a tweet that Biden’s willingness to assign blame stood in contrast to the Trump administration and brought much-needed accountability. “The coverup is over,” Murphy tweeted. “Thanks to President Biden, we now know the full extent of Saudi Arabia’s role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The new Khashoggi policy is a strong start in resetting our relationship with Saudi Arabia and renewing America’s leadership on human rights.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the report but said that more information should be released about the killing. “There’s no question in my mind there is considerably more to declassify here.”

Agnès Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions who led a U.N. inquiry into Khashoggi’s death, said in a statement Friday that “the United States government should impose sanctions against the Crown Prince, as it has done for the other perpetrators — targeting his personal assets but also his international engagements. Banishing those responsible for ordering the execution of Jamal Khashoggi from the international stage is an important step towards justice and key to sending the strongest message possible to would-be perpetrators the world over.”

The post Biden Balks at Sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince After Release of Report on Killing of Jamal Khashoggi appeared first on The Intercept.

In his first foreign policy address earlier this month, Biden said his administration was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” But he also promised that the U.S. would continue to help Saudi Arabia defend itself against missile attacks, including from Iranian-backed militias like the Houthis in Yemen. In the following weeks, his administration has yet to explain how it distinguishes between offensive and defensive forms of support.

On Thursday, 41 members of Congress sent a letter to Biden expressing support for his decision to limit U.S. backing for the war but asked him to clarify what forms of “military, intelligence, [and] logistical” support it defines as “offensive” activities and what forms of support will continue.

“You have said that the United States will ‘continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people’ from ‘threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries,’” the letter says. “What activities does this policy entail, and under what legal authority is the administration authorized to engage in such activities?”

The letter was written by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.; Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and signed by 38 others. In a phone interview Wednesday, DeFazio told The Intercept that he wasn’t aware of any formal communication between the Biden administration and Congress about their policy, and said the letter was trying to get answers.

“What’s the difference between an offensive weapon or a defensive weapon?”

“That raises questions that we would like to have answered,” DeFazio said. “How do you define weapons? What’s the difference between an offensive weapon or a defensive weapon? Congress has acted a number of times to block arms sales to the Saudis. So we just have a number of questions. We think it’s obviously a tremendous improvement over the position of the Trump administration. We would just like more clarification, more detail about what the shift means and also what [legal] authority they’re depending upon to continue to be involved in this conflict in any way.”

Khanna told The Intercept that he had informal conversations with Biden administration officials about how they interpret “offensive” operations, but he wanted the administration to clarify the details with Congress as a “formal statement of administration policy.”

“My understanding is that the ban on any U.S. participation in Saudi military strikes applies very broadly to any Saudi bombing or missile strikes into Yemen,” Khanna said. “There is no wiggle room for the Saudis to claim they’re attacking a place in Yemen out of self-defense. That is my understanding of how the administration intends the directive.”

Asked about the letter, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council referred The Intercept to the Department of Defense and the State Department for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond, and spokespersons for the State Department and director of national intelligence declined to comment.

The letter comes as the Biden administration is expected to release a long-awaited intelligence report on the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. The report is likely to serve as a reminder of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and could reopen old wounds about the direct involvement of the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. After the assassination in 2018, Congress passed measures to block arms sales and direct President Donald Trump to cut off U.S. support for the war in Yemen, but he vetoed them.

Biden is expected to call King Salman of Saudi Arabia, MBS’s father, to discuss the U.S.-Saudi relationship before the release of the Khashoggi report. As a candidate, Biden took a much harsher line on arms sales, saying in a November 2019 primary debate that “there is very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE began their intervention in March 2015, after an Iranian-backed rebel group overran the country’s capital, Sanaa. Under the Obama and Trump administrations, the U.S. supported the intervention with arms sales and intelligence, even as the Saudi air force bombed civilian targets, like markets, schools, and medical clinics. The Trump administration cut off midair refueling for Saudi warplanes in 2018, but other forms of U.S. support continued.

Last month the Biden administration paused all arms sales to Saudi and the UAE, with Secretary of State Tony Blinken citing a desire “to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives, and advances our foreign policy.” Those sales included a massive $23 billion transfer of advanced weapons technology — including the F35 fighter jet and Reaper drones — to the UAE as part of the Trump administration’s “Abraham Accords.”

The letter from members of Congress questions what weapons the administration deems “relevant” to offensive operations and whether the $23 billion sale will go forward.

In the past, Saudi officials have claimed their airstrikes were acts of self-defense against the Houthis, who themselves have carried out missile attacks against targets in southern Saudi Arabia.

 “Which weapons are offensive or defensive depends on one’s own perspective in this conflict.”

Max Abrahms, a professor of political science at Northeastern University and a critic of the U.S. intervention, told The Intercept the Democrats who signed the letter are right to question the Biden administration. “The distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is often unclear,” Abrahms said in a phone interview. “Which weapons are offensive or defensive depends on one’s own perspective in this conflict.”

The letter also contains a detailed list of questions about Biden’s other policies toward Yemen, including whether the U.S. will pressure the UAE and Saudi Arabia to stop arming and financing different militias there, and whether it would support an independent investigation into allegations of disappearances and torture by UAE-backed forces — which the Trump administration denied knowledge of in 2019.

The post Democrats Pressure Biden on U.S. Backing for Saudi War in Yemen appeared first on The Intercept.

Speaking at the State Department, Biden told diplomats that he would prioritize diplomatic solutions to the conflict and appointed, as a special envoy, one of the department’s top Middle East experts. He also announced support for a cease-fire and an effort to restart long-stalled peace talks.

“This war has to end,” Biden said. “And to underscore our commitment, we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”

The move signaled a dramatic shift in U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, a move that has long been urged by progressive activists. Under President Donald Trump, Congress passed resolutions blocking certain arms sales and directing the U.S. to end its role in the hostilities, but Trump vetoed them.

One of the primary backers of the vetoed resolutions, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept by phone that Biden’s announcement was a victory. “This is now a decisive step and really what the war powers resolution was calling for, so I’m very pleased,” Khanna said.

“This is now a decisive step and really what the war powers resolution was calling for, so I’m very pleased.”

Asked if Congress’s job was done, Khanna said he thought the legislature still had a role to play in supporting diplomatic efforts and reversing last-minute policy changes by the Trump administration.

The Biden administration had previously placed a temporary freeze on billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as saying that it would review the transfer of advanced military hardware, including air-ground munitions, that the Trump administration sought to advance over the objections of Congress.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched their intervention in Yemen in March 2015, after an Iranian-backed rebel group known as the Houthis took over the capital and forced out Yemen’s internationally backed president. The U.S. has supported the intervention, first under President Barack Obama and then under Trump, with weapons sales, intelligence, and logistical support, even after Saudi airstrikes increasingly targeted civilian sites like hospitals and schools.

The Biden administration has not yet announced operational details of the move or clarified what they meant by “offensive operations.” In his address, Biden said that the U.S. would continue to help defend Saudi Arabia from drone and missile attacks, some of which have come from Yemen and have led the Saudis to claim that they are pursuing the war in self-defense.

An administration official declined to share operational details of what the cutoff meant but pointed to the fact that the Biden administration had previously announced they were “reviewing several arms sales to ensure they are in line with our strategic goals, including ending the war.”

Briefing reporters on Thursday morning, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the prohibition would extend “to the types of offensive operations that have perpetuated a civil war in Yemen that has led to a humanitarian crisis,” but would not result in the U.S. halting its own operations against Al Qaeda in the country.

The details of what constitutes “offensive operations” are important because the Saudis have frequently claimed they were acting defensively.

Kate Kizer — policy director with the progressive group Win Without War, which has lobbied to end U.S. support for the intervention — told The Intercept by phone that understanding the details of the distinction are important because the Saudis have frequently claimed that they were acting defensively.

“The coalition has tried repeatedly in the past to say that airstrikes in residential areas in Yemen have been ‘defensive’ operations because they were responding to a ballistic missile strike,” Kizer said. “So it’s really important to define what that means.”

Biden’s call is a hard won-victory for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, much of which had urged Obama and Trump to end U.S. support for the war. Khanna, along with Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had repeatedly introduced various measures to stop U.S. support for the war, all of which initially failed in Congress.

Khanna told The Intercept that a turning point on Capitol Hill was the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Saudi dissident who was brutally killed by Saudi agents, likely on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who is also a key architect behind the Yemen war.

“After Khashoggi’s murder, things changed.”

“When we started, there was such a strong U.S. relationship with the Saudis that it was very hard to break through,” Khanna said. “And it took a lot of work in the House; we were taking on our own leadership in the beginning. But then after Khashoggi’s murder, things changed.”

Kizer told The Intercept that building support for ending the war has been a long process among progressive activists, and that it was important to move the discussion beyond a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. “I think what really has been the gamechanger over the years is building a public education campaign that really changed the terms of the debate about what’s happening in Yemen,” Kizer said. “When we started in 2015, it was totally framed through the lens of Iran, and the détente with Saudi Arabia and the Iran nuclear deal. Very little was said about Yemen.”

The post In Dramatic Policy Shift, Biden Withdraws U.S. Support for Saudi “Offensive Operations” in Yemen appeared first on The Intercept.

The events of January 6 may be the defining moment of Donald Trump’s presidency. But the siege was also the culmination of years of warnings about the the growing threat posed by far-right extremists. An October report from the Department of Homeland Security, for example, said that “white supremacist extremists” will “remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”

“Can we just accept that the post-9/11 era is over?” Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin, a former Defense Department official who touted her experience as a CIA analyst in Iraq and her expertise on terrorism and insurgencies when she ran for Congress in 2018, told MSNBC. “We are in a new era.” While noting that external threats like Russia and China remained, Slotkin continued that “the single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. It’s the threat of domestic terrorism. It’s that polarization that threatens our democracy.”

However Trump leaves office, a new Congress appears poised to revive a years-old debate on whether the U.S. should expand the legal framework for going after “domestic terrorism.” A group of former Justice Department officials, along with the FBI Agents Association, has long argued that current law makes it easier to prosecute ideologically motivated acts of violence as terrorism if they appear to be inspired by a foreign terror organization like the Islamic State, and that a domestic terror statute would allow them to prosecute white supremacist terror — like Dylann Roof’s mass shooting in a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina — on equal footing.

But civil liberties advocates are wary of such a move, noting that federal law enforcement already has powerful tools to investigate and prosecute acts of domestic terrorism without any new laws, and that importing the anti-terrorism framework risks creating broad and vague powers that could be used to go after activists or religious minorities.

“Anyone familiar with the scope of surveillance and targeting of Black political dissent, or Muslim communities, knows that law enforcement has all the tools it needs to aggressively disrupt and hold accountable those who planned and participated in the storming of the Capitol,” said Diala Shamas, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Why they didn’t raises serious questions, but it was not because their hands were tied. We don’t need new terrorism designations.”

It’s also unclear exactly what a new domestic terrorism law might look like or whether President-elect Joe Biden would support it.

In November, the Wall Street Journal reported that an informal group of advisers had suggested that Biden step up efforts to counter extremism, including by creating a White House post and an interagency task force to oversee efforts to counter domestic extremism. On his campaign website, Biden promised to “work for a domestic terrorism law that respects free speech and civil liberties, while making the same commitment to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism.” A transition spokesperson told The Intercept that Biden has not yet taken a position on whether “domestic terrorism” should be a federal crime or what a statute should look like and declined to comment further.

In an address last week while announcing his nomination of Merrick Garland for attorney general, Biden called members of the mob that stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists,” and said that Trump had incited an “all-out assault on our institutions of democracy.”

In U.S. terrorism prosecutions, the defendant isn’t charged with “domestic terrorism” or “international terrorism” directly. In fact, U.S. law didn’t have a definition of “domestic terrorism” until October 2001. Most terrorism prosecutions rely on broadly construed charges of “material support” for international terror groups, even if the defendants have few direct ties to those networks.

Sayfullo Saipov, for example, an Uzbek immigrant who drove a truck down a bike lane in downtown Manhattan, killing eight people, was charged with providing “material support” to ISIS after claiming its cause as his own, despite having no other ties to the group.

But the “material support” provisions work differently for domestic terror acts, because the U.S. government doesn’t designate domestic organizations, even those like the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, as terrorist groups. Instead, terrorism law can be used to charge someone for providing material support for certain offenses, more than 50 of which can be domestic. They include killing a federal officer, using weapons of mass destruction, and setting off explosives, but not many mass shootings.

Although terrorism laws can apply to right-wing violence, a 2019 review by The Intercept found that as a matter of practice, they rarely are. The review found that since the 9/11 attacks, 268 right-wing extremists have been prosecuted in federal court, but Justice Department prosecutors only used anti-terrorism statutes in 38 of those cases. That formed a sharp double standard with international terrorism prosecutions, in which such laws were used more than 400 times.

Jason Blazakis, a former State Department Official and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who has written in support of a domestic terrorism statute, told The Intercept that existing law is a difficult and arbitrary patchwork that makes it hard to prosecute certain acts, like politically motivated mass shootings, under terrorism laws.

“When someone like [Tree of Life synagogue shooter] Robert Bowers kills 18 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and he’s not considered a domestic terrorist because he used a handgun and not a weapon of mass destruction. It really points to the absurdity of the law as it exists today,” Blazakis told The Intercept. “If that were an individual inspired by ISIS, they’d be charged with an act of terrorism.”

“We should think very carefully about whether new authorities are actually needed, how those authorities are likely to be used, and how they might be abused.

Blazakis said he supports a narrowly tailored domestic terror statute that would make it easier to charge individual, politically motivated acts of violence, rather than trying to designate domestic groups as “terrorist,” which would raise First Amendment issues.

But critics say the expansion of federal law enforcement power since 9/11 makes additional terrorism laws unnecessary and potentially dangerous. “The FBI has, since 9/11, gained extraordinary authorities to investigate. In order to open an assessment — the lowest level of investigation — the only thing that the FBI needs to have is an ‘authorized purpose,’” said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “Given the fact that there are at least 50 statutes that count as domestic terrorism, I feel confident that they could find an authorized purpose. They have certainly done that when they have gone after Muslims and other minority communities.”

The “terrorist” label is also “vulnerable to political exploitation,” Patel noted, pointing to Republicans’ use of terrorism language to describe antifa last summer.

During the nationwide protests that followed George Floyd’s death last year, Trump and Republican legislatures showed an awareness of the political effects of the terrorism label. Shortly after Trump tweeted that he wanted to designate antifa a “terrorist organization,” former Attorney General Bill Barr issued a statement: “The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.” A number of Republican members of Congress also introduced resolutions urging the designation, which were condemned by civil liberties groups.

There have already been attempts in Congress to introduce a domestic terror statute, but they haven’t made it out of committee. In 2019, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., introduced legislation that would allow certain crimes to be prosecuted as domestic terrorism if they were aimed at intimidating civilians, influencing government policy by intimidation or coercion, or violently disrupt government business. But civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, opposed the bill in part because they said it would give broad discretion to the attorney general to decide when to prosecute offenses as terrorism. (Blazakis said the Schiff bill had built in checks that could prevent abuse, including a requirement that prosecutions be reviewed by the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.)

“If that statute had been enacted last summer,” Patel said, “Attorney General Barr would have had the discretion to treat property damage from the anti-racism protests as terrorism. And I don’t think we want to leave that kind of discretion to the attorney general, even when you trust the attorney general.” A spokesperson for Schiff did not respond to a request for comment.

Lawmakers should think carefully about applying any broad new legal frameworks for terrorism given how far-reaching post-9/11 measures turned out to be, Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, told The Intercept by email.

“Many of the intelligence and law enforcement authorities that were created or expanded after 9/11 were expanded with al Qaeda in mind — that is, with the idea that these new authorities were necessary to address the threat presented by a relatively small number of committed terrorists based overseas,” Jaffer wrote. “But those expanded authorities ended up having dramatic implications for the lives and liberties of millions of people both inside and outside the United States, the vast majority of whom had absolutely nothing to do with al Qaeda. Before we go down this road again, we should think very carefully about whether new authorities are actually needed, how those authorities are likely to be used, and how they might be abused. It’s important to remember that all of the authority we invest in this administration will be available to every future administration has well.”

The post Capitol Hill Assault Revives Calls for Domestic Terrorism Law, but Civil Liberties Groups Are Wary appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. intelligence agencies have been looking into whether the United Arab Emirates is helping to finance the Libya operations of the Russian Wagner Group. Both the UAE and Wagner have intervened to support Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar, who has tried to overrun the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli.

But the intelligence reporting, according to current and former officials, has done nothing to slow U.S. arms sales to the Gulf country. The Trump administration is seeking congressional approval of an unprecedented $23 billion sale of weapons to the UAE, including of some of the U.S.’s most advanced military technology, like the F-35 fighter and MQ-9 Reaper drones. If it goes forward, the sale will shift the long-term balance of power in the region.

The intelligence community’s effort was hinted at in a report to Congress last week by the Pentagon’s inspector general. The report said that although the Defense Intelligence Agency’s reporting on the Wagner Group’s financing in Libya is “ambiguous,” the DIA has nonetheless “assessed that the United Arab Emirates may provide some financing for the group’s operations.” This detail in the inspector general’s report, which was first surfaced by Foreign Policy, does not mention when or how U.S. military intelligence reached that assessment.

Although outside analysts have long suspected coordination between the UAE and Russia in Libya, interviews with current and former officials, as well as the inspector general’s report, demonstrate that the U.S. intelligence community is probing ties between one of the U.S.’s largest weapons clients and a mercenary company the U.S. State Department has called a “proxy force” for the Russian Ministry of Defense. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

A former senior U.S. official said that the intelligence about the agreement between the UAE and Wagner included financial assistance.

One current official told The Intercept that U.S. intelligence reporting early this summer indicated that the UAE had signed an agreement similar to a “memorandum of understanding” with Wagner, which many suspected of including direct financial support.

A former senior U.S. official told The Intercept that the intelligence about the agreement between the UAE and Wagner included financial assistance.

After the report was circulated to U.S. intelligence agencies, the CIA informed at least one European ally that it believed the UAE was bankrolling at least some of Wagner’s forces in Libya, according to a third source, a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

The UAE is one of the U.S. military’s closest partners in the Middle East and is seen, despite its relatively small size, as a rising military power in the region. But the country’s support for military dictatorships, like the regime in Egypt, as well as its increasing ties to Russia and China, have caused some in Washington to view it as a problematic ally. The country nonetheless remains one of America’s largest arms customers, having bought billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from U.S. manufacturers in the past decade.

Neither the DIA nor U.S. Africa Command provided comment before publication. Spokespersons for the UAE Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment.

The massive arms sale the Trump administration is pursuing appears to have come in response to the UAE’s normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel. Many congressional Democrats will try to block the sale.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a frequent critic of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, tweeted on Monday that a classified briefing on the sale raised a “mind blowing number of unsettled issues and questions the Administration couldn’t answer.”

Libya has been engulfed in civil war for much of the past decade, since a U.S.-led NATO intervention helped topple longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But what emerged was a fragile balance of power among increasingly armed groups, and another civil war broke out in 2014.

The so-called Wagner Group — which entered the conflict in 2019 — is a collection of private mercenary companies that are equipped and closely linked with Russian military intelligence, and several of its entities have been sanctioned for work on behalf of Russia. It has allowed Russia to cultivate a military foothold in Libya with a degree of deniability.

A U.N. panel of experts has documented the repeated violations of the U.N. arms embargo on Libya, citing countries supporting both sides of the conflict. Both Wagner and the UAE, as well as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, have thrown their support in Libya behind the self-described “Libyan National Army,” backing Haftar in the east, as Turkey and Qatar have supported the Tripoli government. Analysts have long observed what appears to be close operational coordination between the Russians on the ground and Emiratis supporting Haftar.

Wolfram Lacher, a Libya researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told The Intercept that last year, Russian mercenaries at times appeared to be acting as ground forces while the UAE, which does not have a large army, operated drones and fighters.

Last year, Russian mercenaries at times appeared to be acting as ground forces while the UAE, which does not have a large army, operated drones and fighters.

“There was clearly also a coordinating role between [Russian mercenaries] and the Emirati drones,” Lacher said. “For the entire autumn until early 2020, the Emiratis were the only ones flying drones and fighter jets around Tripoli. And meanwhile on the ground, the Wagner guys were really pushing forward. They were the ones leading the push forward towards the center of Tripoli. … They made that progress aided by Emirati drones. So clearly there was coordination.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has remained mostly on the sidelines of the Libyan conflict but recently issued a number of sharp condemnations of Wagner for its activities in Libya. AFRICOM, which estimates some 2,000 Russian mercenaries are among the foreign fighters in the country, released aerial imagery purportedly showing them moving military hardware into Libya.

And, as Wagner and the Libyan National Army withdrew from Tripoli this summer, AFRICOM accused the Russian mercenaries of rigging mines and other explosive devices in Tripoli neighborhoods. Wagner, a Navy admiral said, was responsible for the “reckless use of landmines and booby traps,” which were “harming innocent civilians.”

Lacher said that the international presence in the country — particularly from the Russians and from Turkey, which is supporting the Tripoli government — would be difficult to reverse.

“The covert Russian intervention was a consequence of Emirati adventurism in Libya, the Turkish intervention was a reaction to it,” Lacher wrote in an email. “But now that they’re there, Russia and Turkey appear to be establishing themselves for the long term in Libya. And it’s not clear to what extent the Russian presence now still serves Emirati aims, and to what extent it now primarily serves Russian interests.”

The post Arms Sale to UAE Goes Forward Even as U.S. Probes Tie Between UAE and Russian Mercenaries appeared first on The Intercept.

Castro has also called for bringing the war in Afghanistan to an end, cutting off U.S. support for the Saudi-led conflict in Yemen, and having Congress end blank-check authorizations for wars in the Middle East — which would force Congress to debate and define the scope of the war on terror.

Come next Congress, Castro may have a real power to make good on those ideas.

But first, he has to win his bid to become chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, beating two senior members in an uphill, secret-ballot election. If Republicans keep control of the Senate, whoever is elected chair in the Democratic-controlled House could end up becoming one of the most important congressional figures in shaping a post-Trump foreign policy.

The position is only open because insurgent Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal, ousted committee chair Rep. Eliot Engel in a New York primary. Though Castro isn’t particularly known as a leader in the progressive foreign policy space, among the contenders, he is by far the most sympathetic to the broader left, explaining why he has rounded up near-unanimous support among the country’s progressive foreign policy organizations.

But despite that support, it’s unclear how many progressive votes Castro may actually get. Often, member-to-member races can be less ideological and have more to do with personal relationships. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., for example, a progressive voice on foreign policy who sponsored a number of congressional efforts to stop U.S. support to Saudi Arabia, indicated in September that he would support New York Democrat Gregory Meeks. (In a statement, Khanna told The Intercept that Meeks was helpful in building support for the Yemen resolution and that he “shares an understanding about the harm a colonizers model of the world has caused in Asia and Africa.”)

Over the course of two phone interviews from his home in San Antonio, one last month and another last week, Castro laid out his vision of a Foreign Affairs Committee that he said would be more diverse and tackle a wider range of issues, and wouldn’t let up on investigating Trump

“It’s true that the other side is going to make big political headlines about how you’re ‘coming after’ opponents. But are we supposed to not hold people accountable folks for what were intentional acts?” Castro said in October. “I think there is a greater risk to doing nothing and letting everybody skate. That’s the greatest risk.”

Castro, alongside his twin brother and former presidential candidate Julián Castro, are perhaps best known as vocal critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. (During his brother’s presidential campaign, Joaquin grew a beard to help people tell them apart, with mixed success.) But during his seven years in Congress, Joaquin Castro has quietly built a reputation for tough oversight, particularly in his current role as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who has endorsed Castro in the race, said that Castro developed a reputation as a hands-on leader in the CHC and that he is serious about accountability for immigration abuses.

“I’ve watched him run the caucus through some very, very difficult years — the last two years under Trump,” Grijalva said. “He experienced it. We visited the private prisons, the for-profit prisons, visited the border, saw the separation firsthand. He saw the Border Patrol and ICE suddenly become political arms of the Trump administration. … You can’t just go back to the way it was there. There has to be reforms and guardrails going forward.”

Castro’s stance on post-election investigations could put him at odds with a Biden administration. Last week NBC reported that the Biden administration is wary of post-inauguration Trump investigations, fearing they may appear hyperpartisan and undermine national unity. That would be in line with the Obama White House’s messaging on Bush-era torture: The U.S. should “look forward, not back.”

In his work with the committee, where he chairs the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, Castro has been clear that he thinks unfinished investigations due to Trump’s stonewalling should be completed after President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated.

In August, for example, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke remotely at the Republican National Convention while on official diplomatic travel in Jerusalem — an act that is both unprecedented and likely illegal — Castro launched an investigation into how State Department resources may have gone to supporting Pompeo’s political activity.

Later, when State Department officials testified in front of the committee in September, Castro warned them not to stonewall his document requests. “If we don’t wrap this investigation up … I am going to ask this committee to make sure that those investigations continue past November and past January.”

“There has historically been this idea that once an administration is done, you try to move forward and you don’t want to look like you’re simply trying to go after or prosecute political opponents,” Castro said last week. “We have to do what is necessary to make sure that a future administration is not inspired by the Trump administration to conduct some of the same activities as before, like separating kids from their parents, knowing that they have no way of tracking that and reuniting them.”

This summer, after it became clear that committee chair Eliot Engel lost his primary election, Castro announced his bid, calling for a “new generation of foreign policy leadership.” But in a system usually dominated by seniority, Castro, having only come to Congress in 2013, is at a severe disadvantage.

Castro is up against California Democrat Brad Sherman and Meeks, both of whom were elected to Congress more than a decade before Castro. Both are relatively more hawkish on Iran and U.S. support for Israel. Sherman opposed the Obama administration’s Iran deal; Meeks, although he was a target for progressives in a June primary election in Queens, has the backing of many in the powerful Congressional Black Caucus and is seen as a heavy favorite.

In a statement, Sherman said he was running for the position because he thought he was the most qualified and would do the best job. “That said, I know Joaquin is capable, knowledgeable and a hard-working member of the Foreign Affairs committee. He would do a good job if elected.” A spokesperson for Meeks did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Because both the House and Senate foreign policy committees oversee the State Department, the race will determine who will be in charge of shepherding legislation to rebuild the department after the number of career diplomats was decimated under the Trump administration. Castro has already outlined his plan to “build a bigger, better State Department” — with an emphasis on diversity. He also worked on legislation to combat harassment and discrimination at the department and introduced legislation that would fund paid internships.

Castro also said that under Biden, the Foreign Affairs Committee should adopt a stronger focus on migration, asylum-seekers, and refugees, including by holding hearings on climate refugees, and that the committee should get involved in trying to reunite families who were separated under Trump’s immigration policies. During his campaign, Biden promised to form a task force that aimed at unifying the 666 kids with their parents.

In interviews, several Democratic staff members who were not authorized to speak on the record said that Castro’s chances to win the race outright are slim, but that he may have a pathway to a majority if he can cultivate enough support from both progressives and younger members of the caucus. And to that end, he has engaged heavily with outside advocacy organizations — taking what is usually a secretive, member-to-member campaigning process and turning it into a public effort to build support. A coalition of progressive organizations, including the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, published a letter endorsing Castro.

One Democratic aide interviewed by The Intercept, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said that because Castro’s chances are slim, engagement with progressives and progressive groups was a savvy way to draw attention to the race. “Castro knows that he has a narrow path to victory that is dependent on defining himself as the champion of the new progressive foreign policy consensus,” the aide said.

On the other hand, although Castro has cast himself as a progressive alternative in the race, he is not a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and has not been endorsed by CPC. When I asked him whether he identifies as a progressive, he paused and said, “I think if you look at my record, it’s been progressive.”

Many of the stances Castro has taken over the years are generally in line with the left wing of the party’s asks for a new foreign policy — in wanting to examine the expansive use-of-force resolutions that allow U.S. wars to continue indefinitely in the Middle East, for instance. He has defended the Iran deal and been an early supporter of efforts to curb the U.S. role in Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen. And although all three candidates have stated their opposition to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Castro has been willing to go further in criticizing Israel’s human rights violations, including by signing a letter critical of the Israeli government’s home demolitions in Palestine.

Stephen Miles, the executive director of the progressive group Win Without War, which has endorsed Castro, told The Intercept that progressives should demand a foreign policy in line with certain principles, not necessarily one that is made solely by progressive caucus members.

“Folks like Congressman Castro, who are not members of the Progressive Caucus, can really pick up this mantle of a different kind of foreign policy — one more deeply rooted in the notion that those who are on the receiving end, or feeling the impacts of these decisions, should be part of the decision-making process,” Miles said.

And one of Castro’s central promises of his bid is to increase the diversity of witnesses before the committee, which is an issue he has championed alongside the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The foreign affairs committees are known for calling on a relatively insular group of D.C.-based experts, and one analysis earlier this year highlighted low gender diversity among their witnesses. “Ultimately this a question not just about what is our foreign policy, but how we make foreign policy,” Miles said, adding, “We’ve seen the same handful of folks be witnesses, regardless, frankly of whether the chairman was a Democrat or Republican.”

Last month, Castro testified in front of the House Rules Committee in favor a rule requiring committees to track the diversity of witnesses — gender, racial, and otherwise.

“During my eight years now on the committee, I don’t recall that we’ve had a Palestinian come in front of us and give us their perspective on the situation in the Middle East, for example,” Castro said. “I don’t think that should be controversial at all. And the United States has over the years positioned itself as a mediator and arbiter of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. And if it’s going to truly be a fair mediator or arbiter, and you have got to be willing to hear from all sides.”

Correction: November 25, 2020, 9:05 a.m.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly cited an analysis claiming that the congressional foreign affairs committees have the lowest gender diversity of any committee’s pool of witnesses. The analysis critically cited gender diversity figures for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but did not compare those to the witness pools of other committees.

The post Progressives Look to Wield Power in a New Place: The Foreign Affairs Committee appeared first on The Intercept.

On Sunday afternoon, VOA staff were sent a memo on the policy dated October 2 by Michael Pack, a former conservative filmmaker who is currently the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, the agency that oversees VOA. Pack was previously a close associate of former White House adviser and far-right activist Steve Bannon. The memo, which was first reported Sunday night by NPR, was accompanied by an updated “social media policy” that reflects Pack’s guidance.

The Intercept spoke with three VOA journalists about the memo, all of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. The three journalists said the policy had sparked immediate concern that such a broad definition of “conflicts of interest” could be used to target journalists whose coverage VOA management deemed too critical of the Trump administration. Two of the journalists also expressed concerns that Pack’s guidance ran afoul of the agency’s “firewall” — a legal requirement that VOA remain free from government interference, including from USAGM.

A spokesperson for USAGM did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

All three journalists also described an increasingly aggressive internal review process, in which VOA managers review rank-and-file journalists’ coverage for evidence of political bias. On Sunday, NPR reported that VOA’s longtime and scrupulously neutral White House reporter Steve Herman was the subject of such an internal investigation into whether his coverage of the White House was biased. Two journalists at VOA told The Intercept that a number of other investigations have taken place of less high-profile reporters, often resulting in reporters being told to provide more airtime for right-wing viewpoints.

“Conflicts of interest are not limited to those involving the recipient of money, ownership of stock, or gifts. The rule is broader,” the memo says. “Simply put, it is a conflict of interest for a journalist to participate personally and substantially in reporting on an issue: (1) in which they have a personal interest or (2) have publically personally expressed a political opinion.”

The conflict of interest policy outlined by Pack goes further than typical journalistic ethics policies, which usually stress neutrality or objectivity but do not characterize voicing a single opinion as a conflict.

The memo goes on to say that public criticism offered on any issue is grounds for recusal from reporting on that issue. The memo offers as an example if a VOA journalist “publicly criticizes the U.S. Department of Justice’s leadership for, among other things, implementing the policies and protecting the prerogatives of the Administration,” they “must recuse themselves from reporting on the Department and the part of the Administration implicated by the criticism.” The memo also says that staff should not cover any issue in which they are affected by government policy, giving the example that J-1 visa holders should “recuse themselves from any story involving J-1 visas.”

The memo cites the New York Times’s Ethical Journalism Handbook and the Washington Post’s “Policies and Standards” Page, which respectively contain language about “neutrality” and “fairness.” But the CEO’s memo turns minor violations of journalistic objectivity — a malleable concept to begin with — into a punishable offense. And, against the backdrop of Pack’s tenure at USAGM, employees worry that the broad standard lays a groundwork that could be used to punish journalists or water down coverage of the Trump administration.

One VOA journalist told The Intercept that “this new guidance is so vague and so broad that it could be used to silence journalists for covering almost anything within their own countries. … If a journalist working in the U.S. on a J-1 visa can’t cover the J-1 visa issue, can a journalist in America who breathes air not cover policy about clean air?”

The memo goes on to say that public criticism offered on any issue is grounds for recusal from reporting on that issue.

The memo says that other behavior, like “liking” a comment on Facebook, can be scrutinized as well. “For example, a journalist who on Facebook ‘likes’ a comment or political cartoon that aggressively attacks or disparages the President must recuse themselves from covering the President,” the memo says.

Bill Grueskin, a professor of professional practice at Columbia Journalism School, told The Intercept by email that conflict of interest policies typically define a “conflict” more narrowly. He gave examples like holding stock in a company you cover or having a spouse at the agency you cover.

“We can all be personally affected by almost any government action, whether it’s adjusting Social Security contributions or living near a national forest,” Grueskin wrote. “By setting such vague standards, VOA is opening up the possibility that these policies will be enforced arbitrarily, to harass reporters who don’t fall in line with the agenda their bosses are pushing.”

Pack’s memo has also raised concerns about VOA’s “firewall,” a policy that exists to protect VOA from outside government influence. VOA’s firewall is written into its congressional charter. Passed into law by the 1994 Broadcasting Act, the firewall “prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news … free of political interference,” VOA’s website says. “The firewall ensures that VOA can make the final decisions on what stories to cover, and how they are covered.”

Thomas Kent, a former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who also teaches at Columbia University, told The Intercept that the networks under USAGM, including VOA, have an obligation to set policies for fairness and neutrality. “The law says that the government and the head of USAGM should not be making editorial decisions and must respect the editorial decisions of all the networks. In that sense, I think that a memo of this sort should be coming from the heads of the networks, not the head of USAGM,” Kent said.

According to NPR, Pack’s memo has already been the subject of a whistleblower complaint filed by the Government Accountability Project alleging that it violates the VOA firewall by telling VOA leadership how to assign reporters to different stories and beats.

“The firewall is very clear. The USAGM CEO is not supposed to be sending out any kind of messaging about how news should be covered — how and by whom,” said a journalist interviewed by The Intercept. But another didn’t agree, saying that it was within Pack’s purview to send “best practices,” not specific instructions, for journalists to abide by.

One VOA journalist told The Intercept that the memo will contribute to a “culture of fear” under Pack and that employees have worried their past social media “likes” might come under scrutiny. “This feels like they are going after us,” the journalist said. “The example that was given in the letter was quite specific. It’s certainly making a lot of people nervous, including myself.”

Since Pack became the head of USAGM in June, he has been accused of trying to politicize coverage at VOA. Shortly after his confirmation, he fired the heads of four media organizations under USAGM’s purview, including the heads of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Pack later gave an interview with pro-Trump news outlet The Federalist, in which he speculated that the groups he oversaw would be “a great place to put a foreign spy” — a comment some in VOA thought could subject their overseas colleagues to reprisals. And in the same interview, while stressing that he would not tell specific journalists what to report, he nonetheless said it was his job “to drain the swamp, to root out corruption and to deal with these issues of bias.”

Pack’s comments caused controversy at VOA, and a group of 14 journalists at VOA signed a letter denouncing the actions and remarks about spies. One source told The Intercept that Pack’s past comments are an important factor in how VOA employees are viewing the new guidance.

“Given Pack’s past comments saying that there is an inherent left-wing bias in VOA and … that his job is to correct that bias, this kind of sudden emphasis on our social media policy very much makes me think that they’re looking at some of our social media profiles online to substantiate those claims.”

The post Trump Appointee to VOA Reporters: Criticizing Trump Is a Conflict of Interest appeared first on The Intercept.

Lopez’s email echoed a widespread far-right conspiracy theory about Muslim Americans: that national Muslim advocacy organizations, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, are secretly fronts for overseeing terrorist organizations. Lopez was writing to urge the largest federal law enforcement organization in the country to act on the unfounded theory.

“HAMAS is a designated FTO” — Foreign Terrorist Organization — “& CAIR is its US branch … but members of Congress openly support it, even are featured as keynote speakers at its events,” Lopez wrote. She warned about CAIR and another American-Muslim group: “We need to understand that this is a domestic insurgency aimed at destruction & replacement of the US Constitution – please let me know how I can help.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the Center for Security and Policy, where Lopez worked at the time, as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement.” It is unclear if Lopez, who was a vice president with the group, remains at the Center of Security Policy; the group no longer appears in many of her public biographies. (Lopez did not respond to repeated inquiries and the Center for Security Policy declined to comment.) But her LinkedIn page lists the center as a current affiliation, describing her role as that of a “thought leader” and “project manager” in the “counterjihad movement.”

“We were concerned when she joined the administration. What we found is a large number of meetings proving our hypothesis.”

Lopez’s message was obtained by the Washington-based group American Oversight this month as part of a public records request into Gorka’s role at DHS. Founded in 2017, lawyers from American Oversight filed suit for her calendars and external communications last year. The agency began releasing documents earlier this year and shared a recently released collection with The Intercept.

Because of her record of anti-Muslim comments, Gorka’s roles with the Trump administration — she was an early appointee to the transition team for the Department of Homeland Security — raised alarm bells among Muslim advocacy groups in the U.S. While it’s not clear from the FOIA documents whether Gorka ever responded to Lopez’s October appeal, the email was one among many in the trove that American Oversight says confirmed the worst fears: that Gorka’s appointment could have emboldened far-right and anti-Muslim voices to see an ally in Trump’s DHS.

Austin Evers, American Oversight’s executive director and a former lawyer for the State Department under President Barack Obama, told The Intercept by phone that the group filed the lawsuit to find out what role Gorka had in DHS’s policy process and to see whether she was in touch with outside voices on the far-right.

“Katharine Gorka comes from an ecosystem of anti-immigrant, anti-Islam organizations and personalities,” Evers said. “We were concerned when she joined the administration that she would bring that network in, and enhance its influence with the power of the United States government. What we found is a large number of meetings proving our hypothesis.”

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR Director of Government Affairs Robert McCaw said, “These messages confirm what we already knew — Katharine Gorka is an anti-Muslim bigot and conspiracy theorist who openly collaborates with other far-right extremists. Ms. Gorka never had any business serving in the federal government.”

A former writer for the far-right website Breitbart, Gorka had used various platforms to air anti-Muslim views in the past. In a 2015 interview, she proposed “shutting down the radical mosques.” She had also suggested that the news network Al Jazeera — a frequent boogeyman of the Islamophobic far right — should not be allowed to broadcast in the United States.

Though it is unclear if Gorka ever responsed to Lopez’s October email, Lopez had indeed maintained a relationship with a sympathetic ally in the highest levels of government.

According to the FOIA documents, Gorka and Lopez ran into each other earlier in August 2018, when Gorka’s husband Sebastian — a former Trump White House official and bombastic right-wing personality — gave a foreign policy address at the think tank Westminster Institute, where Katharine Gorka formerly served as executive director. Lopez wrote to Gorka the next day and shared her private Protonmail address. “Great to see you … last night at Westminster, Katie – looking forward to following up w/you,” Lopez wrote.

After more than two years as a senior policy adviser at DHS, Gorka became press secretary for the department’s Customs and Border Protection last June. Two months later, she left the Trump administration and now works at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. Unlike her husband, Sebastian, who has been a vocal presence on right-wing media defending the president, Katharine Gorka, who goes by Katie, is a more understated presence. Her caution extends to what she puts in government email.

The FOIA documents paint a picture of Trump’s DHS as heavily influenced by political appointees like Gorka.

Calendars and emails, however, which were obtained through American Oversight’s FOIA request, largely confirm previous news reports that she was an influential, behind-the-scenes presence on terrorism policy and had a hand in shaping DHS’s approach to “countering violent extremism” programs.

The FOIA documents paint a picture of Trump’s DHS as heavily influenced by political appointees like Gorka, and the revelations come at a time when DHS stands accused of politicizing intelligence to benefit Trump. Last week, the House Intelligence Committee released a whistleblower complaint from Brian Murphy, the former head of DHS’s intelligence division, who told the committee that senior leadership had pressured him to inflate the threat of left-wing violence, while downplaying that from white supremacy and Russian election interference.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, DHS moved to shift the focus of its “countering violent extremism” grant program. CVE, as the policy area is known, purports to espouse a community-based terrorism prevention effort aimed at preventing all forms of extremist violence in the U.S. Even under President Barack Obama, the effort was criticized for singling out American Muslims for suspicion. As a result, CVE programs grew to be controversial for targeting Muslim American communities for surveillance.

Under Trump, the program appeared to go one step further — and criticisms deepened, not least because of the involvement of officials like Gorka.

In 2017, then-DHS Secretary John Kelly altered the distribution of about $10 million in CVE grant money previously allocated to community organizations by the outgoing Obama administration. Among the groups cut were Life After Hate, a nonprofit aimed at de-radicalizing white supremacists. News reports, including a profile in BuzzFeed News later that year, linked Gorka to the decision.

The calendars obtained by American Oversight confirm that much of Gorka’s work in 2017 focused on policy around CVE. Her calendars list a first “CVE grant discussion” on January 24, 2017 — four days after Trump’s inauguration — and continued to list her as a participant in more than 10 meetings or discussions on CVE between then and the end of March 2017.

Gorka’s calendars show that, throughout the year, she was invited to participate in meetings, discussions, and phone calls on CVE programs, including discussing partnerships with other DHS agencies. For example, her calendar shows one October 2017 meeting between staff from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Office of Citizenship “to explore partnering on developing CVE programs for children of immigrants.” It’s unclear if anything came of the meeting.

Gorka’s calendar also lists a February 2017 discussion on “CVE grants and Sanctuary Cities.” Again, it’s unclear if anything came of the meeting, but the Trump administration would later fight a court battle over whether the Department of Justice can withhold law enforcement grants from sanctuary cities.

The calendars show Gorka also had a hand in other terrorism prevention initiatives at DHS. In late 2017, she was invited to participate in a meeting on “DHS Screening and use of publicly available information” — possibly a reference to a later policy change by the Trump administration to start screening the social media pages for refugee and asylum seekers.

Gorka was so central to terrorism policy at DHS that, after Kelly left in November 2017, Gorka was one of the officials tasked with coordinating between different DHS offices.

Gorka was so central to terrorism policy at DHS that, after Kelly left to become Trump’s chief of staff in November 2017, she was one of the officials tasked with coordinating between different DHS offices to develop a briefing on terrorism prevention for the incoming secretary.

While at DHS, Gorka also frequently corresponded with various people at her soon to be employer, the Heritage Foundation, where she is listed as having a number of meetings during her tenure in public office. One frequent confidant was Robin Simcox, then a terrorism researcher at the think tank who authored a report called “The Asylum-Terror Nexus: How Europe Should Respond,” which it pushes a similar line to the justifications given by Trump and other anti-immigration activists to the U.S.’s asylum program. (Simcox, who frequently shared his published works with Gorka’s official government email address, did not respond to a request for comment made to the U.K.’s Counter Extremism Group, where he is the director.)

Gorka also used her work email to confide in Heritage scholars, including about her plans after leaving DHS. In June 2018, more than a year before she left the agency, Gorka emailed James Carafano, a national security expert at the think tank, asking to talk about “terrorism prevention and life after DHS.” (A spokesperson for Heritage declined to comment for this story.)

Eighteen months later, she would become Carafano’s colleague, when, according to a LinkedIn page, she formally joined Heritage.

The post At Homeland Security, Anti-Muslim Activist Katharine Gorka Maintained Ties With Islamophobes appeared first on The Intercept.

In May, President Donald Trump nominated Louis Bremer — a former Navy SEAL turned investment banker — to serve as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. In that role, Bremer would be the top civilian in the Defense Department overseeing the special operations community.

Bremer is currently a managing director at Cerberus Capital Management — a private equity company whose founder, Stephen Feinberg, has close ties to the Trump administration and was once considered for a high-up job in the intelligence community. Bremer also sits on the board of directors of Tier 1 Group, an Arkansas-based special operations training company that is owned by Cerberus.

In March 2019, the Washington Post — where Khashoggi was also a columnist — published a column by David Ignatius, which, citing “Saudi and American sources,” claimed that members of the Saudi rapid response team that killed Khashoggi in October  2018 had been trained in the United States. The column said that the CIA had warned other government agencies “that some of this special-operations training might have been conducted by Tier 1 Group” under a State Department license.

A U.S. government source confirmed the account at the time to The Intercept, saying that the CIA warning was intended to stop members of the Saudi team from being granted U.S. visas again for further training as part of defense liaison programs with the U.S. (The official asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.) The CIA did not respond to an email requesting comment.

At a nominations hearing on Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., asked Bremer about the allegations, and whether Tier 1 Group or Cerberus ever investigated them. In response, Bremer said that he was unfamiliar with the article, and said neither company had investigated the allegation “to my knowledge or recollection.”

“I do know that we train Saudi nationals as part of our engagements with the Kingdom as an allied nation,” Bremer said. “We train other nations as well. But I have no knowledge of that.”

“So until today,” Kaine asked, “you were not aware that an allegation had been made that a company on which you sit as a director, with a small board of directors, had potentially been involved in training Saudis who were participants in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi?”

“I find it incredibly hard to believe that a five-person board of this company would not have had a fire drill when this allegation arose.”

Bremer said he would check his records and follow up with Kaine.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, responded to Bremer’s account with skepticism.

“Having served on a number of corporate boards myself, it’s hard for me to believe that a mention of your company by name in a column by David Ignatius — one of the leading foreign affairs commentators in the country — would not come to your attention nor to the attention of the board,” King said. “I find it incredibly hard to believe that a five-person board of this company would not have had a fire drill when this allegation arose.”

“We have a culture of compliance at Cerberus,” Bremer said. “That culture is pushed down into our portfolio companies. So as I sit here and think about it in real time, I think it’s probably likely that we did do some sort of investigation, I just don’t recall the specifics of that.”

Cerberus did not respond to a request for comment, and calls to Tier 1 Group’s office went unanswered.

Bremer’s nomination was first reported by Politico, which noted that in a now-deleted Instagram account, he described himself as a “Harley riding, tequila-drinking Navy SEAL and White House Fellow who buys companies on occasion.” His nomination was criticized by former officials who questioned his ability to reset the culture of the special operations community, which has come under fire after a number of high-profile scandals, including a Green Beret being strangled to death, sexual assault charges, drug abuse, and the war crimes trial of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher.

“When the President’s nominee to be the chief civilian Pentagon leader over U.S. special forces operations is a director of a company that may have trained those who assassinated journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it is critical that the Senate understand all the facts about the claim and whether Mr. Bremer or his colleagues took any steps in response to such a shocking allegation,” Kaine said in a statement after the hearing.

The post Pentagon Nominee Questioned About Company’s Reported Ties to Khashoggi Killers appeared first on The Intercept.

Maj. Adam DeMarco, appointed that evening to act as a liaison officer between the D.C. National Guard and the U.S. Park Police, testified before the House Natural Resources Committee that the events of June 1 were “deeply disturbing” to him, and that he observed the protesters acting peacefully.

“Having served in a combat zone, and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel threatened by the protestors or assess them to be violent,” DeMarco said in his opening statement. “In addition, considering the principles of proportionality of force and the fundamental strategy of graduated responses specific to civil disturbance operations, it was my observation that the use of force against demonstrators in the clearing operation was an unnecessary escalation of the use of force.”

“Having served in a combat zone … at no time did I feel threatened by the protestors or assess them to be violent.”

Tuesday’s hearing also featured Acting Park Police Chief Gregory Monahan, who steadfastly insisted that the operation to clear the park was solely intended to put up a security fence around the square, and that it had nothing to do with Trump walking through and posing for a photo op with a Bible just minutes later. “Our focus that day was to install that fencing,” Monahan said. “There is 100 percent zero correlation to our operation and the president’s visit to the church.”

As the square was being cleared, Trump gave a brief speech in the Rose Garden, saying “As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults, and the wanton destruction of property.”

In his testimony, DeMarco said he did not know why the order was given the clear the square before the declared curfew. But his testimony adds to a growing chorus of voices criticizing the Trump administration for its crackdown on protests in D.C. The sudden escalation and violence against journalists, caught on video, immediately sparked widespread condemnation, including from foreign governments and Trump’s former defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis.

House Democrats have been probing the whether the violent clearing operation was ordered by senior officials in the Trump administration. Attorney General William Barr and Defense Secretary Mark Esper were both nearby, and both have denied giving an order to clear the scene. Barr also faced questioning Tuesday from the House Judiciary Committee about the deployment of federal officers to Portland, Oregon, where they have assaulted protesters and seized them off the street for questioning.

Monahan stuck to a narrow script, maintaining that there was no connection between Trump’s photo op and the operation, and that protesters had been violent.

Tuesday’s hearing was also Gregory Monahan’s first public appearance since June 1. He was scheduled to testify before the Committee on Natural Resources last month but canceled just days before, writing in a letter to the committee that he could not attend due to his attention to “ongoing protests and … violence and destruction of memorials and monuments.”

But the move was conveniently timed. Under the committee’s rules, the Democratic chair, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, can issue a subpoena without a committee vote, but only if Republicans on the committee are given seven days notice. When Monahan canceled just before the hearing, the committee staff did not have enough time to organize a vote to subpoena Monahan. “Holding the vote isn’t always feasible on that short notice,” said Adam Sarvana, communications director for the committee’s Democratic staff, in an email.

During the hearing, Monahan stuck to a narrow script — maintaining that there was no connection between Trump’s photo op and the operation, and that protesters had been violent. He even brought a police helmet he said was dented by a brick thrown by a protester, but did not provide any details about the incident.

Monahan and other administration officials have repeatedly claimed that 50 officers were injured due to violence from protests, though no documentation has been provided. Under questioning during Tuesday’s hearing, Monahan testified that only one officer was injured on June 1, and the injury took place after police had moved to clear the square.

Monahan also answered questions about internal documentation of the evening’s events. The U.S. Park Police have come under fire for the fact that they did not record their radio transmissions during the operation, which is standard practice for the department. U.S. Park Police also do not wear body cameras, unlike many police departments around the country.

In response to a question, Monahan said he acknowledged body cameras’ “alignment with contemporary trends in law enforcement,” but said “at this time we are not in a position to successfully implement, manage, and sustain a body-worn camera program.”

The post National Guard Major Calls Assault on D.C. Protesters “Deeply Disturbing” appeared first on The Intercept.

Giving money to the victims of war, commonly called condolence or ex gratia payments, has long been a part of U.S. strategy in places like Afghanistan, where commanders have also used it to compensate local civilians for property destruction. In 2016, for example, after the U.S. admitted to bombing a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, military officials on a nearby U.S. base handed out thousands of dollars to the relatives of some of the 42 people killed.

But in places like Syria and Somalia, where the U.S. has conducted airstrikes with a smaller ground presence, human rights groups have criticized the military for failing to compensate or even properly account for civilians who were killed and injured by American bombs.

In May, the Defense Department sent a first-of-its kind report to Congress that shows the limits of condolence payments. The report, posted on a department website with little notice, states that in 2019, the military made 65 condolence payments in Afghanistan, six in Iraq, and none in any other country.

In the first half of 2019 alone, the monitoring group Airwars tracked 43 separate reports of civilian casualties from the U.S.-led coalition’s operations in Syria estimating that between 415 and 1,029 civilians were killed. The Department of Defense, for the same period in Syria, acknowledged only nine “credible” civilian casualty incidents, resulting in 21 civilian deaths. None of those appear to be reflected in the new report on condolence payments.

Luke Hartig, a fellow with New America and a former senior director for counterterrorism on Barack Obama’s National Security Council, told The Intercept that having U.S. troops on the ground made it “easier to both assess damages and make the payments” in places like Afghanistan, but added, “I don’t totally buy that rationale for not making any ex gratia payments in other locations.”

In 2019, the military made 65 condolence payments in Afghanistan, six in Iraq, and none in any other country.

Congress authorized money to be used for compensation payments in 2017 in Syria, and in 2018 extended it to Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. Earlier this month, in response to a law passed by Congress last year, the Defense Department issued “interim regulations” meant to create an internal process for gathering reports of the payments and then sending them to Congress.

The regulations — which are expected to be finalized early next year — say that the “principal goal” of the payments is to “help authorized commanders obtain and maintain friendly relations with and the support of local populations where U.S. forces are operating.”

Hartig said that he had hoped the regulations would acknowledge, if not a legal obligation, at least a moral duty to compensate for U.S. errors. “Mistakes happen, and part of this is not just to smooth things over but to attempt on its own right to try to make good when we make mistakes,” he said. “I would have expected more moral and ethical culpability in here.”

In a statement to The Intercept, Pentagon spokesperson Michael Howard said that the interim regulations allow “authorized commanders, at their discretion” to provide payments as a “means of expressing condolences or sympathy or as a goodwill gesture in the event of property damage, personal injury, or death that is incident to the use of force by the U.S. Armed Forces, a coalition that includes the United States, or a military organization supporting the United States or such coalition.”

Internally, the Defense Department refers to condolence payments as a type of “ex gratia payments” — Latin for “from favor” — meaning that the U.S. government is choosing to make them voluntarily, not from a sense of legal obligation. The military also uses the term to describe payments made to compensate for property damage or to pay the families of fallen Afghan soldiers or police officers who were working with the U.S.

“Offers of ex gratia payments … are not legally required, nor may they be construed or considered as an admission or an acknowledgment of any legal obligation to provide compensation, payment, or reparations for property, personal injury, or death,” the interim regulations say.

Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty International USA’s Security With Human Rights Program, told The Intercept that the regulations made it clear that the military wasn’t even attempting to provide the type of legal accountability required by international law.

“Civilians are civilians. There are not ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’ civilians. Civilians need to be protected, period.”

“This is designed to serve a short term strategic interest — that the commander on the ground thinks it’s helpful to have friendly relations with the people that his troops are interacting with,” said Eviatar. “It’s not designed at all to address the interests of the victims of U.S. bombings.”

The vast majority of the 611 payments tallied in the 2019 report are marked as compensation for “battle damage” to property, or as so-called “hero payments,” for the families of fallen Afghan allies. The 71 condolence payments in Afghanistan and Iraq ranged in amount from $169 to $35,000.

And although human rights advocates described the regulations as a step forward for transparency, Eviatar also expressed dismay with a provision in the regulations that requires that the recipients of compensation be “friendly” to American forces.

“Under the laws of war, civilians are not the enemy,” Eviatar said. “Civilians are civilians. There are not ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’ civilians. Civilians need to be protected, period.”

The preponderance of payments in Afghanistan in the report demonstrates that compensating civilians is a key part of U.S. strategy in that conflict.

In 2019 — the same period in which the U.S. made 65 condolence payments in Afghanistan — the U.S. assessed that 57 “reports” of civilian casualties were “credible,” according to the Department’s most recent annual accounting. Those credible claims added up to 132 Afghan civilians killed and approximately 91 civilians injured. Clearly, not each individual death or injury resulted in a payment, although some payments may have covered multiple individuals, and Howard said that “generally, U.S. military forces operating in Afghanistan offer condolence payments at a relatively high rate.”

But the military has also been heavily criticized for how rarely it assesses that civilian casualties have taken place. The Defense Department openly admits that it uses a different standard of “civilian casualty” than the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, or UNAMA, which estimated that in 2019 “international military forces” — mostly the United States — were responsible for 559 Afghans killed and 227 injured.

The main reason for the discrepancy, as a recent DOD report on Afghanistan explains, is that the U.S. forces only assess claims as “credible” when their own sources of intelligence can verify that civilians were killed. “The UNAMA reports rely primarily on human sources and in many cases [the United States] cannot verify the validity of UNAMA sources,” the report says.

Journalists and rights groups counter that on-the-ground investigations are critical. The U.S. military rarely visits the site of a raid or airstrike, or interviews eyewitnesses — and in several cases, they have had to reverse their position on civilian casualties from an attack after outside investigators surfaced new information.

The post The Pentagon Has a New Process for Paying for Civilian Deaths — but Is Still Slow to Acknowledge Them appeared first on The Intercept.

The 80-page text, first reported by the Washington Post, is a sign of how far the party’s center of gravity has shifted in four years. The draft was released Tuesday evening to the more than 150-member platform committee for an amendment process. It will likely be ratified at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee next month.

With lengthy sections on racial justice, immigration, climate change, and health care, the document hews closely to many of the policy recommendations produced by a Biden-Sanders unity effort earlier this month. But that unity report largely left out foreign policy, which is where some of the Democratic platform draft’s most significant departures from the 2016 platform lie.

“I think the platform shows that they’ve taken a number of important progressive foreign policy priorities on board,” said Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders. “There’s a lot to celebrate here, both in terms of where the party is moving on these issues, and of a broader unifying vision for the country.”

“There’s a lot to celebrate here, both in terms of where the party is moving on these issues, and of a broader unifying vision for the country.”

The draft text includes a section on scaling back the military’s involvement in Afghanistan and counterterrorism operations around the world. The text says Democrats support a “durable and inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan” that prevents Al Qaeda from sheltering in the country, and pledges to “right-size our counterterrorism footprint,” including by working with Congress to repeal use-of-force authorizations which presidents including Barack Obama have cited as an expanding legal basis for counterterrorism actions in many different countries. As vice president and on the campaign trail, Joe Biden has argued that the U.S. should reduce its military presence in Afghanistan while maintaining a role for special operations.

When the Democrats released and ratified their 2016 platform, it was widely hailed as the most progressive in the party’s history. But on foreign policy, the document was very much a product of the Obama era: celebrating the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” and condemning Donald Trump’s plan to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The draft text for 2020 shows Democrats doing more to distance themselves from Trump — denouncing him for failing to get the U.S. out of wars, accusing him of “further militariz[ing] our foreign policy,” and saying that his decisions “brought the world closer to catastrophe.”

The 2020 platform also goes further in its commitments to scale back military intervention, progressive activists told The Intercept. “It is important that every voter sees that the Democrats are committing to be the party of diplomacy, while Donald Trump has lied about ending the forever wars and instead brought us to the brink of new military conflicts,” said Alexander McCoy, political director for the progressive veterans’ group Common Defense, in an email.

The draft platform also says that confrontation with countries like China should not primarily be militaristic, and celebrates diplomacy as a “tool of first resort.” Unlike the 2016 platform, the draft explicitly condemns “regime-change” policies, particularly with respect to Iran. “Democrats believe the United States should not impose regime change on other countries and reject that as the goal of U.S. policy toward Iran,” it reads, referencing the Trump administration’s policy of cheering on the collapse of the Iranian government.

“As is always the case with platforms, the proof will be in the actions that follow.”

In another departure from 2016, the draft also suggests reducing the defense budget, saying, “we can maintain a strong defense and protect our safety and security for less.” The 2016 platform promised to focus on waste and fraud in Pentagon spending — but didn’t specifically say that the budget top line should decrease.

That element of the platform could receive pushback from others in the party. Just yesterday, a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives helped defeat a measure to reduce the Pentagon’s spending authorization by 10 percent — which would not even have brought the budget down to where it was at the end of the Obama administration.

Stephen Miles, executive director of the D.C.-based group Win Without War, told The Intercept that the suggestion to reduce defense spending in the text is important, but that it doesn’t reflect just how much military spending has increased since Trump took office.

“We were already at near-record levels of spending before that spending spree started,” Miles said. “So it’s a step in the right direction. But the president has sprinted in the wrong direction.”

“As is always the case with platforms,” Miles added, “the proof will be in the actions that follow in a Democratic administration or a Democratic caucus.”

The post Democrats Unveil Draft Foreign Policy Platform With Promises to End “Forever Wars” and “Regime Change” appeared first on The Intercept.

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are planning to use Sanders’s amendment as part of an effort to push for drastic cuts to military spending in this year’s budget in response to the coronavirus pandemic and its devastating economic impact. The group of legislators also wants to build support for the idea of reducing the Pentagon’s mammoth expenditures in anticipation of a future Democratic administration and budget rules set to change next year.

Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., one of the co-chairs of the caucus, told The Intercept that the caucus planned to focus on a handful of amendments that address spending in the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act. The caucus discussed its plans on a conference call Tuesday.

“I see this as an organizing campaign around the size of the defense budget,” Pocan said. “Next year may be the best chance, with a Democratic president and maybe a Democratic Senate, so we really are going to do everything we can this time.”

Progressives in Congress have long called for reductions to U.S. military spending, which has increased by more than $100 billion annually under Donald Trump, arguing that money would be better spent funding domestic priorities. But within Congress, progressives have limited influence on the size and shape of the Pentagon’s budget, and efforts like Sanders’s are a test of their political clout.

According to the draft text of Sanders’s amendment, it would apply a blunt 14 percent cut to all of the accounts authorized by the bill except for Defense Department and military payroll, and the Defense Health Program. The cuts would add up to about 10 percent of the bill’s top line, bringing the total authorized spending down by $74 billion.

The savings would then be used to establish a Treasury Department grant program, which would allow local and county governments to apply for money to be spent in “high-poverty” areas. The text lists building public housing, community health centers, and schools; decontaminating drinking water; and payroll for teachers, among other listed “permissible uses,” and prohibits the money from being spent on prisons.

“What this amendment is about is saying it is time to fundamentally change our national priorities,” Sanders said in a statement. “In the midst of the worst public health crisis in over 100 years and the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, we do not need to authorize $740.5 billion in bombs, weapons, fighter jets and endless wars.”

“In the midst of the worst public health crisis in over 100 years and the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, we do not need to authorize $740.5 billion in bombs, weapons, fighter jets and endless wars.”

Sanders’s critics will likely object to proportional, across-the-board authorization cuts as a method of reducing spending.

Gordon Adams, a professor at American University’s International School of Service and former top budget official in the Clinton administration, told The Intercept that he thought Sanders’s amendment was unlikely to pass, but it could send a message.

“What I think [Sanders] is doing here is seizing a moment to make a point,” said Adams, who also advised Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign. “He’s not legislating defense. He’s making a point that in an era of racial tension and pandemic, the big fiscal tradeoffs for the government are on the table. That’s what he’s really saying.”

A window may open up in 2021. With the budget request deadline in February, incoming presidents can begin reshaping the budget in the first weeks of their administration. Additionally, decade-old budget rules are set to expire that tie the amount of national security spending to Congress’s non-defense spending, giving a potential President Joe Biden even wider latitude to make significant cuts to the Defense Department without touching other areas.

In separate interviews, Pocan and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told The Intercept that they would introduce a counterpart amendment to Sanders’s in the House, but did not provide details. “I’m not sure I can tell you exactly the crafting other than it will target 10 percent of the defense budget,” Pocan said.

Both also said they were looking at additional targeted cuts, including to emergency wartime accounts — called “overseas contingency operations” — and to Trump’s Space Force. In the past year, Congress, at the request of the Trump administration, dramatically expanded overseas contingency funding as a way to get around defense budget caps.

Lee also introduced a nonbinding resolution last week that would declare it the “sense of the House of Representatives” that Congress should cut “up to $350 billion” from the defense budget. The resolution mirrors a similar call by the Poor People’s Campaign and other activist groups, but it would not have any required impact on the budgets that Congress passes each year.

Lee told The Intercept that the resolution was part of a consensus-building effort aimed at future years.

“There are two efforts taking place at the same time,” she said by phone. “One is our 10 percent cut across the board this year. The $350 billion [resolution] we introduced to make sure we begin to set the stage and set the framework. We did that so we could start educating our colleagues and the public about the real savings that could occur in the defense budget.”

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Pentagon officials have called for increases in military spending as a way of confronting Russia and China. The administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy says that “long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia” requires “increased and sustained investment” and that view has gained mainstream acceptance even among voices in the Democratic Party. In 2018, a group of bipartisan national security experts commissioned by Congress to review the strategy recommended that “Congress increase the base defense budget at an average rate of three to five percent” each year in coming years.

This year’s bill looks to take competition with China one step further. Although the Senate version of year’s authorization bill already authorizes more than $21 billion for shipbuilding ($1.4 billion above the budget’s request), Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has joined with his Republican counterpart to advocate for a “Pacific Deterrence Initiative.” In a joint op-ed with Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Reed says that the multibillion-dollar venture will “ensure U.S. forces have everything they need to compete, fight, and win in the Indo-Pacific.”

“We can’t just say ‘cut’; we have to say what is the alternative.”

And as the military budget has increased, progressive Democrats have been able to marshal little opposition beyond a handful of protest votes to past defense bills. Last year, progressives boosted amendments that restricted the Trump administration’s war powers to attack Iran or participate in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, both of which passed the House but got stripped out when the House version of the bill was reconciled with the Senate. House Democrats also passed a measure that would have repealed the 2002 use of force resolution for the Iraq War, and that effort, too, did not make it into the final bill. The following January, the Trump administration cited the 2002 resolution as the legal basis for the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a progressive member on the House Armed Services Committee, told The Intercept that he was looking at cuts to overseas contingency operations, as well as cutting funding for a new generation of nuclear ground-launched ballistic missiles.

“The Democrats have to be smart about messaging. We have to talk about not just what the reduction is going to be, but how we’re going to create millions of new jobs with that money,” Khanna said. “We can’t just say ‘cut’; we have to say what is the alternative.”

But Khanna was skeptical that progressives could make comprehensive cuts to defense without a larger presence in congressional leadership: “We need the presidency. We need people in our leadership who are progressive.”

The post Progressives Plan to Push Big Cuts to Defense Spending, Citing Coronavirus Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

Founded in 2010, Team Rubicon mobilizes military veterans and other volunteers skilled as first responders to do disaster relief. It is one of a number of nonprofits founded after 9/11 by a new generation of veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Team Rubicon volunteers have worked on six continents and in all 50 states, and helped out in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. More recently, the group’s American and U.K. branches have helped set up mobile coronavirus test sites, delivered food and supplies to those at risk, and moved and tagged bodies at hastily established mortuaries.

Team Rubicon USA was started by Marine Corps veterans Jake Wood and William McNulty, who first joined forces to lead a team of volunteers into Haiti after it was devastated by a 2010 earthquake. Its meteoric rise was fueled by high-profile media attention. Wood was recognized by the GQ “Gentlemen’s Fund,” Gen. David Petraeus served on the group’s advisory board, and the organization received early financial grants from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and others. Team Rubicon’s American chapter now deploys tens of thousands of volunteers, and has sister organizations in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Norway.

But a decade after they began working together, Wood, who leads the group’s American wing, and McNulty, who runs its global branch, have found themselves on opposite sides of the court dispute that is threatening to hamper much of Team Rubicon’s service work around the world. The power struggle is linked to a question that has dogged the group since its earliest days: whether, following the troubled U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, international veterans would agree to work under American leadership.

At the center of the dispute are allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment that the group’s U.S. leaders say indicate a “failure to protect the Team Rubicon brand.” The alleged offenders, the CEOs of Team Rubicon U.K. and Team Rubicon Australia, have faced internal investigations, but have kept their jobs, which Team Rubicon USA argues is unacceptable given the allegations.

The court battle concerns whether Team Rubicon’s global branch and country affiliates should be allowed to keep using the organization’s name and branding in their work and fundraising despite their failure to fire the two men accused of misconduct. After TR USA attempted to revoke its trademark agreement with the global division and pressured funders not to donate to the work of TR Global, TR Global sued, arguing that TR U.K. and TR Australia are legally independent organizations and the global branch doesn’t have the authority to fire their CEOs.

The group’s global branch also claims that volunteers for Team Rubicon USA have themselves faced sexual misconduct allegations before, and says the 2019 incidents are being used as a pretext for the group’s American leaders to seize control of what has become a worldwide network of organizations.

The allegations surfaced last August after a leadership retreat at a YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado, according to court records, interviews, and internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The main accusation centers on a late-night encounter between a volunteer for Team Rubicon’s Canadian outlet and the CEO of its U.K. branch, Richard Sharp. The details are murky, and various documents, including a declaration filed over the weekend by the alleged victim, Melissa DeMeda, offer incomplete versions of what happened.

In her initial statement to Team Rubicon in August, DeMeda described an incident that occurred late one night at the retreat after extensive drinking, when she and Sharp stepped outside so Sharp could smoke. The conversation began normally, but Sharp soon started touching her in ways that made her uncomfortable, tried to kiss her, and made remarks suggesting they have sex, according to her written statement, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept.

“No, I’m not doing this,” DeMeda told Sharp, according to her statement. She then backed away and went inside.

In messages to colleagues later, Sharp denied propositioning DeMeda, but he apologized to her the next day, according to an internal investigation of Sharp by Team Rubicon U.K., which was obtained by The Intercept. In statements to the board members who conducted the internal U.K. investigation, Sharp said that the encounter “was just a conversation” and “there was no incident.”

“If I was an ogre why would she come outside with me?” he asked, according to the board’s report. Sharp did not respond to a request for comment.

TR Canada CEO Bryan Riddell learned of the incident the next day and reported it to Wood and others, according to the U.K. board’s report. In an email exchange with Sharp, Riddell said he wanted to get the incident resolved, but added that he was “disappointed in [DeMeda’s] judgment last night.”

“I know it takes two to tango,” Riddell emailed Sharp.

In a statement emailed to The Intercept, Riddell said those remarks were “premature on [his] part and showed poor judgement.” He continued: “I had no reason to doubt her credibility then, and we still don’t; we commended her for her courage to report the incident.”

DeMeda’s allegation split Team Rubicon’s American and global branches, with the U.S. organization under Wood’s leadership accusing the Global affiliate of failing to take appropriate action against Sharp and Geoffrey Evans, the CEO of Team Rubicon Australia. DeMeda accused Evans of publicly directing “sexually inappropriate remarks” at her during the retreat, such as, “You’re a gorgeous girl” and “I’d have sex with you,” according to her statement to TR USA.

In DeMeda’s own declaration filed Saturday night, she wrote only that she “experienced objectionable behavior” from Sharp and Evans, without offering details. DeMeda could not be reached for comment; her lawyer did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

If Sharp and Evans had been Team Rubicon USA employees, they would have been “fired for cause,” according to a filing from TR Canada CEO Riddell, whose chapter is the only global affiliate supporting the group’s American branch in the court fight. That led TR USA to try to end its trademark agreement with the global division.

After DeMeda’s initial complaint to Team Rubicon in 2019, two other people told TR USA that Sharp had verbally harassed them during the retreat. One accusation centered on an argument Sharp got into with a woman on the night of August 14 after a bonfire where Sharp, formerly a decorated officer in the Royal Marines, was pressured to talk about his wartime experiences. Sharp had been hurt by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, which led to his being medically discharged, the U.K. board’s report said, and ended his military career.

Later that evening, after Sharp had drunk more alcohol, he and the woman got into a heated argument about his military service, according to the TR U.K. board’s internal report and witness statements obtained by The Intercept. According to the statements, witnesses heard Sharp call the woman “an ungrateful prick,” and use the word “cunt.”

Sharp “left the room and walked into the lobby to go back to his room,” the U.K. board report says, and apologized the next morning. “He described himself as being ‘too drunk and I walked into the wrong crowd in the wrong state of mind.’ [Sharp] described his experiences that evening as creating ‘the perfect storm.’ We agree that it is likely that it did.”

Sara George, one of the TR U.K. board members responsible for conducting the British investigation, referred The Intercept to a statement on TR U.K.’s website that does not mention Sharp by name. The statement says that despite “significant extenuating circumstances,” the panel of trustees found that “a member of staff had been verbally abusive, while under the influence of alcohol,” and that further similar conduct would be grounds for dismissal. It also noted that the panel was “unable to conclude that there had been any incidence of sexual harassment,” in part because it lacked access to the complainants. The internal U.K. report noted that the board members who conducted the British probe were blocked by TR USA and its lawyers from speaking directly with DeMeda, the other woman who accused Sharp of harassment, and other witnesses.

“We came to the conclusion that the U.S. investigation was not conducted fairly or properly as required by English law and that there was no reasonable prospect of its conclusions being upheld in a British court,” George told The Intercept.

DeMeda’s declaration says she was never invited to participate in the British panel’s investigation.

“I do not consider myself a victim,” DeMeda wrote in her declaration. “I never asked anyone to shield me from inquiries regarding what I experienced at the [conference] in Colorado. Nor was I ever informed that investigators in the United Kingdom or Australia or anywhere else were interested in talking to me. I would have willingly participated in such investigations had I been asked. Moreover, I would have been willing to talk directly to the CEOs of Team Rubicon UK and Team Rubicon Australia about the conduct that was the subject of my written complaint. While I would not have expected such conversations to be easy, I was willing to do whatever was necessary to resolve the situation.”

While DeMeda said she stands by her complaint, “it was not my original inclination to include the conduct of the CEO of the Team Rubicon Australia in my submission. I felt pressure to do so by Mr. Riddell.”

“No pressure has ever been applied, in fact, completely the opposite,” Riddell wrote in an email to The Intercept. DeMeda told him about the alleged conduct before they left Estes Park, he wrote, and he told her he was obliged to take it very seriously, adding: “Ms. DeMeda has TRC’s full support in that matter.”

In an email, Evans, the CEO of Team Rubicon Australia, wrote that the independent Australian review concluded that his remarks to DeMeda would not have “constituted sexual harassment under Australian or U.S. law.”

“The independent Australian investigation found that I could not have reasonably anticipated that Ms. DeMeda would be offended, humiliated or intimidated by my remarks, amongst the many other remarks made by others on that evening,” Evans wrote.

Additionally, according to Evans, the review found that “TR-USA’s management of this matter did not meet Australian standards for procedural fairness,” and that TR USA had blocked accesses to witnesses and refused to provide adequate source material from witnesses’ statements.

“When first approached by TRUSA, I was advised I was being interviewed about ‘an inappropriate sexual comment,’” Evans wrote. “I was genuinely upset that Ms. DeMeda had taken offense to something I may have said. I therefore immediately and unreservedly accepted responsibility for my actions and issued a sincere apology to her. Following this, I believed the matter resolved.”

Team Rubicon’s structure has long been a source of discord. When the group was founded, it was primarily an American organization. In the late 2000s, the number of veterans’ charities in the United States grew explosively, far outpacing the rate at which other charities were being founded.

But the idea of utilizing veterans’ first responder skills appealed to many outside the United States. So in 2014, the organization sought advice from an independent consulting firm on how to expand internationally, according to a court declaration from McNulty, who now serves as CEO of TR Global and is on the board of TR Australia. The consulting firm, IDEO, found that “while foreign veterans and leaders were very excited about the Team Rubicon brand, philosophy and mission,” they “harbored skepticism about American oversight and preferred to be part of a global coalition, as opposed to seeing themselves as subordinate to a controlling American parent,” according to McNulty.

In an email, McNulty said that the independence of individual country affiliates had other advantages, including that it allowed them to identify unique service opportunities based on their veteran community’s experience. After the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, for instance, TR U.K. recruited former Gurkas — elite Nepalese soldiers who fought in the British army — to help TR USA get aid into the country. “The thought was, if we can operate as a family of charities, TR-USA would benefit because it could deploy to places in the world that might otherwise be non-permissible for Americans,” McNulty wrote.

But Wood long opposed the idea of licensing the brand through a global entity, preferring a U.S.-led international structure, McNulty said, and sought to undermine it almost from the beginning.

In an interview, Wood told The Intercept that he thought a direct licensing model was “more efficient” and “more effective,” and that he’s been transparent about that belief throughout.

“There has never been a long-running, multiyear secret conspiracy to unwind TR Global,” Wood said. “At times we did propose alternative ways forward that included the dissolution of TRG. But that was never secretly done. It was proposed and discussed directly with TR Global.”

In her declaration, DeMeda said that Riddell, the TR Canada CEO, wanted to “forc[e] the dissolution of Team Rubicon Global” so that TR Canada could establish a direct licensing relationship with Team Rubicon USA. “I was aware that the CEO of Team Rubicon Canada intended to author a letter to that effect and that he hoped to secure the cooperation of the CEOs of Team Rubicon UK and Team Rubicon Australia with this objective,” the declaration states. The other CEOs, however, did not agree to the proposal.

Riddell disputed that characterization. “My feelings on the structure of the network were always transparent and it was always my intent for us to arrive at a shared vision for the future of the network,” he wrote in an email to The Intercept.

After making her internal complaint to the organization in August 2019, DeMeda accepted a job with Team Rubicon Canada, but she no longer works there.

TR Global has also suggested that sexual misconduct is a long-standing cultural problem at TR USA. Included in the court documents is a letter McNulty wrote in 2018 to the chair of the board of TR Global, where he lists “[r]eported sexual assault and allegations of sexual misconduct at TR UK and TR USA, respectively,” as “[i]ssues of concern.”

A letter from retired Norwegian Brig. Gen. Ole-Asbjørn Fauske, the chair of the board of directors for Team Rubicon Norway, says that a Norwegian volunteer heard from an American counterpart that “women have had to learn to accept a culture of sexual harassment within Team Rubicon USA because of the lack of action when such incidents were reported.”

Wood told The Intercept that Team Rubicon USA “takes issues of sexual harassment very seriously.” Four instances of sexual harassment involving Team Rubicon USA volunteers were reported in 2018 and 2019, Wood said, and all four resulted in “the expulsion of the offending volunteer from the organization.”

“When issues of sexual harassment have arisen in our volunteer ranks, we take an approach that is firm, fair, and consistent, and we move very swiftly to adjudicate those claims,” Wood said. “And they do not happen very often.”

The U.K. board report also accused Wood of providing large amounts of free alcohol at the retreat, and said that the group’s American leaders refused to answer questions about how alcohol was purchased and provided.

Wood told The Intercept he viewed that allegation as a “smokescreen and deflection technique from TR U.K.,” adding that “none of that was pertinent to the actions of their CEO or whether or not he committed misconduct.”

“Most of the alcohol was donated by sponsors of the organization,” Wood said, and liquor was not served.

The code of conduct for the conference does not mention alcohol, though Wood said he “led conversations on our culture and our values and our expectations for this event, and part of that was setting an expectation around alcohol use.”

But a declaration from the only TR Global staffer to attend the retreat paints a more chaotic picture. “I personally witnessed TR-USA representatives freely furnishing drink tickets to anyone that made a request without limitations,” wrote Adam Szafran, TR Global’s chief operating officer. “At one point the servers at the hosted bar that were taking tickets at the hosted bar left, but alcohol at the hosted bar continued to be consumed without any oversight.”

When Szafran tried to discuss the “alcohol mismanagement issues” with TR USA staff, he wrote, “my concerns were dismissed.”

At a veterans’ gathering, the TR U.K. internal investigation noted, alcohol could pose special risks. “It was a reasonable expectation that attendees would consume either no alcohol at all for the duration of the conference or in very moderate quantities in private,” the report said. “This is particularly important in the context of an event attended by large numbers of the veteran community which is notably afflicted by alcoholism and addiction.”

Update: May 13, 2020, 11:30 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from Team Rubicon Australia CEO Geoffrey Evans that was received after publication, as well as a slightly fuller account of the accusation against him.

Update: May 20, 2020
This story has been updated to include an additional comment from Sara George and to clarify the findings of the TR U.K. board investigation.

The post Amid Allegations of Sexual Impropriety, Excessive Drinking, and Power Politics, a Veterans Group Wages Civil War appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week the Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a police contract with Persistent Surveillance Systems LLC to let the company and police fly three airplanes outfitted with high-resolution cameras over the city. According to the contract, the imaging systems can photograph up to 32 square miles every second, allowing for the slow-motion reconstruction of virtually all outdoor movement.

Baltimore police representatives have previously stated that the intent of the Aerial Investigation Research program is for the planes to fly simultaneously, allowing them to record imaging for 90 percent of the city.

In their complaint, lawyers for the ACLU call the system a “society-changing threat to individual privacy and to free association” and argue that it violates constitutional rights to privacy and free association.

“The data collected through the AIR program will amount to a comprehensive record of the movements of Plaintiffs and nearly everyone in Baltimore — facilitating an unprecedented police power to engage in retrospective location-tracking,” the complaint says. “The AIR program would put into place the most wide-reaching surveillance dragnet ever employed in an American city, giving [Baltimore police] a virtual, visual time machine whose grasp no person can escape.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a community organization called Leaders for a Beautiful Struggle, which has advocated for racial justice and police reform in the city, as well as by two other Baltimore activists and community organizers. The ACLU argues that constant aerial surveillance would “undermine the ability of LBS to carry out political activities crucial to its mission.”

The Baltimore Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deployment of the AIR program follows an all-too-familiar storyline of police technology after 9/11, in which tracking equipment developed for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan has been repurposed by the private surveillance industry and sold to American police departments, which quietly deploy it without public debate.

The technology used in the AIR program was developed for Air Force reconnaissance drones in the late 2000s as part of a military project called “Gorgon Stare.” Police in Baltimore began testing the technology in secret in 2016, until Bloomberg News revealed that it was used to monitor protests in the aftermath of a police officer’s acquittal on a murder charge in the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a broken neck in the back of a police van. After public outcry, the program was temporarily shut down.

But after the company pitched city officials on restarting the program last year, a test run was authorized. The pilot program — which is intended to run for 180 days — includes some limitations on how the technology can be used. It can only be employed to investigate four types of crimes — homicide, shooting, armed robbery, and carjacking, according to the contract — though the police commissioner can request its use in “extraordinary and circumstances, on a case-by-case basis.”

The photo resolution is “limited to 1 pixel per person,” the contract states, meaning that individuals and vehicles are represented as dots, though Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said last month that the technology has “the ability to upgrade the quality” if needed.

With Maryland’s coronavirus shutdown orders keeping most people inside, it’s unclear how the pilot program could produce an accurate picture of outdoor tracking technology. But it seems to be intended as a proof of concept for urban surveillance that could ultimately be deployed on a much larger scale.

The costs of the test program in 2020 — $3.7 million, including hiring an estimated 15 to 25 image analysts — will be underwritten by the foundation of Texas-based billionaire philanthropist John D. Arnold, a former energy trader and hedge fund manager, according to the contract.

“This isn’t the first time that local law enforcement has sought to use technology that was originally developed for the military in war zones abroad,” Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, wrote in an email. “But the Constitution clearly prohibits the use of these spy planes against Americans here at home.”

The post Lawsuit Aims to Stop Baltimore Police From Using War-Zone Surveillance System to Spy on Residents appeared first on The Intercept.

Although federal officials have known of the shortages for months, they have not been remedied. Yet every year since 2017, Congress has directed FEMA to set aside $41 million of its budget to offset the extraordinary costs of providing security for President Donald Trump’s properties. The “Presidential Residence Assistant Protection Grants” were most recently funded by Congress in an appropriations package in December.

According to memos posted on its website, FEMA has previously identified Trump properties in New York, New Jersey, and Florida as “qualifying residences” and paid out millions of dollars to the New York Police Department and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, among others. The grant program is limited to reimbursing “operational overtime and backfill overtime” for law enforcement and cannot be used to underwrite salaries or purchase police equipment.

The grant program does not make up a huge part of FEMA’s annual budget or its disaster relief fund, which just received a $45 billion infusion from last month’s stimulus bill. But at a time when every federal dollar counts, some question whether the payout to secure Trump properties is a good use of government resources.

Tyson Slocum, a program director with the advocacy group Public Citizen, told The Intercept by phone that the program “doesn’t seem to be in line with FEMA’s core objectives” and that he had “a financial conflict of interest concern” about it. Public Citizen recently used public records requests to show how much the Secret Service paid to rent rooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

“It’s been well established that President Trump spends an inordinate amount of time at his properties, that he routinely advertises his properties as part of his official duties, and that having this sort of special fund to help offset local security costs is an indirect benefit to the president,” Slocum said. “Allowing reimbursements to those local law enforcement costs could be relieving the Trump businesses of having to provide extra security.”

A former FEMA official who declined to be named for fear of professional reprisal, told The Intercept that the $41 million grant program was created in 2017 to help cover the huge costs of security at Trump’s residences, though it is unclear who in Congress shepherded the language to passage then and in each year since.

The former official pointed out that previous presidents have spent time in private residences — like the vacation home Barack Obama rented on Martha’s Vineyard in 2013, or the private ranch used by George W. Bush while in office — but that neither burdened local law enforcement agencies the way that Trump’s trips to his properties have.

In 2017, for example, a letter from the NYPD to Congress estimated that it had cost the department $24 million to provide security to Trump Tower, the Manhattan property that served as Trump’s headquarters during the transition period between Election Day and his inauguration.

A FEMA spokesperson told The Intercept by email that the money earmarked for security at Trump properties could not be repurposed due to language in the appropriations bills, which requires that the money be used “exclusively” for “protection activities … directly and demonstrably associated with any residence of the President that is designated or identified to be secured by the US Secret Service.”

FEMA is “evaluating changes in the application processes and grant requirements” as a result of the government’s Covid-19 response efforts, the spokesperson said.

Since 2017, the Trump administration’s budget requests have proposed steep cuts to FEMA’s disaster preparedness grants, drawing condemnation from some experts who claim that they are necessary to prepare for future disasters. Last year, the Trump administration also took more than $150 million from FEMA’s disaster relief fund to pay for immigration enforcement along the southern border.

The post Amid Critical Supply Shortage, FEMA Is Spending Millions to Protect Trump Properties appeared first on The Intercept.