In the months after we received the intelligence reports, which are written in a highly bureaucratic and opaque style, we had them translated from Persian into English and then had the translations cross-checked. Once we determined the significance of the documents — the cables detail MOIS operations in Iraq from late 2013 through early 2015 and include reports from Iranian assets at the highest levels of the Iraqi government — we approached the New York Times and proposed a reporting partnership. The article we jointly published with the Times is the product of months of collaboration, in which Intercept and Times reporters verified the authenticity of the documents and conducted further reporting to place them in context.

Because the raw intelligence reports contain large amounts of sensitive personal information, we are publishing only brief excerpts with the articles. As we continue to evaluate the cables for newsworthy material, we will publish new stories along with relevant excerpts.

In addition to providing insight into Iran’s espionage operations and its strategies for managing Iraqi and Kurdish politics, the documents lay out what amounts to a secret history of the war against the Islamic State and reveal the surprising ways in which Iranian and U.S. interests often aligned in that conflict. The tale the documents tell is a crucial chapter of a much bigger story: how the devastation that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq gave Iran a golden opportunity to build a political and social order there that was more favorable to their interests.

Indeed, these intelligence reports show Iran grappling with many of the same challenges that bedeviled the United States as it struggled to maintain control over a restive Iraq during the U.S. military occupation. While the U.S. continued to exert influence after its formal withdrawal of troops in 2011, it was Iran, with its vast network of spies and assets, that expertly manipulated Iraqi politics, shaping the power structures and cultivating the leaders who remain in place to this day. In keeping with this shift, today’s movement of Iraqis seeking to wrest control of their own government and expel outside influence has a new primary focus: Iran.

The post The Story Behind the Iran Cables appeared first on The Intercept.

In an indictment unsealed on May 9, the government alleges that documents on the U.S. drone program were leaked to a news organization. These documents detailed a secret, unaccountable process for targeting and killing people around the world, including U.S. citizens, through drone strikes. They are of vital public importance, and activity related to their disclosure is protected by the First Amendment. The alleged whistleblower faces up to 50 years in prison. No one has ever been held accountable for killing civilians in drone strikes.

Following in the dangerous path of the Obama administration, the Trump administration is continuing to use the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who enable journalists to uncover disgraceful, immoral, and unconstitutional acts committed in secret by the U.S. government. At The Intercept, we stand firmly opposed to all such prosecutions.

James Risen, director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, said in a statement:

Like previous prosecutions of alleged journalistic sources, the prosecution of Daniel Everette Hale amounts to an abuse of the Espionage Act to criminalize the process of reporting. Everyone who cares about press freedom should reject the government’s outrageous crackdown on whistleblowers, which accelerated dramatically under President Barack Obama and has escalated further under Donald Trump, targeting the very people who are working the hardest to hold the government accountable for abuses and to protect our democracy.

The post Statement on the Indictment of Alleged Drone Strike Whistleblower appeared first on The Intercept.

Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh needs to give Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) plausible deniability regarding his anti-abortion views. Collins, who is nominally pro-choice, said shortly before Kavanaugh’s nomination that a Supreme Court nominee “who would overturn Roe v. Wade would not be acceptable to me.” But she’s spent much of the time since his nomination looking for excuses to claim that Kavanaugh’s views on Roe are uncertain.

Well, they aren’t. Even before Kavanaugh became a Supreme Court nominee, his record indicated fairly clearly that he opposes Roe. And he cleared up any remaining doubt on the second day of his confirmation hearing — despite the fact that almost no one noticed.

Even before his hearing, Kavanaugh’s views on abortion weren’t exactly a state secret. He gave a speech to a conservative think tank in 2017 praising Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe v. Wade, and he wrote an opinion arguing that the Trump administration could temporarily imprison undocumented women who were seeking an abortion.

Kavanaugh’s 2017 speech, when laid alongside a statement he made during his confirmation hearing, eliminates any doubt that he opposes Roe.

The judge made this statement during an exchange with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) regarding “the foundations of the unenumerated rights doctrine.” The term “unenumerated rights” refers to rights, such as the right to an abortion, which are not explicitly named in the Constitution’s text, but which the Supreme Court has held to be implicit in that text.

According to Kavanaugh, “all roads lead to the Glucksberg test as the test that the Supreme Court has settled on as the proper test” to determine the scope of these unenumerated rights.

“Glucksberg” means Washington v. Glucksberg, a 1997 Supreme Court decision holding that the Constitution does not protect a right to physician-assisted suicide. According to Chief Justice Rehnquist’s opinion for the Court in Glucksberg, the question of which unenumerated rights are protected by the Constitution should be answered by asking which rights are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”

We don’t have to guess, however, whether Judge Kavanaugh thinks that a constitutional right to abortion is grounded in this Glucksberg test, because he’s already answered that question. As law professor Jim Oleske points out on Twitter, Kavanaugh said in his 2017 speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute that “even a first-year law student could tell you that the Glucksberg’s approach to unenumerated rights was not consistent with the approach of the abortion cases such as Roe vs. Wade in 1973, as well as the 1992 decision reaffirming Roe, known as Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.”

So, to spell this all out, Kavanaugh believes that the way to determine whether the Constitution protects a particular unenumerated right is to apply the test the Supreme Court laid out in Glucksberg. And the judge also thinks that “even a first-year law student could tell you” that Roe is inconsistent with Glucksberg.

It doesn’t take the brains of a fourth-term United States senator from Maine to figure out what this means if Kavanaugh is confirmed. Judge Kavanaugh will be the fifth vote to kill Roe if he joins the nation’s highest Court.

For what it’s worth, Kavanaugh’s statement that “all roads lead to the Glucksbergtest as the test that the Supreme Court has settled on as the proper test” is incorrect. As law professor Jamal Greene first pointed out on Twitter, Glucksbergwas “explicitly disavowed in Obergefell,” the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality decision.

According to Obergefell, Glucksberg “is inconsistent with the approach this Court has used in discussing other fundamental rights, including marriage and intimacy.”

Kavanaugh’s apparent endorsement of Glucksberg as the sole test for determining unenumerated rights, in other words, threatens a whole lot more than the right to an abortion. It also suggests that he believes that a wide range of Supreme Court decisions governing sex, romantic relationships, and intimacy were wrongly decided.

Judge Kavanaugh appears to be telegraphing his belief that Roe, Obergefell, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which provides that the government cannot prosecute consenting adults for having sex, were not correctly decided.

Top photo: Brett Kavanaugh, is sworn in before delivering his statement during his confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 4, 2018.

The post Facebook Suppressed a Story About Brett Kavanaugh’s Opposition to Roe v. Wade. We’re Republishing It. appeared first on The Intercept.

On June 5, 2017, The Intercept published a story about the document. We did not know the identity of the source who had sent it to us. Shortly after we posted our story, we learned that Winner had been arrested two days earlier. After an internal review, we acknowledged shortcomings in our handling of the document. However, it soon became clear that the government had at its disposal, and had aggressively used, multiple methods to quickly hunt down Winner.

The information in The Intercept story on the NSA report played a crucial role in alerting local election officials who had been in the dark about the cyberattack — a public service that was implicitly acknowledged in a recent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. As a former official from the Department of Homeland Security told The Intercept’s Sam Biddle, transmitting word of the cyberattacks down the chain was “not a high priority issue” for the NSA.  The vulnerability of the American electoral system is a national topic of immense gravity, but it took Winner’s act of bravery to bring key details of an attempt to compromise the democratic process in 2016 to public attention.  Those same details were included in the July indictment of alleged Russian military intelligence operatives issued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Instead of being recognized as a conscience-driven whistleblower whose disclosure helped protect U.S. elections, Winner was prosecuted with vicious resolve by the Justice Department under the Espionage Act. Her plea agreement reflects the conclusion of Winner and her lawyers that the terms of this deal represent the best outcome possible for her in the current environment. She not only faced unrelenting pressure from prosecutors, but a series of setbacks in the courtroom severely restricted her lawyers’ ability to defend her.

The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, contributed to Winner’s legal defense through the Press Freedom Defense Fund.

Reality Winner’s courage and sacrifice for the good of her country should be honored, not punished. Selective and politically motivated prosecutions of leakers and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act — which dramatically escalated under Barack Obama, opening the door for the Trump Justice Department’s abuses — are an attack on the First Amendment that will one day be judged harshly by history.

The post Statement on the Sentencing of Whistleblower Reality Winner for Disclosing NSA Report on Russian Election Hacking appeared first on The Intercept.