Though Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia directly participated in the defense of Israel, intercepting Iranian missiles and drones and supporting the operation, none of the Arab countries involved are willing to publicly admit their participation, and Washington is going along with the deception. The full extent of “partner” air operations responding to Iran has now been added to the web of secret bases, hidden military alliances, and undisclosed weapons pockmarking the region. Now, as the region finds itself perched on the possibility of a wider war, the public has once again been left in the dark.

As Iranian-made missiles and drones headed toward Israel in the 12-hour operation last Saturday, U.S. military officers were stationed throughout the region to coordinate the unified response and coach the secret partners, according to military sources. Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain were also tied into the American-led air and missile defense network, but these countries also have stayed quiet.

Now, the secret partners are even going out of their way to deny their roles, while at the same time delivering a subtle message to Israel (and the United States) that they are not going to be so cooperative should Israel further escalate.

Take Jordan, a long-standing U.S. ally and one of America’s staunchest military partners in the fight against ISIS. While acknowledging that the kingdom’s American-made F-16 fighter jets joined those from the U.S., Britain, France, and Israel in shooting down Iranian drones and missiles, Amman has not revealed any specific details about whose jets were where, above whose airspace, or when they engaged targets. (As The Intercept previously reported, U.S. F-15E strike aircraft primarily operated from Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. And Israeli fighters shot down drones and missiles over Jordanian territory.)

Despite its involvement as the central hub, Jordan’s foreign minister offered a stark if vague warning, hinting that the patience it has shown toward Israel and America may be waning. On April 14, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Ayman Safadi said that Jordan’s participation “is a firm policy that anything that poses a threat to Jordan will be confronted, because our priority is to protect Jordan, protect the lives of Jordanians, protect the capabilities of.”

King Abdullah II said on Tuesday that Jordan’s “security and sovereignty are above all considerations.”

Safadi added that similar action would be taken to respond to any attacks emanating from Israel toward Iran. “We will intercept every drone or missile that violates Jordan’s airspace to avert any danger,” he told Al-Mamlaka state-run news channel.

In his own effort to distance his country from the spiraling conflict, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani denied that any Iranian-made weapons had been launched from within his country’s borders. The prime minister’s remarks came after both the Israel Defense Forces and Iranian media identified Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon as countries from which drones and missiles originated. On Tuesday, the Pentagon said that Iranian weapons originated from Iran, Syria, and Yemen.

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“We … condemn the fact that the weapons launched at Israel violated the airspace of several regional states, putting at risk the lives of innocent people in those countries,” the U.S. said at the United Nations on Wednesday. (Iraq also secretly hosts U.S. Army Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, which shot down some Iranian missiles, as The Intercept previously reported. The presence of U.S. Patriots on Iraq soil had not been publicly known before Saturday.)

Like Jordan’s foreign minister, al-Sudani added, “Iraq rejects the use of its airspace from any country. We don’t want Iraq to be engaged in the area of conflict.” What steps Baghdad might take to protect its airspace remain unclear. 

Saudi Arabia is a stranger case still. The Israeli press reported that “Saudi Arabia acknowledged that it had helped the newly forged regional military coalition,” according to a story on KAN News, Israel’s public radio English language news. But the Saudi monarchy pushed back. “Saudi Arabia was not involved in intercepting recent Iranian attacks on Israel, according to informed sources speaking to Al Arabiya TV channel,” the Saudi Gazette reported. “The sources stressed that there have been no official statements issued regarding Saudi involvement in countering these attacks. This clarification follows reports by some Israeli news sites that attributed statements to an official Saudi source, claiming the Kingdom’s participation in the defensive alliance that responded to the Iranian attacks.”

Some reports say that American KC-135 aerial refueling tanker jets circled in the air over Saudi airspace at the time of the Iranian strike. The U.S. is known to station these flying gas stations on Saudi soil at King Abdulaziz Air Base in Dhahran. Other reports say that Saudi Arabia closed its airspace to U.S. aircraft during the operation, demanding that the U.S. refrain from launching any counterattack on Iran from its territory.

The United States has sold Patriot missile batteries and the longer range Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile systems to Saudi Arabia, and stationed Patriot missiles on Saudi soil. Patriot has also been sold to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE; THAAD is also operational or in development in the UAE, Oman, and Qatar. The U.S. Army deploys its own Patriot batteries in Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

“Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin continues to communicate with leaders throughout the Middle East region and beyond to emphasize that while the United States does not seek escalation, we will continue to defend Israel and U.S. personnel,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday, declining to name what leaders and only referring to the Arab states as “partners through the region.”

There has hardly been any American media coverage of the role of these various Arab countries in the defense of Israel, further adding to the state-imposed secrecy. But what these “partner” nations choose to do, should Israel decide to attack Iran, in protecting their airspace and sovereignty is an important factor in any Israeli decision, 

“You got a win,” President Joe Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “Take the win,” urging that Israel restrain from further action.

Biden also said that the U.S. would not help Israel in any effort to retaliate on Iran. But as with the current war in Gaza, and reports about Israel’s unwillingness to share plans about the strike on Iran’s embassy in Syria until just moments before it was executed, Israel has often found that America’s red lines don’t count for much. Soon, the U.S. may have to decide on which side to take in the event that Arab states engage with Israeli aircraft, drones, or missiles.

The post The Secret U.S. Alliance That Defended Israel From Iran Attack appeared first on The Intercept.

Units on alert, naval ships repositioning, bombers postured to fly, Marines ready to storm the beaches. These are all of the routines of a crisis that signals U.S. military readiness for war. But there’s another routine that often eludes Washington’s acknowledgment: the military’s own deployment schedule when it comes to units venturing out there into the real world. The schedule is sacrosanct. So while some might think the potential for war with Iran — right now — is high and the U.S. military is on high alert, the reality is that it’s business as usual.

On Friday, the Pentagon made vague statements that it is moving assets to the Middle East to express American displeasure and readiness should Iran attack Israel. President Joe Biden made a public threat toward Iran: “Don’t,” referring to any Iranian strike. And the administration trumpeted the presence of Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of Central Command, or CENTCOM, in Israel, there to “consult” with America’s ironclad partner.

But as Washington hawks and the news media hold their breath for what they call an “imminent” strike overseen by Tehran on Israeli soil, the U.S. military in the Middle East is sticking to its regular schedule of soldier comings and goings, including the redeployment of a high-profile Marine battle group that returned to the U.S. after an eight-month voyage. 

In fact, thousands of Marines, Navy sailors, Army troops, and Air Force war fighters have cycled back stateside over the past few weeks and even since the Israeli attack on the Iranian Embassy compound in Syria on April 1. In a purely routine way, in accordance with existing plans, some half-dozen deployments to the Middle East have come to an end. For the armed services, maintaining soldier schedules is more important than geopolitics. And indeed, there’s no evidence that the military services take much notice of the contradiction between their schedules and a brewing escalation. They are more focused on trying to please service members, wives, and parents in their bids to recruit and retain enlisted people than they are on the Pentagon’s war game machinations.

Even the Army’s undertakers are calling it quits. According to a recent announcement, Army body-bag handlers returned from the Middle East this month. “The 54th Quartermaster Company is the Army’s only active-duty mortuary affairs unit,” the announcement reads. “The unit sent 29 Soldiers to Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates in support of a wide array of operations in the region. Today, we get to welcome back detachment number one, 29 of our best from CENTCOM,” the company commander Capt. Peter Kase said. 

Meanwhile, service members overseeing rescue operations relating to air and naval attacks by Yemen returned home this month. An announcement celebrating the accomplishments and return of the U.S. Air Force Capt. Araceli Saunders last week details her efforts while deployed in Saudi Arabia, including “providing airborne alert for Operation POSEIDON ARCHER enabling thirty-one coalition strikes on Yemeni bases” and “reducing the threat to international maritime shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.” 

Despite Houthi attacks from Yemen and Iran-backed militia strikes from Syria and Iraq, U.S. forces routinely cycle in and out of the Middle East. On March 16, more than 4,000 Marines and sailors with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit began their journey home from a deployment that was reoriented from pure training to direct support for American diplomacy and military readiness after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. 

Meanwhile, soldiers tasked with strengthening deterrence on land, according to the Army, have also ended their deployments. On February 8, artillery gunners with the Michigan Army National Guard returned from a deployment to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. According to the press release, the soldiers supported Operation Inherent Resolve, the military’s ongoing war against ISIS.

“Alpha Battery’s accomplishments during their deployment underscore the Michigan National Guard’s commitment to ensuring the safety and security of our nation,” a spokespeople said. “Their dedication and proficiency in operating the HIMARS [long-range missile] system have significantly advanced our strategic objectives in the region.”

The return of soldiers from CENTCOM follows an announcement this past week that the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, based out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, is reorganizing to better meet its own internal deployment requirements. There’s no mention of strategic reshuffling to meet imminent plans for war, but rather “to provide predictability for Airmen” in future deployments and rotations, in other words, to meet quality-of-life objectives.

As intelligence officials give dire predictions to the New York Times about Iran’s threat, and Israeli military officials warn citizens against hoarding in preparation for a volley of cruise missiles, Iran continues to go to great lengths to avoid an out-of-control conflict with its sworn adversary, and its hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

A Financial Times report from this week details Iran’s efforts to convey through diplomatic channels that it does not wish to see an escalation that stokes all-out war with Israel and the United States. This and other news media reports say that Iran is engaging the United States through diplomatic channels to find a response that both demonstrates deterrence in response to the April 1 strike, without starting a war. (The U.S. and Iran have been talking through Oman to avoid an appearance of direct negotiations.)

In a subtle nod to its view that it’s business as usual, the U.S. Navy quietly relinquished command of the Red Sea Combined Task Force 153, handing it over to an Italian counterpart at the beginning of April. “I am incredibly proud of all the hard work and dedication by CTF 153 staff and units at-sea in support of Operation Prosperity Guardian,” outgoing U.S. Navy commander Capt. David Coles said. “Their efforts have directly contributed to regional maritime security and freedom of navigation in the CTF 153 area of operations. … It is a true honor to hand over command to an incredibly strong maritime partner like Italy. I know the Task Force is in good hands, and look forward to celebrating CTF 153’s future accomplishments under Capt. Messina’s stewardship.”

If Iran attacks Israel or the United States, on the ground, the American military posture looks routine, nowhere near matching the feverish vibes coming out of Washington. From his hotel room in Tel Aviv, Kurilla undoubtedly is closer to the action with his cellphone on red alert. But his visit is purely symbolic with regard to Iran. The truth is that the U.S. “mission” in the Middle East right now is as much to dissuade Israel from escalating.

The post U.S. Military Isn’t That Concerned About War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Negative experiences during military service are the main drivers of extremist beliefs amongst veterans, a new study from the RAND Corporation concludes. While the Pentagon-funded think tank report cites former President Donald Trump and January 6 as radicalization catalysts, one or more negative experiences in the military was the most consistent attribute for those expressing right- or left-wing extremist views, the study found in a survey of 21 veterans.

Extremist movements supported by RAND’s sample group included QAnon, the Proud Boys, the Five Percent Nation, KKK, Antifa, the Nation of Islam, and the New Black Panthers.

The 21 veterans interviewed for the study revealed a “considerable presence of negative and traumatic life events for interviewees while in the military and afterward while trying to adapt to civilian life,” the study says. The report is careful to note that it applied a small sample size and the need for further research to bolster correlation between time in the military and radicalization, but its general conclusions mirror other studies.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland conducted a 2022 study that found extremists who plotted or conducted mass casualty extremist attacks were 2.41 times more likely to be classified as mass casualty offenders if they served in the military. “Service members and veterans are not more likely to radicalize to the point of violence than members of the general population,” the study concluded. “However, this research brief illustrates that when service members and veterans do radicalize, they are more likely to plan for, or commit, mass casualty crimes, thus having an outsized impact on public safety.”

A Department of Justice report from 2018 also identified prior military service as a risk factor for violent extremism, alongside other factors including being socially isolated, being single, living alone, and being male.

The RAND study comes as Pentagon leadership and members of Congress on both the left and right have called for greater efforts to root out extremism in the ranks. In the wake of January 6, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tasked the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group to implement steps and provide recommendations addressing the threat posed by extremist activities. The subsequent defense secretary report required the military services to include in-person discussions about extremist activity in periodic training and required counter-extremist activity training engaging senior officers, law enforcement, and legal advisers.

The Pentagon push to root out extremism follows pressure from liberal lawmakers. In 2021, senators including Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Robert Menendez, D-N.J.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., wrote to Austin, “The Department must make every effort to identify service members involved with violent extremist groups to curtail future misconduct and to ensure the maintenance of good order and discipline within the ranks.”

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Meanwhile, this month, Republican members of Congress have launched their own effort to root out extremism of the left-wing variety, motivated in part by the self-immolation of Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell in February. In a letter sent to Austin, Reps. Brandon Williams, R-N.Y.; Brian Mast, R-Fla.; Eli Crane, R-Ariz.; Mike Kelly, R-Pa.; Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas; Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla.; and Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, wrote to demand a right-wing version of Democrats’ earlier demands. 

“Your dedication to rooting out extremist behavior within our ranks has been well documented and demonstrates a commitment to maintaining the honor and cohesion of our armed forces,” the representatives wrote. “It is with this shared commitment in mind that we urge your attention toward the equally pressing issue of left-wing extremism among active duty service members and veterans.”

What members of both parties have ignored is the central finding of the RAND report, which identifies veterans with negative military experiences as the demographic at higher risk for radicalization. This suggests that extremism stems from military service rather than a common belief that extremism is infiltrating into the ranks in any significant way. Indeed, a 2023 report commissioned by the Defense Department and conducted by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analyses also found “no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole.” The report also found that “Extremism in the veterans’ community has peaks and valleys over recent decades, and currently appears to be on the increase,” reflecting more the current political environment nationally than the nature of those driven to military service.

Sexual and psychological abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from recovering corpses, and substance abuse developed during active duty were all listed by veterans as negative experiences that coincided with their radicalization, according to RAND.

These negative experiences, as well as others, are also the cause of the military’s recruiting crisis, in that it has been unable for a number of years to meet its own goals in attracting qualified 18- to 24-year-olds to serve.

As the Defense Department struggles under the demands of liberal lawmakers to add more de-radicalization programs to their docket (and as the GOP accuses the military of acquiescing to a left-wing conspiracy to turn the military woke), little is being done to evaluate military service itself and its corrosive effects. Bushnell’s death and the spate of suicides prevalent among young soldiers point to a culture crisis for the military itself, in whom it attracts to serve and then how it treats its own service members once they are in the military. The recent RAND report, in addition to the studies preceding it, suggest that programs focused on addressing the hardships soldiers undergo while serving in the military and in reentering civilian life is a most sensical path forward. 

The Intercept’s coverage of veterans’ health is made possible in part by a grant from the A-Mark Foundation.

The post There’s a Bigger Driver of Veteran Radicalization Than Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

In light of the deadly ISIS-K attack on the Crocus City Hall in Russia last month, the homeland security complex is newly focusing on a high-profile Islamic State attack inside the United States, according to new government reports and statements. For seven months, Hamas has been the primary focus of federal counterterror operations, with the FBI anticipating a terrorist strike intended to highlight America’s military support for Israel.

“I see blinking lights everywhere I turn,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in December, addressing post-October 7 domestic threats and a new obsession with Hamas that came out of the Gaza war.

Within the past week though, members of Congress are demanding that the government provide classified briefings on the ISIS-K threat, expressing “serious concern” about the group’s reach. The New Jersey homeland security department, one of the country’s most active counterterrorism hubs, has also produced an intelligence brief this week warning about potential ISIS-K attacks. And the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has produced a hand-wringing report about the current U.S. capability to conduct “‘over-the-horizon’ counterterrorism operations” in Afghanistan to thwart the group’s future operations. 

In a way, the shift from Hamas to ISIS-K is one welcomed by the terror fighters because the focus eliminates all of the tricky politics associated with the Gaza war, especially the difficulty the FBI and others have had separating pro-Palestinian sentiments from support for Hamas. And, not coincidentally, all of the focus on pro-Trump so-called domestic extremists. The Al Qaeda-like attack in Moscow also harkens back to a familiar threat and the 20-year war for the federal government, one even emanating from Afghanistan.

ISIS-K, known as Islamic State Khorasan, is the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate that is now active in south Asia and the Caucasus. The name Khorasan comes from ancient Persian and refers to the region that encompasses Afghanistan and northeastern Iran, and portions of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan. Surviving fighters from Al Qaeda have congregated under the banner of ISIS-K. The Director of National Intelligence labels ISIS-K, founded in 2015, as one of ISIS’s “most lethal branches.”

In some ways, ISIS-K is the actual successor to Al Qaeda, which introduced high-profile attacks in northwest Africa and Yemen, culminating in 9/11. Before the assault in Moscow which killed 140 last month, ISIS-K had attack the U.S. directly when during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan it sent a suicide bomber that killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghans at the Kabul airport. Since assuming command in 2020, the group’s leader, Sanaullah Ghafari, has pledged further attacks, and he has taken on the ISIS goal of trying to create a physical Islamic caliphate.

Beginning in 2022, ISIS-K has also increased its messaging targeted on the United States. The ISIS Al-Naba newspaper commented on the initial indictment of former President Donald Trump, claiming “American unrest is looming on the horizon” and that “this is taking place by the arrangement of Allah.” ISIS-K’s English-language Voice of Khurasan commented on the raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, claiming “America is a ‘banana republic’ corrupt at a level not seen before.” ISIS-K has also commented on gun violence, highlighting gun killings in America and calling them “tit for tat” for U.S. foreign policy failures.

Last month, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of Central Command, said that ISIS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.” When asked whether the military is conducting sufficient strikes on ISIS-K in Afghanistan given the U.S. withdrawal, Kurilla told Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., “in a classified setting, ma’am, I can talk about where we are in terms of the find, fix, and finish on them.”

In a April 3 intelligence brief from the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness obtained by The Intercept, the agency warns, “The ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) attack in Russia highlights the group’s aspiration to become the most active ISIS affiliate, conduct global attacks, and inspire homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) to threaten the U.S. and Europe.”

In the same breath, the brief acknowledges that ISIS itself remains “a low threat to New Jersey and the surrounding region” and that the group has never “successfully conducted a directed attack within the U.S.” thanks to global efforts, such as that of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. The brief says that coalition and U.S. operations have “diminished ISIS’s military capability, territorial control, leadership, financial resources, and online influence.”

“The largest threat from ISIS still comes from [Homegrown Violent Extremists] who consume ISIS propaganda, radicalize, [and] often pledge allegiance to the group,” the brief concludes. (The FBI says that the majority of foreign-inspired terrorists in the U.S. continue to be ISIS-affiliated, as they have been for most of the past decade. On Saturday, the FBI arrested 18 year old Scott Mercurio, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for planning to attack local churches and allegedly providing material support to ISIS. “This case should be an eye-opener to the dangers of self-radicalization, which is a real threat to our communities,” Shohini Sinha, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Salt Lake City field office said.)

The new threat posed by ISIS-K was further amplified in a recent letter sent by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., demanding a classified briefing on the ISIS-K threat. 

“ISIS-K’s recent attacks further highlight their ability to strike around the globe. Their operations include a suicide bombing in Iran in January of 2024 and a massacre at a concert hall in Moscow in March,” the senators wrote. “Further, ISIS-K planned attacks against civilians in Germany and the Netherlands were also thwarted. It is evident the potential and desire for strikes by ISIS-K around the globe, including against the United States, remains significant. As former Director of Intelligence for CENTCOM, retired Army Major General Mark Quantock recently stated, ‘The U.S. remains target No. 1 for ISIS-K.’”

Late last month, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also said that Wray confirmed to him that an ISIS-linked smuggling network was penetrating the U.S. southern border. Rubio told ABC News that ISIS-K had “reconstituted itself as we warned would happen when we had this disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. One of the reasons why we didn’t want to withdraw precipitously is because you gave them operating space to reorganize themselves and plan externally.”

The post Terror Hunters Trade Hamas for ISIS-K, Perhaps With Some Relief appeared first on The Intercept.

“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him,” Sun Tzu wrote in the 4th century, one of those warfare aphorisms that the modern-day U.S. Army has adopted as part of its psychological operations career group. “Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant,” the Army says in a recruiting video released last year. But it is the Army that is pretending to be strong. A devastating new Defense Department inspector general report finds that its own psyops ranks are critically short at a time when Washington is obsessed with stoking influence against America’s many adversaries.

The IG report, “Evaluation of the DoD Military Information Support Operations Workforce” finds that the Army, the primary Defense Department proponent for battlefield influence and deception, has failed to staff its own psyops units at a time when the Pentagon struggles with fighting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation campaigns, particularly about U.S. military operations and bases.

A December 2010 secretary of defense memorandum, issued during the Obama administration, discontinued the use of the term “psyops” and replaced it with Military information Support Operations, or MISO. The memo stated that the term “psyop” had become misleading and, “although psyop activities rely on truthful information, credibly conveyed, the term psyop tends to connote propaganda, brainwashing, manipulation, and deceit.” The memo noted that for that reason, the Pentagon would “no longer use the term psyop to describe activities (in peacetime or during combat operations) that are intended to influence foreign audiences.” Nonetheless, the Army continues to use the term “psyop” or psyops when referring to its units and to the overall career field.

(The term “information warfare” was also replaced with “information operations” during the same time period. Seeking to soften the terminology of counterterrorism, the Obama administration also sought to change the name of the Global War On Terror to Overseas Contingency Operations, a term that never stuck. The administration also introduced the euphemism “violent extremist” instead of terrorist, a term that is now applied to domestic activists with no connection to any foreign power or influence.)

In its March report, the inspector general found that the Army’s four Psychological Operations Groups (two active duty and two in the reserves) operated with only 60 percent of their authorized strength. It also found that one third of Army Reserve psyops detachments, feeder organizations sprinkled around the country used to beef up the psyops groups during mobilization, exist only on paper, most being completely unmanned. And only a quarter of the detachments had assigned and qualified commands (captains) required to pursue their missions.

According to the report, MISO and other types of information operations are the main way the military responds to adversaries without engaging in armed combat. And yet despite this allegedly critical function, the IG found that “the Army does not have sufficient MISO-qualified military personnel in its Army Reserve and active component MISO units or serving in MISO positions on joint force command staffs to meet the increasing demand.”

The inspector general also found another problem: a comprehensive study of the entire psyops branch, with soldiers spread across the active duty component and the reserve components (Army Reserve and National Guard) has not been completed in 20 years.

Psyops is a military term that refers to efforts to influence enemy battlefield perceptions through leafleting, radio and television broadcasting and deception. Such operations, as Sun Tzu attests, are as old as organized warfare itself. In recent decades, with the growth of online news and communications, ubiquitous cellphone use, and social media, psyops has expanded. That expansion, and the nature of how information circulates, reaches far beyond the battlefield. Though there are national “influence” operations against countries such as Russia, China, and Iran that are run by the State Department and the intelligence agencies, psyops still generally refers to battlefield use.

At a time when the military says that there is “increasing demand” for psyops, it is phasing out psychological operations roles to make room for newer priorities, according to an internal Army paper. “We needed to reduce 32,000 spaces to both shrink overall structure and make room for about 7,500 new billets for emerging efforts like directed energy, the Mobile Short Range Air Defense program, and multi-domain task force teams,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy A. George wrote in February, recommending a reduction of psyops soldiers. 

Reducing the number of soldiers allocated to “special operations,” which psyops is a part of, is not without controversy. According to recent reporting, the head of Special Operations Command Gen. Bryan Fenton is fighting the Army plan, taking his complaint up the chain of command to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

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In congressional testimony last month, Fenton said that MISO soldiers and units “are indispensable in 21st century warfare, which includes the development of critical information force capabilities such as civil affairs and psychological operations” adding that “MISO [the operations themselves] to counter strategic competitors have more than tripled in the past three years — comprising more than 60% of SOF’s [special operations forces] worldwide MISO activities in FY 2023.” He also pointed to the Joint MISO WebOps Center that helps coordinate combatant commands’ efforts to actively engage “foreign audiences to illuminate and counter hostile propaganda and disinformation.”

The national and regional WebOps centers maintain overt pro-U.S. websites and social media accounts that publish propaganda, but where the connection to the Pentagon is obscured or hidden in the fine print.

Despite Fenton’s push to preserve unfilled positions conducting the Army’s MISO, recent revelations about the Pentagon’s psyops call into question just how effective these programs really are. 

In 2022, an extensive report by the Washington Post revealed widespread concern inside DOD that psychological operations were being waged both recklessly and ineffectively by the armed services. The report was spurred by research from the Stanford Internet Observatory which detailed over 150 instances of Facebook and Twitter removing accounts linked to U.S. military influence campaigns.

The Pentagon also has pushed for new powers to fight adversaries in cyberspace. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act gave the Defense Department a green light to engage in offensive psyops campaigns, including clandestine operations that align with the same definition as covert, meaning that the armed forces can carry out influence operations that deny an American connection, according to an analysis by Lawfare. 

As the Post detailed, after the congressional authorization, an unnamed defense official said, “Combatant commanders got really excited” and were “eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.” 

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Some of these operations involved anti-Russia narratives describing Russia’s war in Ukraine as imperialist and attempting to shift popular sentiment toward support for Ukraine. Another account apparently targeting Iranian citizens reposted content from Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in Farsi. One account spread misinformation that claimed that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees were reporting that bodies being returned from Iran had missing internal organs. The latter tweet would be in violation of CENTCOM’s psyops directives, according to the Post. 

Researchers at Stanford ultimately found that despite the dozens of Defense Department obscured accounts spreading misinformation, the effect on foreign populations was far less than information conveyed overtly from self-identified U.S. sources.

“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu says. As the inspector general report demonstrates, there is a lot of deception going on to convince the American public that military psyops is a good investment. That campaign seems to have been successful.

The post New Report Reveals Dirty Secret of Army Psychological Operations appeared first on The Intercept.

When Vice President Kamala Harris toured the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this week, site of the infamous 2018 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, she pushed for more gun control and called for communities to accept more federal help in stopping school shootings. “I will continue to advocate for what we must do in terms of universal background checks and assault weapons ban” Harris said.

But in a land where gun control is politically impossible, the only tangible help the Biden administration offers schools are resources to conduct better behavioral profiling of students, doing so through a Secret Service center founded to study the psychology of presidential assassins. The push, supported by a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the role of the Department of Homeland Security in school violence, would turn America’s schools into another adjunct of the national security apparatus, a veritable school for spies.

School shootings are indeed an epidemic in America, and Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 and injured 17 more in Parkland is a tragic example of yet another juvenile who fell through every social service safety net that American society had to offer. He is a poster child for the ease with which mentally ill Americans can acquire guns. But can the Secret Service really help to deal with the scourge, and is it the right agency to do so?

The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, or NTAC, was created in 1998 to examine threats to the president and security at complex public gatherings. Its focus was expanded a year later to the psychology of school shootings after the Columbine shooting resulted in 15 deaths and horrified the nation. Today, NTAC is “a multidisciplinary team of social science researchers” who assist “law enforcement, schools, government, and other public and private sector organizations to combat the ever-evolving threat of targeted violence,” according to its website.

Over decades, the NTAC has created desks in over a half-dozen Secret Service field offices, staffed by domestic security strategists who conduct school visits and staff training that mostly focus on recognizing “behavioral” traits that its study associates with mass violence. Last year alone, the NTAC touted some 331 training sessions, and it brags that over the last five years, it has trained hundreds of thousands of school administrators and teachers. The demand for its assistance, the Secret Service says, is thanks in part to NTAC publications regarding threats to schools. In its most recent report, “Improving School Safety Through Bystander Reporting,” the NTAC suggests schools encourage programs for students to report suspicious behavior, removing barriers that might impede any such tattletale reporting. 

“For reporting programs to be a useful tool for intervention and prevention in K-12 schools, students and other members of a reporting community need to be aware of the importance of reporting, their role in reporting, what to report, and any resources that are available when it comes to reporting threats and other concerns,” the NTAC report says. “Research finds that the fear of being ostracized, or experiencing other forms of retaliation, is a significant barrier to reporting. When students view reporting as ‘snitching,’ they are discouraged from coming forward with their concerns.”

Another NTAC study, “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” studied nearly 70 averted attacks against schools, using demographic information to identify school shooters. Attributes tracked by NTAC include history of school discipline, contact with law enforcement, experience being bullied, mental health issues, alcohol and drug use, and the broadly defined psychological trauma “impacted by adverse childhood experiences.”

NTAC stresses that the goal of school monitoring of students and its suggested “see something, say something” practice is successful intervention. It is the same framework originally created to deal with international terrorism and now expanded to thwart domestic “extremists” and government “insider threats.”

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But are such government programs created to deal with national security threats appropriate when applied to K-12 schools? Not only is NTAC’s list of behavioral threats just as applicable to skateboarders as they are to potential shooters, but lodging the school safety program in the Secret Service, and its Protective Intelligence Division (where NTAC is assigned), also questionably pushes school systems to adopt a national and homeland security curriculum.

“One thing I learned is that threat assessment doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Bev Baligad, chair of Threat Team Hawaiʻi, said after the Hawaiʻi Threat Assessment Conference last year, where NTAC and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Threat Evaluation and Reporting office made presentations. NTER houses the national “see something, say something” campaign and its own behavioral threat assessment and management program office. “There is a statewide push to build threat assessment capacity on all islands,” Baligad told the conference. 

At an NTAC training in Arizona last month, Cochise County School Superintendent Jacqui Clay said, “As the county school superintendent, the reason that we’re doing this is that we have to become a learning community and not be in silos, especially when it comes to school safety.”

“As we come together, the sheriff’s department, the police departments, the (Arizona) Rangers, Border Patrol, superintendents, the community, that’s a deterrent. It’s more of a deterrent because they see we’re working together,” Clay added. “If we all learn the words to the song, then we can sing the song together, better. This is part of the song.” Some of those singing the song are law enforcement agencies without a prior mandate in U.S. schools.

“Messaging should demonstrate to students that there is a big difference between ‘snitching,’ ‘ratting,’ or ‘tattling,’ and seeking help,” a Secret Service guide says. 

Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the EAGLES Act to prevent acts of mass violence, a bill that would bolster the NTAC by creating a national program on targeted school violence prevention, while expanding the NTAC’s “research and training on school violence and its dissemination of information on school violence prevention initiatives.”

“Accurate behavioral threat assessments and early interventions are essential to maintaining a safe environment in our schools and communities and preventing another tragedy from taking place,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, in reintroducing the legislation. “The U.S. Secret Service is uniquely equipped to help evaluate these threats, and our bill would enable them to share their tools and expertise with school safety partners across the country.”

Not everyone horrified at the rise of gun violence inside schools has signed on to the mission of reauthorizing and expanding the NTAC as proposed in the EAGLES Act. 

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote of the bill that “Threat assessment, including as proposed in this legislation, poses major risks for and to students, including increased and early contact with law enforcement, overidentification of students … for ‘threatening’ behavior, distraction from the role of easy access to guns in enabling mass shootings in schools and elsewhere, and undermining of students’ rights under civil rights laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504. School safety belongs in the hands of educators, and those trained in child/adolescent development — not law enforcement, and we should never start from a place of viewing some children as threats.”

The Consortium for Constituents With Disabilities followed suit, adding, “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a border security and counterterrorism agency. This agency has no expertise in student behavior or child development. Nonetheless, they would develop best practices and train school staff on threat assessment, treating children as potential terrorists.”

The post Kamala Harris Touts Secret Service Program Encouraging High School Spying appeared first on The Intercept.

“The right number of civilian casualties is zero,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of Israel’s war last week.

In December, a year after the Pentagon announced a new program to address civilian casualties, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for an “urgent” effort to get units and headquarters throughout the military to take on the task of mitigating civilian harm.

“Hard-earned tactical and operational successes may ultimately end in strategic failure if care is not taken to protect the civilian environment as much as the situation allows – including the civilian population and the personnel, organizations, resources, infrastructure, essential services, and systems on which civilian life depends,” says the new Joint Chiefs of Staff directive to the armed services. The January 2024 document, obtained by The Intercept, has not been previously reported.

But as the Defense Department pushes forward to revamp its protocols addressing civilian harm, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, released an audit this month that finds that field commands have so far largely rejected the Pentagon’s effort. The scathing GAO report, “Civilian Harm: DOD Should Take Actions to Enhance Its Plan for Mitigation and Response Efforts,” finds that Washington has failed to inculcate a new appreciation of the impact of civilian harm and that its top down directives have been met with ire and confusion from both military commanders and rank-and-file soldiers alike. 

In December 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued an instruction formalizing the department’s new civilian harm response, which “Establishes policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for civilian harm mitigation and response.” 

“Protecting civilians from harm in connection with military operations is not only a moral imperative, it is also critical to achieving long-term success on the battlefield,” the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan said, as previously reported by The Intercept.

Wide-ranging in its scope, the directive and plan sets in motion 11 core objectives that establish a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Steering Committee, a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the creation of dedicated staff positions at battlefield commands to help mitigate civilian harm, and multiple initiatives to gather more information on incidents and trends with the goal of reducing civilian casualties.

The new regulation, Dan E. Stigall, director for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Policy in the Office of Secretary of Defense, wrote in December 2023, “provides important policy guidance to shape how DoD conceptualizes, considers, assesses, investigates, and responds to civilian harm.”

And yet the GAO report, issued earlier this month, finds that despite the Pentagon mandate, Middle East and Africa regional commanders have failed to change practices for how civilian harm prevention is being factored into military operations. The GAO also found that the Defense Department “has not addressed uncertainty about what constitutes improvement and how the action plan applies to certain operations.” In other words, there is an absence of processes and metrics to record civilian deaths and then interpret incidents and causes for the purpose of learning lessons. The Pentagon itself has also failed to think through civilian casualties and harm caused in the context of all types of operations.

The GAO generally excuses the failure of the fighting commands to take adequate measures to revamp their practices given the military’s focus on small-scale counterterrorism operations over the past two decades. According to the report’s findings, “in our discussions with DOD components about challenges in implementing the action plan, some [commanders] indicated that they are unclear about how to mitigate and respond to civilian harm for large-scale conflicts. This is because they felt that the action plan is geared toward counterterrorism operations.” Creating a culture of civilian harm reduction “will require much more time, resources, and personnel than during the counterterrorism or irregular warfare operations of the past 20 years,” the GAO concludes.

Large-scale conflicts refer to potential wars with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But building up a capacity inside the military to assess civilian harm for conflicts like Ukraine and Israel is also a Pentagon goal in order to properly assess the use of U.S. weapons by American arms recipients, experts say.

U.S. Central Command officials, responsible for the Middle East, told the GAO that they didn’t understand the end goal of the Defense Department plan, given that they felt it fails to provide any way to measure the number of civilian deaths. The command also told the GAO that it was already working to mitigate civilian harm even without the new directives, saying that “the [Pentagon] action plan may be more helpful to other combatant commands that have not had recent experiences with combat and civilian harm mitigation.” It is a strange position for CENTCOM to take given that Austin’s directive itself was precipitated by successful lobbying by human rights groups for the military to address civilian harm in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, where it became clear that CENTCOM was not doing enough. 

U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, similarly told the GAO that it should be allowed to continue with its operations as they are being conducted and that nothing more needed to be done to implement Austin’s plan. According to the report, a SOCOM official “told us that there is currently no deficiency in DOD’s civilian harm mitigation and response efforts and the action plan codifies what the command is already doing.”

Officials from Africa Command and Indo-Pacific Command expressed similar skepticism about the Pentagon’s effort, according to the GAO report. A Navy officer said that the new regulations were unpopular within the rank and file: “some staff at lower levels of the Navy are asking questions about what DOD is fixing by implementing the action plan,” the officer said. 

On December 13, 2023, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a new staff functional task, contained in its Unified Joint Task List, or UJTL, that directs all military organizations to “manage civilian harm mitigation and response.” The UJTL is the standard “library of tasks, which serves as a foundation for capabilities-based planning across the range of military operations.” It is a comprehensive menu of “tasks, conditions, and measures” used to establish standards and even job descriptions across the entire defense enterprise. A printout of the tasks is over 1,600 pages, but the UJTL is maintained electronically.

According to an electronic copy obtained by The Intercept, the “urgent” priority new task directs the armed forces to “plan, integrate, and/or manage approaches for mitigation and response to civilian harm in plans, operations and/or training.”

“This task may include the Civilian Environment Teams at operational commands, composed of intelligence professionals; experts in human terrain, civilian infrastructure, and urban systems; and civil engineers, to assist commanders in understanding the effects of friendly and adversary actions on the civilian environment. This task may also include the development of command red teaming policies and procedures appropriate to relevant operational environments, with a focus on combating cognitive biases throughout joint targeting processes,” the description of the task says. It calls for reporting on the number of “trained, qualified, and certified personnel ready to support civilian harm mitigation and response requirements.”

With Austin’s civilian harm reduction rollout in 2023 and now with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chiming in, demanding that the services and commands incorporate civilian harm reduction into its staff and operations, a fundamental disagreement inside the military comes into focus, pitting top brass in Washington against combat commanders serving overseas. In the field, according to the GAO report, commanders believe that they are abiding by the laws of war and that their jobs which require putting their lives on the line are difficult and dangerous enough without having to modify them to satisfy Washington. They view the Pentagon as out of touch, catering more to public opinion and negative news coverage than to military reality.

The Pentagon, by focusing on “managing” and “mitigating” civilian harm is also being cautious about directing any mandate to count (or account for) civilian casualties because of the legacy of the dreaded “body count” from the Vietnam era, where commanders were pressured to inflate the number of enemy killed to demonstrate the false success of their operations. In Desert Storm (the first Gulf War in 1991), then CENTCOM commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf fashioned his own experiences into a creed that his command would refuse to count not only Iraqi combatants killed, but Iraqi civilians as well. For many in the military, that bias not to count civilian casualties has continued to this day.

Pressure from human rights and civilian casualty organizations began to change this practice after the Kosovo war in 1999, holding NATO and individual military forces accountable for civilian casualties and harm. Two decades of fighting after 9/11 accentuated the need to account for civilian harm, not just for legal and humanitarian reasons, but also because the effort to kill terrorists without accounting for civilian effects was shown to just increase the number of terrorists in succeeding generations.

In the formulation of its civilian harm “mitigation” strategy, the Pentagon has chosen specifically to ignore the work of the human rights and warfare-monitoring community, as revealed in a 2022 RAND Corporation report on “U.S. Department of Defense Civilian Casualty Policies and Procedures.” The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the report says, rejected the use of “third party” assessments because it did “not want to be held accountable to a range [of number] that is not an accurate estimate.”

The GAO report notes that a Joint Staff official said that the Defense Department still chooses to ignore civilian casualty assessments from third-party sources even though it itself fails to aggregate its own data and make its own efforts. Citing the RAND study, the GAO notes however that “Third-party groups tend to identify a range of estimates and leverage local news, social media sites, and footage of incidents posted to YouTube or other outlets” and that these estimates, though they can vary widely from the DOD’s internal numbers, are still essential to improve the accuracy of the military’s own assessments.

The GAO urges the DOD to establish effective metrics and “to get buy-in from DOD components and officials at all levels implementing the [civilian harm] action plan.” It also says that the Pentagon needs to “better monitor progress in implementing [its own plan] to help ensure that the improvements endure.” It is not an optimistic prognosis for civilians after years of external pressure and more than a year after Austin unveiled his new plan.

The post Biden Decries Civilian Deaths in Gaza as Pentagon Fails With Its Own Safeguards appeared first on The Intercept.

In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, the intelligence community and the FBI believe that the threat of Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States has increased to its highest point since 9/11, according to testimony of senior officials. “It’s long been the case that the public and the media are quick to declare one threat over and gone, while they obsess over whatever’s shiny and new,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point earlier this month. Wray said that though many “commentators” claimed that the threat from foreign terrorist organizations was over, “a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations [are calling] for attacks against Americans and our allies.”

Though Wray cites Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and ISIS as making new threats against America, he said that the bureau was actually more focused on “homegrown” terrorists — Americans — as the primary current threat. “Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” he said at West Point.

Soon after the Gaza war began, Wray appeared before the House Committee on Homeland Security and said that homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs, posed the single greatest immediate foreign terrorist threat to the United States.  

According to the FBI, while inspired by the actions of foreign terrorist groups, HVEs are lone actors or members of small cells disconnected from material support of the established extremist groups they draw inspiration from. Though Wray isn’t willing to discount the likelihood of a 9/11 magnitude attack — in fact, at West Point he cites the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as the equivalent of an attack on the United States that would have killed nearly 40,000 people in the single day — he says small-scale and “lone wolf” attacks are more likely. “Over the past five months, our Counterterrorism Division agents have been urgently running down thousands of reported threats stemming from the [Israel-Hamas] conflict,” Wray said on March 4.

“The FBI assesses HVEs as the greatest, most immediate international terrorism threat to the homeland,” Wray said in his November testimony to Congress, adding that “HVEs are people located and radicalized to violence primarily in the United States, who are not receiving individualized direction from [foreign terrorist organizations] but are inspired by FTOs, including the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (“ISIS”) and al-Qa’ida and their affiliates, to commit violence.” 

Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for North America, echoed Wray’s concern in his testimony this month before Congress. “The likelihood of a significant terrorist attack in the homeland has almost certainly increased since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Multiple terrorist groups — including ISIS and al-Qa’ida — have leveraged the crisis to generate propaganda designed to inspire followers to conduct attacks, including in North America. The increasingly diffuse nature of the transnational terrorist threat challenges our law enforcement partners’ ability to detect and disrupt attack plotting against the homeland and leaves us vulnerable to surprise.” Guillot’s counterpart in U.S. Southern Command, responsible for the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, Gen. Laura Richardson, did not raise the domestic terror threat during her congressional testimony. 

Though the FBI is focused on homegrown threats, Wray does say that after months of chasing down an influx in leads, his counterterrorism division has started “to see those numbers level off,” adding that “we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.”

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence and the highest-ranking U.S. intelligence official, agreed with Wray’s view, testifying this week, “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world.” 

“While it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” she warned, setting the stage for a renewed priority of Middle East terrorism at the very time when much of the intelligence apparatus had shifted to a different type of domestic terrorist threat after January 6. In the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment, praise for the October 7 attack by the Nordic Resistance Movement, a European neo-Nazi group, was cited as evidence of the spread of extremist ideology. No direct neo-Nazi plots, however, were identified. 

The Intercept also recently wrote of the homeland security agencies’ expanded interest in domestic extremism, specifically targeting anarchists and leftists in the wake of Aaron Bushnell’s death.

Among the foreign threats raised during his West Point address, Wray mentioned Hezbollah support and praise for Hamas posing “a constant threat to U.S. interests in the region,” Al Qaeda issuing its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or Yemen, calling on jihadists to attack Americans “and Jewish people,” and ISIS urging its followers to target Jewish communities in both Europe and the United States. 

To embellish the domestic threat picture, earlier this week, Wray said that immigrant crossings at America’s southern border were extremely concerning, with foreign terrorist organizations infiltrating into the country through drug smuggling networks. “There is a particular network that has — some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have — ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about, and we’ve been spending enormous amounts of effort with our partners investigating,” he said.

Picking up where Wray left off, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News this week that illegal immigration was one of the greatest catalysts for America’s imperilment. “The terror threat to this country is enormous.” Cruz said. “It is greater than it’s ever been at any time since September 11th.”

Other members of Congress have similarly seized on Wray’s warnings about the Hamas threat to push for their own policy objectives. As Wired reported this week, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, met with lawmakers in December in an attempt to dissuade them from initiating reforms that could cripple the FISA 702 authority, a law enshrining the intelligence community’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance. 

According to the report, Turner “presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms may prove detrimental to national security.”

In the past three months, the only Hamas-connected prosecution carried out by the Department of Justice appears to be the arrest of Karrem Nasr, a U.S. citizen who allegedly traveled from Egypt to Kenya in an effort to wage jihad with the Somalia-related terrorist group al-Shabab. “Karrem Nasr, motivated by the heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, devoted himself to waging violent jihad against America and its allies,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a press release, saying that they had been able to disrupt his plot.

The post FBI Warns Gaza War Will Stoke Domestic Radicalization “For Years to Come” appeared first on The Intercept.

As the immigration crisis continues and the Biden administration pursues a muscular enforcement strategy with an eye to public opinion and the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security prospers. One obscure $6 billion program has grown silently: a network of over 1,000 surveillance towers built along America’s land borders, a system that it describes as “a unified vision of unauthorized movement.”

A broad outline of the Biden administration’s plan to solve the immigration crisis in America was unveiled this week, including 5,800 new border and immigration security officers, a new $4.7 billion Southwest Border Contingency Fund, and more emergency authority for the president to shut down the border when needed. Moving forward on these programs will “save lives and bring order to the border,” President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address last week.

Homeland Security’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget request, released yesterday, includes $25.9 billion to “secure the border,” mostly through more government agents and more (and more capable) technology. Hidden in the fine print is the $6 billion tower surveillance program, one that has been in the works and growing since 2005 for years.

The system is called Integrated Surveillance Towers, and it is projected to reach “full operational capability” in 2034, a network of over 1,000 manned and unmanned towers covering the thousands of miles that make up America’s northern and southern borders. IST includes four ever-growing programs: Autonomous Surveillance Towers (AST); Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT); Remote Video Surveillance System Upgrade (RVSS-U); and the Northern Border RVSS (NB-RVSS). The deployment of various towers have been going on so long, some are already obsolete, according to the DHS 2025 budget request.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, IST detects and identifies “threats in near real time,” plugging up one gap that allows for “the exploitation of data collected by sensors, towers, drones, assets, agents, facilities, and other sources informing mission critical decisions in the field and at Headquarters.” Modern technology, including AI and “autonomous capabilities,” the Border Patrol says, is key to “keeping front-line personnel safer, more effective, and one step ahead” of border enemies.

Towers are currently being built and netted together by Elbit America (part of Israel’s Elbit Systems), Advanced Technology Systems Company, and General Dynamics. Defense Daily reported in September that DHS plans to acquire about 277 new IST towers and upgrade about 191 legacy surveillance towers in the latest set of contracts. A January press release from General Dynamics celebrates the distinction of being named one of the three recipients of a piece of a $1.8 billion indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract: “The Consolidated Tower & Surveillance Equipment (CTSE) system consists of all fixed and relocatable sensor towers, and communications and power equipment necessary for CBP [Customs and Border Protection] to perform surveillance along the southern and northern borders of the United States.” The company says it may take up to 14 years to complete.

The network of towers hosts various day and night capable cameras and radars, and can also be equipped with other sensors, including cellphone communications intercept devices, to paint a picture of hostile terrain below. The main focus of DHS today is to net all of the towers into “a single unified program” and integrate AI into the ability to detect movement and activity to create a “common operating picture.”

Though billions have been spent on the IST program, government auditors have consistently questioned whether it actually reduces unlawful border crossings. A General Accountability Office assessment from 2018 concluded that the DHS was “not yet positioned to fully quantify the impact these technologies have on its mission,” that is, whether the towers actually help to stem the flow. The GAO then recommended that DHS establish better metrics to “more fully assess … progress in implementing the Southwest Border Technology Plan and determine when mission benefits have been realized.”

A new GAO report issued last month updates progress on the IST program and says that finishing the network in Texas has been a problem. “According to the IST program manager,” the report reads, “… ease of access and willingness of property owners are key factors when considering sites for tower placement. The program manager stated that sites in the Laredo and Rio Grande Valley sectors … are still challenging because these areas need permissions from multiple landowners and road access may be an impediment.”

Though the vast majority of undocumented immigrants cross the southern border at just a handful of locations, homeland security equally seeks to cover the entire Canadian border with towers, according to DHS documents. And not only that: Homeland security is eyeing the California coast and the coastal Atlantic for future expansion, portending a ubiquitous nationwide system of ground surveillance.

ResearchAndMarkets.com’s November report on “Border Security Technologies”says that the market will exceed $70 billion globally in 2027, rising from $48 billion in 2022. “The adoption of AI-integrated surveillance towers will be critical to driving growth, with the total value of camera systems globally expected to reach $22.8 billion by 2027; up from $10.1 billion in 2022. Surveillance towers are capable of creating a virtual border, detecting, identifying, and tracking threats over great distances.”

“AI-integrated surveillance towers are at the centre of growing concern by campaign groups regarding their potential to analyse the behaviour of the general population, possibly infringing upon people’s human rights. These concerns may slow adoption unless addressed,” the report says.

The post U.S. Government Seeks “Unified Vision of Unauthorized Movement” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up its efforts to penetrate college campuses under the guise of fighting “foreign malign influence,” according to documents and memos obtained by The Intercept. The push comes at the same time that the DHS is quietly undertaking an effort to influence university curricula in an attempt to fight what it calls disinformation.

In December, the department’s Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council, or HSAPC, sent a report to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlining a plan to combat college campus unrest stemming from Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. DHS has used this advisory body — a sympathetic cohort of academics, consultants, and contractors — to gain support for homeland security objectives and recruit on college campuses.

In one of the recommendations offered in the December 11 report, the Council writes that DHS should “Instruct [its internal office for state and local law enforcement] to work externally with the [International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators] and [National Association of School Resource Officers] to ask Congress to address laws prohibiting DHS from providing certain resources, such as training and information, to private universities and schools. Current limitations serve as a barrier to yielding maximum optimum results.”

Legal scholars interviewed by The Intercept are uncertain what specific laws the advisory panel is referring to. The DHS maintains multiple outreach efforts and cooperation programs with public and private universities, particularly with regard to foreign students, and it shares information, even sensitive law enforcement information, with campus police forces. Cooperation with regard to speech and political leanings of students and faculty, nevertheless, is far murkier.

The DHS-funded HSAPC originated in 2012 to bring together higher education and K-12 administrators, local law enforcement officials, and private sector CEOs to open a dialogue between the new department and the American education system. The Council meets on a quarterly basis, with additional meetings scheduled at the discretion of the DHS secretary. The current chair is Elisa Beard, CEO of Teach for America. Other council members include Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District; Farnam Jahanian, president of Carnegie Mellon University; Michael H. Schill, president of Northwestern University; Suzanne Walsh, president of Bennett College; and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. 

In its December report, the Council recommends that DHS “Immediately address gaps and disconnects in information sharing and clarify DHS resources available to campuses, recognizing the volatile, escalating, and sometimes urgent campus conditions during this Middle East conflict.”

DHS’s focus on campus protests has President Joe Biden’s blessing, according to the White House. At the end of October, administration officials said they were taking action to combat antisemitism on college campuses, assigning dozens of “cybersecurity and protective security experts at DHS to engage with schools.” 

In response to the White House’s efforts, the Council recommended that Mayorkas “immediately designate an individual to serve as Campus Safety Coordinator and grant them sufficient authority to lead DHS efforts to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.” That appointment has not yet occurred.

The Council’s December report says that expansion of homeland security’s effort will “Build a trusting environment that encourages reporting of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents, threats, and violence.” Through a “partnership approach” promoting collaboration with “federal agencies, campus administrators, law enforcement, and Fusion Centers,” the Council says it hopes that DHS will “establish this culture in lockstep with school officials in communities.” While the Council’s report highlights the critical importance of protecting free speech on campus, it also notes that “Many community members do not understand that free speech comes with limitations, such as threats to physical safety, as well as time, place, and manner restrictions.”

The recent DHS push for greater impact on campuses wouldn’t be the first time the post-9/11 agency has taken action as a result of anti-war protests. In 2006, an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit revealed that DHS was monitoring anti-war student groups at multiple California college and feeding that information to the Department of Defense. According to documents the ACLU obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the intelligence collected on student groups was intended “to alert commanders and staff to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection issues.”

Mayorkas wrote on November 14 last year that a DHS academic partnership will develop solutions to thwart not only foreign government theft of national security funded and related research on college campuses but also to actively combat the introduction of “ideas and perspectives” by foreign governments that the government deems opposing U.S. interests. 

“Colleges and universities may also be seen as a forum to promote the malign actors’ ideologies or to suppress opposing worldviews,” Mayorkas said, adding that “DHS reporting has illuminated the evolving risk of foreign malign influence in higher education institutions.” He says that foreign governments and nonstate actors such as nongovernmental organizations are engaged in “funding research and academic programs, both overt and undisclosed, that promote their own favorable views or outcomes.”

The three tasks assigned by Mayorkas are:

• “Guidelines and best practices for higher education institutions to reduce the risk of and counter foreign malign influence.”
• “Consideration of a public-private partnership to enhance collaboration and information sharing on foreign malign influence.”
• “An assessment of how the U.S. Government can enhance its internal operations and posture to effectively coordinate and address foreign malign influence-related national security risks posed to higher education institutions.”

The threat left unspoken in Mayorkas’s memo echoes one spoken out loud by then Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft in the months after 9/11, when the first traces of the government’s desire to forge a once unimaginable expansion into public life in America rose to the surface. 

“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” Ashcroft told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to … enemies and pause to … friends.”

The post DHS Using Hamas to Expand Its Reach on College Campuses appeared first on The Intercept.

Now that the party nominees for president have all but been decided, America’s entire election infrastructure is under assault, from foreign governments, hackers, and extremists. Or at least that’s the frenzied message being conveyed from on high these days. Russian warning lights are flashing. Think tanks are working overtime to grind out panicked reports about cybersecurity and disinformation. Fearmongering proliferates on both sides of the political aisle. 

But it is the federal government that is most active in this effort, and in its zeal to “protect” the elections, Washington is building a narrative that achieves exactly what it blames foreign adversaries for. By arguing that the elections can and will be manipulated, federal agencies are delegitimizing the highly effective and secure electoral system, and affirming the view of too many Americans that the vote can’t be trusted.

Polling shows that conservative voters continue to be distrustful of America’s electoral system. The opinion of the electorate at large is murkier to assess, but some Democrats have also waded into the election denialism.

Last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that election interference is a major priority in the coming months. As evidence of the Bureau’s work on the issue, Wray cited an FBI investigation into two Iranian hackers who had used voter rolls to disseminate misinformation about illegal ballots being cast overseas. 

In his testimony, Wray conflates the threat posed by cyber attacks with targeted disinformation campaigns. There is abundant evidence that foreign governments like Russia engaged in efforts to influence the 2016 and 2020 elections. But there are no examples of successful cyber attacks on the election system itself.

More recently, the FBI, Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security reported in late December that despite incessant hand-wringing over election security, foreign adversaries had no impact on the 2022 midterm elections. This week, they reported that there were no credible threats against Super Tuesday’s primary election. 

“While the government detected some foreign government-affiliated and criminal cyber activity targeting election infrastructure, including activity by suspected People’s Republic of China cyber actors and activity claimed by pro-Russian hacktivists, there is no evidence that this activity prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes or to transmit election results in a timely manner; altered any technical aspect of the voting process; or otherwise compromised the integrity of voter registration information or any ballots cast during the 2022 federal elections,” the report states. 

“Additional identified activity involved Russian, Iranian, and Chinese government-affiliated cyber actors scanning and, in some instances, accessing political campaign infrastructure, that is, information and communications technology and systems used by, on behalf of, or closely associated with a political organization, campaign, or candidate. However, there is no evidence that any information obtained through such activity was used in any foreign influence operation or was otherwise deployed, modified, or destroyed.”

None of these conclusions have deterred the now vibrant election protection apparatus of the federal government from accelerating their work. After the 2016 Democratic National Committee cyber attack, the Department of Homeland Security took much of the lead, designating election systems as critical infrastructure and pushing cyber security. DHS not only gained greater power over the U.S. voting system, but it also stoked fears that the decentralized and highly eclectic state and voting system was weak. 

Earlier this month, former DHS intelligence chief John Cohen told ABC News that America is “heading into a highly dangerous, perfect storm” as the 2024 election approaches. Former DHS assistant secretary Elizabeth Neumann added that “there are barrages of threats coming from multiple vectors – and multiple components of election infrastructure. It’s not just the voting machine.” 

According to a DHS bulletin obtained by ABC, Homeland Security today is sounding the alarm regarding foreign influence operations, which they say are “designed to undermine” the democratic “processes and institutions, steer policy, sway public opinion or sow division.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, housed within DHS, is also distributing information to voters in an effort to combat what it labels as “disinformation,” which it claims is an unprecedented threat to democracy. Earlier this month, CISA announced the creation of a new election interference program: #Protect2024, suggesting it is the duty of American civilians to fight a domestic war for election security. 

In addition to dozens of materials warning of potential threats and urging state and local teams to practice “emergency response plans,” CISA has also extended its offer to conduct physical and cyber security assessments, alluding to the notion that elections cannot be safe without the federal government’s helping hand. An FBI report detailing federal agency responsibilities for election security further describes CISA’s role as providing “election infrastructure partners with no cost physical security assessments to identify vulnerabilities and provide recommended mitigation measures.”

Outside the FBI and the DHS, the director of national intelligence is also overseeing a governmentwide push to raise the specter of foreign election interference. In a Q&A with DNI’s Election Threats Executive Shelby Pierson — a position created in 2019 — the top elections intelligence chief outlined her desire to see the federal government further penetrate into local election infrastructure. 

“We are focused on how the IC” — intelligence community — “can best support the FBI and DHS. … I want to see us evolve and continue to cultivate this whole-of-government approach to securing our elections and encourage our mission partners to reach beyond their limits and look beyond 2020,” Pierson said in the interview soon after being appointed, adding an allusion to the intelligence community’s efforts to police social media. “Through our FBI and DHS partners, the IC shares appropriate intelligence to state and local election officials, and private sector partners to include social and digital media platforms.”

Pierson was later criticized for repeating her own disinformation before Congress in a classified briefing. Contrary to Pierson’s testimony that Russia was working to tilt the 2020 election for Donald Trump, multiple national security officials contradicted this statement, clarifying that there was no intelligence to that effect, and offering solely that Russia was intending to sow discord in America. 

The federal government seems intent on conveying the message that the electoral system is vulnerable, despite the fact that the highly distributed state and local electoral system — protected in part by its decentralization and diversity — inherently makes it resilient and overall invulnerable. Michael Cornfield, an associate professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management told CBC: “The chances that the actual ballot tabulation could be hacked are next to nothing. … It’s almost impossible.”

Because the federal government knows this, it has shifted its emphasis to a far more ambiguous and unprovable threat, that “foreign malign influence” is the problem. That Russia or China are trying to influence American public opinion isn’t new and shouldn’t ring alarms. Martin Libicki, a cyber warfare expert at the Rand Corporation, points out that all countries regularly attempt to influence foreign elections, highlighting Barack Obama’s visit to the U.K. to advocate against the Brexit referendum. 

The federal government’s argument is that Russia and China (and even Iran) — through “malign influence” — are clandestinely seeking to undermine American’s faith in elections and even damage American democracy. Acceptance of this proposition, and the belief that “they” are succeeding, is central to the federal government’s larger effort to combat disinformation, which plays out in new efforts to police social media and even regulate free speech. For local election officials, the only solution on tap from Washington is offering to supply secret “intelligence.”

To deal with protecting the vote itself against interference or manipulation, the federal government has been offering cybersecurity “hygiene” audits of state and local systems, while employing the National Security Agency and the military’s Cyber Command to thwart any incoming electronic attacks. While “election security” makes sense on the surface, the overall effect, particularly as the bureaucrats push greater centralization and standardized machines and procedures, is that it might actually increase the vulnerability of a system that is already secure because of its very decentralization and variety.

None of this directly addresses “malign influence” or the vitality of American democracy, neither of which are solvable by government efforts to restrict information. And by increasingly doling out security clearances to state and local officials so that they can get “intelligence” on foreign influence efforts, the federal government enlists election officials into a bifurcated public and secret world, one that undermines transparency and consequently lessens public confidence.

The post How Homeland Security Is Undermining Faith in U.S. Elections appeared first on The Intercept.

In the hourlong meeting at CNN’s London Bureau on February 13, staffers took turns questioning a panel of executives about CNN’s protocols for covering the war in Gaza and what they describe as a hostile climate for Arab reporters. Several junior and senior CNN employees described feeling devalued, embarrassed, and disgraced by CNN’s war coverage.

The panelists — CNN Worldwide CEO and CNN Editor-in-Chief Mark Thompson, CNN U.S. Executive Editor Virginia Moseley, and CNN International General Manager Mike McCarthy — responded with broad assurances that the employees’ concerns were being heard, while also defending CNN’s work and pointing to the persistent obstacle of gaining access inside the Gaza Strip.

One issue that came up repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau. As The Intercept reported in January, the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.

“You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” said Amanpour, who was identified in the recording when an executive called her name. “So you’ve heard it, and I hear what your response is and I hope it does go a long way.”

CNN spokesperson Jonathan Hawkins declined to comment on the meeting and pointed The Intercept to the network’s previous statement about SecondEyes, which described it as a process to bring “more expert eyes” to coverage around the clock. “I would add to this that the staff members on this group include Arab staff based outside Israel, and have done since the group was established,” Hawkins said. 

Amanpour did not respond to a request for comment.

Like other mainstream news organizations, CNN has faced a flood of internal and external criticism of its coverage of Israel and Gaza since October 7, accused of minimizing Palestinian suffering and uncritically amplifying Israeli narratives. Just this week, CNN described an Israeli massacre of more than 100 starving people who were gathered to get food as a “chaotic incident.” Earlier this month, The Guardian published an extensive story sourced to multiple CNN staffers who described the network’s Gaza coverage as “journalistic malpractice.”

During the February meeting, a half-dozen staffers spoke candidly about concerns with CNN’s war coverage. They said the coverage has weakened the network’s standing in the region and has led Arab staffers, some of whom entered lethal situations to cover the war, feeling as though their lives are expendable.

“I was in southern Lebanon during October and November,” one journalist said. “And it was more distressing for me to turn on CNN, than the bombs falling nearby.”

The meeting began as an effort for leadership to discuss editorial priorities. Thompson, in his opening remarks, spoke at length about his vision for evenhanded journalism and reiterated his personal openness to critical exchange and inquiry. “There’s something about the essence of CNN — its brand, what it stands for — which to me is great breaking news, with, right in the middle of the frame, a human being, someone you trust and whose background you know, acting as your guide to what’s happening,” he said.

As soon as the C-suite opened the discussion up to staff questions, the interrogation began.

“My question is about our Gaza coverage,” said the journalist who worked from Lebanon in the fall. “I think it’s no secret that there is a lot of discontent about how the newsgathering process — and how it played out.”

Instead of finding solace in CNN’s coverage of the war, the staffer continued, “I find that my colleagues, my family, are platforming people over and over again, that are either calling for my death, or using very dehumanizing language against me … and people that look like me. And obviously, this has a huge impact in our credibility in the region.”

The journalist posed a question to the executives: “I want to ask as well, what have you done, and what are you doing to address the hate speech that fills our air and informed our coverage, especially in the first few months of the war?”

Thompson responded that he’s generally satisfied with how the network has covered Israel’s war on Gaza, while conceding that “it is impossible to do this kind of story where there are people with incredibly strong opinions on both sides,” without “sometimes making mistakes.” He added that CNN has gotten better at admitting mistakes and trying to correct them and suggested, in response to the staffer’s concerns over dehumanization, that holes in coverage are a consequence of limited access to Gaza.

“I think the fact that it’s been very difficult for us until relatively recently, and even today, to get fully on the ground inside Gaza, has made it hard for us to deliver the kind of individualized personal stories of what it’s been like for the people of Gaza, in the way it has been more possible for us with the story of the families of those murdered and kidnapped by Hamas in the original Hamas attack on Israel,” said Thompson, who answered most of the questions.

If the network had the same access to Gaza as it does to the families of Israeli hostages, he continued, “I believe we would have done the same,” citing a story the network ran about one of its own producers caught in Gaza. “I think that we have for the most part tried very hard to capture the … our job is not to be moral arbiters, it is to report what’s happening.”

Another newsroom staffer chimed in to object to the network’s uncritical coverage of statements by Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “I think a lot of us felt very strongly about the fact that there were very senior anchors not challenging people like, comments like, the defense minister using what is considered under international law, genocidal language, ‘human animals,’ all of those things that made up the first seven pages of the South African legal case at the ICJ,” referring to the International Court of Justice.

The employee then turned to SecondEyes: “If we want a culture that truly values diversity, we need to be really honest about, nobody gets it right. But we did not have our key Jerusalem producers on that Jerusalem SecondEyes — we didn’t have an Arab on it for some time.”

The staffer went on to say that Muslim or Arab journalists at CNN were made to feel that they must denounce Hamas to clear their names and be taken seriously as journalists. “I’ve heard this, where a number of younger colleagues now feel that they didn’t want to put their hands up to speak up even in the kind of the local Bureau meeting,” the staffer said. “People were taking their names off bylines.”

Thompson interjected, saying that people seemed to be speaking up now and that he welcomes editorial discussions.

Another staffer disputed that characterization and noted that Arab and Muslim journalists walk a difficult line between feeling proud of working for CNN while facing pressure from their families and communities over working for a network with a pronounced pro-Israel bias. 

“I think it’s very important for you to know that the degree of racism that those of us of Arab and Muslim descent face inside Israel, covering Israel, was disproportionate — the targeting of us by pro Israeli organizations, and what we had to hear,” another staffer added.

Amanpour chimed in toward the end of the meeting. She praised the reports of Clarissa Ward, Nada Bashir, and Jomana Karadsheh and suggested that CNN should have more experts like them on the ground and in the field, especially at the start of a conflict.

“Bottom line, we do actually have to send experts to these unbelievably difficult, contentious, you know, game-changing stories,” said Amanpour, a veteran war reporter. “It isn’t a place, with due respect, to send people who we want to promote or whatever, or teach. Maybe in the second wave, maybe in the third wave — but in the first wave, it has to be the people who know, through experience, what they’re seeing, and how to speak truth to power on all sides. And how to recognize the difference between political or whatever or terrorist attack, and the humanity, and to be able to put all of that into reporting.”

“For me, video is not a talking head on a balcony in a capital,” Amanpour said. “It just isn’t. To me, video is reportage.”

The post In Internal Meeting, Christiane Amanpour Confronts CNN Brass About “Double Standards” on Israel Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.

The Times report was initially heralded in an email sent to the newsroom, conveying praise from Executive Editor Joe Kahn, who described the story as an example of the best kind of enterprise reporting the paper is capable of. 

In the past couple of weeks, as the year drew to a close and many of us were on holiday, we published several signature pieces of enterprise on the Israel-Hamas war from different teams in the newsroom. Joe spotlighted some of them: 

…

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella spent several weeks and conducted 150 interviews to report on how Hamas weaponized sexual violence during the October 7th attack. The topic is a highly politicized issue and a delicate one to report, and Joe noted how the team, including photographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv, did it in a sensitive and detailed way.

But that message came roughly at the same time as another staff missive urging Times employees not to criticize each other on the company’s internal Slack. Many reporters and editors understood that directive to be a reference to an intense internal debate unfolding over the story — a rolling fight that is revived on a near-daily basis over the tenor of Times coverage of the war in Gaza. (A Times spokesperson, Charlie Stadtlander, said those assumptions were inaccurate, and that the email was “a release of a company-wide policy, the deliberate and measured development of which began in the beginning of 2023.”)

As criticism of Gettleman’s story grew both internally and externally, producers at “The Daily” shelved the original script and paused the episode, according to newsroom sources familiar with the process. A new script was drafted, one that offered major caveats, allowed for uncertainty, and asked open-ended questions that were absent from the original article, which presented its findings as definitive evidence of the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. 

That new draft remains the subject of significant controversy and has yet to be aired on the flagship podcast. The producers and the paper of record find themselves in a jam: run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report. Meanwhile, sources at the Times say Gettleman has been assigned a follow-up to gather evidence supporting his original reporting. (On January 29, he and his co-reporters published a follow-up story addressing questions raised “on social media by critics” about Times sourcing on claims of sexual violence.)

Internal critics worry that the article is another “Caliphate”-level journalistic debacle. “There seems to be no self-awareness at the top,” said one frustrated Times editorial staffer. “The story deserved more fact-checking and much more reporting. All basic standards applied to countless other stories.”

The critics have highlighted major discrepancies in the accounts presented in the Times, subsequent public comments from the family of a major subject of the article denouncing it, and comments from a key witness seeming to contradict a claim attributed to him in the article.

Stadtlander said the paper doesn’t comment on ongoing reporting and, that no piece of its journalism is final until it’s been published: 

As a general matter of policy, we do not comment on the specifics of what may or may not publish in The New York Times or our audio programs. Just like our print report, The Times’s audio editorial process is a result of independent consideration of newsworthy topics, and not in response to any criticisms. The Daily’s production team is constantly looking at the scope of The Times’s news report, with many efforts in various stages of development at any given time. There is only one “version” of any piece of audio journalism: the one that publishes.

The dissent within the Times comes as the paper is also facing serious external scrutiny for its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Since October 7, the New York Times has shown deference to Israel Defense Forces sources while diminishing the scale of death and destruction in Palestine. An Intercept analysis found that in the first six weeks of the war, the New York Times, alongside other major publications, consistently delegitimized Palestinian deaths and cultivated “a gross imbalance” in coverage to pro-Israeli sources and voices. The paper’s coverage of South Africa’s charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice played down severity of the case at the outset and downplayed Israel’s defeat on Friday. Just last week, the Times ran a headline touting the “Decline in Deaths in Gaza,” even as Israel continues to kill Palestinians in shocking numbers on a daily basis. 

“Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, The Times’s journalists have reported with sensitivity, independence and unflinching detail on destructive events that have generated strong reactions, including the piece of journalism from Dec. 28 about allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas,” the Times spokesperson wrote. “We continue to report on this matter as part of our broader coverage of the conflict, capturing both the global implications and deeply personal stories of those affected by the ongoing fighting.”

New York Times leadership has long taken a reflexively pro-Israel stance, and it is no surprise that the paper’s coverage has not been swayed by the criticism. Yet it’s done more than double down on its existing reporting: The Times has also succumbed to pressure campaigns by a pro-Israel media watchdog to change or soften its coverage of Israel.

Pressure From CAMERA

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, was founded in 1982 in response to what it claims was anti-Israel bias in the Washington Post’s reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Since its inception, CAMERA has successfully lobbied for hundreds of corrections in major media outlets, seeking to streamline a pro-Israel line in news reports and editorials. It has smeared journalists whose work it disagrees with and launched boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding with enough deference to its requests. 

In the past few months, the group has forced at least two changes in the New York Times, which sometimes responds to CAMERA with quiet edits and sometimes with formal corrections. The Times removed the use of the term “occupation” from a description of Israeli military forces and made a correction to language describing Palestinian deaths in Gaza. 

Emblematic of CAMERA’s influence at the Times is the fact that Kahn’s father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of CAMERA’s board — though before Kahn rose to prominence at the paper. By the time Leo Kahn joined the group as a board member in 1990, it was already famous for its aggressive pursuit of corrections and wording changes in the media to reflect a more pro-Israel stance. And, according to the Times’s profile of Kahn when he was elevated to his current post in 2022, he and his father often “dissected newspaper coverage” together. 

CAMERA, which boasts more than 65,000 members, campaigns against coverage in a wide variety of U.S. news outlets, but it has been particularly aggressive in its targeting of the paper of record. For over a decade, CAMERA has paid for billboards across the street from the Times headquarters criticizing the paper for its allegedly biased coverage. At times, it has even used its billboards to equate the paper of record with Hamas. All that pressure has had an impact. Dating back to 2000, CAMERA’s website records dozens of successful corrections issued by Times editors after concerted harassment campaigns. 

Kahn began his career at the Times in 1998 after making a name for himself as a China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He reported on Wall Street for the Times before returning to China, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on China’s legal system. In 2008, Kahn returned stateside to work for the Times as a foreign editor, quickly rising to oversee the entire foreign desk by 2011, where he managed all aspects of foreign reporting, including the Middle East. In 2016, he was promoted to managing editor before finally ascending to the newspaper’s top role in 2022.

Leo Kahn studied journalism at Columbia University before building his fortune as a business owner. He was a co-founder of Staples and multiple New England grocery chains, in addition to a brief stint as a co-owner of SuperOffice, a major office supplies retailer in Israel. As late as 2008, the year Joe Kahn was promoted to editor on the foreign desk, Leo Kahn was listed on CAMERA’s board of directors.

Stadtlander, the New York Times spokesperson, denied that CAMERA gets special treatment. “The Times handles all requests for correction from outside sources through discussion among our Standards team and the relevant editors familiar with the reporting in question. Feedback from any group, including CAMERA, is not treated any differently nor would it warrant any unique involvement from masthead editors,” he wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Joe Kahn has worked at The Times for more than 25 years, during which time he had — and still has — no relationship whatsoever with CAMERA. His father’s role on their board ended before Joe held any editing role at The Times.”

The Times’s record of acquiescing to CAMERA’s relentless requests, however, is striking in contrast to its historic resistance to correcting its stories. 

“It has always been extremely difficult to get corrections placed in the Times, and it’s even harder since they got rid of their public editor, which was a way of taking complaints to a person whose job it was to respond,” Jim Naureckas, senior editor at the media oversight organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told The Intercept. “You didn’t need to have a friend inside because you had a person whose job it was to take your complaint. With that position gone, it’s much more of a black box. It’s hard to get a hearing for your complaint. You can send an email, but it’s often like dropping a stone down a well. You might hear a splash, or you might not.”

CAMERA did not respond to a request for comment. 

While there is no evidence that Kahn himself has changed the paper’s overall handling of requests from CAMERA, between 2011 and 2016, when Kahn oversaw the foreign desk, CAMERA successfully initiated more than a dozen corrections on issues ranging from Israeli settlements to the blockade of Gaza. And in 2012, he quickly made a minor, but telling, correction at the group’s request, according to CAMERA’s website.

In March 2012, the New York Times published an article interrogating the way the Arab Spring uprisings had undermined support and attention to the plight of Palestinians. The piece drew CAMERA’s attention because it included a photograph depicting Israel Defense Forces soldiers firing on Palestinians, and the photo caption did not specify that they were using rubber bullets. While rubber bullets are less deadly than live ammunition, they can result in serious injury and even death.

According to CAMERA’s account, they quickly notified Kahn, then an international desk editor, who “agreed the caption needed correcting.” The Times soon issued a correction: “A picture caption on Thursday with an article about the increasing marginalization being felt by Palestinians in the West Bank referred incompletely to the action of the Israeli soldiers shown. While the soldiers, whose activity was not recounted in the article, were indeed firing rifles at stone throwers in the West Bank town of Al Ram last month, the rifles contained rubber bullets.”

A Softer Tone

Long before the Hamas attack on October 7, critics have voiced concerns over the New York Times’s approach to covering Israel, as well as family connections between New York Times employees and the Israel Defense Forces. Over the past 20 years, the children of three Times reporters enlisted in the IDF while the parents covered issues related to the Israel–Palestine conflict. In addition, Times Israel reporter Isabel Kershner was scrutinized for citing work from an Israeli security think tank where her husband worked, without disclosing the connection. 

CAMERA’s criticism, meanwhile, comes from the perspective that the Times is not sufficiently deferential to Israel. Taken together, many of the changes the Times has made following lobbying by CAMERA do not fundamentally alter the premise of the reporting. With some exceptions, they instead alter the tone and tenor of the reports, steering coverage toward CAMERA’s preferred perspective. 

Over the past few years, the Times made a CAMERA-inspired change to an article describing Jesus as living in Palestine, a change to an article that failed to describe the Western Wall as the holiest site in Judaism, and a correction for conflating property seizure with violence. 

CAMERA scored an editor’s note for an article on Gaza’s ailing fishing industry in 2022 that omitted certain statistics about the annual catch of Gaza fishermen operating under Israel’s yearslong blockade. 

The group secured one of its most substantial changes in 2021, when Kahn was serving as managing editor. In response to a demand by CAMERA, the Times appended a lengthy explanatory editor’s note to the top of an article, a type of alteration that almost always has to pass through a member of the masthead leadership.

The article in question was a profile of the celebrated Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer. According to CAMERA, the piece, written by correspondent Patrick Kingsley, described Alareer in too positive a light. The Times was quick to agree, appending a 267-word note that described comments that Alareer had made about Israeli poetry in 2019, when he took a tone much more critical of Israeli literature than he had in Kingsley’s presence. The note concluded:

In light of this additional information, editors have concluded that the article did not accurately reflect Mr. Alareer’s views on Israeli poetry or how he teaches it. Had The Times done more extensive reporting on Mr. Alareer, the article would have presented a more complete picture.

Almost exactly two years later, Alareer was killed in what the human rights group Euro-Med Monitor deemed a targeted strike by the Israeli Defense Forces. He had received direct threats by phone before his apartment was bombed. Pinned to his Twitter profile was a post with his now-famous poem: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”

Update: January 30, 2024
This article was updated to note that on January 29, the New York Times published a follow-up story about claims of sexual violence by Hamas.

The post New York Times Puts “Daily” Episode on Ice Amid Internal Firestorm Over Hamas Sexual Violence Article appeared first on The Intercept.

Like all foreign news organizations operating in Israel, CNN’s Jerusalem bureau is subject to the rules of the Israel Defense Forces’s censor, which dictates subjects that are off-limits for news organizations to cover, and censors articles it deems unfit or unsafe to print. As The Intercept reported last month, the military censor recently restricted eight subjects, including security cabinet meetings, information about hostages, and reporting on weapons captured by fighters in Gaza. In order to obtain a press pass in Israel, foreign reporters must sign a document agreeing to abide by the dictates of the censor.

CNN’s practice of routing coverage through the Jerusalem bureau does not mean that the military censor directly reviews every story. Still, the policy stands in contrast to other major news outlets, which in the past have run sensitive stories through desks outside of Israel to avoid the pressure of the censor. On top of the official and unspoken rules for reporting from Israel, CNN recently issued directives to its staff on specific language to use and avoid when reporting on violence in the Gaza Strip. The network also hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter at the onset of the war. 

“The policy of running stories about Israel or the Palestinians past the Jerusalem bureau has been in place for years,” a CNN spokesperson told The Intercept in an email. “It is simply down to the fact that there are many unique and complex local nuances that warrant extra scrutiny to make sure our reporting is as precise and accurate as possible.”

The spokesperson added that the protocol “​​has no impact on our (minimal) interactions with the Israeli Military Censor — and we do not share copy with them (or any government body) in advance. We will seek comment from Israeli and other relevant officials before publishing stories, but this is just good journalistic practice.”

One member of CNN’s staff who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal said that the internal review policy has had a demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war. “Every single Israel-Palestine-related line for reporting must seek approval from the [Jerusalem] bureau — or, when the bureau is not staffed, from a select few handpicked by the bureau and senior management — from which lines are most often edited with a very specific nuance” that favors Israeli narratives.

A shaky arrangement has long existed between the IDF censor and the domestic and foreign press, forcing journalists to frequently self-censor their reporting for fear of running afoul of prohibited subjects, losing their press credentials, and potentially being forced to offer public apology. CNN, like other American broadcasters, has repeatedly agreed to submit footage recorded in Gaza to the military censor prior to airing it in exchange for limited access to the strip, drawing criticism from those who say the censor is providing a filtered view of events unfolding on the ground. 

“When you have a protocol that routes all stories through one checkpoint, you’re interested in control, and the question is who is controlling the story?” Jim Naureckas, editor of the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, told The Intercept. 

CNN’s team in Jerusalem are the “people closest to the Israeli government,” Naureckas added. “In a situation where a government has been credibly accused of singling out journalists for violent attacks in order to suppress information, to give that government a heightened role in deciding what is news and what isn’t news is really disturbing.”

While CNN has used its standing to obtain raw footage of human suffering inside Gaza, it has also pushed out near-daily updates delivered directly from the IDF to its American and international viewers and embedded reporters alongside Israel soldiers fighting in the war.

Early in the war, on October 26, CNN’s News Standards and Practices division sent an email to staff outlining how they should write about the war. 

“Hamas controls the government in Gaza and we should describe the Ministry of Health as ‘Hamas-controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict. If the underlying statistics have been derived from the ministry of Health in Gaza, we should note that fact and that this part of the Ministry is ‘Hamas-controlled’ even if the statistics are released by the West Bank part of the ministry or elsewhere.”

The email goes on to acknowledge CNN’s responsibility to cover the human cost of the war but couches that responsibility in the need to “cover the broader current geopolitical and historical context of the story” while continuing to “remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of Israeli civilians.”

The email further instructed reporters and editors to “make it clear to our audiences whether either or both sides have provided verifiable evidence to support their claims.”

In a separate directive dated November 2, Senior Director of News Standards and Practices David Lindsey cautioned reporters from relaying statements from Hamas. “As the Israel-Gaza war continues, Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda. Most of it has been said many times before and is not newsworthy. We should be careful not to give it a platform.” He added, though, that “if a senior Hamas official makes a claim or threat that is editorially relevant, such as changing their messaging or trying to rewrite events, we can use it if it’s accompanied by greater context.” 

The language of the directives mirror similar orders from CNN management at the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, when Chair Walter Isaacson ordered foreign correspondents at the network to play down civilian deaths and remind readers that the violence they were witnessing was a direct result of the attacks on September 11.

Also in October, CNN hired a former IDF soldier to contribute writing and reporting to CNN’s war coverage. Tamar Michaelis’s first byline appears on October 17, 10 days after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel. Since then, her name has appeared on dozens of stories citing the IDF spokesperson and relaying information about the IDF’s operations in the Gaza Strip. At least one story bearing only her byline is little more than a direct statement released from the IDF. 

According to her Facebook profile, Tamar Michaelis served in the IDF’s Spokesperson Unit, a division of the Israeli military charged with carrying out positive PR both domestically and abroad. (Last year, the Spokesperson Unit was forced to issue a public apology for conducting psychological operations, or “psyops,” against Israeli civilians.) Michaelis recently locked her profile, which does not indicate the dates of her service in the IDF, and she did not respond to a request for comment. 

“Tamar Michaelis worked with CNN on a freelance basis for a few months last year, and worked in the same way as any freelancer, within our normal guidelines,” the CNN spokesperson wrote. 

CNN’s Gaza war coverage, regardless of where it originates, has been subject to the news organization’s internal review process for reporting on Israel and Palestine. According to an email reviewed by The Intercept, CNN expanded its review team over the summer — as the highly controversial overhaul of Israel’s judicial system moved through Israel’s Parliament — to include a handful of editors outside of Israel, in an effort to streamline the process. 

In a July email to CNN staff, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Richard Greene wrote that the policy exists “because everything we write or broadcast about Israel or the Palestinians is scrutinized by partisans on all sides. The Jerusalem bureau aims to be a safety net so we don’t use imprecise language or words that may sound impartial but can have coded meanings here.” 

But because the protocol could slow down the publication process, Greene wrote, “we have created (wait for it…..)

The Jerusalem SecondEyes alias!”

The CNN spokesperson told The Intercept that Jerusalem SecondEyes “was created to make this process as swift as possible as well as bring more expert eyes to staff it across the day, particularly when Jerusalem is dark.” The spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether CNN has a similar review process in place for other coverage areas.

“Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility.”

The CNN staff member described how the policy works in practice. “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the person said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”

The post CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor appeared first on The Intercept.

The federal government’s domestic spying powers come from Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which was revamped after 9/11 to create mass data collection powers, has been routinely abused and manipulated, and is set to expire at the end of this year. While the bill’s sponsors — including House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Turner and ranking Democratic Rep. Jim Himes — have described the bill as a “reform,” it contains a provision that would widen the scope of companies required to surrender information to investigators without a warrant.

A number of hawks who held key intelligence posts in the Trump administration are gunning for its passage. The push comes as President Joe Biden continues to fall in the polls, while Trump renews his desire to wield totalitarian powers. “I want to be a dictator for one day,” he recently said. “You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

Civil rights experts warn that the sweeping powers of the Intelligence Committee’s bill would be a danger under any presidential administration, and a particular threat should Trump win the 2024 election. “Jim Himes appears to be desperately throwing a Patriot Act-like expansion of warrantless surveillance into the hands of Donald Trump,” Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, told The Intercept. “It’s beyond unacceptable and must be called out.” 

According to Wired, the Intelligence Committee bill is being quietly supported by the White House and senior intelligence community officials. 

The House Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, free from the influence wielded by spy agencies over the Intelligence Committee, has advanced a competing piece of legislation, which would defang the 702 authority by forcing government officials to obtain warrants prior to its use, in addition to a number of other reforms that would inhibit warrantless data collection. In Congress, the bill is supported by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus as well as the right-wing Freedom Caucus. It’s also backed by civil liberties advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

On Tuesday, the House is likely to vote on the Section 702 legislation through a process known as Queen of the Hill. The unusual parliamentary procedure would put the two competing bills up for a floor vote, with a simple winner-takes-all majority needed to secure passage. Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about his position on the dueling reauthorization efforts. 

Congress will also be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass bill that contains a provision extending the 702 authority in its current form until April. 

Section 702 allows the U.S. government to gather the communications of non-U.S. citizens abroad, but in practice, it allows the government to surveil Americans who are in touch with foreign nationals as well. The authority has been used to conduct thousands of “backdoor” searches on U.S. citizens, including elected officials and activists. The spying power grants the government the ability to force telecommunications providers to hand over information on its targets. The language in the Intelligence Committee bill would expand the definition of entities that must comply with requests under 702, making it such that almost any company or organization involved in communications would have to surrender information to investigators without a warrant.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has described it as a “Patriot Act 2.0.” Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center, said that the House Intelligence Committee’s bill would have devastating consequences for everyday Americans. “Hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other places that offer wifi to their customers could be forced to serve as surrogate spies. They could be required to configure their systems to ensure that they can provide the government access to entire streams of communications,” she tweeted. “Even a repair person who comes to fix the wifi in your home would meet the revised definition: that person is an ’employee’ of a ‘service provider’ who has ‘access’ to ‘equipment’ (your router) on which communications are transmitted.”

Turner, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, recently touted the backing of Trump allies who served in the CIA, Department of Justice, and other intelligence community posts. In a letter to the House speaker last week, Mike Pompeo, William Barr, John Ratcliffe, Robert O’Brien, and Devin Nunes nodded to the importance of reforming FISA, praising marginal changes like congressional oversight of the FISA court while dismissing the push for a warrant requirement.  

In addition to a warrant requirement, the Judiciary Committee bill, sponsored by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., addresses another method for warrantless data collection long practiced by the Department of Justice and intelligence community. It would close a loophole that allows the government to circumvent a ban on buying private data directly from companies and instead using third-party brokers to buy the same data from an indirect source. 

Biggs, a member of the Freedom Caucus, joined with Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and other lawmakers calling on Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers to support his bill. “The intelligence community is attacking our Fourth Amendment privacy rights. Rogue actors continue to abuse FISA Section 702 to improperly spy on American citizens, and it is far past time for the practice to come to an end. The Fourth Amendment guarantees Americans a reasonable expectation of privacy, and the government should never be given the opportunity to skirt the supreme Law of the Land,” Biggs wrote in a press release accompanying a letter to congressional leaders. 

Jayapal, for her part, said that the law should be overhauled to protect Americans’ constitutional rights and their sensitive data, “Section 702 reauthorization should be subject to strong scrutiny and debate and cannot be included in larger, must-pass legislation,” she wrote. “Congress must work to stop the government from warrantlessly spying on Americans.”

The post Trump Allies Are Giddy About House Intelligence Committee’s Surveillance Bill appeared first on The Intercept.

In a semiannual report to Congress, the watchdog found a breakdown in the process to provide care for sexual assault survivors, damaged artillery earmarked for Ukraine, and continued failures to monitor the Defense Department’s single most expensive program, the scandal-ridden F-35 fighter jet. Taken together, the inspector general’s findings paint a picture of a sprawling military-industrial complex that, while providing billions in aid to foreign militaries, has failed to solve long-standing issues that result in extreme levels of taxpayer waste. 

“While we constantly hear from DOD officials and politicians backed by major weapons manufacturers that an ever increasing military budget is essential for our national security, the inspector general’s office consistently demonstrates that this is not the case,” Erik Sperling, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Just Foreign Policy told The Intercept. “Whether failing to ensure adequate oversight on the weapons we have spent billions sending to Ukraine, or the failed fighter jets we finance and send to Israel, our increased defense spending comes at a tremendous and wasteful cost to the American taxpayer and to the innocent civilians on the receiving end of our weapons.”

In October, President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve $75 billion in combined security assistance for Israel and Ukraine. The request would add to the $44 billion in security assistance already pledged to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, and the tens of billions of dollars in security assistance delivered to Israel over the past five years. Over the summer, Israel finalized a deal to purchase 25 new F-35s, financed with $3 billion in defense aid from the United States. 

Just last month, the Department of Defense failed its sixth straight audit, underscoring the lack of oversight of the funds that Congress forks over to the armed forces every year. Among the rationales for its failure, the Pentagon unconvincingly offered that there is “progress sort of beneath the surface of a pass-fail,” and that “we keep getting better and better at it.” The Pentagon has also flubbed its oversight of the money it sends to U.S. allies; in June, the military found that an accounting error overstated the cost of Ukrainian defense aid by $6.2 billion.

In July, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to force the Department of Defense to clean up its act by proposing that any part of the agency that fails to complete a clean audit be forced to return 1 percent of its budget. 

“From buying $14,000 toilet seats to losing track of warehouses full of spare parts, the Department of Defense has been plagued by wasteful spending for decades,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote in a statement at the time. “Every dollar the Pentagon squanders is a dollar not used to support service members, bolster national security or strengthen military readiness.”

Under the Inspector General Act, agency oversight officials are required to send reports to Congress every year summarizing their activities and findings. The most recent Defense Department report covers the period from April through September and was published on November 30. It includes summaries of investigations, updates on compliance with oversight actions, and unresolved issues still plaguing the department. 

It contains over a dozen advisories and evaluations regarding programs supporting the war in Ukraine, many of which remain classified. 

Among those issues made public, the inspector general found that heavy artillery howitzer cannons and dozens of Hummers destined for Ukraine required significant repairs and had not been properly maintained. The report noted that the contractors paid by the government had failed to provide upkeep on critical military equipment that could have just as easily been used by the U.S. military. 

The inspector general also found that Pentagon officials did not always explain the payments they made when terminating contractors’ projects, potentially overpaying contractors to the tune of $22 million. 

Most egregiously, the Defense Department failed to report inventory for its $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program — an issue that dates back to the program’s launch in 2006. 

According to the report, “the DoD OIG has identified the F-35 JSF program as a material weakness impacting the DoD’s ability to achieve a clean audit opinion.” Despite its price tag, this weapons system often fails to function and was recently found to be less efficient than its predecessor for providing close air support in combat. 

Beyond financial breakdowns, the inspector general also reported that the Defense Department’s protocols for protecting its employees are not routinely followed. The Pentagon’s medical treatment facilities failed to consistently triage and record care administered to survivors of sexual assault, with the lack of documentation creating barriers for access to medical care after an assault. 

According to the report, holes in the Defense Department’s documentation process could lead to sexual assault victims not being prioritized for emergency care, receiving a forensic exam to document their assault, or being given access to a victim advocate. The finding comes after sexual assault reports have risen across multiple divisions of the military.

In the report’s introduction, Inspector General Robert Storch hinted at part of the problem of reining in the Department Defense: recalcitrance on the part of the officials being audited. 

“During this period, we encountered difficulties with timely responses from the DoD, specifically regarding provision of information and security reviews of our reports,” Storch wrote. By way of example, he added, “A Navy command initially refused to provide requested records to DoD OIG evaluators based on its misunderstanding of the DoD OIG’s jurisdiction and authority to have access to all information available to the DoD.”

The post As U.S.-Funded Wars Rage in Israel and Ukraine, Pentagon Watchdog Warns of Military Failures appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.

In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.

“A die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers has put out a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported in 1977, citing senior State Department officials. When reports of a possible hit on Kissinger first came out, it was believed to be the work of Palestinian militants, but senior officials told the paper that they were certain that the threat was emanating from the Likud party.

The Likud hard-liners who put up the money — described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc” — were reportedly upset at Kissinger’s diplomacy around the end of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. Kissinger had been instrumental in disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria that saw Israel withdrawing from territories it had conquered. On the Israeli side, Likud’s rival Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to agree to the compromises.

The 1973 war had also led to a damaging oil embargo by Arab states against the U.S., and Kissinger was said to be willing to cut any deal necessary to turn the spigot back on — which the 1974 disengagement deals accomplished.

Of the hit, the Daily News reported, “The motive was said to be revenge against Kissinger for allegedly selling out Israel during his Mideast shuttle diplomacy.”

The Likud strongly denied the allegation at the time, as did the State Department. (The reported plot to assassinate Kissinger is just one of several instances in which Israelis displayed intense hostility toward their strongest ally, including a 1967 attack on an American spy ship and an espionage operation in the 1980s.)

While Kissinger succeeded in his short-term goal of ending the oil embargo and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, his efforts at statesmanship intentionally obstructed efforts to find a long-term solution to the permanent occupation of Palestine.

As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote today, Kissinger went against Richard Nixon’s own directive to find a way for lasting peace when everything and anything was on the table. Kissinger believed that a constant state of conflict and instability granted America an upper hand in the Middle East. “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best,” Kissinger told his subordinates at the onset of the Yom Kippur War.

Despite his Jewish heritage, Kissinger showed little regard for the Israeli state or Jewish people beyond their utility to the American empire. Helping Soviet Jews escape to the United States to avoid the Russian crackdown was “not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1973, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Whatever animosity once existed between the Likud party and the former secretary of state was long past them. Today, the party is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first elected to the post in 1996. (That election was prompted by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who many believe was the last great hope for enduring peace in Israel.)

Netanyahu has taken a page out of the Kissinger playbook, using unending conflict to cling to power and inviting ever more extremist politicians into the Likud coalition. In September, just weeks before Israel launched its all-out war on Gaza, the pair had an affectionate meeting in New York.

Israel’s bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip in recent weeks rivals the concentrated bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia that Kissinger oversaw decades ago.

The post Members of Israel’s Ruling Likud Party Once Planned to Assassinate Henry Kissinger appeared first on The Intercept.

Sanders spoke to The Intercept minutes before a Senate Democratic caucus luncheon, where the question of placing conditions on $14 billion in aid to Israel is on the agenda. “Yes,” he replied gruffly when asked if there was a chance he would push for a floor vote. 

Sanders’s comment comes as the death toll in Gaza is around 15,000 — with some estimating it to have exceeded 20,000 — and amid a temporary pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Vermont senator has thus far refrained from calling for a permanent ceasefire, a key demand of activist groups that has broad support among the American public and has gained traction among members of Congress. He has instead only gone as far as calling for humanitarian pauses in fighting. 

The Department of Defense has already sent a variety of heavy weapons and ammunition to Israel to support its continuing war in Gaza, according to a leaked list obtained by Bloomberg. Congress is now seeking to approve another $14 billion, requested by President Joe Biden, to provide advanced weapons systems, support for artillery and ammunition production, and more projectiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has also called for restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel. 

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law,” Murphy said on Sunday. “I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws.”

One way the U.S. could place conditions on the aid is through what is known as the Leahy law, named after Sanders’s longtime colleague and former senator from Vermont Patrick Leahy. The Leahy law prohibits U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights violations. 

While the idea faces opposition within the Democratic caucus, and the U.S. has never before placed conditions on its billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Biden seems to be considering the proposition. He told reporters the day after Thanksgiving — at the start of the temporary truce — that conditioning aid is a “worthwhile thought,” adding that “I don’t think, if I started off with that, we’d [have] ever gotten to where we are today.”

When pressed on whether he might use his position on the Senate Budget Committee to push for reining in the Israeli military’s onslaught, Sanders said, “there are ways we can approach it and that is what we are exploring right now.” 

The post Bernie Sanders May Push Vote on Conditioning Aid to Israel in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Intercept.

The resurrection of the death penalty is a long-standing goal of Israel’s far-right politicians past and present, whose efforts intensified at the beginning of this year with the introduction of a bill that would mandate the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of terrorism in Israeli courts. 

The bill, which garnered preliminary approval from Netanyahu’s government, defines terrorism as “the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland,” suggesting it will be applied largely toward Palestinians committing terrorism against Israelis, and not the other way around. While existing law already sanctions state executions, the proposed legislation would make the death penalty mandatory in some cases, and it would also remove safeguards preventing executions being handed down by military tribunals that oversee the administration of laws in the occupied West Bank.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, right-wing Israeli politicians have trumpeted the bill as a means to execute the Palestinians detained for their role in the assault and to enshrine Israel’s right to execute people who carry out future attacks. At the same time, family members of the hostages taken from southern Israeli kibbutzim have condemned the move as political theater, intended solely to score political points while simultaneously enraging the Hamas militants who control the hostages’ fate. The debate over the bill came amid Israeli negotiations with Hamas over the release of captives in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians who are imprisoned in Israel; the two sides reached a deal, which includes a temporary ceasefire, on Wednesday.

“Now they will add more ways to kill Palestinians, once again, without real due process.”

Given the expansive definition of terrorism adopted by Israeli politicians and military commanders, the bill could have far-reaching consequences. Israel has wielded terrorism as justification for wide-ranging suppression campaigns, including the branding of some half-dozen Palestinian civil society organizations “terrorists” despite repeated failures to demonstrate any basis for their accusations. 

“This is another political escalation toward death, violence, and chaos by the far-right Israeli government,” Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at the human rights organization DAWN, told The Intercept. “They have sentenced thousands of Palestinians to death in Gaza with no due process by dropping bombs on their homes. They have killed hundreds in the West Bank with no due process by gunning them down in the streets. Now they will add more ways to kill Palestinians, once again, without real due process.” 

In March, the Knesset approved a preliminary version of the bill, which requires three more rounds of voting before it can pass into law. On Monday, the national security committee took up the bill for a hearing, and was met with furious opposition by families who claimed the bill would only endanger the lives of their family members held hostage by Hamas. During the hearing, screaming matches erupted between politicians and aggrieved families. 

Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was taken captive by Hamas, pleaded in the committee to halt the bill. “I asked you already last week and I begged you to stop. I begged you not to make any kind of hay out of us or our suffering,” Dickmann said, according to reporting in the Times of Israel. 

“Please do not have a hearing now on the gallows, please do not have a hearing now on the death penalty. Not when the lives of our loved ones are in the balance, not when the sword is on their necks. I am here in the name of Carmel and for her to remain alive. Please, choose life and ensure they come home alive and whole.” 

After the hearing, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right politician who leads the Jewish Power party, hugged Dickman in a photo-op intended to depict his support for the families. In response, Dickmann wrote online:

“I told you: Don’t hug me but you hugged [me] anyway. I told you: Don’t endanger our beloved ones but you endangered them anyway. All for a picture. Itamar Ben Gvir, you have no boundaries. Everyone sees that you’re making a circus out of the blood of our families. It’s not too late. Stop.”

Yarden Gonen, whose sister was being held in Gaza, told Knesset members that they were “playing along with [the] mind games” of Hamas,” The Guardian reported. “And in return we would get pictures of our loved ones murdered, ended, with the state of Israel and not them [Hamas] being blamed for it. … Don’t pursue this until after they are back here,” she said. “Don’t put my sister’s blood on your hands.”

The proposed legislation would remove an existing requirement that only a three-person panel composed of officials with the rank of lieutenant colonel can hand down a death sentence. Allowing more junior military personnel to hand down such sentences has the potential of putting the determination of who lives and who dies in the hands of more radicalized soldiers. Within the Israeli military, political radicalization tends to follow an inverse relationship with military rank — a dynamic not dissimilar to that of the U.S. military. 

The law would also take away the military chief of staff’s power to commute death sentences, which has occurred multiple times in Israel’s short history. The death sentence has long existed in Israeli law as a punishment for war crimes, but it has not been seen through to completion since 1962, with the execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Earlier this year, United Nations experts condemned the legislative push. Contrary to the justification provided by right-wing politicians claiming it will serve as a deterrent, the experts said, carrying out executions in the occupied territories will only fuel hostilities and detract from ongoing peace efforts. 

For years, right-wing politicians like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have made inflammatory comments about the death penalty, stoking the bloodlust driving their hyper radicalized base. In 2015, upon entering the Knesset, Smotrich — who now oversees parts of the vast Israeli security apparatus occupying the West Bank — told a news anchor that he was prepared to carry out state-sanctioned executions himself.

“I am willing to be the one who carries out that sentence. It will be difficult for me. It’s not easy. But if this is the right decision, if this is what’s right for the people of Israel and what’s right for the state of Israel, and it passes all the judicial proceedings, I am certainly prepared to be the one,” said Smotrich, amid an effort in the Knesset to pass an execution bill. “You’re ready to be the hangman?” the news anchor asked in disbelief. Smotrich replied, “I am prepared to be the one who carries out this suitable and just sentence.”

The post After Hamas Attack, Israeli Politicians Want to Empower Military Tribunals to Execute Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

In the background, Manchin has been propping up a new third-way organization. Along with his daughter Heather Bresch, he has been soliciting funds for a new nonprofit that, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, is being overseen by the senator’s longtime associates who became significant power players in West Virginia after receiving plum appointments during Manchin’s rise to the top of the state Democratic Party. 

Bresch, a former pharmaceutical executive, registered Americans Together in July as a 501(c)(4), a legal classification that means it is not required to publicly disclose its donors. While the senator’s daughter has said the organization will be set apart from Manchin’s political endeavors, few restrictions exist on how it can spend its money. Should Manchin run for president on the No Labels ticket, Americans Together could work to boost his candidacy or oppose other presidential campaigns through what’s known as an independent expenditure. But the nonprofit could also provide Manchin a financial cushion with few spending restrictions should he leave politics altogether.

Manchin and Bresch did not respond to requests for comment.

Craig Holman, a lobbying and ethics expert at Public Citizen, told The Intercept that dark-money nonprofits “are frequently and almost always set up by someone opening a presidential run intended to provide a means for unlimited contributions from external sources that are frequently used to indirectly benefit a presidential campaign.”

“By having a family member or former colleague set up 501(c)(4), that provides the kind of distance that makes it easy to avoid coordination restrictions,” Holman added, referring to federal election laws that prohibit campaigns from coordinating with nonprofits. “If a daughter or former staffer set it up, it is difficult to prove coordination. These dark-money groups can get away with a lot.”

An independent expenditure, however, is just one way the nonprofit could spend its money. 

“It can be used for lobbying expenditures, for instance,” Holman said. “So if Manchin ends up losing and becomes part of a lobbying firm, the funds can be used for the lobbying activities as long as he’s not a candidate. At no point does the fund have to be dissolved. He can hang on to it forever.”

Manchin and Bresch are seeking to raise $100 million for Americans Together “to change the national narrative and garner support for those willing to prioritize policy and country over party and politics,” according to a solicitation obtained by the Wall Street Journal in August. The nonprofit’s formation follows a record windfall from No Labels, which doubled its fundraising to over $20 million in 2022 and began increasing the six-figure salaries paid to its executives ahead of its planned 2024 presidential stunt.

Manchin’s name does not appear on Americans Together’s paperwork — and Bresch told the Wall Street Journal that the organization will be divorced from her father’s political prospects — but the senator himself was making fundraising pitches for the organization. West Virginia secretary of state filings, meanwhile, show that Bresch has tapped her father’s longtime allies to join her in overseeing the organization. 

Nick Casey, Manchin’s former campaign treasurer, is listed on Americans Together’s filing as treasurer, while Steve Farmer, a Republican lawyer who has known Manchin for decades, is listed as secretary. Other than Bresch, they are the only two individuals listed on the group’s filing. Casey and Farmer, both prominent lawyers in West Virginia, did not respond to requests for comment.

Casey worked for Manchin during his statewide races for secretary of state and governor in the early 2000s. He helped overtake the infrastructure of the West Virginia Democratic Party, which was purged after Manchin assumed control of the political machine, eventually taking the reins as party chair from 2004 until 2010, the year Manchin left state politics for the U.S. Senate. (Casey went on to work for Gov. Jim Justice, who fired him in 2017 after the governor switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Justice is now seeking the Senate seat that Manchin is set to vacate.)

As governor, Manchin appointed Farmer to the West Virginia University board of governors. In 2008, former WVU football coach Rich Rodriguez accused Farmer of conspiring with Manchin, other members of the board of governors, and university president Mike Garrison, himself appointed by the board, to force him into signing a contract with a clause requiring him to pay out $4 million should he leave before the expiration of his contract. All of the WVU appointees denied Rodriguez’s allegations, and Rodriguez ultimately settled a related lawsuit with the university.

Farmer also served on the WVU board of governors as Bresch was ensnared in a scandal over whether she had completed required coursework to receive an advanced business degree from the university. The scandal resulted in multiple firings and an internal review that determined Bresch’s grades had been “pulled from thin air.” Bresch, who would go on to become CEO of the EpiPen maker Mylan, emerged from the drama relatively unscathed. 

Casey and Farmer have stood by Manchin after he faced his own set of scandals, including probes the FBI and IRS launched into his inner circle and business associates in West Virginia, and as he grew in notoriety on the national political stage. 

In the face of Donald Trump’s broadsides in 2018, Farmer spoke to the Daily Beast about how Manchin should respond. “If Trump wants something positive for West Virginia, Manchin will support it regardless of what the president says about him personally,” Farmer said. “He can’t control the president’s behavior—he can only control his own.”

In 2021, as Manchin faced pressure for his intransigence on helping to pass key parts of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, Casey said of the senator, “You’re in the hot seat when you’re a quarterback, but it’s pretty satisfying when you make progress,” adding that Manchin was “the greatest QB who never got to start at West Virginia University — just ask him.”

There is a long history of the Manchin family working to enrich one another through their professional dealings. After assuming the role of CEO of Mylan in 2012, Bresch oversaw the price hike of EpiPens by hundreds of dollars. At the same time, Bresch’s mother and Manchin’s wife, Gayle Manchin, worked to ensure that schools were required to carry, and therefore pay for, EpiPens while she served atop the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Years later, as part of an effort to woo the senator into supporting White House legislative priorities, Biden appointed Gayle Manchin to lead the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal agency overseeing development efforts for Appalachian states. As The Intercept first reported, the Manchins directed tens of millions of dollars to the Canaan Valley and surrounding wilderness area where the couple own a vacation condo. 

Before his political rise, Manchin founded a coal brokerage firm that has continued to supply his family with significant sums of income to this day. The company, Enersystems, is now overseen by Manchin’s son, Joe Manchin IV. 

The company makes hundreds of thousands every year overseeing waste coal transfers to the Grant Town power plant outside Fairmont, West Virginia. The plant has faced closure repeatedly only to be saved time and time again by rate hikes for consumers. 

American Bituminous Power Partners, or AmBit, the operator of the financially troubled plant, has been locked in a yearslong legal battle with Horizon Ventures, the company leasing the land upon which the Grant Town power plant sits. Last month, a judge ordered AmBit to pay a decade’s worth of back rent to Horizon Ventures, according to legal documents reviewed by The Intercept. 

Horizon could not only drive AmBit into financial ruin, but also evict it entirely if it fails to pay what the court has ordered it to fork over. The closing of Grant Town would deal a fatal blow to Enersystems, which funnels its entire coal supply to the Grant Town plant. 

Horizon is run by Stanley Sears, a longtime business owner and political player in West Virginia who has known Manchin since the start of his political career. The dispute over the plant led to a falling out between Manchin and Sears, as well as his son, Scott Sears, who served as Manchin’s right hand on the campaign trail and in the governor’s office. Scott Sears, who left the Democratic Party to support Trump, said without a serious path to the presidency, and a foreclosed seat in the Senate, it’s time for his onetime friend to exit politics. 

“Since he’s fucked and can’t recover,” Sears told The Intercept, “next best thing is to raise as much money as he can and walk away and be happy.” 

The post As Manchin Prepares Senate Exit, His Friends and Daughter Are Lining Up a No Labels Lookalike appeared first on The Intercept.