As Congress and the national security state continue their quest to ban the TikTok social media platform in the United States, President Joe Biden has been courting TikTok influencers to help him shore up youth support for his reelection. While the administration has been publicly casting TikTok as a grave threat to American security, the White House has quietly hosted a number of influencers to pitch them on pro-Biden content.

“Don’t jump, I need you!” Biden joked to a group of TikTok influencers as he walked by the group standing on the White House balcony on his way to deliver his State of the Union speech earlier this year. 

In recent months, some of the biggest TikTok users with accounts boasting millions of followers have visited the White House, visitor logs reveal. Since September alone, some of the most prominent examples include:

• Jason Linton, a dad who posts wholesome content about his family and whose TikTok account @dadlifejason has 13.8 million followers.
• Michael Junchaya, (who goes by “Mikey Angelo” on the handle @mrgrandeofficial, 3.5 million followers), a young entertainer who specializes in rap recap videos.
• Mona Swain (@monaswain, 1.9 million followers), theater enthusiast.
• Alexandra Doten, space communicator, who previously worked for NASA (going by “Astro Alexandra” @astro_alexandra, 2.3 million followers).
• Andrew Townsend (going by “Papi Dre” @andrewtowns, 3.1 million followers).
• Alex Pearlman (@pearlmania, 2.6 million followers), comedian.
• Josh Helfgott (@joshhelfgott, 5.5 million followers), LGBTQ+ advocate.

Perhaps the biggest TikToker hobnobbing at the White House was Oneya Johnson, a viral sensation famous for his angry reaction videos (@angryreactions) boasting 27 million followers. He visited the White House on September 27. (Johnson has since deleted his account after being arrested for domestic violence.)

Each of these TikTokkers’ meetings was coordinated by White House deputy director of partnerships, Morgan MacNaughton, who herself has a background with the company. She was hired away last year from Palette, a social media talent management company that specializes in TikTok personalities. While there, MacNaughton helped found the political group “TikTok for Biden” (since renamed “Gen-Z for Change”). Many of the TikTok users who visited the White House are themselves represented by Palette.

In 2022, Palette received a $200,000 payment from the Democratic National Committee for paid media, Federal Election Commission data shows. According to the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, Palette was paid a retainer from the DNC to cover expenses for eight TikTok creators to travel to Washington in hopes of wooing them in the run-up to the midterm elections, resulting in an Oval Office meeting with Biden.

Anita Dunn, senior adviser to the president, told The Intercept that MacNaughton “helped to get POTUS’s message out to more audiences.”

“The reason Morgan’s position exists is because we knew the work she was capable of: discovering, ideating and leading creator talent,” Christian Tom, director of the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, told The Intercept. “In just under a year at the White House, she has driven on many digital creator projects that have been vital to our digital strategy.”

Related

Tech Official Pushing TikTok Ban Could Reap Windfall From U.S.–China Cold War

With Biden’s reelection campaign in full swing, it would hardly be surprising that they’re meeting with influencers whose videos reach millions of Americans — were it not for the administration’s national security rhetoric about the app’s purported threat. Earlier this month, Biden raised his concerns about TikTok during a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, their first contact since November. Biden administration officials have raised hypothetical concerns about the Chinese ownership of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. 

Public opinion on banning TikTok is sharply divided, with support tending to come from older Americans but marked opposition coming from youth. Biden’s support for the legislation has irked even some of his most ardent supporters.

“There are clearly some First Amendment concerns here and to do this in an election year seems wrong to me,” Harry Sisson told The Intercept. Sisson describes himself as a “pro-Biden content creator” and frequently uses his TikTok account (@harryjsisson, 800k followers) to advocate for the president and blast his opponents. (Sisson has himself visited the White House and is represented by Palette.)

“There are over 170 million Americans on TikTok, many of which get their news from the app, and to take that away and give Trump a talking point only hurts the Democratic Party,” Sisson said.

While White House visitor logs are only available through this past September, it is clear that TikTok influencers have continued to frequent the White House. When Biden gave his State of the Union speech in March, Sisson was one of dozens of social media influencers, including TikTok stars, invited to the White House where he spoke to his 800,000 followers during Biden’s address. The influencers sat on the White House balcony and watched as Biden headed over to the Capitol to deliver his speech.

Though the Biden administration has directly consulted on the creation of the legislation that could ban TikTok, the Biden campaign has embraced the app, creating an official account in February. The decision has drawn criticism from even some of Biden’s most stalwart allies.

“I’m a little worried about a mixed message,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the decision.

The White House, for its part, has brushed off accusations of hypocrisy, pointing to the fact that the federal ban on the use of TikTok on government devices is still in place and applies to White House officials, referring questions to the Biden campaign. 

The campaign has said that it will “continue meeting voters where they are.” 

Unless, of course, the app is banned.

The post As Biden Cheers TikTok Ban, White House Embraces TikTok Influencers appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel’s attack on Iran late Thursday night was met with a dangerously premature sigh of relief from both the news media and U.S. government, that somehow full-scale “war” was avoided.

Outlets like the New York Times were quick to characterize the attack as “subdued” and “limited” in scope, pointing to Iranian statements that the attack was launched from within Iranian borders and used small drones rather than fighter jets. Then it was further revealed that the Israeli attack included a stealth cruise missile launched from long range so as to not upset Israel’s new Arab partners.

But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.

The misconception has even infected the U.S. government.

“The downplaying of direct attacks on its soil may indicate the Islamic Republic lacks the desire, or capability, to match its bluster with professed military might,” a State Department communiqué produced after the attack and obtained by The Intercept says. “Over weeks of unprecedented military exchanges between Iran and Israel … Iranian officials appear keen to avoid further escalation.”

On Thursday, prior to the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian vowed that if Israel strikes back, “the next response from us will be immediate and at a maximum level.” Now, Tehran has to adjust to the reality that a massive Israeli counterattack didn’t come and might never.

As the media and the world awaits full-scale war between Iran and Israel and even frets about nuclear escalation, a huge reality of modern warfare is being overlooked: We are already fighting World War III. No, it is not empires marching armies through countries, conquering continents. And no, it isn’t millions of young men (and now women) pressed in uniform on scales of nearly 100 years ago. And no, in most societies where war is a constant, the public doesn’t even have to feel the pain of war, except in that the military dominates everything and robs everything else of resources: programs to fight poverty, food, housing, health care, transportation, climate change.

World War III instead is all around, a planet that is aflame with armed conflict and awash in arms sales, an overlapping Venn diagram of killing that engulfs the globe, and a constant bonanza for national security “experts” and the military–industrial complex.

Let’s take a tour of the battlefield.

In the Middle East, the U.S., Turkey, Iraq, and even Iran all have footholds in Syria as their internal civil war continues unabated. And all of it goes unremarked most of the time as people look elsewhere for World War II-like battles. Iranian; Iranian-funded or backed or inspired; or independent militias in Syria and Iraq target U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq, and now Jordan. The United States bombs, but so does Israel, and Turkey, and other silent partners of Washington in the war against Iran, and Syria, and ISIS, and Hezbollah. The fight against ISIS, Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. says, involves 80-plus “partners” fighting not just in Syria and Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and Libya. A coalition of 80-plus countries — but the U.S. is loath to name them all, especially the allied “special” operators who are clandestinely working on the ground.

What we do know is that 10 countries have been involved in airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, including the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Korea. Like so many other conflicts, it’s not altogether clear who bombed who or from where, nor other members of the supporting cast. The U.S. bombs from aircraft carriers and from the Gulf states, and from Kuwait and Jordan, and possibly even from Saudi Arabia and Oman. But World War III is about keeping things secret, so who knows.

In the Red Sea, these same countries — plus France, Italy, Norway, Seychelles, Spain, Greece, Finland, Australia, and Sri Lanka — have joined to fend off Houthi attacks at sea. Even more countries are allegedly participating in the coalition in secret, given the sensitivities surrounding support for Israel during its war with Hamas. But then there’s also the war against pirates, and the war against nuclear proliferation, and the war against arms smuggling, and the Middle East war even against drugs, all carried out by a vast international maritime fleet involving dozens of countries.

While Israel’s war in Gaza, and its back and forth with Iran, is atop the Billboard charts for now, in Ukraine, a trench war and a standoff has now dragged on for more than two years. Here as well, all eyes have been on some kind of decisive victory or defeat, but World War III is more characterized by Ukraine or its proxies regularly attacking targets inside Mother Russia, attacks that Moscow downplays. Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side are now making regular incursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions. Meanwhile, the real World War III is NATO already at war with Russia, increasing its activities adjacent to the enemy, expanding its ranks, building up its military, and supplying arms to Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, is deployed from Norway to Bulgaria, and has in the past two years built up a major new base in Poland. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea have played their part in shuttling drones, missiles, and artillery shells into the Russian war effort.

Though the blatant Russian invasion seems to embody the old-fashioned concept of occupying armies and World War II, the reality is that Ukraine never turned into “the largest tank battle” ever, as some predicted, nor did it “escalate” to nuclear war, nor has it even been decisive. 

The war in Ukraine is certainly the world-altering event of the past five years, but even here, without more borders crossed, without escalation, and without Russia and NATO shooting at each other directly, some mighty lessons can be learned. Armies clashing is an illusion. World War III is thus not some conquering army sweeping its way across the continent. At no time have more than 300,000 soldiers been on the battlefield in Ukraine at any one time; in World War II, it was nearly 10 million facing each other on a daily basis (and some 125 million mobilized overall). Because of the greater lethality of weapons, military casualties in Ukraine have been enormous. But most of the ground engagements have taken place at the company or even platoon level; massing too many troops in one place is just too dangerous in today’s world. And this has all unfolded while neither Russia nor Ukraine have been able to harness airpower in the same way the United States has. Other than Vladimir Putin’s heartless offensive that used young Russian men as cannon fodder, few nations want to fight this way, preferring long-range air and missile (and now drone) attacks.

South of Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia continue to simmer. Last year, Azerbaijan attacked the breakaway republic of Artsakh. With the backing of Turkey and Israeli weapons, Azerbaijan attempted to permanently squash the ethnic Armenian enclave, successfully driving tens of thousands of civilians into neighboring countries. 

Past the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea is also brimming with maritime conflict. Constant Chinese naval passes around the borders of Taiwan are supplemented with close calls with South Korea, Japan and the Philippines (and the United States). Meanwhile, Myanmar’s civil war continues unabated.

On the Korean Peninsula, North Korea continues nuclear testing and the unannounced firing of ballistic missiles into the ocean, and tensions are a constant background noise of war games, military incursions, and cross-border incidents. Thousands of artillery batteries stare each other down across the Demilitarized Zone, as South Korea points the finger at North Korean technology used in Iranian missiles launched toward Israel. And, of course, the United States and other “partners” are active on the ground.

In a world of supposed “international order,” India and Pakistan continue to fight over their common border, as they have been doing for decades. And India and China face off, another flashpoint that could spell World War III to some but one that is already here in reality.

In Africa, military forces, terrorists, militants, mercenaries, militias, bandits, pirates, and separatists are active, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Sudan. China and Russia scramble for bases and influence (China already has a base in Djibouti). Russia’s Wagner Group is active in Africa and involved in combat, and in the past two months, Rwandan military forces have attacked targets in the DRC, and Morocco has conducted drone strikes on Polisario fighters near the Western Sahara border.

On the African continent, the U.S., France, and the U.K. have been engaged in expansive yet clandestine fighting, supposedly against Islamic terrorists, while all around the continent smolders and neither can claim any long-term wins on the dual fronts of counterterrorism and peacekeeping. American troops operating in Niger are stuck as the country’s U.S. government-trained junta claims America’s footprint is illegal. The United States has also been bombing targets in Somalia for years now, and the African Union mission in Somalia has been actively involved in combating al-Shabab.

U.S. forces continue to fan out across Latin America and the Caribbean, using missile cruisers to intercept drug smuggling submarines, sending marine anti-terrorism teams into a fully destabilized Haiti, and fast-tracking exports of helicopters, aircraft, and naval drones to Guyana as its neighbor Venezuela hungrily eyes its oil reserves. Senior Biden administration officials have floated sending U.S. troops into the treacherous swatch of jungle connecting South and Central America known as the Darién Gap to stem the flow of migrants and drugs across the U.S. southern border. 

And what even happened to neutrality in the past few years? Switzerland and Austria have provided arms to Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. Only little Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius, Panama, and Vanuatu have no formal armed forces, but even there, Iceland is a very active member of NATO and Panama is a close military ally of the U.S. Speaking of small countries taking on big fights, Fiji and Luxembourg both count themselves as members of the global coalition to defeat ISIS. 

Ubiquitous warfare, our World War III, paints a worldwide picture that is overwhelming, leaving little room to imagine that something can be done about it. And it’s hard not to conclude that the superpowers and the national security “community” aren’t somehow satisfied with the status quo. But as with addiction, the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem — or in this case, a global war.

The post Israel Attack on Iran Is What World War III Looks Like appeared first on The Intercept.

Ahead of the United Nations Security Council action to consider the Palestinian Authority’s application to become a full member of the international body, the United States is lobbying nations to reject such membership, hoping to avoid an overt “veto” by Washington. The lobbying effort, revealed in copies of unclassified State Department cables obtained by The Intercept, is at odds with the Biden administration’s pledge to fully support a two-state solution.

In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution granting Palestine the status of a non-member observer state.

Related

Intel Report Warned Abraham Accords Would Fuel Violence

The diplomatic cables detail pressure being applied to members of the Security Council, including Malta, the rotating president of the council this month. Ecuador in particular is being asked to lobby Malta and other nations, including France, to oppose U.N. recognition. The State Department’s justification is that normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states is the fastest and most effective way to achieve an enduring and productive statehood. 

While clarifying that President Joe Biden has worked vigorously to support “Palestinian aspirations for statehood” within the context “of a comprehensive peace that would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a diplomatic cable dated April 12 details U.S. talking points against a U.N. vote for Palestinian statehood. The cable says that Security Council members must be persuaded to reject any proposal for Palestinian statehood — and thereby its recognition as a sovereign nation — before the council’s open debate on the Middle East, scheduled for April 18. 

“It remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors,” the cable reads. “We believe this approach can tangibly advance Palestinian goals in a meaningful and enduring way.” 

“We therefore urge you not to support any potential Security Council resolution recommending the admission of ‘Palestine’ as a U.N. member state, should such a resolution be presented to the Security Council for a decision in the coming days and weeks.”

Experts say that without a unanimous Security Council vote, any vote from the U.N. General Assembly is largely symbolic.

“Like it or not, a General Assembly vote on this issue is of political rather than legal weight,” Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s U.N. director, told The Intercept. “The Assembly can only accept a new state ‘on the recommendation’ of the Security Council.” 

The diplomatic cable includes a rationale for the administration’s opposition to the vote, citing the risk of inflaming tensions, political backlash, and potentially leading to the U.S. Congress cutting U.N. funding.

“Premature actions at the UNSC, even with the best intentions, will achieve neither statehood nor self-determination for the Palestinian people. Such initiatives will instead endanger normalization efforts and drive the parties further apart, heighten the risk of violence on the ground that could claim innocent lives on both sides, and risk support for the new, reform government announced by President Abbas,” the cable says.

Asked about the cable and whether its opposition to U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood contradicts the Biden administration’s position in support of a two-state solution, the State Department did not respond at the time of publication.

“The U.S. position is that the Palestinian state should be based on bilateral agreements between the Israelis and Palestinians,” Gowan said. “It does not believe that the UN can create the state by fiat.”

A second cable dated April 13 sent from the U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, relays Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld’s agreement with the United States that Palestine should not be recognized for statehood. In cooperation with the United States, according to the cable, Sommerfeld instructed Ecuador’s permanent representative to the United Nations José De La Gasca to lobby Japan, Korea, and Malta (all rotating members of the Security Council) to reject the proposal. Lobbying of permanent member France is also mentioned.

Sommerfeld agreed, according to the cable, that “It was important any proposed resolution fail to achieve the necessary votes without a U.S. veto.” The cable says, “Ecuador would not want to appear isolated (alone with the United States) in its rejection of a ‘Palestine’ resolution (particularly at a time when the most UN member states are criticizing Ecuador over its April 5 incursion into Mexico’s embassy in Quito).” Ecuador finds itself in an escalating conflict with Mexico over its decision to arrest the former Ecuadorian vice president inside the Mexican Embassy.

Asked about the second cable, the State Department and the Ecuadorian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment. 

With its yearlong seat on the powerful 15-member Security Council, Ecuador holds outsized influence to vote against the Palestinian proposal for recognition. 

“This really shows the extent to which the [Ecuadorian President Daniel] Noboa administration is beholden to the United States,” Guillaume Long, senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research and former foreign minister of Ecuador, told The Intercept when shown the cable. “On top of this, it is quite shocking to see the United States, which condemned Ecuador’s April 5 storming of the Mexican embassy and its violation of international law … making the most of Ecuador’s isolation in the hemisphere to get it to do its bidding. Ecuador is just buying its way out of its crimes by committing more crimes. Truly shocking,” said Long, referring to Ecuador’s rejection of Palestinian membership in the U.N.

After the publication of this story, the Ecuadorian government released the following statement, which reads as translated: “Regarding the alleged leaks published by a digital portal, the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry denies the veracity of its content. The foreign policy of the National Government, including its actions as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, is clear, adhered to the principles of international law, public and transparent, as is all participation of the country and its authorities in different international forums. Citizens are called to obtain information only through official means.”

Since 2011, the U.N. Security Council has rejected the Palestinian Authority’s request for full member status. On April 2, the Palestinian Observer Mission to the U.N. requested that the council once again take up consideration of its membership application. According to the first State Department cable, U.N. meetings since the beginning of April suggest that Algeria, China, Guyana, Mozambique, Russia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, and Malta support granting Palestine full membership to the U.N. It also says that France, Japan, and Korea are undecided, while the United Kingdom will likely abstain from a vote.

“It is important that all Security Council members hear at this stage of the process that a number of members have questions that require further study about the Palestinian Authority’s formal request for UN membership through the Council, and that if a vote is forced on the issue, you will join the United States and not support approval of the application,” the cable reads.

Update: April 18, 2024
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Ecuadorian government made after publication.

The post Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood appeared first on The Intercept.

The United States shot down more drones and missiles than Israel did on Saturday night during Iran’s attack, The Intercept can report. 

More than half of Iran’s weapons were destroyed by U.S. aircraft and missiles before they ever reached Israel. In fact, by commanding a multinational air defense operation and scrambling American fighter jets, this was a U.S. military triumph. 

The extent of the U.S. military operation is unbeknownst to the American public, but the Pentagon coordinated a multination, regionwide defense extending from northern Iraq to the southern Persian Gulf on Saturday. During the operation, the U.S., U.K., France, and Jordan all shot down the majority of Iranian drones and missiles. In fact, where U.S. aircraft originated from has not been officially announced, an omission that has been repeated by the mainstream media. Additionally, the role of Saudi Arabia is unclear, both as a base for the United States and in terms of any actions by the Saudi military.

In calculating the size of Iran’s attack and the overwhelming role of the United States, U.S. military sources say that the preliminary estimate is that half of Iran’s weapons experienced technical failures of some sort.

“U.S. intelligence estimates that half of the weapons fired by Iran failed upon launch or in flight due to technical issues,” a U.S. Air Force senior officer told The Intercept. Of the remaining 160 or so, the U.S. shot down the majority, the officer said. The officer was granted anonymity to speak about sensitive operational matters.

Asked to comment on the United States shooting down half of Iran’s drones and missiles, the Israel Defense Forces and the White House National Security Council did not respond at the time of publication. The Pentagon referred The Intercept to U.S. Central Command, which pointed to a press release saying CENTCOM forces supported by U.S. European Command destroyers “successfully engaged and destroyed more than 80 one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicles (OWA UAV) and at least six ballistic missiles intended to strike Israel from Iran and Yemen.”

Israel says that more than 330 drones, low-flying cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles were launched by Iran, including some 30 Paveh-type cruise missiles, 180 or so Shahed drones, and 120 Emad intermediate-range ballistic missiles, as well as other types of weapons. All of the drones and cruise missiles were launched from Iranian territory, Israel says. Some additional missiles were also launched from inside Yemen, according to IDF data.

Most media reports say that none of the cruise missiles or drones ever entered Israeli airspace. According to a statement by IDF spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari, some 25 cruise missiles “were intercepted by IAF [Israeli Air Force] fighter jets outside the country’s borders,” most likely over Jordanian territory.

Israel’s statement that it shot down the majority of Iranian “cruise missiles” is probably an exaggeration. According to U.S. military sources and preliminary reporting, U.S. and allied aircraft shot down the majority of drones and cruise missiles. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the Royal Air Force Typhoons intercepted “a number” of Iranian weapons over Iraqi and Syrian airspace.

The Jordanian government has also hinted that its aircraft downed some Iranian weapons. “We will intercept every drone or missile that violates Jordan’s airspace to avert any danger. Anything posing a threat to Jordan and the security of Jordanians, we will confront it with all our capabilities and resources,” Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said during an interview on the Al-Mamlaka news channel.

French fighters also shot down some drones and possibly cruise missiles.

U.S. aircraft, however, shot down “more than” 80 Iranian weapons, according to U.S. military sources. President Joe Biden spoke with members of two F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft squadrons to “commend them for their exceptional airmanship and skill in defending Israel from an unprecedented aerial attack by Iran.” Two F-15 squadrons — the 494th Fighter Squadron based at Royal Air Force Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, and the 335th Fighter Squadron from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina — are forward deployed to the Middle East, at least half of the planes at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.

Two U.S. warships stationed in the Mediterranean — the USS Carney (DDG 64) and the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51) — shot down at least six ballistic missiles, the Pentagon says. The War Zone is reporting that those ships may have fired Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptors in combat for the first time. A U.S. Army Patriot surface-to-air missile battery in Erbil, Iraq, shot down at least one ballistic missile. Wreckage of an Iranian missile was also found outside Erbil, as well as in an open area outside the province of Najaf.

Iran’s attack marks the first time since 1991 that a nation state has attacked Israel directly. Contending with extremely long distances and utilizing scores of decoys and swarm tactics to attempt to overwhelm Middle East air defenses, Iran managed to hit two military targets on the ground in Israel, including Nevatim Air Base. According to the IDF, five missiles hit Nevatim Air Base and four hit another base. Despite the low number of munitions successfully landing, the dramatic spectacle of hundreds of rockets streaking across the night sky in Syria, Iraq, and Iran has left Tehran contented with its show of force. 

Iran “has achieved all its goals, and in our view the operation has ended, and we do not intend to continue,” Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, said over the weekend. Still, he cautioned, “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger response.”

The U.S. coordinated the overall operation from the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where the overall commander was Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the air commander of CENTCOM. “We take whatever assets we have that are in theater … under our tactical control or in a direct support role across the joint force and the coalition, and we stitch them together so that we can synchronize the fires and effects when we get into that air defense fight,” Grynkewich told Air & Space Forces Magazine after the Iran attack. “We’re trying to stitch together partners in the region who share a perspective of a threat, share concern of the threats to stability in the region — which primarily emanate from Iran with a large number of ballistic missiles — and be in a position where we’re able to share information, share threat warning. And the ultimate goal is to get to a much deeper and fuller integration. We’ve made tremendous progress.”

In a call immediately following Iran’s attack, Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange” and warned of the “risks of escalation” — as if that hadn’t already happened.

Correction: April 16, 2024
A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Mohammad Bagheri as the president of Iran. He is the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces.

The post U.S., Not Israel, Shot Down Most Iran Drones and Missiles appeared first on The Intercept.

The regional war in the Middle East now involves at least 16 different countries and includes the first strikes from Iranian territory on Israel, but the United States continues to insist that there is no broader war, hiding the extent of American military involvement. And yet in response to Iran’s drone and missile attacks Saturday, the U.S. flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

The news media has been complicit in its portrayal of the regional war as nonexistent. “Biden Seeks to Head Off Escalation After Israel’s Successful Defense,” the New York Times blared this morning, ignoring that the conflict had already spread. “Iran attacks Israel, risking a full-blown regional war,” says The Economist. “Some top U.S. officials are worried that Israel may respond hastily to Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attacks and provoke a wider regional conflict that the U.S. could get dragged into,” says NBC, parroting the White House’s deception.

The Washington-based reporting follows repeated Biden administration statements that none of this amounts to a regional war. “So far, there is not … a wider regional conflict,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Thursday, in response to a question about Israel’s strike on the Iranian Embassy. Ryder’s statement followed repeated assertions by Iranian leadership that retaliation would follow — and even a private message from the Iranians to the U.S. that if it helped defend Israel, the U.S. would also be a viable target — after which the White House reiterated its “ironclad” support for Israel.

While the world has been focused on — and the Pentagon has been stressing — the comings and goings of aircraft carriers and fighter jets to serve as a “deterrent” against Iran, the U.S. has quietly built a network of air defenses to fight its regional war. “At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.”

As part of that network, Army long-range Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile batteries have been deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and at the secretive Site 512 base in Israel. These assets — plus American aircraft based in Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — are knitted together in order to communicate and cooperate with each other to provide a dome over Israel (and its own regional bases). The United Kingdom is also intimately tied into the regional war network, while additional countries such as Bahrain have purchased Patriot missiles to be part of the network.

Despite this unambiguous regional network, and even after Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, the Biden administration has consistently denied that the Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza. It is a policy stance — and a deception — that has held since Hamas’s October 7 attack. “The Middle East region is quieter than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an ill-timed remark eight days before October 7. “We don’t see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after three U.S. troops were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iran-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan. Since then (and even before this weekend), the fighting has spread to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.

As part of the regional war network, four American ships, part of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) battle group, have played a central role in thwarting Iran-backed attacks. The ships are equipped with long-range Standard surface-to-air missiles and the Phalanx close-in weapon system, a Gatling gun that serves as the ship’s last lines of defense against attack. All of the ships have been conducting offensive and defensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, focused on Houthi attacks (they all shot Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles at targets in Yemen on January 12).

According to maritime spotters and the Navy, the destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107) has been conducting defensive and offensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since mid-March. It has been engaging Houthi drones and missiles fired from inside Yemen toward Israel and toward maritime traffic. The destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) has also been operating in the Red Sea. Just on Tuesday, it targeted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile that was targeting the U.S. commercial ship M/V Yorktown, according to the Navy. The destroyer USS Laboon (DDG 58) arrived in the region in December and has been operating mostly in the Gulf of Aden. The guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea (CG 58) arrived around Christmas and has served as the main air defense command-and-control hub.

American ships have quietly called at ports in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti (the port of Duqm in Oman has been the most often visited foreign port). Lebanon is also involved in the conflict as Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks.

The White House has also said that U.S. fighter jets were involved in some of the shootdowns of Iranian missiles. Flight trackers noticed a U.S. Air Force refueling plane, stationed in Qatar, flying missions over Iraq during the Iranian attack. In total, according to CNN, around 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles were launched at Israel overnight Saturday. All told, US forces were responsible for over 100 interceptions of Iranian drones and missiles, according to Israeli officials.

The post Israel Conflict Spreads to 16 Nations as Biden Admin Says There’s No War appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House is worried that Iran might strike a U.S. target as part of a potential retaliation for Israel’s April 1 attack on its embassy in Damascus, Syria, according to notes from a meeting involving National Security Council officials earlier this week. Tehran has vowed that “Israel will be punished” for the Syria strike and the killing of Quds Force commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi. 

New concern about a potential Iranian strike comes even though the Biden administration has sought to distance itself from the Israeli airstrike, stressing that it had no advance knowledge of the operation.

“I don’t have anything more to say about the strike in Damascus, except that we weren’t involved in any way whatsoever,” NSC spokesperson retired Adm. John Kirby said on Monday. 

On Monday night, Iran conveyed to the Biden administration that if it involved itself in defending Israel were Tehran to undertake a retaliatory strike, it would consider the United States a viable target as well. The issue was discussed at a Tuesday NSC meeting, according to notes reviewed by The Intercept. (The NSC did not respond to a request for comment.)

At the Tuesday meeting, an NSC official conveyed high-level concerns that the administration did not want to publicly appear to be in any official dialogue with Tehran, with whom the U.S. does not have formal diplomatic relations.

Last Friday, four days after the Israeli airstrike, over a dozen Republican senators signed a letter accusing the Biden administration of undertaking a “strategy of appeasement” with Iran. 

Despite an-ever widening and escalating military action since the Gaza war began, the Biden administration has insisted that the war remains contained to Israel, despite attacks by Israel in Syria and Lebanon; despite repeated attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen and the retaliatory strike that have followed; and despite attacks and responses against U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. The strikes by the U.S. (and its coalition partners) are always described as taking place against “Iran-backed” organizations and militias.

In January, three American Army soldiers were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iranian-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan called Tower 22. There have been over 150 attacks on U.S. Middle East forces since the Israel–Hamas war began. U.S. Central Command, the Pentagon’s Middle East combatant command, has launched a seemingly endless barrage of strikes on Iranian-backed targets throughout the region, as well as undertaken naval and air attacks in and around Yemen.

The position of the Biden administration has consistently been that it doesn’t see any of this as escalation. “We don’t seek a wider war with Iran,” Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after the three U.S. troops were killed in Jordan. “We don’t seek further conflict, we don’t want to see this widen out into a regional conflict.”

Since then, the U.S. has quietly conducted talks with Iranian officials to seek to avoid direct confrontation between the two countries’ armed forces, according to CNN and other media reports. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Biden and his team are working to prevent escalation with Iran in the Middle East.

On Wednesday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Israel “must be punished and it shall be.” That same day, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz said his country would respond with a direct attack. “If Iran attacks from its own territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran,” Katz posted on X. Since April 2023, the U.S. and Israel have been in close cooperation in sharing and building common Iran contingency plans.

The post Biden Administration Fears Iran Might Target U.S. Forces Over Israel Strike appeared first on The Intercept.

As the NCAA finishes up March Madness, another type of madness is unfolding as the U.S. military retools its weapons of mass destruction response apparatus to focus not on attacks by familiar foreign terror groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, but by American citizens. 

Late last month, for the first time ever, the National Guard conducted an exercise simulating a frantic search for a nuclear dirty bomb at a basketball and hockey arena in Trenton, New Jersey. What made the exercise different from hundreds of such similar war games held since 9/11 is that purely domestic terrorists were identified as the perpetrators.

“The FBI has just received intelligence that a well-resourced domestic terrorist group has planted bombs, including one with cesium-137 — a radioactive isotope — in the arena,” the military said about the scenario for the exercise. “The clock is ticking.”

The CURE Insurance Arena in Trenton is a multipurpose facility able to seat 8,000. The arena aims to attract more college basketball matches, having hosted Princeton vs. Rutgers in November.

The mock nuclear materials search took place from March 25-28 and involved National Guard “Civil Support Teams” from New Jersey, Delaware, and Idaho; other military teams; city, county, and state police and hazardous material teams; and federal government agencies, including the local FBI field office and experts from the national Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

Established during the Clinton administration in 1998, the National Guard Civil Support Teams are charged with “consequence management” in the event of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear — known as CBRN — incident. The 20- to 25-member teams can also be assigned to “incidents of national significance” and “national security events” that involve intentional and unintentional CBRN releases. They have been deployed on standby for the Super Bowl and Boston Marathon, as well as for NCAA tournaments. The teams were extensively employed during Covid-19.

The exercise scenario last month resembles the feverish plot of the post-9/11 TV series “24,” which dramatized the concept of a ticking time bomb and the extraordinary measures it might justify. (“24” also had its own sports tie-in, having aired its pilot episode right after the Super Bowl.) But “24” portrayed the dirty bomb plots as being masterminded by foreign terror groups similar to those that carried out 9/11. By pointing the finger at a “domestic terrorist group” — that is, Americans — the U.S. military outpaces not just Hollywood, but also the facts.

Though the FBI says in its fiscal year 2025 budget request to Congress that during 2023, its Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate “disrupted 42 incidents; made 62 arrests; and had 43 indictments, 56 sentencings and 56 convictions,” none involved actual nuclear materials or such a dirty bomb. There’s no evidence that any domestic terrorist group has ever been well-resourced enough to construct a nuclear dirty bomb. But that hasn’t stopped Washington from building on January 6 to feed its current domestic extremism obsession and fearmongering about it.

In November, the Washington-based Stimson Center published a report, “The Threat from Within,” that hypes the purported insider threat to nuclear security posed by “domestic violent extremists.” The report is funded by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The Stimson Center also receives funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (the Defense Department agency charged with weapons of mass destruction).

“The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol revealed the flaws in a system designed to weed out unsuitable candidates for sensitive work protecting nuclear materials, weapons, facilities, technology and personnel,” the Stimson report’s executive summary says. 

The report acknowledges a shift from foreign to domestic terrorism, saying, “Rather than focusing on international extremists with foreign ideological motives, federal agencies and law enforcement have begun to recognize the prevalence of domestic violent extremist threats to national security and critical infrastructure, including the nuclear sector.”

As an example of the domestic extremist threat to nuclear security, the Stimson reports cites the case of Ashli Babbitt. An Air Force veteran who participated in the storming of the Capitol building before being killed by a law enforcement officer, the report points to Babbitt’s employment at a nuclear plant as “​​troubling — especially when considering the appeal of nuclear infrastructure as a target for extremists.”

That’s of course a long shot from saying Babbitt had any intention of targeting that nuclear infrastructure — which there’s no evidence for — in order to, say, construct a dirty bomb. 

But that won’t stop the government from playing its own game.

The post Feds Search Basketball Arena for Domestic Nuclear Terrorists in Their Own March Madness appeared first on The Intercept.

Fox News, one of the most relentless critics of the war on disinformation, now has a new challenge: Its parent company is looking to build up its own internal capability to combat disinformation. 

Last week, Fox Corporation issued a job posting looking for a corporate “trust and safety behavioral analyst” whose responsibilities would include identifying “misinformation/disinformation.” The job aims to establish a content moderation system across Fox’s businesses, which includes Fox News, to fight disinformation. The corporation will work in close coordination with unnamed partners both inside and outside of the company, the posting says. To this end, Fox intends to use pattern recognition, a key component of artificial intelligence, to “identify hostile users,” the job description says.

The analyst, Fox says, would tend to the “ongoing community health and brand safety of Fox sites and apps that interact directly with users” in order to “safeguard … user communities.” A background in “psychology, criminal justice, social media, gaming, news or media” is a plus, the job announcement says.

Asked about the job posting, Fox did not respond to a request for comment.

The corporate concern with disinformation contrasts rather sharply with Fox News’s overwhelmingly critical coverage of anti-disinformation efforts that police what is posted in social media, which Fox News consistently equates with censorship. 

When the Department of Homeland Security created a now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, prominent Fox News hosts condemned the move in sensational terms. Fox News host Sean Hannity and then-host Tucker Carlson both called the Disinformation Governance Board a “Ministry of Truth,” a reference to the propaganda ministry of a totalitarian state from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade echoed their remarks, saying that “it looks like the Biden administration is taking Orwell’s work not as a warning but as their own manual.” 

Related

Why Fox News Can’t Afford to Quit Donald Trump

Since the board story, the network has been obsessed with the disinformation battle. In the week following the revelation of the Disinformation Governance Board, 70 percent of Fox’s one-hour segments referenced disinformation and the DHS official in charge of the board, according to a defamation lawsuit Nina Jankowicz has filed against Fox News. During 2022, Fox News mentioned Jankowicz over 300 times, the lawsuit states. (Asked about the lawsuit, Irena Briganti, a spokesperson for Fox News, said that the company has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.)

Fox’s corporate interest in disinformation differs from the federal government’s. Fox is interested in audience “engagement” — a term that appears almost half a dozen times in the job posting.

“Helping deliver innovative technology solutions to support user safety and increase engagement,” Fox’s posting lists among the responsibilities of the job. 

Much of the debate about content moderation focuses on heady subjects like freedom of speech and the threat of state-sponsored foreign influence campaigns. But largely absent from the discussion is the simple fact that it’s profitable for companies to remove content that might offend advertisers or audiences. And with advancements in AI technology, it is increasingly possible to do so at scale.

In addition to machine learning, Fox’s job posting references two other terms common to AI: large language models and natural language processing. This technology makes it possible to autonomously sift through vast amounts of data, which previously would have required expensive human teams. As a result, content moderation is going to be cheaper to conduct than ever before.

Fox is far from the only company taking advantage of the breakthroughs in AI to respond to disinformation. 

“More than 95 percent of the hate speech that we take down is done by an AI and not by a person,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (now Meta) told Congress in 2021. “And I think it’s 98 or 99 percent of the terrorist content that we take down is identified by an AI and not a person.”

The federal government is increasingly turning to AI to identify foreign influence operations, according to the Biden administration’s new budget request delivered to the Congress last month.

For the most part, the rapid changes brought about by the explosion of AI technology have yet to enter into the disinformation debate.

“I am pro-disinformation because one man’s disinformation is another person’s fact,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said in 2022.

Gutfeld may want to take that up with his employer.

The post Fox Used to Hate Disinformation Experts. Now It’s Hiring One. appeared first on The Intercept.

“You wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right?” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said this week of NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, a decision the network later reversed. “You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener.” 

But NBC does just that with another party: its pro-war stable of retired military generals and admirals who hold forth on wars and threats to national security. A partisan voice if there ever was one, the TV generals and admirals are all the more scandalous because the network presents them as objective “analysts” as they sit on defense industry and corporate boards that profit from forever wars, including ones not being fought by the United States directly. The conflict is not just tolerated by NBC, it is also never disclosed. (NBC did not respond to a request for comment on its current conflict of interest policies.)

“The U.S. needs to get involved in a leadership role here [in Haiti] and very quickly,” retired four-star Adm. James Stavridis said on the air earlier this month, speaking of the deteriorating situation. Stavridis calls for the deployment of a U.S.-led intervention force, warning of the consequences of inaction. “In the ’90s … we had waves of migration, refugee-driven, from Haiti,” he said.

The host, NBC News’s José Díaz-Balart, to his credit, pushed back. “Admiral, you know this better than anybody else: The history of American intervention in the Americas has not always been that great,” he said. But the network, in giving Stavridis a platform — just as they would have done with McDaniel — doesn’t bother to mention that their “analyst” profits from the use of military force. For example, Stavridis serves as partner of the investment firm Carlyle Group, owner of major defense contractors and which lists the admiral among its Global Aerospace and Government Services Team. 

Related

Cable News Military Experts Are on the Defense Industry Dole

Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, serves as chief international security and diplomacy analyst for NBC News. But the network’s website does not divulge that he is a hired gun, nor any kind of disclosure of his outside affiliations. Stavridis also serves on or has served on the boards of Fortinet, a cybersecurity firm; Neuberger Berman Mutual Funds; McLarty Associates; Beacon Global Strategies; and Ankura, a consulting group. (Stavridis did not respond to a request for comment.)

Stavridis has appeared on the network to discuss Israel’s war on Gaza, but NBC does not disclose his affiliation with the Jewish Institute for National Security, a Washington-based national security think tank that advocates for closer military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel. JINSA’s website lists Stavridis as chair of its Gemunder Center’s U.S.-Israel Security Task Force. 

In an NBC segment in February, Stavridis said that “the administration is going to have to consider strikes in Iran” if attacks from Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria continued. 

When asked by “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker if it might be necessary to withdraw the roughly 3,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria in light of regional tensions, Stavridis balked.

“The last thing in the world we should do is pull them out,” Stavridis said. “This is a minimal presence doing good work: counterterrorism, working with the Iraqis against the Islamic State.”

Though Stavridis is pressing policy recommendations masquerading as dispassionate analysis, another official NBC military analyst has even been involved in a direct conflict of interest. In 2008, a sprawling New York Times exposé revealed that retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, while working as a military analyst for NBC, also worked for military contractor Defense Solutions. McCaffrey went on the air praising Army Gen. David Petraeus, then the commanding general in Iraq, but never disclosed that he was at the same time pushing Petraeus to buy 5,000 armored vehicles made by the same contractor. 

“That’s what I pay him for,” the CEO of Defense Solutions told the Times. 

As a consultant, McCaffrey was not required to adhere to NBC’s conflict-of-interest policies, the then-president of NBC told the Times.

“On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests,” the Times reported. “But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers.”

NBC never suspended or terminated its relationship with McCaffrey, who is still a recurring guest on the network. (McCaffrey did not respond to a request for comment.)

In July, McCaffrey said in an interview with Andrea Mitchell that the Biden administration was “entirely correct” to send cluster bombs to Ukraine — a controversial weapon that is banned from use (the United States is not a signatory to the worldwide ban).

Related

TV Pundits Praising Suleimani Assassination Neglect to Disclose Ties to Arms Industry

In February, in an interview with an NBC satellite station in Seattle, McCaffrey said that Congress’s failure to pass a military aid package for Ukraine “has a huge potential impact on U.S. national security.” Echoing Stavridis’s warning about Haitian refugees, McCaffrey said that if Ukraine loses the war, “we will see potentially 20 million refugees in Western Europe.” 

During the interview, McCaffrey adopted an explicitly partisan position — the same dynamic proponents of firing McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chair, sought to avoid. 

“Our national security is at stake and this is a shameful behavior instigated by Mr. Trump and being responded to by House Republicans,” McCaffrey said.

Once again, McCaffrey’s potential financial conflicts are not disclosed. In 2021, he was appointed to the board of directors of defense contractor Juvare, which said that McCaffrey would provide guidance as the company expands its role in the federal and defense space. 

McCaffrey also serves as president of his own consulting firm, BR McCaffrey Associates, which describes itself as striving to “build linkages” between federal officials and contractors.

Then there’s retired Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Twitty, hired by the network as a military analyst in 2022. Twitty serves as a senior adviser at the powerful Chertoff Group, helping military clients identify business opportunities, according to its website. He is also a senior adviser at the Roosevelt Group, which focuses on strategic communications, advocacy, and business development for the defense industry; and a board adviser at Dataminr, a social media monitoring and artificial intelligence company that contracts with the Pentagon.

The former deputy commander of U.S. European Command, Twitty is a frequent “analyst” explaining the war in Ukraine. 

“Push forward, push hard, let’s get the funding in there,” Twitty advocated in December, pushing U.S. military aid. “I think it’s going to take years: so they will need sustainable funding and predictable funding for the long term.”

Twitty did not respond to a request for comment.

The potential for conflicts is not lost on staffers at NBC. “NBC will write checks for a revolving door of former intelligence and military brass quietly running interference for the defense industry but breaking on-air bread with a Trump ally and top Republican official merits a call to insurrection?” an NBC writer who requested anonymity for fear of professional reprisal told The Intercept. “Send in the troops!”

Correction: March 31, 2024
The host of the NBC segment on Haiti was incorrectly identified. The interviewer was José Díaz-Balart, not Gabe Gutierrez. 

The post NBC Rejects Trump Voice but Embraces War Party appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. intelligence skews its findings to find favor with both Republican and Democratic policymakers, including former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama, a sweeping new study by the Pentagon-backed RAND Corporation finds. The study draws on interviews, some anonymous, with nearly a dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers.

Despite the popular “deep state” characterization of the intelligence community as a rogue army running roughshod over elected leaders, the study concludes the exact opposite. It portrays an intelligence community that naturally tilts its reports and forecasts to curry favor with presidents and their high-level policymakers in Washington, regardless of party or issue. 

“Policymakers most frequently introduce bias in intelligence assessments from a desire to minimize the appearance of dissent, while the IC” — intelligence community — “tends to introduce bias through self-censorship,” the report says.

The study, “Has Trust in the U.S. Intelligence Community Eroded? Examining the Relationship Between Policymakers and Intelligence Providers,” was sponsored by the Pentagon.

From 9/11 to January 6, there’s hardly a shortage of intelligence failures to properly assess the big picture or anticipate crises, leading to a decline in trust by policymakers, some of whom have decried the intelligence community as a monolithic “deep state” outside of their control. But the study suggests that these policymakers often have themselves to blame for pressuring the intelligence community to come to certain conclusions in line with their political interests — in many cases successfully. 

“Through his time in office, President Trump and other administration officials consistently sought to influence — and, in some cases, bias — intelligence,” the study finds. Interviewees cited almost a dozen such examples, some unsurprising (“Russian interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections,” the Muslim travel ban, and the characterization of “antifa”) but others less obvious (“mass shootings” and “the SolarWinds hack”).

Far from the Hollywood picture of intelligence operatives as ruthless Jason Bourne types, interviewees complained about the pressure analysts and management faced from White House policymakers, with one likening it to bullying.

The “culture of fear was real,” one former intelligence official told RAND. “The IC gets tired of being bullied, then they withdraw.”

“Individuals looked to avoid conflict and please political masters,” the study says of the intelligence community analysts and officials, adding that the CIA and other agencies have “an incentive to elicit positive feedback from policymakers” in order to “maintain [their] relevance.”

Across multiple administrations, this dynamic of fear appears to have infected the highest echelons of the intelligence community. Former CIA Director Gina Haspel declined to push back on Trump’s equivocations regarding the intelligence community’s conclusion that Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the study notes. (Haspel had reportedly been ordered by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to attend a congressional briefing where she could have challenged Trump’s statements. She didn’t attend.)

The report identifies Russian meddling in elections as among the most prominent scenarios in which the Trump administration pushed to influence the outcome of intelligence analysis. 

“With election interference, there were attempts to directly impact/change what the intelligence said,” a former official told RAND. “The IC was going to say that Russia did something, but policymakers would insist on adding more language, like something else about Iran.”

Another former official described election security as “the third rail of intelligence topics,” describing congressionally mandated intelligence reports on foreign interference as “an awkward process.” 

Ironically, despite Trump’s repeated insinuations of a “deep state” bent on undermining him, the very intelligence agencies ended up watering down assessments in order to avoid confrontations. As the study observes, “IC analysts looked to avoid conflict with policymakers and avoid charges of being part of the ‘deep state.’” 

The intelligence community’s deference to its political masters was by no means confined to the Trump administration. One former official told RAND that the “process always involves some degree of give and take between analysts and policymakers.” Indeed, the report provides a number of examples of intelligence bias during the Obama administration.

John A. Gentry, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst during the Obama administration, is quoted as saying that superiors told analysts to avoid “specifically identified terms that might trigger criticism of administration policy,” the study notes. Gentry also said that during the Obama years, intelligence analysis suffered from “politicization by omission”: leaving out issues from regular updates or assessments “because the results might displease superiors.”

In 2015, the year before Trump was elected, a survey of the members of the U.S. Central Command — the Pentagon’s combatant command for the Middle East — found that over 65 percent of respondents believed that their analysis was suppressed or distorted in the face of evidence due to editorial disagreement, politicization, or a mismatching with existing analytic lines, the study also notes.

Another example was alleged by a former official at the highest levels of the Obama administration. Obama’s former CIA Director Michael Hayden, the report notes, has written that the community turned a blind eye to Russian information operations due to the administration’s efforts to broker new diplomatic relations with Moscow. Not until 2015 did the U.S. come to grips with Russian efforts, by then just a year out from the 2016 elections famously marred by Russian meddling.

Clearly the intelligence community tilts its findings; but rather than in the direction of Langley, the Pentagon, or any intelligence agency, RAND concludes that it largely tilts toward the White House and its army of political appointees. 

“The RAND report provides an accurate picture of how much the intelligence-policy relationship sometimes departs depressingly far from the ideal of intelligence providing unbiased analysis to policymakers who use it to inform their decision-making,” Paul Pillar, a former national intelligence officer who is now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Study as well as the Quincy Institute, told The Intercept. 

“The report shows the variety of ways in which policymakers who are determined to use intelligence not to inform decisions but instead to sell their already established policies can pollute the process, ranging from blatant arm-twisting to subtle effects on the minds of intelligence officers who do not want to rock the boat,” Pillar said.

The post Spy Agencies Skewed Intel to Please Trump, and Obama Too appeared first on The Intercept.

With the 2024 elections looming, the Department of Homeland Security has a little-noticed weapon in its war on disinformation: comic books. Few have read them, but the series is attracting criticism from members of Congress. Calling the comics “creepy,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., complained earlier this month that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency-produced series was just another way for the federal government to “trample on the First Amendment” in its zeal to fight so-called disinformation.

“DC Comics won’t be adding these taxpayer-funded comic books … to their repertoire anytime soon,” cracked Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s annual report on government waste released in December. 

The comics read like well-meaning (if corny) attempts to grapple with efforts by foreign governments to influence American public opinion, as articulated in intelligence community assessments. But there is a risk that the federal government’s fight against foreign disinformation positions it as an arbiter of the truth, which raises civil liberties concerns. The efficacy of the DHS “Resilience Series” of comic books is also far from obvious. 

The members of Congress might be comforted to know that few people ever noticed the comics. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urges users to “share” their “Resilience Series” comics, but a search of the webpage’s address on X shows that it is linked to fewer than a dozen times. CISA also produced glossy-looking YouTube trailers for its two graphic novels that garnered just 4,000 and 6,000 views respectively — a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of views trailers for other graphic novels attract. 

For CISA, disinformation is no laughing matter. “Disinformation is an existential threat to the United States,” declares CISA’s webpage detailing its “Resilience Series” of comic books.

Third in sales by genre, only behind general fiction and romance novels, graphic novels are particularly popular among the youngest readers. One industry observer notes that in Japan, more paper is used for manga books than for toilet paper. School Library Journal concluded in their graphic novels survey last year that popularity increased over 90 percent year over year in school libraries. The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of school librarians reported opposition to graphic novels from teachers, parents, and others who didn’t consider them “real books.”

Though first released in 2020 in anticipation of the Trump–Biden presidential election, the comics were intended to be an evergreen resource in the war on disinformation. “Learn the dangers & risks associated with dis- & misinformation through fictional stories that are inspired by real-world events in @CISAgov’s Resilience Series,” the U.S. Attorney for Nevada posted on X last April. 

CISA produced two graphic novels, “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes.” “Real Fake” tells the story of Rachel O’Sullivan, a “gamer” and a “patriot” who infiltrates a troll farm circulating false narratives about elections to American voters. “Bug Bytes” addresses disinformation around Covid-19, following Ava Williams, a journalism student who realizes that a malicious cyber campaign spreading conspiracy theories about 5G technology is inspiring attacks on 5G towers.

“Fellow comic geeks, assemble!” CISA said when the comic books were initially released. “Let’s band together to take on disinformation and misinformation.” The CISA post quotes another X post by the FBI’s Washington field office recommending the graphic novels and exhorting the importance of “finding trusted information.”

“The resilience series products were released in 2020 and 2021 to raise awareness on tactics of foreign influence and disinformation,” a spokesperson for CISA told The Intercept, noting that despite continued reference by members of Congress and critics, that this series of comic books has now been discontinued.

“The problem is not that panels about African troll farms (Real Fake) or homegrown antivaxxers (Bug Bytes) might make readers feel insecure—it’s that they don’t make readers feel insecure enough,” writes Russ Castronovo, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and professor of American studies and English, in Public Books magazine. “Or, more precisely, these comics might be judged aesthetic failures because—due to their proximity to propaganda—they leave little space for the vulnerabilities inherent in the act of reading. So, while readers learn that meddling by foreign powers ‘is scary, especially in an election year,’ the graphic fictions commissioned by US cybersecurity assume reading itself to be a process whereby information (as opposed to disinformation) is obtained, questions are answered, and doubts are resolved.”

Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.” 

All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says. 

Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. 

Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.

“Over the past three years, Russia has implemented and run the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history,” Watts said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017. While Russia’s propaganda regarding its first invasion of Ukraine and Crimea was no doubt effective, that employed in 2016 against the U.S. presidential election was “neither well organized nor especially well resourced” according to a detailed study by the Pentagon-backed Rand Corporation. The think tank later concluded that “the impact of Russian efforts in the West has been uncertain.”

Co-author Haque, according to an interview in Forbes, became involved in the Resilience Series after a chance meeting at a bookstore with actor Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, who would later join Erly Stage’s advisory board and introduce Haque to his Americans contacts, which included Watts.

“There is now a real need for schools and public authorities to educate young people on how much fake news there is across all forms of media,” Haque told Forbes.

Related

The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones

Counter-disinformation has become a cottage industry in the federal government, with offices and programs now dedicated to exposing foreign influence, as The Intercept has previously reported. CISA’s Resilience Series webpage directs questions to an email for the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (not to be confused with the FBI’s own effort, the Foreign Influence Task Force, or the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center). In 2021, the CISA Task Force was replaced by a Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation team according to a government audit, which CISA tells The Intercept has now been rolled into something called “the Election Security and Resilience subdivision.” (Malinformation refers to information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate, according to CISA.)

The proliferation of various counter-disinformation entities has been disjointed, prompting the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general to conclude that “DHS does not have a unified, department-wide strategy to set overarching goals and objectives for addressing and mitigating threats from disinformation campaigns that appear in social media.”

CISA’s mission, originally focused on traditional cyber and critical infrastructure security, evolved in the wake of the 2016 election. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson officially designated the election systems as a part of critical infrastructure. Since then, CISA has expanded its focus to include fighting disinformation, arguing that human thought can be said to constitute infrastructure.

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in 2021. 

In pursuit of that cognitive infrastructure, CISA launched the Resilience Series, with an eye to mediums that would appeal to popular audiences.

“We have to find new ways to engage with people through mediums that use soft power and creative messaging, rather than being seen to preach,” Haque said in the Forbes interview.

The post Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation appeared first on The Intercept.

Retired Navy four-star Adm. William McRaven — highly paid leadership guru, business consultant, and special operations commander — received a $50 million “Courage and Civility Award” from richest-person-on-Earth Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this past week. Actress Eva Longoria received the other half of the $100 million grant: the exact amount the Bezos-owned Washington Post lost last year before cutting nearly 10 percent of its staff. 

For Bezos, the Post’s financial woes are mere pocket change. (With his net worth of $200 billion, covering the Washington Post’s financial deficit would be the equivalent of a person making $100,000 a year paying $50 to save over 200 jobs.) All of which is ironic given that Bezos says his motivation for buying the newspaper was “stewardship.”

“Support of American democracy through stewardship of the Washington Post, and financial contributions to the dedicated and innovative champions of a variety of causes,” Bezos said in 2018, demonstrates his “investment in the future of our planet and civilization.” 

Now, he is focused on repairing America’s descent into division, searching for leaders who “aim high, pursue solutions with courage, and always do so with civility.” The three-year-old award follows Bezos’s vow to donate most of his fortune toward reducing inequality and combating climate change.

Bezos is also a growing defense contractor who sat on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board during the Obama administration, an advisory panel that McRaven was also on at the same time. The admiral — famous for overseeing the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, and for his commencement address at the University of Texas where he told graduates to start by making their beds — retired in 2014 and has been making a killing in the civilian world. He sits on the board of oil giant ConocoPhillips, is senior adviser to investment firm Lazard, and on the federal advisory board of Palantir, the Pentagon contractor founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. McRaven has also parlayed his military career into paid speaker and bestselling author of motivational titles like “The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived” and “The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy),” paper-thin books that each dispense featherweight advice on civil life.

All of this has turned the friendly admiral into a multimillionaire, making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from board membership, publishing, and speaking. He holds $2 million worth of stock from ConocoPhillips according to a January 17 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. As chancellor for the University of Texas System, he raked in $2.5 million, making him the highest-paid public university official in the U.S. in 2018. He is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau and the Celebrity Speakers Bureau, where his fees range between $50,000 and $100,000 per speech. He owns two homes: one in Alexandria, Virginia, and another in Austin, Texas, worth some $5 million, property records reviewed by The Intercept show.

“Man’s compassion far exceeds his greed,” McRaven writes in his book “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations,” one of his many treatises that sprinkles the telling of his career from the first Gulf War through the death of bin Laden.

Since 2021, the Courage and Civility Award has found five recipients, all of whom, in their own ways, have taken a stand against Donald Trump and amassed vast personal fortunes — attributes that Bezos seems to value. The 2021 award recipient Van Jones has blasted the former president for years, alongside chef José Andrés who sued the president after comments he made about Mexican Americans. The 2022 recipient Dolly Parton rejected Trump’s offer for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and this year, Eva Longoria used her celebrity status to mobilize Latino voters against the former president.

Following this pattern, McRaven is also a very political admiral, writing multiple op-eds in Bezos’s Washington Post denouncing Trump. He has said that Trump’s criticisms of the news media represent “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.” In an opinion piece that took the form of a letter to the president, he denounced Trump’s own incivility. “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”

His partisanship doesn’t necessarily disqualify him from receiving millions in a charity grant that will in theory give others a leg up in the world and level the playing field, but it does raise the questions: Why him, and why can Bezos be so generous while starving a top-tier newspaper that is clearly in need of his benevolence?

Among his duties as paragon of civility, McRaven has declared his alliance with his national security blood brothers. When Trump stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance, McRaven jumped to his defense, daring Trump to “revoke my security clearance, too,” in the pages of the Washington Post. McRaven called Brennan, who is a vociferous Trump hater, “a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question.”

McRaven also took to the Washington Post defending Acting Director of National Intelligence Joe Maguire, whom Trump had just fired after his subordinate, Shelby Pierson, briefed Congress that the Russian government appeared to prefer Trump over Democratic candidates for the 2020 election. CNN later reported that Pierson had “overstated” the findings of the intelligence community.

Similarly when an obscure Navy Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was passed up for a second star, McRaven again went public, decrying Congress’s “trend of disrespect to the military.” Mr. Civility just didn’t mention why Congress blocked Losey’s promotion: Multiple investigations found he had retaliated against whistleblowers. 

When it comes to national security, McRaven is deployed everywhere. He sits on the board of the Gates Global Policy Center founded by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He sits on the board of the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation Advisory Council. He is an honorary board member of the International Spy Museum. He is on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Washington Post reports that McRaven will split the money from his Bezos award between the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which supports the families of fallen service members, and the BrainHealth Project, which provides mental health resources to veterans. 

The racket goes something like this: A billionaire pays a famous admiral, to pay charities that he is connected with (McRaven’s wife Georgeann is on the board of the Warrior Foundation), to pay disabled veterans, who are the victims of the failures of the national security elite to begin with. It is a modern trickle-down parable that, as always, leaves the worst off with a shiny consolation prize for sacrificing life and limb to their country. 

The national security-obsessed, veteran-loving, cowboy-hat-adorned Bezos has become the ultimate commander in chief of the national security elite, an ersatz Mr. Magoo with a trillion-dollar business that actually tears at the seams of America’s mottled social fabric, decimating small businesses that, unlike McRaven, cannot survive on “courage” and “civility” alone. 

Alongside Bezos, McRaven has formulated a certain conception of civility in which niceties that maintain the status quo emerge as the highest form of service. The destruction of the working class and the injuries sustained in their mad-man wars go unexamined as the admirals hand out Band-Aids. They perpetuate a certain elite consensus with regard to national security, one that drowns out every attempt to impact the societal needs like inequality and climate change which Bezos claims to address. (Bezos evidently doesn’t care that McRaven collects millions from the oil industry.)

One can read McRaven’s “Sea Stories,” review his speeches, and search through the Bezos philanthropy for a sense of who these blood brothers are, what they really believe in. But following the money is a far more telling endeavor.

Who is McRaven really? Former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condensed his storied military career into a G.I. Joe caricature, writing in his autobiography “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace” that “Bill made a big impression with his booming baritone, wide smile, and huge biceps.”

McRaven did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Bezos Cuts $50M Check to Celebrity Admiral as Washington Post Flounders appeared first on The Intercept.

The Pentagon is pursuing a high-tech program that will “minimize cognitive burden” on soldiers, according to budget documents released last week. The $40 million-plus classified program, codenamed “CARCOSA,” shares the same name as “the temple” in the first season of the HBO TV series “True Detective,” a place where an elite pedophile ring performs ritual abuse on children.

The program is overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon’s premier organization funding the development of futuristic weapons and military capabilities. 

There is of course no evidence that the military’s CARCOSA is involved in anything like that; but it’s unclear why, at a time when the White House has prioritized fighting “dangerous conspiracy theories,” DARPA is providing the conspiracy crowd with such fodder. The Intercept reached out to DARPA to inquire whether the elite research agency was aware of the strange coincidence or whether there’s a “True Detective” fan at the agency. DARPA did not respond at the time of publication.

The Pentagon’s CARCOSA is its own temple of information, an AI-driven aggregator that is intended to acquire, sort, and display the blizzard of information that reflects what is going on on a fast-moving future battlefield. “The Carcosa program is developing and demonstrating cyber technologies for use by warfighters during tactical operations,” DARPA’s new fiscal year 2025 budget request says. “Carcosa cyber technology aims to provide warfighters in the field with enhanced situational awareness of their immediate battlespace.”

CARCOSA, DARPA says, will help to “minimize cognitive burden on tactical cyber operators.” In other words, headaches caused by the same information overload we all have to deal with everyday. Individual cyber warriors on high-intensity battlefields such as Ukraine and Israel are inundated with data, from their own communications and IT systems, from a virtual Niagara of intelligence inputs, and from electronic attacks via computers, machines, and drones. On top of it all, the modern battlefield is a venue for “information operations,” which seek to manipulate what the enemy sees and believes.

CARCOSA will support an Army mission area called Cyberspace and Electromagnetic Activities, or CEMA, which provides battlefield commanders “with technical and tactical advice on all aspects of offensive and defensive cyberspace and electronic warfare operations.” The Army says CEMA operators are so inundated with information that they need augmented intelligence technology to help sort the signal from the noise.

CARCOSA stands for Cyber-Augmented Reality and Cyber-Operations Suite for Augmented Intelligence. “Augmented reality” refers to immersive technology that produces computer-generated images overlaying a user’s view of the real world, like Apple’s Vision Pro headset. The program supports development of various technologies, at least according to vague budget documents, all of which seek to defeat a new reality of combat: Individual soldiers and commanders can’t process all of the information that they are bombarded with. 

The full CARCOSA name, which has not been previously reported, appears in a November $26 million DARPA contract to Two Six Labs, a part of Two Six Technologies and owned by the Carlyle Group. Two Six Labs says it supplies “situational awareness interfaces for cyber operators to distributed sensor networks, from machine learning models that learn to reverse engineer malware to embedded devices that enable and protect our nation’s warfighters.” 

“We want to do everything we can to help the US government and the intelligence community,” says Two Six Technologies CEO Joe Logue. “Starting from over here for information operations and influence up through cyber, command control and operations.” In its three years of operations, the Arlington, Virginia, based company has doubled its national security contracts to some $650 million.

“DARPA’s Cyber-Augmented Operations, also known as CAOs, are a vast spectrum of military programs many of which seek to enhance, if not replace, humans with machines,” says Annie Jacobsen, author of “The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency.”

CARCOSA is also mentioned in a DARPA broad agency announcement released February 2023. In the announcement, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office solicits research proposals to create “novel cyber technologies” for warfighters. CARCOSA, it says, will be a 38-month-long program.

At least one other CARCOSA-related contract, this one worth $13 million, has been awarded to Chameleon Consulting Group, which also focuses on information operations, per its website. Raytheon Cyber Solutions, Inc.; Southwest Research Institute; SRI International; and Battelle Memorial Institute have also received CARCOSA contracts.

Though CARCOSA has appeared in the Pentagon’s budget since 2022, when DARPA sought initial funding for the program, this year’s $41.5 million request represents the largest yet for the program.

“For decades now, DARPA has been leading the world in machine learning systems,” Jacobsen told The Intercept. “Today this gets called AI, but ‘machine learning’ is, I think, a more appropriate term of art — machines are not yet intelligent.”

Time, it would seem, is a flat circle, to quote the iconic line from “True Detective,” and which has popularly come to denote something we’re doomed to repeat again and again and again.

The post Secret Pentagon Program Echoes Pedophile Ring in “True Detective” Series appeared first on The Intercept.

The purported threat of TikTok to U.S. national security has inflated into a hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a different story: U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing. That fact hasn’t stopped many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with empty conjecture and innuendo.

In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical. With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they are well placed to know.

The basic charge is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese company, could be compelled by the government in Beijing to use their app in targeted operations to manipulate public opinion, collect mass data on Americans, and even spy on individual users. (TikTok says it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked. This week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that “there’s no CCP ownership” of ByteDance, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.)

Though top national security officials seem happy to echo these allegations of Chinese control of TikTok, they stop short of saying that China has ever actually coordinated with the company.

Typical is an interview CIA Director William Burns gave to CNN in 2022, where he said it was “troubling to see what the Chinese government could do to manipulate TikTok.” Not what the Chinese government has done, but what it could do.

What China could do turns out to be a recurring theme in the statements of the top national security officials.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a 2022 talk at the University of Michigan that TikTok’s “parent company is controlled by the Chinese government, and it gives them the potential [emphasis added] to leverage the app in ways that I think should concern us.” Wray went on to cite TikTok’s ability to control its recommendation algorithm, which he said “allows them to manipulate content and if they want to [emphasis added], to use it for influence operations.”

In the same talk, Wray three times referred to the Chinese government’s “ability” to spy on TikTok users but once again stopped short of saying that they do so.

“They also have the ability to collect data through it on users which can be used for traditional espionage operations, for example,” Wray said. “They also have the ability on it to get access, they have essential access to software devices. So you’re talking about millions of devices and that gives them the ability to engage in different kinds of malicious cyber activity through that.”

Wray is referring to the potential ability, according to U.S. intelligence, to commandeer phones and computers connecting to TikTok through apps and the website.

In testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee in November 2022, Wray was even more circumspect, stressing that the Chinese government could use TikTok for foreign influence operations but only “if they so chose.” When asked by Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., if the Chinese government has used TikTok to collect information about Americans for purposes other than targeted ads and content, Wray only could acknowledge that it was a “possibility.”

“I would say we do have national security concerns, at least from the FBI’s end, about TikTok,” Wray said. “They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm which could be used for foreign influence operations if they so chose.”

The lack of evidence is not for lack of trying, as Wray alluded to during the same hearing. When asked by Harshbarger what is being done to investigate the Chinese government’s involvement in TikTok, Wray replied that he would see whether “any specific investigative work … could be incorporated into the classified briefing I referred to.”

The FBI, when asked by The Intercept if it has any evidence that TikTok has coordinated with the Chinese government, referred to Wray’s prior statements — many of which are quoted in this article. “We have nothing to add to the Director’s comments,” an FBI spokesperson said.

The fiscal year 2025 FBI budget request to Congress, which outlines its resource priorities in the coming year, was unveiled this week but makes no mention of TikTok in its 94 pages. In fact, it makes no mention of China whatsoever.

Since at least 2020, the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has investigated the implications of ByteDance’s acquisition of TikTok. The investigation followed an executive order by former President Donald Trump that sought to force TikTok to divest from its parent company. When that investigation failed to force a sale, a frustrated Congress decided to get involved, with the House passing legislation on Wednesday that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok. 

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the highest-ranking intelligence official in the U.S. government, was asked about the possibility that China might use TikTok to influence the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. Haines said only that it could not be discounted.

“We cannot rule out that the CCP could use it,” Haines said.

The relatively measured tone adopted by top intelligence officials contrasts sharply with the alarmism emanating from Congress. In 2022, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., deemed TikTok “digital fentanyl,” going on to co-author a column in the Washington Post with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling for TikTok to be banned. Gallagher and Rubio later introduced legislation to do so, and 39 states have, as of this writing, banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

None of this is to say that China hasn’t used TikTok to influence public opinion and even, it turns out, to try to interfere in American elections. “TikTok accounts run by a [People’s Republic of China] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022,” says the annual Intelligence Community threat assessment released on Monday. But the assessment provides no evidence that TikTok coordinated with the Chinese government. In fact, governments — including the United States — are known to use social media to influence public opinion abroad.

“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,” computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. “In 2016 Russia did this with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads like everybody else.”

This week, Reuters reported that as president, Trump signed a covert action order authorizing the CIA to use social media to influence and manipulate domestic Chinese public opinion and views on China. Other covert American cyber influence programs are known to exist with regard to Russia, Iran, terrorist groups, and other foreign actors. 

In other words, everybody’s doing it.

The post TikTok Threat Is Purely Hypothetical, U.S. Intelligence Admits appeared first on The Intercept.

Since retiring from the military last year, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit. From military pay of $204,000 a year, Milley is sure to skyrocket to compensation in the millions, especially because he is represented by the same high-powered speakers’ agency as Hillary Clinton, who faced criticism in 2016 for her paid speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Called “cashing in” by military officers, transitioning from capped government salaries to defense industry, private consulting for global risk management, or work with venture capital brings in lavish paydays. For retired generals, the invasion is swift. The recently retired chief of space operations for the Space Force, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, for example, has joined the board of directors for aerospace companies Impulse Space and Axiom Space, as well as becoming senior managing director for investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. Gen. James C. McConville, who served as chief of staff of the Army before retiring last year, has joined the board of directors of drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy and aerospace investment firm AE Industrial Partners, as an operating partner. 

Milley’s speaker’s agency, Harry Walker Agency is touting the retired general, who crossed swords with former President Donald Trump and continues to be a polarizing figure, for his insights on leadership and international conflicts. “His perspective is invaluable for audiences looking to understand the impact of current conflicts and managing risks on boards of directors and leadership teams who are responsible for making strategic decisions and identifying vulnerabilities,” the website says.

According to the speaker’s agency, Milley recently participated in a Q&A at a gathering of 160 CEOs organized by investment bank Moelis & Company, where he provided his “insider’s perspective on world affairs.”

The engagement has not been previously reported.

“He was terrific — we loved him!” said Moelis & Company, a global investment bank, in a review featured on the agency website. “It was fantastic!”

According to the agency website, Milley “provided crucial perspective to business leaders,” but provided little more detail.

On March 4, Milley also spoke at the American Council on Education’s 2024 Presidents and Chancellors Summit at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to an event page. A portrait of Milley appears on the list of major speakers and links to his Harry Walker Agency page. 

His speech at the summit was sponsored by Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting and accounting firms, an event page notes. The page describes his speech as exploring “the convergence of democracy, higher education, and moral leadership during times of crisis”; as well as “emphasizing the responsibilities of leaders to uphold democratic principles and inspire resilience in challenging times.” 

“The Summit was exclusively for presidents and chancellors, and there is no transcript,” Jonathan Riskind, vice president of public affairs and strategic communications for the American Council on Education, told The Intercept in response to a query.

Asked for transcripts of this and other speaking engagements, and for Milley’s compensation, Moelis & Company, the Harry Walker Agency, and Milley himself did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaker’s fees for former top officials like Milley are often substantial. During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Clinton came under fire for receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs alone in one year. Along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the couple raked in over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House.

Milley has emerged as an ardent critic of Trump — unusual for high-ranking military officers who typically eschew politics. In his final speech as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, in a swipe at Trump, Milley said that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

Trump replied with a statement on his social media platform Truth Social: “Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week.”

Clinton’s speeches reportedly earned her around $200,000 a pop — about the same as Milley’s annual salary when he was in uniform.

The post Gen. Mark Milley’s Second Act: Multimillionaire appeared first on The Intercept.

Gaming companies are coordinating with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to root out so-called domestic violent extremist content, according to a new government report. Noting that mechanisms have been established with social media companies to police extremism, the report recommends that the national security agencies establish new and similar processes with the vast gaming industry.

The exact nature of the cooperation between federal agencies and video game companies, which has not been previously reported, is detailed in a new Government Accountability Office report. The report draws on interviews conducted with five gaming and social media companies including Roblox, an online gaming platform; Discord, a social media app commonly used by gamers; Reddit; as well as a game publisher and social media company that asked the GAO to remain anonymous.

The Intercept reached out to the companies identified in the GAO report for comment, but none responded on the record at time of publication.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have mechanisms to share and receive domestic violent extremism threat-related information with social media and gaming companies,” the GAO says. The report reveals that the DHS intelligence office meets with gaming companies and that the companies can use these meetings to “share information with I&A [DHS’s intelligence office] about online activities promoting domestic violent extremism,” or even simply “activities that violate the companies’ terms of service.” Through its 56 field offices and hundreds of resident agencies subordinate field offices, the FBI receives tips from gaming companies of potential law-breaking and extremist views for further investigation. The FBI also conducts briefings to gaming companies on purported threats.

The GAO warns that FBI and DHS lack an overarching strategy to bring its work with gaming companies in line with broader agency missions. “Without a strategy or goals, the agencies may not be fully aware of how effective their communications are with companies, or how effective their information-sharing mechanisms serve the agencies’ overall missions,” the GAO says. The report ends with a recommendation that both agencies develop such a strategy — a recommendation that DHS concurred with, providing an estimated completion date of June 28 this year. 

“All I can think of is the awful track record of the FBI when it comes to identifying extremism,” Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who often streams while playing video games under the handle HasanAbi, says of the mechanisms. “They’re much better at finding vulnerable teenagers with mental disabilities to take advantage of.”

The GAO’s investigation, which covers September 2022 to January 2024, was undertaken at the request of the House Homeland Security Committee, which asked the government auditor to examine domestic violent extremists’ use of gaming platforms and social media. While there is no federal law that criminalizes domestic violent extremism as a category of crime, since 2019 the U.S. government has employed five domestic terrorism threat categories. These are defined by the FBI and DHS as racial/ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism, abortion-related violent extremism, and all other domestic terror threats. 

The GAO study also follows pressure from Congress to top gaming companies to crack down on extremist content. Last March, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to gaming companies Valve, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Riot Games, Roblox Corp, and Take-Two Interactive demanding that they take actions to police gamers. 

“Unlike more traditional social media companies — which in recent years have developed public facing policies addressing extremism, created trust and public safety teams, and released transparency reports — online gaming platforms generally have not utilized these tools,” Durbin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the letter, Durbin requested a briefing from the Justice Department on what channels exist “for DOJ and the online video game industry to communicate and coordinate” on the threat of “online video games by extremists and other malicious actors.”

The federal government’s interest in combating extremism has risen sharply following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed his national security team to conduct a comprehensive review of federal efforts to fight domestic terrorism, which the White House has deemed “the most urgent terrorism threat facing the United States” — greater than foreign terrorist groups like the Islamic State group. Biden’s directive resulted in the first ever national strategy for fighting domestic terrorism, released by the White House in June 2021. The strategy mentions “online gaming platforms” as a place where “recruiting and mobilizing individuals to domestic terrorism occurs.” 

According to the national strategy, the intelligence community assessed that extremists emboldened by events like January 6 “pose an elevated threat to the Homeland”; and that “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult.” 

The federal government says that sharing information with gaming and social media companies is another avenue to identify and combat extremism. The government also recognizes that there are constitutional and legal questions about Americans’ free speech rights. According to the GAO report, both the FBI and DHS indicated that they are proceeding with caution in light of federal litigation on such matters, including one case on its way to the Supreme Court.

In response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, a federal judge last year prohibited the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies from communicating with social media companies to fight what they consider misinformation. 

Federal law enforcement and intelligence have long focused on gaming as an avenue for both radicalization and as a backdoor platform for extremists to communicate. A 2019 internal intelligence assessment jointly produced by the FBI, DHS, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the National Counterterrorism Center and obtained by The Intercept warns that “violent extremists could exploit functionality of popular online gaming platforms and applications.” The assessment lists half a dozen U.S.-owned gaming platforms that it identifies as popular, including Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net, Fortnite, Playstation Xbox Live, Steam, and Roblox.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” former President Donald Trump said in 2019 after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “This includes the gruesome video games that are now commonplace.” 

The GAO report cites over a dozen expert participants in their survey, including three from the Anti-Defamation League as well as the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and several academic institutions. 

The Anti-Defamation League has testified to Congress multiple times about extremists’ use of gaming platforms. In 2019, ADL’s then-senior vice president of international affairs, Sharon Nazarian, was asked by Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., if gaming platforms “are monitored” and if there’s “a way AI can be employed to identify those sorts of conversations.” 

Nazarian replied that gaming platforms “need to be better regulated.”

The post The Feds Are Coming for “Extremist” Gamers appeared first on The Intercept.

When assessing State of the Union speeches, what isn’t said can be just as interesting as what is. 

During his speech last night, President Joe Biden did not mention how the war in Ukraine is ever going to end. He didn’t mention U.S. service member deaths since Hamas’s October 7 attack (including three U.S. troops killed by an attack drone in Jordan and two Navy SEALs who died during a mission to interdict a ship carrying weapons to Yemen). He didn’t talk about the 170 attacks on U.S. troops in Syria and Iraq since Israel’s war in Gaza began, the thousands of U.S. troops stationed in those same countries, plus Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Djibouti, and even in small numbers, in Lebanon and Egypt. He didn’t address the forces in central Asia and Pakistan still overseeing an over-the-horizon war in Afghanistan. He didn’t talk about U.S. military aid to Israel, or Benjamin Netanyahu, or how the United States plans to use its influence to bring about an end to the conflict.

Biden didn’t mention the creeping surveillance state, or his recent affirmation of the NSA’s spying powers by pushing for the reauthorization of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He didn’t speak of upcoming increases in the military, intelligence, and homeland security budgets or justify why more than $2 trillion is now needed. He didn’t talk about the administration’s laser focus on domestic terrorism and extremism or how to pursue threats of violence and illegality while preserving the public’s right to privacy and free speech. He didn’t speak to the alleged national security threat posed by TikTok or the White House’s support for legislation that will try to ban the powerhouse social media app. He didn’t mention the growing dangers of war in space (or the space race now underway). He didn’t talk about alarming developments like autonomous weapons, robots, and drone armies, all of which through AI already threaten to change the very nature of warfare. And of course, not a word was said about nuclear arms control or any programs seeking disarmament.

At a time when the U.S. is closer to war with Iran than it has been in decades, Biden made just one reference to the country: “Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran.”

Biden did not elaborate on what he means by containment: the large-scale U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s friends and proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The administration has gone to great lengths to play down the rising tensions with Iran.

“We are not at war in the Middle East,” Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said in January as U.S. bombs were dropping in the region. “We currently assess that the fight between Israel and Hamas remains contained in Gaza.”

But the Iran-aligned groups warring with the U.S. have directly cited the war in Gaza as a motivating factor, including the Iraqi militant group that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan this January, as The Intercept previously reported.

Biden did mention that he “ordered strikes to degrade Houthi capabilities and defend U.S. Forces in the region.” But he did not explain why, after all these years, U.S. forces remain in the region, or how long they will stay or what is the endgame — especially when the national security community claims that it is shifting its attention to Russia and China.

The presence of U.S. forces and bases throughout a region is an important fact because the Biden administration justifies its airstrikes, including those on Houthi targets in Yemen, as self-defense, circumventing the need for congressional war powers authorization. The move has rankled members of Congress and led to internal debate among Biden’s own national security lawyers. But there’s no sign Biden has ever pondered that the U.S. presence is itself an irritant that contributes to escalation.

When the Biden administration was asked during a Senate hearing on February 27 if there was any historical precedent for Operation Prosperity Guardian, the Pentagon’s name for the U.S.-led military coalition formed to respond to Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, a top administration official was stumped.

“Senator, I’d have to defer to colleagues to find the historical precedent for that,” Daniel Shapiro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, told Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind.

Despite all the genuine threats that weren’t mentioned, the speech still had a healthy dose of fearmongering, with Biden saying our democracy is facing greater peril than any point since the Civil War.

“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.”

The post What Joe Biden’s State of the Union Speech Didn’t Mention appeared first on The Intercept.

Aaron Bushnell’s death by self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington last month has provoked nationwide soul-searching about the war in Gaza. For the U.S. government though, the airman’s death excites a different kind of search: for so-called extremists, particularly left-wing ones. 

Last Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former Army officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking why and how the Pentagon could tolerate an airman like Bushnell in its ranks. Calling his death “an act of horrific violence” that was “in support of a terrorist group [Hamas],” Cotton goes on to ask about the Defense Department’s internal efforts to address extremism and whether Bushnell was ever identified as exhibiting extremist views or behaviors.

Cotton’s agitation to find Hamas supporters in uniform twists Bushnell’s political act, which Bushnell said was in support of the Palestinian people. But it also follows a longstanding urging by other members of Congress like Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — ranking Republican of the Judiciary Committee and former president pro tempore of the Senate — for the military to pursue some kind of similar treatment for leftists.

While studies show that support for extremism is similar or even lower among veterans than the general population, extremism in the active-duty military has become an obsession of the Washington brass since January 6. Soon after taking office, new secretary of defense Austin, a retired Army general, directed the military to conduct an all-hands “stand down” to address extremism in the ranks, commissioning a number of panels and studies to evaluate white nationalism and neo-Nazi support among service members.

Outside of the Defense Department, the FBI is responsible for domestic counterterrorism. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began last October, it has been focused on any foreign blowback on the United States.

“In a year when the [foreign] terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans inside the United States to a whole ‘nother level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told cadets at West Point on Monday. “We cannot — and do not — discount the possibility that Hamas or another foreign terrorist organization may exploit the current conflict to conduct attacks here, on our own soil,” Wray told Congress right after the Gaza war began.

Will Bushnell’s death, and congressional pressure, open the door to build some speculative link between domestic supporters of Palestine and the bureau’s foreign-oriented anti-Hamas work?

Though Bushnell’s suicide was intended to demonstrate his anguish over the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he also embraced anarchism, or at least a present-day articulation of anarchism that is a general rejection of established authority. Bushnell’s posts on Reddit and other social media platforms before his death reflected this embrace of anarchism, and he chose the anarchist symbol as his profile picture for the Twitch account he used to livestream his self-immolation. His Facebook page also followed and liked pages for several anarchist groups. The anarchist collective CrimethInc. also said in a blog post that Bushnell had emailed the group shortly before his death.

Bushnell was also a community activist in San Antonio, Texas, where he was stationed. The Democratic Socialists of America San Antonio chapter issued a statement expressing solidarity with Bushnell and mentioning his work with them on homelessness. “He was an anarchist,” a San Antonio DSA member who interacted with Bushnell told The Intercept, asking that their name not be used. “He had a good nose for recognizing coercive / unhealthy organizing structures and practices; and was very intentional about his relationships with other people.”

Anarchism and the FBI

Since 2019, the FBI has used five “threat categories” to describe domestic terrorism: Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism (AGAAVE), Animal Rights or Environmental Violent Extremism, Abortion-Related Violent Extremism, and “All Other Domestic Terrorism Threats,” which is defined as “furtherance of political and/or social agendas which are not otherwise exclusively defined under one of the other threat categories.”

The AGAAVE threat, the FBI says, “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists.” FBI data reveals that 31 percent of its investigations relate to AGAAVEs and 60 percent of all investigations include cases categorized as AGAAVE and “civil unrest.” Most of that focus since January 6 has been on groups that participated in the protests at the Capitol and supporters of Donald Trump.

Behind the scenes though, according to congressional testimony reported here for the first time, the FBI maintains a program specifically for combating anarchists, called the Anarchist Extremism Program. In Senate testimony, the FBI says that it had increased its targeting of anarchist “violent extremists” across the country by using both human and technical sources to spy on them. Since the nationwide protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the bureau has tasked field offices to tap confidential informants to develop better intelligence about anarchists. In 2021, the FBI more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload; and Wray told Congress that arrests of what the bureau calls “anarchist violent extremists” were more numerous in 2020-2021 (the months around January 6) than in the three previous years combined.

An internal FBI threat advisory obtained by The Intercept defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as individuals “who consider capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive,” and “oppose economic globalization; political, economic, and social hierarchies based on class, religion, race, gender, or private ownership of capital; and external forms of authority represented by centralized government, the military, and law enforcement.”

By the FBI’s definition, little of this applies to Bushnell’s own articulation of his political views, despite the anarchist label. But the airman’s protest fulfills the push by many Republicans and conservatives to get the FBI to equally focus on leftists. In a 2021 hearing, Grassley pushed for more investigations of those on the left, alluding to the bureau’s anarchist extremism program. 

“Former Attorney General Barr stated that the FBI has robust programs for white supremacy and militia extremism, but a significantly weaker anarchist extremism program,” Grassley said to Wray. “How do you plan to make your left-wing anarchist extremism program as robust as your white supremacy and malicious extremism program?”

At a press briefing last Thursday that discussed Bushnell’s ties to anarchism, the Pentagon appeared to hint that his death might be considered an act of extremism.

“A review of Aaron Bushnell’s social media account indicates that he has some pretty strong anarchist views,” a reporter asked. “Under the Pentagon’s definition of extremists, would he fall under that?” 

“I do think it’s fair to say that suicide by self immolation is an extreme act,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder replied, promising a “full investigation.”

The post Will Aaron Bushnell’s Death Trigger Anarchism Witch Hunt? appeared first on The Intercept.

The cable, written by officials with the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, warns about the potential effects of an all-out Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians, driven south by Israeli evacuation orders, are sheltering from Israel’s war on Gaza.

“A potential escalation of military operations in within Southern Gaza’s Rafah Governorate could result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response, multiple relief actors have warned USAID’s Levant Disaster Assistance Response Team,” the cable says.

“Ahead of the proposed military operation, the impact of hostilities has stretched the capacity of Gaza’s health system beyond its limit.”

In its “Key Points,” the cable says, “An offensive in Rafah would likely block the entry and transport of fuel and life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout the enclave, rendering critical infrastructure inoperable and leaving people in Gaza without food, medicine, shelter, and water.”

Though highlighting the consequences of an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, the cable also includes a more subtle warning: Rafah is well past the point of crisis — with Israeli bombs already raining down.

“As of mid-February relief actors had reported escalating panic and increased breakdown of social order in Rafah amid an uptick in aerial bombardment,” the cable says. The communique stresses that Gaza’s health system is already in a dire state: “Ahead of the proposed military operation, the impact of hostilities has stretched the capacity of Gaza’s health system beyond its limit.”

Marked “sensitive but unclassified,” the cable was sent Monday morning from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem’s Office of Palestinian Affairs to State Department officials in Washington, with copies sent to, among others, the National Security Council, secretary of defense, and the CIA.

The cable comes as calls were growing for the Biden administration to oppose an Israeli offensive in Rafah and, more broadly, orchestrate a ceasefire in the war that, since October 7, has seen about 2,000 Israelis and 30,000 Palestinians killed.

Asked about the cable, the State Department did not immediately responded to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for USAID said the agency doesn’t comment on internal documents and pointed to a remarks made last week by Samantha Power, the agency’s administrator, in the West Bank. “The United States has been clear that we cannot support a campaign in Rafah without a credible plan to protect civilians who are living there,” Power said. “And we have seen no credible plan to move these people who are in Rafah to safety, to get them adequate shelter, and to relocate the humanitarian operations.”

“No Viable Evacuation Options”

On February 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to prepare evacuation plans for Rafah in anticipation of a ground offensive. But there’s nowhere for civilians to go, a point acknowledged in the diplomatic cable.

“At present, there appear to be no viable evacuation options for the 1.5 million in Rafah,” says the diplomatic cable.

Over half of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are currently sheltering in the environs of Rafah, which has swelled to more than seven times its normal population, the cable notes. The Rafah Governorate, the southernmost of four regions of the Gaza Strip, covers about 25 square miles, which the cable says is roughly the same size as Syracuse, New York, with its 150,000 people.

Palestinians from other parts of Gaza fled south as the Israel Defense Forces began its military campaign in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-led attacks. Israel said it opened evacuation corridors, though reports of fighting along the routes was routine.

As internally displaced people, or IDPs, passed through the governorate north of Rafah, according to the cable, they were forced to leave their belongings behind.

“In Southern Gaza’s Khan Younis Directorate, the IDF have repeatedly screened and stripped IDPs of most of their possessions,” the cable says, adding that Palestinians “spent months” acquiring basic necessities in Rafah, such as blankets.

The memo warns that while some people want to make the dangerous trip back to locales further north in Gaza, “a large portion of those residing in Rafah, including elderly populations, exhausted IDPs, and those with reduced mobility, would likely remain in the governorate during the potential military operation due to lack of viable alternatives, heightening the risk of mass casualties.” 

“The World Wants Us to Die”

A full-fledged ground offensive in Rafah could have devastating consequences for humanitarian aid throughout the Gaza Strip. Since the October 7 attacks, the Gaza Strip only has two operational border crossings — both in the Rafah Governorate.

Rafah borders the Sinai Peninsula and is home to a crossing with Egypt. The governorate also has a crossing with Israel, called Kerem Shalom.

In a section of the diplomatic cable titled “Rafah Offensive to Halt All Humanitarian Aid to Gaza,” the authors wrote, “A military operation in Rafah may restrict humanitarian assistance from entering the governorate and hinder relief actors stationed in Rafah from reaching people in other areas of the enclave.”

“A military operation in Rafah may restrict humanitarian assistance from entering the governorate and hinder relief actors stationed in Rafah from reaching people in other areas.”

Rafah is already the site of an ongoing Israeli bombardment. The area has been pounded by airstrikes for weeks. Following a set of Israeli airstrikes in Rafah that killed at least 13 people in February, the Biden administration said that it did not constitute a “full-scale offensive.”

“It is not our assessment that this air strike is the launch of a full-scale offensive happening in Rafah,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. He added that “we do not support a full-scale military operation there going ahead.”

The U.S. is unaware when the full-scale operation might happen. “As of March 1, GoI” — government of Israel — “officials have not indicated a specific timeline for the potential military operation,” the cable says.

The cable quotes aid partners on the ground in Gaza, one of whom warned that transiting out of Rafah had become difficult and dangerous because of highly congested roads: “Another partner noted hopelessness among its staff who reported, ‘the world wants us to die.’”

Update: March 5, 2024, 10:59 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include comment from USAID made after publication.

The post Leaked U.S. Cable: Israeli Invasion of Rafah Would Have “Catastrophic Humanitarian Consequences” appeared first on The Intercept.

What the Pentagon hasn’t mentioned is that Tower 22 is also a drone base conducting long-range reconnaissance on militants in neighboring Syria and Iraq for airstrikes, according to two U.S. military sources. The base also serves as a staging facility for special operations forces and a medevac helicopter home base.

And while the Pentagon says Tower 22’s mission was to combat the Islamic State, or ISIS, since Hamas’s assault on Israel in October, its focus has turned to Iran-backed militia groups. 

“To call Tower 22 a logistics support base is complete bullshit.”

“To call Tower 22 a logistics support base is complete bullshit,” an Air Force airman, whose unit was recently stationed at the base, told The Intercept. Logistics was a small part of the mission, amounting to weekly food and fuel deliveries to the nearby Al-Tanf base.

“The main purpose of Tower 22 is to operate drones to spy on insurgents in Iraq and Syria, for targeting purposes,” the airman said. “The main objective I witnessed was taking out targets.”

Tower 22 provided targeting intelligence to Air Force assets stationed at other bases in Jordan, such as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, to use in strikes, the airman said.

An early news story on the drone attack that killed the U.S. service members cited unnamed officials discussing a preliminary report that the drone managed to enter Tower 22 because it was mistaken for another friendly drone returning to the base. (The Intercept later reported that the base lacked adequate air defenses.) Despite the account pointing to a drone presence, few questioned the Pentagon’s refrain that base’s purpose was logistics.

In interviews with defense sources and experts, however, a picture emerges of Tower 22’s purpose as a key base from which to support hostilities with Iran-aligned groups, even as the Biden administration insists that it does not want war with Tehran. The shift in its mission, from fighting ISIS to fighting groups linked with Iran, has not been acknowledged by the Defense Department, which still insists that this is part of its war on ISIS. (The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.)

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the troops killed by a kamikaze drone on January 28 were deployed there “to work for the lasting defeat of ISIS.” U.S. forces continue to operate in Syria under the legal basis of Operation Inherent Resolve, the Pentagon’s name for the international campaign against ISIS that began in 2014. But experts say it’s unlikely that counter-ISIS mission is the main focus.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser and now with the International Crisis Group, a think tank that works to prevent and resolve wars, said, “Whatever they’re doing there, there’s very little evidence that it’s counter-ISIS.”

Counter-ISIS Mission?

When ISIS was driven from their strongholds years ago, the withdrawal of U.S forces from Syria finally seemed within reach. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” former President Donald Trump said in 2018, later announcing that he would withdraw all U.S. troops from the country.

Finucane explained that Trump was outmaneuvered by hawks, like his national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, who wanted to maintain the troop presence but with a new focus: Iran.

One of Tower 22’s functions is to provide support to Al-Tanf, a nearby U.S. military base in Syria whose official purpose is to combat ISIS. A Pentagon inspector general report last year found that there were “no kinetic engagements,” or combat incidents, by coalition forces at Al-Tanf. 

While Tower 22 may have provided logistics such as food and fuel for training operations at Al-Tanf, the lack of combat involving troops at the larger base indicates a diminished role for both facilities in the fight against ISIS.

“If Tanf doesn’t have a counter-ISIS function, it’s hard to see how a support facility for Tanf does,” said Finucane.

The inspector general report, covering data through September 30, preceded Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has spurred an intensified conflict with Iranian-backed groups in the region. The group that claimed credit for the attack on Tower 22 that killed three troops cited as its motivation U.S. support for Israel in the war, as The Intercept has previously reported.

Amid the increase in fighting, the U.S. is faced with a conundrum: how to respond to attacks from groups that the anti-ISIS coalition was not meant to fight.

“The counter-ISIS mission is the only legal basis there is for the U.S. to be there,” said Finucane. “There’s no legal basis to have U.S. troops in Syria to be countering Iran.”

The Pentagon’s solution has been to cast military operations against these Iranian-aligned groups as defensive in nature and necessary for force protection, which the legal basis for the anti-ISIS mission allows for.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that it had killed a militia commander for participating in attacks on U.S. forces in the region, a likely reference to Tower 22.

“The United States will continue to take necessary action to protect our people,” the Defense Department said, emphasizing the self-defense framing. “We will not hesitate to hold responsible all those who threaten our forces’ safety.” 

The post “Logistics” Outpost in Jordan Where 3 U.S. Troops Died Is Secretly a Drone Base appeared first on The Intercept.