Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.

“Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”

A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.

In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.

“There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”

Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.

“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”

Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.

Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.

The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.

There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide report doesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.

Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled.

In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient.

“The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.

A Pattern of Abuse

When Spc. Mayra Diaz was assaulted on the Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, she was lucky to survive.

Diaz was blindfolded, with her hands bound over her head, having water poured on her face — “waterboarding me and causing me to choke,” Diaz later wrote. Her attacker “then wrapped a cord around my neck in an attempt to kill me.”

The assailant was a superior, Sgt. Greville Clarke, who knocked on her door at the barracks before threatening her with a pistol and raping her during the attack. The Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks; officials chose not to issue a public warning, citing concerns about compromising the investigation and causing potential panic.

The problems of homicide and suicide among women in the Army are inextricable from the prevalence of sexual assault. In some cases, like Diaz’s, a sexual attack involves an attempt on a woman’s life. Rape and sexual abuse are known to be detrimental to mental health, increasing the risk of suicide or self harm.

“There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for victims of military sexual trauma. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”

Male soldiers faced a smaller increase in suicide rates compared to civilian men than Army women did compared to civilian women, and men in the Army have a lower risk of dying by homicide than their non-military counterparts.

In fact, The Intercept’s investigation found, suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.

Some cases have made national headlines, such as the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, who took her own life at 20 years old after reporting sexual harassment.

For Ruiz’s family, the timing of her death raised troubling questions, echoing fellow Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillén’s infamous 2020 murder by an Army specialist. A subsequent Army inquiry into Ruiz’s case, reported by Telemundo, pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”

Related

Army Sergeants at Fort Hood Fear for the Safety of Their Soldiers

Years earlier, in the wake of Guillén’s death, an independent review revealed “a total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Investigators issued 70 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul of the military’s sexual harassment and assault prevention programs.

But the violence didn’t stop. Women at Fort Hood continued to experience a grim roll call of harm: Homicide. Sexual assault. Suicides.

Three deaths at Fort Hood were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained by The Intercept.

Counting Guillén and Ruiz, there were nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years. The Defense Department’s most recent suicide report does not provide data on how many suicide decedents experienced sexual trauma, although the Pentagon has provided this data in previous years.

From 2001 to 2023, nearly 1 in 4 women service members experienced sexual assault, according to the Brown University’s Costs of War project, much higher than the numbers annually reported by the Pentagon. Research identifies those experiences as a key driver of suicide risk. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among women veterans have risen faster than among men.

In Diaz’s view, institutional failures were a key factor in her assault.

“Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks,” Diaz wrote in a federal tort claim, “Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”

Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. He died by suicide in custody.

Diaz was “in a U.S. Army base in a locked barracks, opening the door to someone in uniform. It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do,” Christine Dunn, an attorney representing Diaz, told The Intercept. “You don’t expect someone who’s in a uniform to be a serial predator.”

Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post, and only after she and her sexual assault representative made clear that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave.

“I suffered from extreme paranoia, exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large,” Diaz wrote. “I abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened to me. … I began going to weekly therapy but have stopped going because I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.”

The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or reports of Clarke’s predation specifically.

The anxiety, Diaz wrote, has never fully gone away.

“What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” her complaint stated. “It was entirely preventable.”

False and Frivolous

Last year, Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change its 15-6 regulation, which governs the process for investigating military-related misconduct like sexual harassment. Now the first step is verifying the “credibility of accusers with new disciplinary measures for soldiers who submit knowingly false or frivolous complaints.

Some fear the rule may discourage those experiencing sexual harassment from reporting incidents, perpetuating a “culture of victim blaming,” according to Protect Our Defenders’ Connolly.

Related

Pentagon Considers Cutting Its Sexual Assault Rules

While Hegseth rolls back protections, the issue of violence against women in the military appears to be getting worse. The Intercept’s analysis shows that from 2011 to 2020, the per capita rate of women dying by suicide or homicide in the Army was 15 per 100,000. From 2021 to 2024, following the Army’s attempted reforms in the wake of Vanessa Guillén’s killing, the rate increased over 35 percent, to 21 per 100,000.

And deaths continued their pace in 2025.

Siegal McIntyre, the UNC professor studying domestic abuse, pointed to cases like that of Sgt. Francine Martinez, who was just weeks away from her 25th birthday on a night out at Fort Hood in September 2021, when she ran into the father of her child. He was a fellow soldier with whom she had recently separated, and Martinez had filed for child support weeks earlier.

An argument broke out, and when Martinez got into a car to leave, he followed, and eventually shot her in the head. She was hospitalized for two weeks before dying from her injuries, leaving behind her 1-year-old.

Research and Pentagon data indicate that rates of domestic and intimate partner violence in the military, particularly in the Army, are higher than the civilian population. Most victims are women, who also make up most of the homicide cases tied to that violence.

Martinez’s death was one of three cases the Defense Department reported in 2021 in which service members killed someone in a domestic or interpersonal dispute.

But data compiled by The Intercept identified at least seven cases that year in which service members were suspected of killing a spouse or partner in acts of domestic or intimate partner violence — more than double the official count.

“When the situation involves a marriage or partnership between agents and service members, it only complicates reporting,” said Siegal McIntyre.

A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report from 2021 suggests the number could be higher still, identifying several additional domestic violence-related homicides. The Intercept’s investigation also found other years’ congressionally mandated reports also have data tracking problems.

A Project on Government Oversight investigation revealed thousands of abuse cases involving Army personnel were mishandled, many never entered into tracking systems. Investigators could only look at 10 out of more than 60 Army installations. A Government Accountability Office report found the Pentagon doesn’t reliably screen for sexual assault when service members seek care or leave service and lacks systems to prioritize treatment or ensure confidential, long-term support.

“I don’t think there’s a mechanism within the Army for holding itself accountable,” said Dunn, who is also representing some of the 80 victims suing Army gynecologist Maj. Blaine McGraw, who was assigned to Fort Hood in 2023; he has since been accused of recording and making harmful physical contact with women during gynecological exams. (The Army did not comment on McGraw’s case, which remains ongoing.)

Some women who came forward had gone to McGraw seeking rape kits for sexual assault and say his actions further traumatized and distressed them.

“When the institution is facilitating the assaults and allowing them to happen, the institution needs to be held accountable,” Dunn said. “Almost every client who comes to me wants to come forward so that this wouldn’t happen to other women.”

A Failing System

In response to questions from The Intercept, the Army acknowledged having recorded more homicides than were noted in the dataset provided based on The Intercept’s FOIA request.

Between 2021 and 2023, the Army recorded a total of 16 homicides among active-duty women, Hagan told The Intercept. The data provided to The Intercept for its FOIA request counts only nine.

Hagan did not respond to follow-up questions on the discrepancy, and the Army did not provide data outside the years 2021 to 2023.

But the additional homicides would make the disparities found by The Intercept’s investigation even wider. If the same pattern of undercounting extends across the full 14-year span of our data, the true toll could be substantially higher.

After the independent review of Fort Hood following Guillén’s killing, Hagan said, the Army “implemented a series of major reforms to strengthen prevention, reporting, and accountability for sexual harassment and assault.” It shifted its criminal investigations division to civilian leadership, requiring more independent investigations, establishing stricter missing-soldier response protocols, and expanding data-driven oversight of cases.

But the deaths have continued, including another homicide at Hood last year. To advocates, there are other solutions to address these failures.

“You have to call DoD into Congress and demand answers on why progress hasn’t been made,” said Connolly. “Congress could scrutinize the data on domestic violence and other issues. They can appropriate more resources to DV investigations and hold hearings.”

“The potential solution lies with how funding is or isn’t tied to oversight,” Siegal McIntyre said. “Without Congress doing its job, nothing can change.”

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a House Armed Services Committee member and Air Force veteran, said The Intercept’s findings reflect a broader failure of leadership and oversight.

“This report is staggering, and unfortunately, unsurprising,” she said. “Servicewomen consistently bear the brunt of harassment, assault, retaliation, and systemic failures within the ranks, and it is costing them their careers, their safety, and in far too many cases, their lives.”

In a 1995 Defense Department study on homicide victims by gender, female service members across active-duty branches were killed at higher rates than both their male counterparts and women nationally. A Marine Corps and Navy-specific study covering 1995 to 1999 found similarly elevated risks.

The Pentagon never did further analysis. Ana Roque believes that change would fundamentally start with how the military builds itself to protect women like her daughter.

“I understand that the country needs soldiers, but recruiters need to be more careful regarding where these individuals come from,” Roque said. She called for more police and camera surveillance on bases, arguing that if it had been present, “they could have seen him moving my daughter’s body in broad daylight.”

She wishes she could have her daughter back.

“She always had a smile, no matter how difficult her day was,” Roque said. “She made time to help colleagues with various issues and never said no. I have many stories written in my notebook from soldiers and civilians who knew her and told me, ‘She saved me,’ simply by taking a minute to listen to them. She loved her family; we would talk three times a day: at 7 a.m., during my lunch break, and at night, when she would always say ‘Good night, Mommy.’”

How we analyzed the data

Reporters working for The Intercept submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Pentagon seeking data on all U.S. Army active-duty noncombat deaths from 2011 through August 2025. In response, the Department of Defense provided a spreadsheet detailing 5,285 U.S. Army deaths over the 14-year period categorized by rank, gender, military occupation, and cause of death. The latter was classified as either illness, self-inflicted, accident, pending, or undetermined.

To calculate the per capita suicide and death rates for women in the U.S. Army in this time period, The Intercept pulled manpower data from the Defense Department for each year in our analysis to provide the total number of women in the Army. National and international data on homicide and suicide was pulled from the FBI Crime Data Report, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to compare suicide and homicide rates.

There is no publicly available equivalent data for Army veterans, nor has such an analysis been done for the Navy, Air Force, or Marines.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

The post Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants appeared first on The Intercept.

While Feindt sat in the Senate chamber, her 4-year-old son was in the military’s care, spending the day at the North Post Child Development Center at Fort Belvoir, in nearby Virginia. There, according to records reviewed by The Intercept, he was subjected to treatment that would leave lasting psychological effects.

It took a year for Feindt and her husband to figure out what it was.

In a series of interviews with The Intercept, Feindt described a grueling pattern of obfuscation in which military officials refused to answer questions about her child’s treatment, directed her to file public records requests, and claimed not to have the attendant evidence — then produced it months later. Military experts characterized these delays as part of a pattern in which the institution seeks to slow-walk and minimize findings of child abuse or mistreatment to decrease reputational damage. Over a year of persistent requests, Feindt and her husband finally pieced together a picture of their child’s treatment during at least two instances that January: The day of the hearing, when staff mocked and harassed the 4-year-old, and a few days earlier, when surveillance video showed them stepping on his feet and pinning his legs under a table. Local authorities later classified the treatment as child abuse.

“My son barely has the words to describe what happened to him,” Feindt told The Intercept. “You can see it in the video — they’re screaming while the abuse is taking place.”

Three other military families whose children suffered maltreatment in U.S. Army facilities described similar roadblocks. Parents who sought surveillance footage in other abuse investigations described receiving heavily redacted videos, incomplete clips, or footage with audio removed.

“This is a standard tactic in administrative cases,” said Ryan Sweazey, a retired Air Force officer and former inspector general. “They tell you the investigation is done, and if you want to challenge it, you have to file a FOIA request. The report then comes back heavily redacted months or years later.”

That’s what happened to the Feindt family: Army officials allowed them to review only a limited portion of the footage and would not provide copies of the video. While they watched, Feindt and her husband recorded audio and later described the scenes in a memorandum to Defense Department officials, both of which they shared with The Intercept. When the family sought additional footage and records, Feindt said officials directed them to file a Freedom of Information Act request before saying the remaining footage had been deleted after review.

According to Feindt’s memorandum, three staff members watched the teacher pin the 4-year-old’s legs and mock him without intervening. The footage then shows the teacher yanking the child upward by his clothing, grabbing him by the wrists, and pushing him out of camera view, Feindt and her husband write. In the audio the family shared with The Intercept, a child Feindt identified as her son can be heard screaming for the teacher to stop.

Accusations of child abuse in the Army are handled through a quasi-judicial body known as the Incident Determination Committee, or IDC, which operates without many of the safeguards found in civilian courts. These panels can include social workers involved in the underlying case, members of the chain of command, or personnel with limited subject-matter expertise. The committee applies a “preponderance of information” standard that experts say can produce conclusions at odds with civilian investigators reviewing the same evidence.

Once the committee reaches a determination, parents are typically not allowed to review how the decision was made. Proceedings occur behind closed doors, with no transcript, evidentiary record, or opportunity for cross-examination available to families or attorneys.

“It’s one entity acting as judge, jury and executioner. There is no real due process, and there are almost no checks and balances,” said Sweazey.

The Feindt family was left unsure why their IDC did not substantiate abuse claims despite medical concerns and video evidence reviewed by investigators. Feindt tried to attend the committee’s hearing, but her request was denied. Afterward, she sought additional CCTV footage from the daycare, but Fort Belvoir officials told her the case was closed and she would have to file a FOIA request.

The system overseeing military child care centers is so fragmented that even grieving parents struggle to determine who is responsible when something goes wrong, said Jason Degenhard, a retired Army master sergeant who served in special operations. In 2012, Degenhard’s 4-month-old son was in the care of the child development center on Pope Air Force Base (which today is part of Army base Fort Bragg) when a caregiver placed him on his stomach for tummy time, propped him against a rolled blanket, and left the room, as reported by WRAL News in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The infant’s muscles were not developed enough to support his weight, and he suffocated, causing catastrophic brain damage. The baby, named Sonny, was removed from life support days later.

“If you are a new parent trying to figure out how these centers are doing, you really do not have anything to go off of,” Degenhard said. In his telling, his chain of command supported the family immediately after Sonny’s death, but he remained troubled by what he described as limited institutional accountability afterward. Although the center was located on Pope Air Force Base, it operated under Army garrison authority, and Degenhard said the overlapping bureaucracies often left the family unsure who had the authority to provide answers or accept responsibility.

After federal prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges, the Degenhards settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government. Their emotional distress claims were dismissed.

“The heartbreak goes beyond the personal,” said Degenhard, who is still suffering from grief 14 years later. “The professional heartbreak is the lack of accountability, the lack of communication, and the lack of supervision.”

Feindt’s son became fearful and mistrustful of adults, regressed in potty training, and developed nightmares after Hegseth’s January 2025 confirmation, she told The Intercept. The family transferred him to another daycare, where Feindt said he struggled to adjust and accumulated roughly 20 behavioral incident reports in his first month, prompting administrators to bring in trauma specialists for support. His doctors said his symptoms resembled post-traumatic stress.

Army internal documents and communications acknowledged that supervisors watched her son being mistreated but did not intervene; no mandatory reporters documented the incident; and the parents were never notified. The conduct aligns with the Defense Department’s criteria for emotional maltreatment of a minor, but the Army IDC refused to classify the child’s treatment as abuse.

“For 15 months, the military told us this didn’t meet criteria,” Feindt said. “They made our lives a living hell.”

More than a year after the incident, in March 2026, Fairfax County Child Protective Services substantiated the case as child abuse and neglect, according to information provided to the family and confirmed by The Intercept. The finding will remain on the caregiver’s record for seven years.

On May 1, Fort Belvoir Child and Youth Services sent a letter to parents acknowledging a “founded disposition of a child abuse allegation,” stating that one caregiver had been removed from the facility and another was in the process of being terminated.

Records reviewed by The Intercept indicate the conduct at the childcare center extended beyond a single confrontation involving Feindt’s son.

Investigative materials obtained through FOIA describe repeated incidents in which caregivers allegedly mocked, threatened, and harassed children inside the classroom. Investigator notes reviewed by The Intercept describe a caregiver tugging a child’s hair, lifting a child by the back of their shirt, roughly repositioning children during classroom activities, and swinging a broom at a child.

In November 2021, when Pete Hegseth was a co-host on “Fox & Friends Weekend” and Amanda Feindt was an Army major, a storage tank maintained by the U.S. military began leaking jet fuel into the drinking water supply at Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam in Oahu, Hawaii. In what became known as the Red Hill incident, for the name of the fuel storage facility, about 20,000 gallons of JP-5 jet fuel contaminated drinking water for roughly 93,000 people, including members of the military and civilians. The Associated Press reported that about 6,000 people were poisoned.

Feindt and her family were among the military households exposed to contaminated drinking water during the Red Hill fuel leak. After developing severe gastrointestinal symptoms, the entire family sought emergency medical care. Her infant son suffered chemical burns after bathing; her husband underwent multiple medical procedures for ongoing complications; and her daughter later developed neurological issues that the family believes stemmed from the exposure. The Feindts were evacuated from their home, shuffled between seven hotels, and relocated across the country twice. Feindt, a former cancer patient, developed enlarged and suspicious cervical lymph nodes.

Feindt became a substantiated whistleblower and lead plaintiff in a lawsuit over the fuel leak, arguing that the contamination had upended her family’s health, finances, military career, and daily life. Hegseth was of the first national reporters to contact her about Red Hill.

“There was a lot of back-and-forth by email,” Feindt said, recalling that Hegseth knew her attorney and would write from his personal Gmail as he followed the case. “He would check in about Red Hill, and we would give updates to him and Fox. He always seemed like he would advocate for us as a reporter.”

In the four years since Feindt’s exposure at Red Hill, the family has managed more than 700 medical appointments, multiple surgeries, and long hospitalizations. The Army moved the family to Fort Belvoir so Feindt could enter the Soldier Recovery Unit, a program intended to support service members with complex medical issues.

When her son experienced abuse at the Fort Belvoir childcare center, Red Hill came back to haunt her.

Staff members for Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll told Feindt they would not meet with her because of her association with the Red Hill litigation, which she believed had already concluded. (A federal court found the U.S. government liable for poisoning military families through the Red Hill fuel spill, but awarded substantially lower damages than plaintiffs sought.) She escalated the matter beyond Army leadership, going up to Stephen Simmons, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military community and family policy, who acknowledged Feindt’s concerns and indicated he was aware of the situation as it unfolded in messages reviewed by The Intercept.

Simmons referred The Intercept’s request for comment to the Pentagon’s public affairs team, which did not answer detailed questions.

Sweazey, who also runs a nonprofit that supports whistleblowers, said he believes Feindt faced retaliation after pressing the Army for accountability.

“Unfortunately, it appears to be retaliation, and it’s not rare,” Sweazey said. “The moment someone questions the institution, they can become a target.”

Experts say abuse allegations inside military childcare centers often move slowly, with limited transparency and strong institutional pressure to minimize failures.

“Burying cases like these is a matter of control and institutional survival,” said Maj. Gen. Dennis Laich, a retired Army officer and director of the Eisenhower Media Network. “Incidents viewed as leadership failures can damage careers.”

Related

Ousted Air Force Special Ops Command Chief Faces Child Sexual Abuse Material Charges

When a toddler named Evie Glick came home injured from the Ford Island childcare center in Honolulu in 2022, staff told her mother that Evie had tripped, fallen, and hit her head. Jennifer Glick, a special agent with the Army Criminal Investigation Division, accepted that explanation at the time.

The following year, Navy Family Advocacy officials informed the family that Evie may have been physically abused at the daycare after another military family, the Kuykendalls, raised concerns uncovered while investigating the abuse of their own daughter, Bella. The Kuykendalls later launched Operation Mei Mei, an advocacy effort pushing for greater transparency and accountability in military childcare centers.

When the Glicks sought details, records, and footage, they said they received few answers.

It wasn’t until nearly three years after Evie’s injury that Glick saw surveillance footage through Operation Mei Mei. She said the videos contradicted the explanation she had originally been given.

“We were lied to. The [daycare] never told us our daughter was abused,” Glick said. “My first question, being in law enforcement myself, was: Where is the investigation?”

Glick said the footage showed a caregiver grabbing Evie by the arm, pulling her to the ground, and making her head strike the floor — causing the injury that, years earlier, the family had been told happened when Evie fell. In another clip, Glick said, a provider removed Evie’s shoes and socks and threw them away while the 18-month-old cried and wandered the classroom for 16 minutes.

Glick later filed a FOIA request seeking additional footage. She said the material she eventually received was heavily edited, redacted, and stripped of audio.

“They told me I could only view it with a JAG officer present,” Glick told The Intercept, referring to a judge advocate general, or a military lawyer. “There were three clips, each less than 20 minutes long. It wasn’t the full footage I asked for.”

As Feindt was fighting for recognition of her son’s abuse, and unbeknownst to her, the North Post Child Development Center at Fort Belvoir lost its accreditation.

In July 2025, the facility failed to complete required renewal requirements, including annual reporting and coordination of a site visit, as The Intercept confirmed with the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

The Intercept asked Fort Belvoir this April whether the center had experienced any recent changes to its licensing or accreditation status, including suspension, probation, or revocation. Fort Belvoir Public Affairs responded that the facility’s “current licensing status has not been changed” but did not directly answer questions regarding accreditation or respond to related follow-ups.

Unlike civilian daycares, Defense Department child development centers are not licensed by the state where they’re located. Instead, they operate under DoD oversight, but DoD policy requires centers to maintain national accreditation standards.

“My number one problem is that [Army childcare centers] are not responsible or reportable to the state,” said Degenhard, the father whose infant died in Army care. “They follow their own compliance and standards.”

According to a summary circulated among parents following a May 14 Fort Belvoir Parent Advisory Board meeting reviewed by The Intercept, installation officials later acknowledged the center had lost accreditation and recently reapplied. Families had not been informed the facility had operated without accreditation for almost a year.

Feindt said she first learned of the lapse from a former daycare employee and independently contacted the accrediting organization to verify the information before raising it with installation leadership. The issue was later discussed at the parent meeting, where officials acknowledged the loss of accreditation.

Feindt said she was relieved that the caregiver who abused her child had been fired. “But this is not just about our family,” she said. “It’s a serious indictment of a system that failed to protect military children.”

“Leaders at all levels will be held accountable,” Hegseth announced at the confirmation proceeding Feindt attended in January 2025. “And warfighting and lethality and the readiness of the troops and their families will be our only focus.”

Since taking office, Hegseth has made the military’s killing capability and the restoration of what he calls a “warrior ethos” the defining themes of his tenure. He has ordered the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the Defense Department; repeatedly criticized what he describes as “woke” influences in the military; and personally intervened in a series of culture-war controversies involving military installations and schools. Critics argue those battles have consumed attention that could otherwise be directed toward long-standing quality-of-life issues affecting service members and their families.

Related

Newly Released Data Reveals Air Force Suicide Crisis After Years of Concealment

Lawmakers like Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, are pushing for greater transparency through measures like the Military Child and Youth Program Abuse and Neglect Notification Act, which would require timely notification to parents and establish more consistent reporting standards across services when allegations of abuse arise. But experts say the military continues to struggle with accountability when abuse allegations emerge inside its own child care system.

“How can anyone be mission ready or focused on lethal force if the military, in my family’s case, literally poisoned my child and now I can’t take them to daycare because they were abused?” Feindt said.

For Glick, her child’s abuse fundamentally changed how she views military service and childcare inside the Defense Department.

“That affects readiness because people will walk away if they don’t feel their children are safe,” she said.

The Pentagon has shown it can respond quickly when controversies involving children attract national political attention. After parents complained and a flurry of right-wing press coverage erupted over a transgender teacher who wore an animal tail and collar at a Fort Bragg elementary school, Hegseth proudly announced the teacher’s firing within weeks.

Feindt said the speed of that response contrasted sharply with her family’s experience.

“It shows they can act quickly when something becomes politically important,” she said. “But when military children are actually being harmed, families are left fighting the system alone.”

More than a year after the incident involving her son, Feindt said she believes meaningful change will only come if military families and senior leaders speak publicly about what they have experienced.

She pointed to a photo Hegseth posted online showing him fist-bumping a child alongside the caption: “This is our why.”

“Well, if that’s the case,” Feindt said, “why aren’t we taking care of our military kids? Why do we have a system that protects itself instead of protecting our children?”

The post An Army Whistleblower Believed in Pete Hegseth — Until the Military Covered Up Her Child’s Abuse appeared first on The Intercept.

A few days before my best friend’s execution date in 2006, prison administrators granted me one last chance to see him in a legal visit. We discussed his concerns about the humaneness of the lethal injection that would kill him. I will never forget his terrified look.

The day of his execution, I paced my cell hoping for the best. Without access to a telephone, my only method to monitor if or how my friend had died was through radio reports from members of the media who were allowed to witness his final breath.

News reports have historically allowed us as a society to monitor our government when it exercises its greatest power: ending a person’s life. But the state of Indiana has decided to inhibit that public access by banning members of the media from attending executions — unless the condemned person chooses to give a reporter a spot that could instead have gone to their relatives or friends. An appellate court upheld the ban this week. 

Prison officials in Indiana claim the media ban is mainly about respecting the dignity of the condemned person. But the idea that there could ever be dignity in state-sanctioned killing of a perfectly healthy human is ludicrous within itself. That would be the case even if executioners eschewed cruel and unusual methods. But they don’t, even when the media is watching. 

Angel Nieves Diaz continued moving for half an hour after receiving an injection of a drug that was supposed to paralyze him during a Florida execution. It took Arizona officials two hours to kill Joseph R. Wood. He had to be injected with 14 doses beyond the dose that was supposed to cause his death. 

Byron Black yelled, “It’s hurting so bad,” five minutes into a botched execution in Tennessee. John Marion Grant began convulsing and vomiting during his execution in Oklahoma. Prison officials had to enter the death chamber multiple times to wipe away and remove the vomit. The entire time, Grant was still breathing. Just last month, Tony Carruthers lay on a Tennessee gurney for more than hour moaning and bleeding as executioners struggled to find a vein. The execution was eventually called off by government officials.

These are only a few of the botched executions that lack “dignity.” This week, a federal appellate court upheld a decision blocking Alabama from using nitrogen gas to kill Jeffery Lee. Suffocating and asphyxiating on one’s own vomit seemed like a bridge too far. 

As a result of the barbarity of these events, it’s not far-fetched to wonder if Indiana officials have an ulterior motive. Perhaps the media ban has nothing to do with preserving the dignity of the condemned and is instead about obstructing government accountability and public oversight. 

Executions in this country were once highly public affairs. Often held in town squares, any member of the public could attend. In the 1830s, government officials began to enact laws that made executions private events. 

This was not because 19th century executioners were moved to protect the dignity of the condemned (who were disproportionately Black). It was an effort to halt a growing capital punishment abolitionist movement. A significant number of Americans found the public spectacle disgusting.

The same is occurring today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, support for capital punishment in America has decreased from 80 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 2026. This division necessitates transparency — otherwise, the only nongovernment actors able to tell the public the truth are dead.

The “dignity” playbook is a well-worn one that I know well as an incarcerated journalist. As a result of restrictions placed on media access to prisons, prisons have become unjustifiably cruel, less humane and more difficult to monitor. Restricting press freedom erodes human rights and constitutional safeguards and blinds the public to the kinds of cruelty and abuse depicted in HBO’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Alabama Solution.” 

The film was made possible not because officials granted access to outside journalists, but because incarcerated people risked (and endured) severe punishment to document their reality with contraband phones. 

It’s not the first time surreptitious reporting methods revealed the real motives behind media restrictions. In 1906, a reporter in Minnesota ignored a ban on media executions and sneaked in to watch a condemned man spend 14 minutes gasping for air before he strangled to death because the rope used to hang him was too long – he hit the floor when dropped and needed to be raised back up. 

Related

False Testimony Sent Tony Carruthers to Death Row. Tennessee Wants to Kill Him Anyway.

As appellate judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi wrote in a dissenting opinion in the Indiana case, “A government exercises its greatest power when it ends a person’s life. As I see it, such severe and irreversible punishment on behalf of ‘the people’ must be observable to comply with the Constitution.”

Lifting the media ban is the only dignified thing Indiana can do, not only for the condemned but also for the people being asked to fund irreversible punishments.

The post Indiana Banned Press From Executions for “Dignity.” It Actually Serves Repression. appeared first on The Intercept.

Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept that Section 224, named “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” is highly irregular — and closely resembles a bipartisan bill backed by the pro-Israel lobby that died in Congress earlier this year.

“I can’t think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore.

Unlike traditional foreign military aid programs, Section 224 would establish a framework for integrating Israeli-developed technologies directly into U.S. research, procurement, manufacturing, and acquisition processes — which military experts warned would be complicated, if not impossible, to unwind. It would apply across areas including AI, autonomous systems, cyberwarfare, biotechnology, missile defense, and defense industrial production.

Astore, who has taught military history at multiple institutions, said he’s particularly concerned about the AI component. “Israel is a leader in using AI predictive models and programs to surveil and kill people, using manned and unmanned drones,” he said. “The ‘smart,’ even autonomous technologies Israel has used against Palestinians could very well be used by the U.S. government against American citizens — especially the so-called radical left that President Trump appears to see as domestic terrorists.”

The debate is raging as Congress prepares to take up the fiscal year 2027 NDAA, a routine piece of legislation that spells out congressional priorities and budgeting for the armed forces. The House Armed Services Committee approved the legislation on Thursday evening; it now advances for consideration by the full House.

A handful of legislators from both parties have rebuked Section 224. Among them is Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican known for opposing all foreign military aid — a stance that drew the ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and drove millions in spending against him in the recent primary he lost to a Trump-backed challenger.

Massie was quick to condemn the proposal before it moved forward, writing: “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and Massie’s frequent collaborator, attempted to do something similar at the committee stage. On Thursday, Khanna introduced an amendment seeking to remove Section 224, arguing that Congress should not deepen military integration with Israel at a time when lawmakers are increasingly questioning the future of the U.S.–Israel relationship. But the amendment failed in committee after opposition from both Republicans and Democrats, including Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., who argued the U.S. benefits from access to Israeli military technologies developed under real-world combat conditions, citing missile defense, drone warfare, and other emerging capabilities as areas of mutual interest.

According to its proponents, the goal of Section 224 is to transition Israel away from decades of dependence on U.S. taxpayer-funded military assistance and toward a model centered on trade, co-development, and defense partnership — mirroring a desire expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With the Obama-era Memorandum of Understanding with Israel set to expire in 2028, Israel and its backers in Congress are searching for new ways to preserve U.S.–Israeli military collaboration. The current U.S.–Israel MOU provides approximately $3.3 billion annually in foreign military financing and $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation, totaling $38 billion over 10 years through 2028.

Netanyahu stated in January that he hoped to replace Israel’s dependence on American military assistance in the next decade. Less than a month later, lawmakers in both the House and Senate introduced the United States–Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (FUTURES) Act of 2026, a bipartisan proposal designed to expand U.S.–Israel cooperation in many of the same tech and AI areas as Section 224.

Related

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The FUTURES Act was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and in the House by Reps. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, and Don Davis, D-N.C. All four sponsors have received substantial campaign support from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups.

The legislation also received public backing from both AIPAC and FDD Action, the advocacy arm of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has long advocated for deeper U.S.–Israel defense and technology cooperation.

The FUTURES Act did not advance as standalone legislation — but many of its core concepts later reappeared in Section 224 of the FY2027 NDAA. Legislative records and congressional offices contacted by The Intercept indicate that Section 224 adopts the same initiative and many of the same provisions previously proposed in the FUTURES Act, including language related to integrating Israeli-origin technologies into U.S. military programs, defense industrial cooperation, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, biotechnology, cyber capabilities, and joint research and development.

The Intercept contacted the House Armed Services Committee and the Department of Defense, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office, seeking clarification on the origins of Section 224 and whether Pentagon officials participated in its development. Neither the committee nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment before publication.

The Pentagon’s refusal to answer questions about Section 224 comes amid renewed scrutiny of U.S.–Israel intelligence relations. Reporting published this weekend by the New York Times and Military.com detailed Defense Department concerns regarding Israeli espionage risks, raising additional questions about efforts to deepen technological integration between the two countries.

Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations member who previously served as chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, argued that deeper military integration raises broader concerns about the technologies and doctrines the United States may adopt through closer cooperation with Israel.

“Israel is a terrorist state, wantonly committing atrocity and genocide largely facilitated by its use of AI, and we are further along on the same path but, at the very least, complicit,” Bryant said. “And moreso the more we militarily integrate and partner with Israel.”

In a piece for The Guardian, the co-authors of the upcoming book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, described Section 224 as “not an alliance with a talented and responsible ally that will help keep the US safe, but a trap being set by Israel and its lobby to bind our country to a state that, for all its past promise, has gone rogue.”

The post Congress Is Trying to Permanently Integrate U.S. and Israeli Defense Tech appeared first on The Intercept.

Posts marking Passover, Good Friday, and Easter in 2026 included explicitly religious messaging, including imagery of Christian crosses and references to “Christ’s sacrifice” and the Resurrection. The Intercept’s analysis, which catalogued of the department’s Instagram posts from 2020 through early 2026, found these posts show a clear change in messaging not only from the Biden years, but also from President Donald Trump’s first term.

“From a digital diplomacy point of view, this looks like more than a change in images. It suggests a shift in how the U.S. government is presenting itself online,” said Corneliu Bjola, a professor of digital diplomacy at the University of Oxford. “In earlier years, posts projected a broad and inclusive image — what you might call ‘the shiny city on the hill.’ The 2026 pattern points to a narrower and more controlled message about strength and authority — ‘fortress America.’”

Long considered the government’s primary diplomatic arm, the State Department historically used its account to highlight a wide range of international, cultural, and religious observances. In 2020, under the leadership of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the State Department used its account to mark holidays and observances including Juneteenth, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Yom Kippur, and Kwanzaa.

Since Secretary of State Marco Rubio assumed his role, observance-related posts have been limited to Christian and Jewish holidays, including one that featured an impassioned speech by Rubio describing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The account has not marked major Islamic holidays or other widely observed cultural events that it routinely highlighted in prior years.

Federal agencies have already faced scrutiny over controversial social media posts. The Department of Homeland Security has recently drawn scrutiny for using a neo-Nazi-linked song in a recruiting post, and the Department of Labor has faced criticism for social media imagery depicting an all-white, all-male workforce in a 1950s-style campaign, including a post that read, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

Meanwhile, the State Department has moved away from posts highlighting multiculturalism in the United States and abroad.

Under Pompeo, the State Department made posts highlighting initiatives such as the International Religious Freedom Alliance and women’s empowerment efforts. The account also recognized events such as World Press Freedom Day, World Refugee Day, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and the International Day of Reflection on the Rwanda Genocide, among others.

The range narrows significantly under Rubio. Posts during this period place greater emphasis on borders, sovereignty, and enforcement, alongside a more limited set of cultural and religious observances. In September 2025, the account featured a video of Rubio meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel as the country continued its assault on Gaza in what human rights groups and some international observers have described as a genocide.

Related

Trump’s Orwellian Board of Peace Consists Entirely of Human Rights Abusers

In 2025, posts marking observances were limited to a small set of holidays and commemorations, including International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Christmas, and D-Day. Several posts emphasized religious or national themes, including a Columbus Day post that referenced “glory to God and country.”

The posts have also shifted to heavily feature the likeness of President Donald Trump. In early 2026, roughly 40 percent of posts included Trump’s image, a higher share than during either the Biden administration or Trump’s first term. On Tuesday, The Bulwark reported that the State Department is finalizing plans to include President Donald Trump’s image in a redesigned U.S. passport.

Asked why the account no longer marks a broader range of international and religious observances, including major Islamic holidays that had been featured in prior years, a State Department spokesperson said the content reflects the priorities of the current administration.

“Obviously, the president is featured prominently in our posts. He sets U.S. foreign policy, and the State Department’s role is to execute and communicate that agenda,” the spokesperson said. “Our content reflects the priorities of the current administration, including a renewed focus on seriousness and diplomacy. Decisions about what to highlight, including observances, are made by communications professionals.”

Related

He Tweeted Charlie Kirk “Won’t Be Remembered as a Hero.” The State Dept. Revoked His Visa.

Rather than highlighting diplomatic events or cultural observances, the account frequently features stylized graphics of Trump and administration officials alongside slogans emphasizing immigration enforcement, national sovereignty and security. Some posts resemble campaign messaging, including phrases such as “Send Them Back” and “This Is Our Hemisphere,” as well as graphics touting policy outcomes like visa revocations.

Former U.S. diplomats and public diplomacy officials told The Intercept the shift marks a break from long-standing norms that have historically emphasized nonpartisan messaging and broad cultural representation in official government communications.

Daniel Kreiss, a political communication scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the shift reflects a broader pattern across government agencies.

“The cultural and religious diversity that represents all of America — and frankly, for the State Department, the world — is no longer being represented, based on your data, in favor of overrepresenting what the administration cares about,” Kreiss said. “It’s sending a key public signal that these agencies are operating faithfully to the president and his coalition.”

The shift, experts say, is not just about what the United States chooses to show the world, but also what it no longer does. In digital diplomacy, what is omitted can be as consequential as what is shown.

The post Marco Rubio Is Rebranding the State Department as Explicitly Christian appeared first on The Intercept.

As more and more information is published about the suspect in the latest possible assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, commentators are in a typical scramble to assign an ideology or clear politics to the 31-year-old man. 

There’s not a lot to glean so far about Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California. A since-deleted Bluesky account reportedly linked to the suspect included run-of-the-mill criticisms of the Trump administration; he lists himself as a self-employed video game designer and part-time teacher. According to reports, he studied mechanical engineering and computer science, was part of a Christian fellowship, and also a nerdy-sounding club for students to have battles with foam toys. He reportedly donated $25 to ActBlue in 2024 earmarked for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He was a registered voter with “no party preference” in California. From the evidence available so far, the suspect seems to be a normie. 

Trump’s regime can give rise to a normie suspected assassin because the brutality and violence it has so wholly normalized, and the impunity it has reveled in, is deranging. In a piece of writing Allen left behind before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, derangement peeks through between clear reasons for targeting administration officials.

He includes chirpy asides (“stay in school kids”), and bounces between formal and casual registers throughout. He lists as his targets “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel),” without explaining why FBI Director Kash Patel is named for exemption. His final message is more a summary explanation than a manifesto.

But in his more lucid moments, Allen cites concerns that people from across the political spectrum share about Trump and his administration.

“I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me,” Allen wrote in the missive covered by multiple outlets. “I’m no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he added, without specifically naming the president.

Related

Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left

Republicans have, of course, been swift to blame Democrats for the shooting. Trump, who earlier this month threatened to annihilate the “whole civilization” of Iran and revels in his regime’s anti-immigrant violence, told CBS News on Sunday that he thinks the “hate speech of the Democrats … is very dangerous.” 

The president described the suspect’s message as “anti-Christian,” though Allen identifies with Christian faith in his writing. “Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration,” Allen wrote. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

The reasons Allen cites for his fury are not conspiratorial or weighted with ideology. He points to crimes and acts of extreme violence that the administration has either committed or been complicit in, while seeming to fear no constraints or consequences.

The suspect appears to be no devotee of the Democratic Party and no committed leftist. Republicans haven’t even bothered to wheel out the antifa boogeyman; nothing points to any such identification. Allen expressed anger about the Trump administration’s crimes, its acts of oppression, alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile ring, and impunity. Such anger is not the preserve of the left, or even of liberals.

Related

America Tolerates High Levels of Violence but Suppresses Photos of the Slaughter

Allen reportedly targeted Trump and members of his administration, whereas the three previous attempted attacks on Trump’s life appeared to aim only at the president. There is little uniting the suspects involved, except that they were all men in a country awash with guns and threadbare mental health care and support resources at a time of normalized deadly violence and U.S.-backed genocide. 

Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, whose bullet scraped Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania rally in 2024, was a registered Republican but not active in right-wing organizing. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, convicted of plotting to kill Trump at his West Palm Springs resort in Florida in 2024, espoused eclectic anti-establishment politics, having voted for Trump in 2016 before becoming an ardent critic; he was also an obsessive supporter of Ukraine. Austin Tucker Martin, 21, was fatally shot by Secret Service agents after crashing his vehicle into the security perimeter of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in February of this year. His loved ones said he was never interested in politics.

There is no consistency in the varied and messy worldviews of Trump’s would-be assassins. If media commentators and politicians want to make banal points about the rise in political violence, there is only one consistently violent ideology to trace throughout these cases: the fascistic ideology of far-right Republicans and their leader. 

After expressing gratitude for his family, friends, colleagues, and church, Allen ended his message, “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.”

The post How Trump’s America Produces Normie Assassins appeared first on The Intercept.

“I want to occupy,” he told The Intercept. “Yes, occupy, the word nobody likes. I want to occupy southern Lebanon. Move all the Arabs from there, up to the Litani River.”

We’re sitting in the command and control center in Moshav Netu’a, a village so close to the U.N.-brokered “Blue Line” separating Israel and Lebanon that one can see the physical barrier from the windows of many homes. Here, amid a temporary pause in fighting between the U.S.–Israeli alliance and Iran, there’s no sense of peace.

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

Under muddied terms for the two-week ceasefire with Iran, Israel has kept fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching an all-out war on the country’s armed elements and civilians alike. The Israeli military bombed villages and ordered more than 1 million Lebanese civilians to evacuate from the south, territory that is often viewed as Hezbollah’s stronghold due to its significant Shia Muslim population and weapons caches. Israel blew up bridges linking the north and the south of Lebanon. In defiance of previous ceasefire conditions set in November 2024, Hezbollah forces that were supposed to retreat north have remained in the south, and Israeli forces continued to hold five “strategic” hilltops in the north, accumulating more than 10,000 total ceasefire violations.

For the residents of Netu’a, Hezbollah is a problem to be solved, and one to fix with military power.

“The Arabs’ only motivation to stop fighting is if you take their land,” Adom said. “You kill them, it doesn’t matter. You hurt them, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Only taking territories. This is the only thing that matters to them.”

At least seven Netu’a residents told The Intercept that they see the eviction of Lebanese civilians as the only sure way to prevent their own displacement. After October 7, 2023, fearing a follow-on attack by Hezbollah, the Israeli government evacuated kibbutzim and other settlements near its border with Lebanon, including Netu’a, scattering families in hotels across the country.

The evacuation was “like a piece of gum being pulled apart,” said Oranit Manasseh, a mother of four who lives in Shtula, another kibbutz on Israel’s border with Lebanon. “That is what happened to our community, day after day that we were living in hotels away from the kibbutz.”

Manasseh and her children have since been able to return to their home, which was not damaged during the evacuation. When she spoke to The Intercept, the family was staying at a villa in Shtula that would normally host tourists for holidays like Passover but has been sitting largely empty since October 8, 2023, with few Israelis wishing to visit the north for a vacation with incoming missile fire.

Manasseh’s hope, she told The Intercept, is that the Israeli military “depopulate the south, get rid of Hezbollah, and keep the terrorists out.”

Israel’s actions suggest it’s headed in that direction. On Wednesday, in the span of 10 minutes, Israel struck Lebanon more than 100 times, killing at least 300 people. This was the deadliest single incident since the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990. According to reporting from the Financial Times and confirmed by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, more than 100 women, children, and elderly were killed in the strikes, including two journalists and four Lebanese army soldiers.

Part of the justification for Israel’s war on Hezbollah is the view that it is the only way to establish a security buffer to protect communities in the north situated on Israel’s border with Lebanon.

Much like October 7th catalyzed Israeli society’s calls for the war on Gaza — in which Israel killed, according to conservative estimates, 70,000 Palestinians and over 700 more since the oft-violated ceasefire went into effect last year — there are calls to reduce southern Lebanon to rubble.

Related

With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank

They either “crush Hezbollah so that the Lebanese government can disarm, and keep the south free of terrorists,” said another member of Netu’a’s security patrol, or they will have to evacuate again in the future, and it will rip their communities apart.

Israel’s border communities are often referred to as the “periphery.” Looking out from Netu’a, one can see a string of Israeli military outposts situated on the Blue Line, which the U.N. established in 2000, erecting a border wall like the one that cordons off the West Bank. Far from the metropolitan centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, these communities occupy a particular place in Israeli politics, and according to residents who spoke with The Intercept in these communities, there is a consensus that they feel forgotten in the wake of October 7.

“I think the government doesn’t do enough for this area. Israel is like a golden cage,” Manasseh said. “You love it, but we are not safe here anymore.”

These “periphery” residents are working to leverage their political influence to end the “Hezbollah problem,” partly by staying in their communities during this war instead of evacuating, forcing the Israeli military to either protect them or admit they can’t.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

This is also part of what is driving the Israeli military to establish a “security zone” south of the Litani, in the words of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, to “protect” the communities in the north and spare them from another round of evacuation. Israel’s Home Front Command, which is responsible for setting civilian protection guidelines during wartime, announced that because of its strikes on Lebanon, the government would extend the time for Israeli civilians to enter shelters after an alert from zero seconds to 15, due to a partial withdrawal of Hezbollah forces north.

“We all understand that if they reach our borders, it won’t stop there,” said Hila Kronos, who just finished a round of reserve duty in the Israeli military and has been living in Adamit, another Israeli border community, for 20 years. “Maybe not now, but in five or ten years, they could decide everything is calm and use that opportunity to attack Israel.”

Do it now and once and for all is the consensus in these kibbutzim, whose residents insist that they will be staying. “There will be no more evacuations,” another resident told The Intercept.

The desire to establish a security buffer is driving not only Israel’s aerial bombardment campaign, which has claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Lebanese people since the start of the war, but also what used to be a fringe movement that has grown more mainstream in the past two years: the push, as in Gaza, to settle the south of Lebanon.

To do so would require a military commitment that even the most hawkish of Israeli military figures acknowledge Israel does not have. They are facing a manpower crisis and are short more than 15,000 soldiers.

The fringe Uri Tzafon movement, Hebrew for “North Awaken,” which advocates for the Jewish settlement of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, has put their words into action. In February, members of Uri Tzafon launched drones into southern Lebanon, urging residents to evacuate, and breached the security barrier as a demonstration in favor of settlement.

Adom, the Netu’a security official, said that his family does not belong to the Uri Tzafon movement. Still, he told The Intercept, “my middle son wants to establish a movement that would push the government to take control of the area, build settlements, and pass a law declaring it Israeli territory — like the Golan Heights — and formally annex it.”

But Israelis like Kronos are not so sure of this strategy. “They’re trying, but I think we’re losing too many young people,” he said. “There’s too much death for something I don’t believe can actually be achieved.”

Kronos has grown disillusioned living in Adamit, watching war after war claim civilian lives in the south and destroy her home community.

“We were young, without children when we first came here. We would sit on rooftops and watch the rockets, almost like a game, trying to guess where they would land,” Kronos said. “I remember sitting next to a woman. Today she must be around 18. She told me her story: Twenty years earlier, in 2006, she had been sitting in a shelter holding her baby son. She had been told that by the time he grew up, there would be no need for an army in Israel, no war in Lebanon, that things would be better. And now, 20 years later, she was sitting there again, and her son was in Lebanon, fighting.”

The post “I Want to Occupy”: Inside the Israeli Movement Pushing to Raze and Settle Southern Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

Goat meat goes down like big shards of glass when the symptoms set in. The local livestock, the main source of available nutrients, becomes nearly impossible to swallow. It feels, the sufferers say, like deep wounds have been sliced into their throats.

In Kargi, a remote desert village in the far north of Kenya, cancers of the digestive tract plague the population at unusually high rates. The disease most often attacks the esophagus, though stomach cancer is also common. Some patients think it’s a punishment from God.

The evidence on the ground suggests it’s more likely from a multinational oil company. In the 1980s, foreign work crews dressed like astronauts descended on the village of Kargi and the surrounding Chalbi Desert to drill for oil. They spent five unsuccessful years boring nearly a dozen wells thousands of feet into the ground. The men were from Amoco, an American oil company now owned by BP.

The crews then drove off their bulldozers, packed up their protective equipment, and vanished. One of the only traces to mark their presence was a dry white substance scattered on the ground, close to the water wells used by residents and their livestock.

An Intercept investigation drawn from on-the-ground interviews with dozens of Kargi residents, government and corporate reports spanning decades, court filings, and public hearings traces Amoco’s failure to clean up its waste to the ongoing pollution of Kargi. The substance the company left behind contained heavy metals and known carcinogens, but because of a lack of testing and thorough scientific study, it isn’t clear if the waste directly caused cancer in the community.

What is clear is that residents ate it.

Kargi has one of the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in Kenya, and when locals discovered the flaky substance around the wells, many believed it was natural salt and started using it to cook their food.

The water was contaminated. High levels of carcinogenic toxic chemicals, namely nitrates, had seeped into surrounding boreholes and wells — the only water supply in the desert. Animals began dying in the thousands. And people started getting cancer.

By the early 2000s, the cancer rate in the community was three times the national average. The area’s state representative asked the government to investigate the correlation between the disease plaguing his constituents and the drilling waste that had been left behind.

Now, across the manyattas — communities of traditional homes constructed from sticks and patchworks of old clothing — in Kargi and surrounding villages, everybody claims to know someone afflicted by the disease. The “salt” still remains scattered where Amoco, now part of British Petroleum, once searched for oil.

What’s clear now, from court records and environmental tests, is that the white clayey substance collected adjacent to Amoco’s wells was a tool the company used to help drill for oil, that it contained a variety of heavy metals, and that the wells were not properly sealed.

The pollution and disease inspired the first-ever lawsuit filed on the basis of Kenya’s constitutional right to a safe and healthy environment in 2020, when residents of Kargi and other communities in the Chalbi Desert sued the Kenyan national and county governments. They demanded a supply of clean water for people and animals, and they blamed Kenya for failing to police Amoco’s damage to the environment. Six years later, it’s still crawling through the court system.

The Amoco case was the start of a pattern of identifying environmental destruction across the East African country. In the last few years, similar cases have been popping up nationwide, accusing the local and national governments of failing to clean up the waste that other multinational oil companies have left behind, subjecting residents to drink contaminated water. 

A lack of adequate testing and general neglect of Kargi and its surrounding areas makes it difficult to directly correlate cancer to the waste Amoco left behind. But high levels of carcinogenic toxins, including nitrates and arsenic — both commonly used in drilling wells — have been found in the area’s drinking water over the years, in sporadic tests conducted by the Kenyan government and nonprofit organizations.

No official cleanup has ever been done. Neither BP nor the Kenyan government responded to repeated requests for comment.

In Kargi, residents told The Intercept that Amoco’s footprint has left them in a state of constant despair. 

Gumathi Galnahgalle, a village elder in his mid-40s, said the community began to notice people falling ill in the years after Amoco left. When his mother stopped being able to swallow food, he took her to the hospital multiple times.

“There was no treatment; we were just told to take her back home and wait for her time,” he said, standing in front of her grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.”

Amoco’s African Expansion

Amoco’s arrival in the 1980s was met with intrigue and excitement. As helicopters flew over Kargi, foreign crews came into the community to join traditional dances at night.

The company employed locals to cook for their crews. In such a remote area, with few educational opportunities and literacy rates around 25 percent, the work was well-received. Lebeku Mirgichan, now in his early 70s, worked as a cook for Amoco for three years — earning 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (equivalent to roughly $23 today). “At the time, that was a lot of money,” he told The Intercept.

Related

How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything

Oil exploration was a “welcome development for many communities because it came with a lot of promise and opportunity for development,” said Omolade Adunbi, director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. And it wasn’t just Amoco — Chevron and Total had also explored for oil in other parts of Marsabit, the more than 40,000-square-mile county that contains Kargi.

Then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who commissioned the Amoco project, reportedly visited Kargi to watch the drilling. Amoco’s managing director told Moi that “the rock formation made the prospects for striking oil very encouraging and exciting.” Moi said “he had hope that economically viable oil deposits would be found.”

Amoco, then a Midwest-based company, felt that it was on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s leading explorers and developers of oil — acquiring drilling rights in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. Alfred O. Munk, Amoco’s manager of foreign affairs, told The Chicago Tribune, “Heads of state and competitors alike are coming to the sudden, belated conclusion that Amoco is a major international player.”

With Moi’s blessing, Amoco drilled at least 10 oil wells that reached 10,000 feet deep. But in 1990, after five years and no real sign of oil, the project in Kargi was decommissioned. Amoco’s vehicles, guards, and land rovers abruptly left.

In court records and interviews with the community, dozens said they were never officially informed of the project’s end. And no one came to clean it up.

Mass Extinction

The failure didn’t seem to affect Amoco’s business. In 1998, British Petroleum bought it in a $48 billion deal, the largest takeover of an American company by a foreign firm at the time. It changed its name to BP Amoco, then just BP in 2001. Most Amoco stations in the U.S. were converted to BP’s brand.

But in Kargi and its surrounding villages, animals were dying. Across the Chalbi Desert — where over 90 percent of the population of 30,000 is considered impoverished — most people survive off their livestock, eating only the meat and milk of goats, sheep, and camels. Due to the area’s aridity, there is no piped water, and communities rely on groundwater from boreholes and shallow wells.

In the 1990s, after drinking water from a borehole next to an abandoned well that Amoco had drilled, a flock of sheep and goats died in the neighboring village of Balesa, court records allege.

Then, in the early 2000s, 7,000 sheep and goats died under similar circumstances, residents told The Intercept. According to court records, a water quality report conducted by the government immediately after the mass death confirmed that over 600 animals died within two hours of taking the water. The water was found to contain high levels of nitrates, a type of salt and chemical compound that gets dissolved into drilling material for a variety of purposes: as powerful explosives to locate oil, to stop bacteria from growing in wells, and as an additive to drilling mud to strengthen the walls of a well.

When consumed in high amounts, nitrates can be extremely toxic and stop mammals’ blood from carrying oxygen.

A government team was sent to the area on a fact-finding mission in 2003, according to court documents. They recommended that the community should not give the water to infants and that the veterinary department should carry out toxicology tests in Kargi. It also found that the wells had not been properly sealed. A 2004 government report concluded that “the claims of the presence of esophagus cancer in the region were everywhere the team visited and concern is overwhelmingly evident as reported by medical personnel and local community.”

Subsequent tests commissioned by a local nonprofit organization found that levels of nitrates and arsenic were high in Kargi waters.

Five years later, a prospective report by a Swedish oil company, Lundin, which was planning to look for oil and other mining materials, confirmed that a “white clayey substance used to cool drill bits by Amoco while drilling was collected adjacent to the well.” Lundin tested it and found extremely high alkaline levels — which can cause chemicals to be corrosive and destroy skin when spilled.

The former Amoco cook, Mirgichan, alongside two other community members who also worked for Amoco, told The Intercept that they remember watching workers’ skin start to peel off when they worked with drilling materials.

In its report, Lundin found the substance to be “extremely saline and sodic” and that it was related to “abundant” claims about related health issues by the local communities, including dying livestock and cancer cases.

Between 2007 and 2009, multiple tests on the water found that it was not meeting the World Health Organization recommended standards, according to court records. The Kenyan water resources authority declared that it was not safe for human consumption. A local nonprofit found that high levels of nitrates and arsenic were in the water, and they were the probable cause of the livestock deaths.

By then, people were dying.

In Search of Nutrients

In Kargi, where food is scarce, community members kept finding the white substance that Amoco left behind and decided to put it to use, packing it up and using it to cook. The area, littered with salt-like mounds, became so popular with residents that it was named kwa chuvmi, loosely translated to “where there is salt.”

There are conflicting reports over what exactly the “salt” was. According to Kenyan court documents, the salt-like substance was actually two heavy drilling chemicals: barite and bentonite. Barite is a mineral used in large quantities to increase the density of drilling fluids, and bentonite, a clay-like substance often referred to as drilling mud, helps in carrying cuttings to the surface and stabilizing boreholes. The chemicals can have “catastrophic effects,” on the environment and people, said James Njuguna, an engineering professor at Robert Gordon University.

According to tests undertaken by Lundin, Amoco used “a white material that could pass for salt like substance,” but was “essentially a special clay material used to cool the drill bits.” It contained high levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and electrical conductivity.

Between 2006 and 2009, records from the only health center in Kargi, a village area with only 10,000 residents, registered 65 cancer-related deaths — which health workers said was largely throat cancer — or a rate nearly three times higher than the national average, according to government reports.

In 2008, Safi Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer just after giving birth, leaving behind the baby and four other small children. There was no medicine or treatment available, and she was advised to stay at home. “There are many orphans here,” Mirkalkona told The Intercept. “And yet, we still do not understand this disease.”

The same year, Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, who represented Kargi and the surrounding area in Kenya’s national assembly, brought the issue to the Parliament.

“Strange diseases started occurring in the specific areas where oil was drilled,” he said. “I do not know how we can possibly explain the sudden emergence of cancer cases.”

“It is really embarrassing that we sit here and … years later people are still dying,” Lekuton continued in his speech. “We have a survey that has revealed shocking statistics of men and women who are ailing from throat cancer and many have died.” 

But leaders, including in the energy ministry, were dismissive and said no connection had been found between oil exploration and cancer cases.

By 2009, a community member was dying of cancer every month, according to a local news report. The symptoms and deterioration of residents were similar. The first was an inability to swallow meat. The patients were then referred for a biopsy, “but the majority prefer to go back home and wait to die,” the report said. Some tested positive for esophageal cancer.

Desert of Death

Years went by with no answers. In 2013, a documentary titled “Desert of Death” aired on Kenyan national television on throat and stomach cancer patients in the county, suggesting that waste left behind after failed oil prospecting had a connection to the disease. The youngest cancer patient featured was 3 years old. The documentary drew countrywide attention, prompting further discussions in the government.

“I come from Kargi Village, and I have about 150 names of those who have died as a result of that disease,” Godana Hargura, senator of Marsabit, said in a government hearing in 2015. “The situation is so desperate.”

In Kargi, there is only one health center serving the 10,000 residents. There is no doctor — just a clinical officer, a nurse, and a nutritionist.

“People normally come too late. Most of the people are sick, but they don’t even know that they are sick,” said Abraham Situma, the clinical officer. “We really need more human resources.”

Situma often refers the cases to Marsabit county hospital, a two-hour drive from Kargi. Following that, many patients are then referred to a hospital in Meru, over 300 miles away. But, Situma said, most prefer to just stay in Kargi and pass away at home. So many people have died in their homes that they became labeled the “manyattas of death.”

In July 2024, separate from the court case, the community petitioned Kenya’s National Assembly to order a comprehensive and independent probe into cancer cases in the region. The community said they had documented close to 1,000 cancer-related fatalities in the last decade, all attributed to the consumption of contaminated water. The fatalities were reported in Kargi and other surrounding areas, but only 100 families had the victims’ health records, because their culture dictated that the dead be buried with documents.

Related

How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot

“I call it the social death of the environment,” said Adunbi, the University of Michigan professor. “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death, and there is no oversight on how many of these corporations have conducted their activities in these spaces.”

Meanwhile, the case filed in 2020 by the Kargi residents remains ongoing and continuously delayed.

The petition detailed accusations against nine Kenyan and county governments — including the attorney general; ministries of environment, water, and sanitation; as well as the National Oil Corporation of Kenya — of being accountable for failing to ensure that Amoco caused little damage to the environment; disposed of waste oil, salt water, and refuse; and did not cause fluids or substance to escape to the environment.

“The untold pain, suffering and hopelessness is exemplified by the rampant deaths that take place in the manyattas without the residents of Marsabit County having access to medical care, the long distance the resident have to travel seeking medical care and lack of financial capacity to carry the burden of the cancer scourge,” the petition reads.

There were also plans to sue BP, but it has proved to be too legally complex, according to John Mwariri, acting executive director of Kituo Cha Sheria, the Kenyan legal aid group leading the case. The company had also long diverted its interest away from the Marsabit region into more fruitful areas in countries like Angola, Egypt, and Algeria.

In Kargi, the community has lost hope in getting answers. In his manyatta, Galnahgalle, the village elder, awaits the same fate as his mother.

“I keep being told to go home as there is no treatment,” he said. “Amoco should come and explain what they did here.”

The post An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates appeared first on The Intercept.

When Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr talks about broadcast licensees serving the “public interest,” he loves to emphasize “localism.” 

Localism is the idea that powerful entities (in this case, broadcasters) should serve the needs and interests of the communities they service. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue with, especially at a time when news deserts are spreading, small-town outlets are folding, and, thanks to the administration in which Carr serves, local public radio stations are reeling.

When you look at the fights Carr actually picks with broadcasters over the “public interest” requirement, however, a curious pattern emerges. They aren’t local stories at all, unless you consider Tehran and San Salvador local. They’re national and global stories that upset not residents of underserved heartland communities, but President Donald Trump, the man whose gilded face Carr wears as a lapel pin. 

Sure, when he’s playing for the home crowd, Carr will openly admit, and even brag about, helping Trump reshape the national media to his liking. That’s what he did at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, bragging about such “wins” as the Paramount–Skydance merger in Trump’s ongoing feud against media adversaries. Carr’s FCC approved that deal only after unconstitutionally extracting editorial concessions from CBS News and helping Trump launder a multimillion-dollar alleged bribe though the courts.

But in less partisan settings, from congressional testimony to mainstream media interviews, localism has become Carr’s go-to talking point whenever he’s pressed on his unconstitutional efforts to police news content or confronted with his past statements railing against the partisan suppression of news. He’s not censoring the airwaves, he claims; he’s just sticking up for the little guy. 

Yet Carr has never threatened a broadcast license because a newsroom ignored city council meetings or local crime, or offered a biased take on a school board’s budget decisions. It would, of course, violate the First Amendment for him to do that too — the FCC, as Carr once said, “does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” But at least it would be consistent with his populist gimmick.

Related

The Latest FCC Censorship Push No One Is Talking About Targets Incarcerated People

In fact, his threats arise from coverage on national news networks, not their local affiliates, which actually hold the broadcast licenses he’s threatening to revoke. In other words, he’s threatening to punish local news stations for national content they don’t produce, and sometimes don’t even air, that angers Trump.

Let’s play back some of Carr’s greatest hits; see if you can spot the localism. 

• When Trump complained that news outlets were running “fake news” about Iranian missile strikes, Carr warned that broadcasters running “hoaxes and news distortions” would lose their licenses if they didn’t correct course.
• After MSNBC declined to carry a White House briefing on the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego Garcia, Carr accused Comcast of ignoring “obvious facts of public interest” and warned “news distortion doesn’t cut it.” MSNBC (now MSNOW) is not a local outlet — it’s a cable station that the FCC doesn’t even regulate. 
• Carr investigated KCBS, a San Francisco radio station, leading to rampant self-censorship in fear of retaliation. That might sound local, but the story that drew his ire was about a federal immigration enforcement operation. He didn’t care if the locals in the Bay Area wanted to know what immigration officers were up to — only that his boss does not want them to know. 
• Carr investigated CBS over the same interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that Trump sued over, despite experts’ virtually unanimous agreement that the claims were frivolous. Then he helped Trump shake down Paramount for the aforementioned palm-grease by waiting until two days after Trump’s settlement check arrived to approve CBS parent Paramount’s merger with David Ellison’s Skydance. He touted that merger as proof of Trump “winning” his war on the media at CPAC. 
• When Trump sued the BBC over a documentary about January 6, Carr wrote to the heads of PBS and NPR demanding transcripts and video of any American broadcast of the program, claiming the British broadcast about events in Washington, D.C., contained “news distortion.”
• After late night host Jimmy Kimmel commented on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Carr warned that if ABC and Disney did not “take action” against Kimmel, the FCC would act. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said, drawing comparisons to mafia movies.

Carr also likes to tell broadcasters what they should air, but he doesn’t implore them to report more or better local news. Instead, he launched the “Pledge America Campaign,” calling on broadcasters to meet their public interest obligations by airing “patriotic, pro-America content” celebrating “the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”

And in an expressly anti-local “public interest” intervention, Carr enthusiastically backed Trump’s directive to give the Army-Navy football game an exclusive broadcast window. Carr said in a press release earlier this month that “such scheduling conflicts weaken the national focus on our Military Service Academies and detract from a morale-building event of vital interest to the Department of War.” Because, of course, the hallmark of community broadcasting is not letting fans watch their local teams because the Pentagon needs a morale boost for its illegal, unpopular wars.

As a prior version of Carr knew, the FCC cannot police journalism for ideological bias. Localism is a Trojan horse Carr uses to legitimize his attack on the Constitution. 

His only serious effort to impact local news undermines it instead by consolidating more local licenses under conglomerates like Nexstar and Sinclair — companies that are ideologically aligned with Trump on national issues but have long track records of ruining local coverage through cost cutting. Carr even bent ownership rules to approve a $6.2 billion Nexstar–Tegna merger, which a federal judge halted Friday because of harms to local news consumers.

Nexstar is aggressively cutting jobs at flagship stations like WGN in Chicago and KTLA in Los Angeles, even as it lobbies for permission to expand further. Sinclair has decimated local newsrooms across the country, replacing them with centralized national programming — the exact opposite of the localism Carr claims to champion.

The real Brendan Carr is the unrepentant censorship czar who shows up at CPAC and openly threatens broadcasters on X, not the slicker version who rails against coastal elites to change the subject when questioned about his unconstitutional antics. 

Carr is among the most shameless bootlickers (or Florsheim dress shoe-lickers) in an administration full of sycophants. The only localities whose interests he serves are the White House and Mar-a-Lago. He’s the last person who should be policing the “public interest,” locally or anywhere. 

The post Trump’s FCC Chief Says His Censorship Protects the Little Guy. It Really Serves One Powerful Man. appeared first on The Intercept.

The communications, revealed in December 2025 meeting minutes reviewed by The Intercept, come as the administration has employed religious rhetoric in its military policies. Amid the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, some service members and political supporters have framed the war in religious terms, including describing it as part of “God’s divine plan.” Other federal agencies have also openly embraced white nationalist rhetoric and imagery, including a Department of Homeland Security recruitment post that used a neo-Nazi-associated anthem days after the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

When the White House announced Kirk’s appointment to fill her late husband’s seat on the board, it highlighted Charlie Kirk’s “bold Christian faith,” language critics say suggests religion was treated as a qualification for the role.

“The appointment of Erika Kirk to the U.S. Air Force Academy Board of Visitors goes hand in hand with Christian nationalist incursions into our armed forces, such as Pete Hegseth’s actions and statements promoting his fervent brand of evangelical Christianity at the Pentagon,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Critics warn the changes could reshape how the military’s premier officer training institution educates future leaders as it aligns with the administration’s “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” initiative, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s marquee plan to reverse the military’s diversity efforts and emphasize “lethality.”

Minutes from the meeting describe academy leaders briefing the board on steps taken to implement those directives, including removing DEI elements from the admissions process and reviewing curriculum and academy facilities for compliance with presidential executive orders.

Related

How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians

In public comments submitted to the Board of Visitors, included in the meeting materials, Doug Truax, CEO of the conservative Restoration of America Foundation, urged the board to review faculty and programs he said were aligned with “social justice” agendas. He also singled out Col. Candice Pipes, the academy’s admissions chief, for commenting on racial disparities in the Air Force, and claimed she said she pays a “diversity tax” as a Black woman.

The Air Force Academy has established four task forces to ensure compliance with the “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” plan, according to the minutes. One of them, focused on admissions, found that “with the changes being implemented, the Academy’s admissions process is merit-based and that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) elements have been removed.”

The Board of Visitors is a congressionally mandated oversight body that reviews cadet life, curriculum, faculty, finances, and discipline at the Air Force Academy, which commissions roughly half of the service’s new officers each year and plays a central role in shaping the culture of future military leadership. The board’s findings and recommendations are delivered to the secretary of the Air Force and forwarded to Hegseth and Congress. While the board cannot directly set policy, its oversight can shape Pentagon scrutiny and congressional funding decisions.

“The Board can influence congressional funding of the academy, so there’s definitely some power there,” said William J. Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught at the academy for six years. “More than anything, the appointment of Kirk to the board demonstrates the ongoing politicization of the service academies.”

Unlike earlier political appointments to the board, Kirk’s selection reflects a specific political and religious alignment rather than expertise in military affairs, said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a graduate and former instructor at the academy. She warned the move could encourage academy officials who share those views to shape internal reporting or programs in ways that reinforce them.

“The BOV only makes recommendations to the secretary of defense through the secretary of the Air Force, so its influence is typically quite indirect,” VanLandingham said. “However, given Secretary Hegseth’s alignment with Kirk’s group and connections to Ms. Kirk, this appointment could provide a backdoor directly to the secretary of defense, thus elevating its power.”

Related

Hegseth Leads Push to Punish Military Service Members Over Charlie Kirk Comments

The changes revive long-standing concerns about religion and ideology at the academy. The Colorado Springs institution has faced repeated allegations over the past two decades that Christian beliefs are favored within cadet culture and leadership structures. In 2005, the Air Force launched a major investigation after cadets reported pressure to attend chapel services and adopt evangelical Christian beliefs. The review found that academy leaders had struggled to fully accommodate the religious needs of non-Christian cadets and had blurred the line between permissible religious expression and coercion.

Later climate surveys continued to highlight the issue. One 2010 survey found that 41 percent of cadets who identified as non-Christian said they had experienced unwanted religious proselytizing at least once or twice in a year.

“USAFA has long struggled with unlawful religious viewpoint discrimination, institutionally favoring Christianity over other religions,” said VanLandingham. “This appointment is not helpful in that regard.”

Federal law governing the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors divides appointment authority among the White House and congressional leadership. The panel’s members are selected by the president, the House speaker and House minority leader, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate armed services committees.

Of the board’s 14 currently filled seats, 10 are held by members of Congress, including seven Republicans and three Democrats, compared to five Democrats and three Republicans in December 2022. The remaining four members are presidential appointees. Only a small minority of the board’s members have prior military experience.

Minutes from a December 2022 meeting during the Biden administration show that academy leaders briefed members on cadet welfare programs, admissions, and sexual violence prevention initiatives, a stark contrast to the priorities under Trump.

Astore, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said the board historically drew little attention from faculty focused on cadet education. But he said recent meetings and Kirk’s appointment suggest a growing focus on ideological priorities rather than professional military education.

“I don’t think Erika Kirk is going to question why cadets aren’t learning their Clausewitz and Sun Tzu,” he said.

“It is telling and highly inappropriate that the White House, in announcing Kirk’s appointment, brought up Charlie Kirk’s ‘bold Christian faith,’” Gaylor, of Freedom From Religion Foundation, said, “as if that were a qualification for his widow serving on it. The Constitution still bars any religious test for public office, but apparently the White House isn’t aware of that.”

The White House did not respond to questions from The Intercept asking why Kirk was selected for the position.

Turning Point USA, the conservative activist organization founded by Charlie Kirk where his wife is now CEO and board chair, also did not respond to questions about what role she is expected to play on the board.

Related

Military Leaders See Iran War as “God’s Divine Plan” — a Chilling Turn for Trump’s Fascism

A spokesperson for the academy said the institution “thanks all members of the Board of Visitors for their service and commitment to our mission,” and that according to federal law, “the institution does not influence or take a position on the selection of individual Board of Visitors members.”

But critics and former academy officials warned the changes could shape a generation of officers more loyal to political ideology than to the military’s traditional commitment to constitutional, nonpartisan service.

“They aren’t serious about developing officers of character at USAFA who can critically think and defend our nation most effectively through wise leadership,” VanLandingham said. “They are interested in turning the military into a Christian nationalist praetorian guard.”

The post Air Force Academy Prepares Ideological Overhaul, With Erika Kirk Bringing “Bold Christian Faith” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli military had sealed the city off from the outside world. Just over a week after the U.S. and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Israeli settlers have ramped up their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli forces have imposed a near-total closure of municipal centers, shutting gates and restricting crossings without warning or perceptible logic.

“It’s so unpredictable,” said Shadya Saif, 40, a Palestinian mother of three who teaches at a private school in Ramallah. The Intercept rode alongside Saif as she traveled back to Ramallah from Nablus on Saturday, when the Israeli military closed all but one checkpoint out of the city, putting it under an effective blockade and forcing all traffic through a checkpoint called Shavei Shomron.

The unannounced closures left Palestinians scrambling. Many were visiting Ramallah to see family members during Ramadan, and they hoped to reach their destinations in time for iftar, the fast-breaking meal enjoyed at sunset. Others needed to enter the city to receive medical treatment they cannot obtain elsewhere. Saif had risked the journey to see her dying uncle and, knowing the risks of crossing, she’d left her chronically ill daughter in Nablus with him.

“I was worried I would get stuck here,” Saif told The Intercept inside a yellow “service” taxi, the only form of public transportation widely available in the West Bank. Even though nearly all of her family lives in Nablus, she has tried to avoid visiting since October 7, 2023, after which the Israeli military clamped its ubiquitous yellow gates over entry points throughout the West Bank.

Related

Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers

Israeli soldiers stopped each car to inspect Palestinians’ IDs. At their limit, drivers began pulling their cars onto roundabouts and driving the wrong way down the street, but the final say lay with Israeli forces, who allowed only one car at a time to approach the military installation. Some abandoned their cars to walk through checkpoints and reach their families on foot. An elderly Palestinian woman prayed aloud, saying that all she wanted was to make it safely to her family in Ein Yabrud, a village on the outskirts of Ramallah.

As we sat waiting at the checkpoint, Saif’s face was filled with worry. She opened her phone to show pictures of her daughter, dressed in pink and smiling at the camera.

Saif’s daughter has muscular dystrophy and requires specialized treatment and 24-hour supervision. Saif took a big risk visiting Nablus to see her dying uncle in the hospital, she said, because if she were to get stuck there due to a checkpoint closure — which did happen for three days last week — her daughter’s health would be put in jeopardy.

“I left her with my uncle just for the day, but I have to be there to care for her,” Saif said. “I know her medications and how to ensure she doesn’t get sick.”

Saif made it back to Ramallah, but she said it would not have been possible a few days earlier.

The day after the U.S. and Israel started attacks on Iran, the prevailing sentiment in Ramallah was anxiety. People wondered if there would be road closures and food and fuel shortages like during last year’s Twelve Day War, and whether the Israeli government would impose what Palestinians describe as collective punishment in the West Bank, even though they were not involved in the conflict.

“It has nothing to do with anything Palestinians in the West Bank are doing or not doing,” said Aviv Tatarsky, who leads an Israeli protective presence collective that organizes watches to deter settlers from invading Deir Istiya, a village outside Ramallah. “And still, there’s an Israeli decision, and life comes to a stop.”

Ramallah, which has long functioned as a relatively insulated bubble from the effects of Israel’s occupation, is also dealing with a struggling economy. Paired with the war, the economic downturn has muted Ramadan celebrations, according to residents who spoke with The Intercept.

“We are suffering,” said Faisal Taha, who drives taxis in Ramallah. “There is no money, no work. We are in debt, and I have four mouths to feed. What am I to do? I have been driving my taxi all day, and I have forty shekels.”

Unemployment in the West Bank is hovering around 40 percent — up from 13 percent two years ago — and GDP has contracted by 13 percent since October 7.

Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli NGO that monitors settlement construction in the West Bank, said he was not surprised by the restrictions imposed by Israel.

“They always use instances of violence to perpetuate more violence,” Etkes said. “This is what we have seen for years, since October 7, and now it is worse than ever.”

As during the Twelve Day War last year — after which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “historic victory” that would “stand for generations” against the Islamic Republic of Iran — there are already the beginnings of flour and fuel shortages in the West Bank as the Israeli Civil Administration, which runs the military occupation of the territory, imposes import restrictions.

“This is not something new. It happened in June during the Twelve Day War, and it’s kicking off again,” Tatarsky said. “But what’s different this time is that Israel is also blocking roads — not only disconnecting Palestinians from Area C, but also blocking roads between Palestinian villages.”

A week later, on March 7, there was still only one checkpoint out of Ramallah open, forcing all traffic through a bottleneck that passes by the Beit El settlement and through the Jalazone refugee camp. This is the only route for Palestinians living in Ramallah to access Route 60, the main thoroughfare connecting Palestinian communities in the south to those in the north.

Driving up the highway and passing village after village that had been closed off by the Israeli military, Etkes said it was clear the war with Iran was being used as a pretext for “a system that is meant to reduce as much as possible the area where Palestinians can move freely,” part of the settlement movements’ goal to alter the facts on the ground regarding de facto annexation.

Nabih Odeh, 63, who has been driving public transit taxis in the West Bank for more than 30 years, has watched what he describes as the slow annexation of the West Bank unfold. As he drove up Route 60, he pointed to village after village sealed off by the Israeli military.

“There, that’s Aqraba, closed,” Odeh said. “If you want to get in or out, you must walk. That’s Turmus Ayya — very wealthy — still closed.”

Eighty percent of Turmus Ayya’s residents have U.S. citizenship, yet the town was closed off, its yellow gate locked. Service taxis pulled up to drop residents off, leaving them to walk to the town center or be picked up by relatives. Its status as a wealthy American Palestinian village has no bearing on Israel’s decision.

At the same time, Israeli settlers have used the war with Iran as an opportunity to launch further attacks on Palestinian communities, largely in Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control — working in tandem with movement restrictions in Areas A and B, the Palestinian-administered population centers and villages created under the 1995 Oslo Accords.

Messages circulating in settler WhatsApp groups have called for violence against Palestinians to match Israeli airstrikes in Iran. One graphic depicting a roaring lion, to match the Israel Defense Forces’ name for the military operation against Iran, reads: “It is time to launch a preemptive attack in all arenas, until the enemy is expelled from the country and subdued outside it. This time we win, once and for all.”

“I mean, generally, when you’re speaking about Israeli society, it is torn apart in so many ways,” said Orly Noy, editor at Local Call and chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. “But there’s one thing that always unifies,  and I’m speaking about the Jewish section of society, of course, and this is war.”

Related

Rubio Admits That America Is Fighting Israel’s War

Netanyahu is willing to do anything to stay in power, Noy added, and during his time in office, he has worked effectively to paint the Iranian regime as an existential threat to Israel, working in tandem with the U.S. “He has taken advantage of it very well,” Noy said.

During Operation Rising Lion, this rally-around-the-flag effect has not only served Netanyahu’s interests but also those of settlers living in the West Bank.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, estimates that settler attacks have increased 25 percent since the start of the conflict. Israeli settlers have killed six Palestinians since the start of the war with Iran, including three in one incident in the West Bank community of Khirbet Abu Falah, east of Ramallah.

Israeli settlers shot Fare’ Hamayel and Thaer Hamayel, and a third man, Mohammad Murra, died of suffocation from tear gas deployed by Israeli forces.

As the world’s attention remains on Iran, solidarity activists said that Israeli settlers appear to feel they have additional impunity to conduct attacks.

“They will be treated as heroes by their supporters, by their society,” Etkes said. “And the government will do nothing about it.”

The post With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, movement is no longer a mundane part of daily life. Israel’s military assault and prolonged siege have dismantled Gaza’s transportation system so thoroughly that journeys that once took minutes by car now require hours of walking through rubble and grotesque debris. What used to be an ordinary act — leaving home, reaching a clinic, visiting kin — has now become a form of physical labor, a calculation of pain, and a risk weighed against necessity.

By late 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Transport and Communications reported that approximately 70 percent of registered vehicles — more than 50,000 cars, taxis, buses, and trucks — had been destroyed or rendered inviable. Between 68 and 85 percent of the road network suffered damage or total destruction, with some areas such as Khan Younis losing more than 90 percent of their routes. Israeli forces repeatedly bombed, cratered, and bulldozed major roads and intersections, instigating chaos that fragmented the Strip into isolated zones where movement between neighborhoods requires long detours or hours on foot.

Related

Trump’s War to Nowhere

While the world turns its attention to Iran, daily life in Gaza has not returned to pre-genocide conditions. Since the U.S. and Israel began their joint assault on Iran, Lebanon, and the broader region, prices in Gaza have risen sharply as people rushed to buy essential goods and fuel. The sudden surge in demand and limited supply spiked the cost of food, water — and transportation. Border crossings were closed for 48 hours, further exacerbating shortages and contributing to the rapid rise in prices. In recent days, prices have begun to gradually decrease and stabilize, but the overall economic burden remains heavy for most households in Gaza, where many people are still struggling to cover basic needs.

Roads no longer connect neighborhoods, and transportation no longer guarantees access to health care, work, or sustenance. Even streets that remain technically passable are obstructed by rubble, vehicles, or collapsed infrastructure beneath the surface. Water and sewage lines burst under bombardment, flooding streets and turning mobility into an endeavor plagued by biohazards. In many areas, roads have become indistinguishable from ruins.

This collapse did not result solely from airstrikes. Israel’s blockade — which continues to restrict fuel, spare parts, tires, batteries, and heavy machinery — has undermined Gaza’s ability to repair or recover. Vehicles that survived bombardment often remain immobilized due to mechanical failures no workshop can fix. Even basic parts and equipment — filters, belts, brake systems — have become hard to find. Fuel scarcity has driven prices far beyond the reach of most families, while mechanics resort to dangerously improvised substitutes that destroy engines and emit toxic fumes across densely populated areas.

Related

Plans Call for “New Rafah” Built in Israel’s Image — Without Palestinians

As formal transportation disappears, residents rely on unsafe alternatives: tuk-tuks with no safety standards, animal-drawn carts, overcrowded cargo trucks not designed for passengers, or walking long distances across shattered streets. Asphalt has collapsed and fractured, mingling with rubble, sewage, twisted metal, and remnants of destroyed buildings, forming uneven, dirt-like paths. Movement through these spaces turns the act of walking into a physically punishing routine. The clatter of collapsing buildings and distant bombardment is constant, and the air feels opaque with dust and smoke.

Municipal authorities cannot clear the wreckage. The fuel shortages and lack of functioning equipment affect them too, preventing large-scale removal of debris. The result is a form of enforced immobility: Entire neighborhoods remain effectively cut off, not by checkpoints but by devastation. Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.

I have experienced this reality repeatedly. Over several weeks, I traveled with my brother, Mohammed, four times to reach a dentist in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, nearly 10 kilometers from our home. There is no reliable transportation between the two areas. The distance became an ordeal measured not in maps but in muscle fatigue, time lost, and pain that intensified with every uneven step.

On one of those days, rain fell heavily. Broken roads turned to mud layered over shattered asphalt and sharp stones. Water pooled in craters left by bombs. At times, I sprinted across short safe patches, only to be slowed again by mud and debris.

Transportation carried us only part of the distance. We always completed the journey on foot, adjusting our pace to the condition of the road and to the limits of our bodies. Without severe tooth pain, I would not have left my room. The road drained me more than the dental procedure itself. Each step felt like a negotiation between necessity and collapse.

I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way: a flowering tree growing beside rubble, a rose bush somehow still nourished, a building that had not yet fallen, the faint radiant glow of children playing in a distant schoolyard. I photographed the clouds, took pictures of myself simply to pass time, and paused whenever my body demanded it. These small acts were my survival mechanisms, attempts to assert that Gaza still contained something worth noticing.

This experience is not exceptional. It reflects a broader reality in which access to health care depends not on medical need alone, but on physical endurance. Patients miss appointments or abandon treatment altogether because they cannot reach clinics. Parents carry children for kilometers to medical points. Elderly people and those with disabilities remain trapped in place, dependent on others or forced to forego care indefinitely. The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.

Economic consequences intensify the crisis. Tens of thousands of drivers have lost their livelihoods as taxis, buses, and trucks were destroyed or immobilized. Commercial transport has slowed dramatically, disrupting supply chains and inflating the cost of basic goods. Workers arrive late or not at all. Students walk for hours or drop out entirely. For displaced families, transportation costs have reached apocalyptic levels, with some paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to move belongings short distances. Those without money walk, scavenge what they can, and leave the rest behind.

In the absence of regulation and fuel availability, informal transport operators dictate prices brazenly. Gaza’s local authorities acknowledge the exploitation, but under siege conditions, they have limited options to protect residents. Scarcity governs movement more than public need, reshaping social relations around access, endurance, and pent-up anger. Western‑run aid organizations vow to “maintain a steady and predictable flow of supplies,” yet recent reports note that while some aid has entered Gaza, the overall volume remains insufficient to meet basic needs, fueling frustration and despair.

The pattern of destruction reveals intent. Israeli attacks have repeatedly targeted intersections, bridges, and key road junctions, severing connections between neighborhoods and governorates. These actions obstruct ambulances, humanitarian convoys, and civilian movement, amplifying the effects of injury, hunger, and displacement. Gaza’s government estimates that losses in the transport sector exceed $3 billion, including the destruction of more than three million linear meters of roads. Mobility itself has become a casualty of war, leaving residents lurking between hazards and temporary shelters, pleading for safety.

Related

Gaza’s Civil Defense Forces Keep Digging for 10,000 Missing Bodies

Local officials have proposed emergency rehabilitation plans focused on reopening critical routes linking hospitals, shelters, and aid distribution centers. These efforts prioritize survival rather than reconstruction. Without access to fuel, spare parts, and heavy machinery, even minimal recovery remains largely theoretical, constrained by political decisions beyond Gaza’s control.

Transportation in Gaza is not a technical issue or a matter of convenience. It defines the limits of daily life. It determines who can reach a doctor, who can work, who can study, and who must stay behind. As long as movement itself remains under siege, life in Gaza will continue to contract, measured not by distance but by pain, exhaustion, and loss. In the 21st century, Palestinians in Gaza navigate a landscape where walking through ruins has replaced the most basic promise of mobility, ceaselessly testing endurance, resilience, and the abiding human spirit.

The post Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Roads and Transit. Now, We Walk Everywhere. appeared first on The Intercept.

For nearly a decade, Air Force maintenance units spent more than $1.79 million in taxpayer funds buying 5,166 high-end knives and other luxury items, including switchblades and combat-style tactical knives with no legitimate maintenance use, The Intercept has found. It’s a drop in the bucket of a U.S. military budget creeping ever closer to a trillion dollars, about $300 billion of which belongs to the Air Force. But with a military budget so bloated, the knife-ordering frenzy illustrates how obviously frivolous spending can go unchecked.

“Everyone knew we didn’t need them,” said a former noncommissioned officer recently honorably discharged from Hill Air Force Base. “There was literally zero justification in any maintenance field.”

The Benchmade Infidel and Mini Infidel, the most popular choices, are sleek and black, with automatic blades that slide straight out the front. Their presence on the flightline, where maintainers work to repair and tune up airplanes between flights, is difficult to justify — and often outright banned. Procurement records obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests show that Air Force maintenance units have been buying the knives as far back as at least 2017 and as recently as June 2025, spanning multiple major commands.

Accounting for roughly a quarter of troops in the Air Force, maintainers are the technicians and mechanics responsible for upkeep of approximately 5,000 planes. They’re chronically understaffed and overworked, as The Intercept previously reported, and maintainers spanning nine bases and major commands said that some of the crucial supplies they need for maintenance — like safety wire, specialized hydraulic fluids, and calibrated test equipment — are difficult to obtain. Maintainers said that while essential tools and materials were often delayed or unavailable, nonessential items like high-end knives moved easily through the supply system, likely due to an apparent misclassification, as a procurement expert explained to The Intercept.

Related

Newly Released Data Reveals Air Force Suicide Crisis After Years of Concealment

“It always felt like we were just putting duct tape on these jets to keep them flying,” said an active-duty senior airman who previously served in the 57th Maintenance Wing at Nellis Air Force Base. “Jets would come back with the same broken parts or worse, just so we could meet flight numbers. We never had money for proper tools, but there would be brand-new computers, unit flags, or other items to make the unit look better.”

For some maintainers, the option to order a shiny combat knife for free is something of a silver lining. “This is one of the only good things that maintainers get,” said a former maintainer from Edwards Air Force Base.

In other cases, the knives were markers of inclusion. “Tech sergeants would come in for a short time and get a knife as a welcome present,” said the former maintainer from Hill.

Nine current and former Air Force maintainers who spoke to The Intercept for this story were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation. As is common in the military, maintainers who raise concerns about excessive spending can face ostracization or professional consequences.

 “It wasn’t like higher-ups would be mad if they caught you,” said the source from Hill. “They had knives too.”

“Supply Could Hook Them Up”

“We were told that if you wanted one, all you had to do was be friends with people attached to the supply line,” said a source who worked in the backshop at Nellis. “I knew plenty of people who would do favors for supply troops to get their hands on a knife.”

Six people stationed at Nellis between 2017 and 2024 confirmed that misuse of the supply system was common. One source said they still have six Benchmade knives, gifted by a noncommissioned officer in the 57th Wing. The source said they were never told how those knives were obtained.

More than 59 active-duty Air Force bases in the United States and numerous overseas installations operate under the same supply system. The Intercept submitted requests for procurement data to 28 Air Force bases and received responsive records from 12 installations. Every base that returned records showed similar knife-ordering patterns across its flightline maintenance units.

“Most things were done with handshakes, winks and nods. Definitely a good ol’ boys club,” said Micah Templin, a former weapons troop in the 57th Maintenance Wing at Nellis. “There were quid pro quos and IOUs. If you did someone a favor one day, maybe your chief or leadership would feel comfortable looking the other way on another.”

Sources from U.S. Air Force units in the continental United States, South Korea, and Germany said personnel routinely used the term “box cutters” as a euphemism for the knives. This made them sound simple and practical, several maintainers said, while the knives themselves were prized largely for their appearance, retail price, and the status of owning one rather than any maintenance-related use. Maintainers interviewed by The Intercept said the knives were popular largely because they “look cool.”

While Defense Logistics Agency records show how many knives were purchased overall, FOIA responses from individual bases offer only a partial picture of where those orders originated. But every installation that did provide records showed recognizable patterns, suggesting the practice was not limited to a single base or command.

Several maintainers said they believed leadership used unit funds to purchase high-end items that were later diverted for personal use, describing a culture in which “nothing was given out without a take.” Maintainers said those who resisted or questioned practices could find themselves scrutinized or under extra pressure, which discouraged reporting and allowed misuse of the supply system to continue unchecked.

“I feel like maintainer leadership will legally do everything they can to keep someone from speaking out and do anything to protect their careers. That’s the trend within senior leadership in maintenance,” the backshop source said.

Seven sources from domestic and overseas units said this often means senior enlisted personnel direct junior troops to place orders, move items, or handle deliveries on their behalf. For those with access, it’s easy to order items with minimal oversight. The practice, sources said, allowed leadership to benefit from questionable purchases while shielding themselves from scrutiny and leaving lower-ranking airmen exposed to potential disciplinary or legal consequences.

Knives were the most common example of the misspending, but maintainers described similar practices involving other high-end items. Five airmen who served in the 64th Aggressor Squadron’s maintenance units at Nellis Air Force Base between 2018 and 2020 said senior noncommissioned officers in the squadron’s Combat Oriented Supply Organization routinely ordered new flat-screen televisions for maintenance spaces, then placed the fully functional replaced sets into unit storage areas. According to the airmen, senior noncommissioned officers later removed some of the televisions from unit spaces for personal use.

“I remember a time when a tech sergeant ordered a ton of Yeti coolers and then told me to load them directly into his private vehicle,” said an active-duty avionics troop stationed in Europe, granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. “It was always ordered in ones and twos. Anything else would raise too much suspicion.”

According to Dallas Sharrah, a former staff sergeant who served at Nellis Air Force Base: “People were mainly ordering switchblades or Oakley sunglasses for their buddies. Supply could hook them up a bit before they got yelled at.”

Costly Debris

Outside of toolkits, knives are never allowed on the flightline. They’re considered Foreign Object Debris, according to former maintenance officers, meaning they’re at risk of being sucked into an aircraft intake and damaging the engine.

The Air Force Materiel Management Handbook says that all orders must be justified for official use, but classification issues in the procurement catalog blurred the lines that define what qualifies. The knives are broadly available through standard supply channels, making repeated or bulk orders easy to place. At Nellis, purchases often averaged 20 knives per order, with some as high as 47.

“In the aggregate, someone had to be doing an audit somewhere and said to themselves, ‘Why did we order so many knives? Why are those requisitions restricted to certain bases and certain units? What is going on here?’ Clearly, no one was looking,” said Steve Leonard, a retired senior military strategist, procurement expert, and professor at the University of Kansas.

The procurement catalog is divided into subsections, Leonard explained, and knives were listed as Class IX, a category shared with maintenance-related items. But in his view, the knives should have been considered Class II items, which are intended for individual issue and subject to stricter justification, approval, and accountability requirements.

Items classified as Class II are typically restricted from purchase with unit funds if they primarily benefit individuals, while Class IX repair parts move through maintenance supply channels with far less scrutiny. “Most people aren’t interested in stealing hydraulic valves,” he said.

Defense Logistics Agency procurement records show the knives carry a “J” security code, meaning they are treated as security-related items rather than maintenance equipment, a designation that undermines their classification as routine repair parts.

When asked about the findings, an Air Force spokesperson did not address specific allegations or installations. The Intercept provided the Department of the Air Force with FOIA records, national stock numbers, and other evidence of more than $1 million in suspect knife purchases across six installations.

“The Department of the Air Force takes all allegations of fraud seriously and has processes and procedures in place to investigate them,” the spokesperson wrote in response. “If service members or citizens have concerns or evidence of specific wrongdoing, they are encouraged to report the information to local law enforcement or their Office of Special Investigation.”

Benchmade, the manufacturer of the Infidel and Mini Infidel knives most named in procurement records and troop testimonies, declined to comment.

Limited Oversight

It remains unclear how many knives airmen have obtained in recent months. On June 9, 2025, The Intercept submitted FOIA requests to 28 Air Force bases. Twelve installations provided responsive procurement records, while the remaining bases delayed, obstructed, or did not meaningfully respond.

At Hill Air Force Base, officials falsely claimed records from another installation were their own. Davis–Monthan Air Force Base admitted it had gone months with no staff to process FOIA requests. Joint Base San Antonio–Randolph reported spending only 30 minutes searching eight years of procurement records before declaring no knife purchases existed. At Luke Air Force Base, an officer sent conflicting messages about whether a request had been received, then attempted to delete an earlier acknowledgment email.

Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said she had not previously been aware of the purchases or inconsistencies in the bases’ FOIA replies. “I am literally trying to understand what to look for and who to ask,” she wrote in an email.

The Defense Department’s inspector general system, responsible for oversight of potential fraud and other misconduct, declined to comment on the knife purchases. An inspector general spokesperson said the office does not comment on active investigations and would not say whether any investigation related to the purchases was underway. The IG system is undergoing a major overhaul, with many positions open under the second Trump administration.

At the same time, Air Force inspector general complaint records obtained by The Intercept through FOIA requests show that from January 2016 through December 2022, maintenance and munitions units at Nellis Air Force Base generated at least 274 complaints. The allegations included abuse of authority, reprisal, potential contracting fraud, and hostile work environments.

Related

Ousted Air Force Special Ops Command Chief Faces Child Sexual Abuse Material Charges

Many of the complaints were recorded as “assisted” or closed within days, averaging roughly three complaints per month over six years from the same units later tied to irregular knife purchases documented in this reporting.

Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog, said the pattern reflects broader concerns about misuse of government funds and poor oversight. “While every instance might not be fraudulent, I’ll expect many of the knives purchased are for personal use with taxpayers picking up the tab,” he said. “Wasted money and unauthorized use is a bad mix, and only the tip of the iceberg.”

At Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, FOIA-obtained records describe a “recurring problem with physical location and quantity consistency” of supply items and note that “thievery is not out of question.” As a corrective step, the documents say leadership submitted an unfunded request for surveillance cameras through the procurement system.

The post Air Force Maintenance Staff Can’t Stop Buying Fancy Knives With Tax Dollars appeared first on The Intercept.

Two FBI agents, one from New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, told a former member of Extinction Rebellion NYC they wanted to ask him about the group at his home upstate on Friday, an attorney for the group told The Intercept. The visit followed a prior attempt to reach him at his old address.

The FBI’s apparent probe of Extinction Rebellion NYC comes as the Justice Department ramps up its surveillance of activists protesting immigration enforcement and the Trump administration creates secret lists of domestic enemies under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.

“I believe this to be a significant escalation of the criminal legal system against XR and find it very troubling,” said Ron Kuby, the Extinction Rebellion attorney. “This is usually the way we find out an actual investigation is underway and is often followed by other visits and other actions.” 

The former Extinction Rebellion member, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his safety, said that the visit came after a phone call in January from a special agent that he assumed was a scam.

“I was skeptical the phone call was really from the FBI, but after I declined to speak with the agent, she said that she was standing outside my door,” he said. She was actually at the activist’s former address, which he said made him additionally dubious. But last week, when the agents showed up at his current address, he said he saw the agent’s business card through his door.

Kuby confirmed that the agent’s business card information corresponded to a current member of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force. A text message from the agent, reviewed by The Intercept, shows she identified herself and stated that she was at the former member’s house to question him about Extinction Rebellion. Her name, title, and phone number match a known special agent on the task force, according to court records.

Reached by The Intercept, a public affairs officer for the New York FBI field office said, “Per longstanding DOJ policy, we cannot confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of any investigation.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Extinction Rebellion NYC is a chapter of a loose international climate justice movement that does highly public direct actions, like an April Earth Day spray-painting over the presidential seal inside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Kuby said none of the group’s actions are violent or rise above the level of misdemeanors, and would not typically be of interest to federal counterterrorism investigators.

The former member said he had not been involved in any Extinction Rebellion actions in two years and hadn’t participated in anything that he thought would send the FBI to his door. 

“All of our actions are incredibly public,” he said. He recalled that the agent said she had some questions about Extinction Rebellion NYC, and that he wasn’t in any trouble, before the activist declined to speak and closed his door.

Why the FBI’s counterterrorism task force would investigate Extinction Rebellion is unknown, Kuby said.

“Often, the FBI starts with former members of a group, or less central people, to begin investigations,” Kuby said. “The fact that they repeatedly pursued this member, and traveled hundreds of miles from his old address in NYC – this suggests a real investigative effort.”

Trump’s September presidential memorandum, dubbed NSPM-7, called for the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices to investigate a broad spectrum of progressive groups and donors for “anti-fascism” beliefs. 

Related

Longtime Paid FBI Informant Was Instrumental in Terror Case Against “Turtle Island Liberation Front”

A November FBI internal report obtained by The Guardian revealed that there were multiple active FBI investigations related to NSPM-7 in 27 locations, including New York, where the agent investigating Extinction Rebellion works. Trump’s directive instructed Joint Terrorism Task Forces to proactively investigate groups and activists with vague language that civil liberty watchdogs say could easily criminalize protected speech and protest.

FBI agents also visited several activists affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups in the Boston area last March, according to a local news report. The reasons for those visits remain unclear, and the activists involved said nothing came of them. The FBI’s Boston Division declined to comment to the press at the time.

After Extinction Rebellion NYC members protested New York Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s town hall at a Long Island synagogue last month, objecting to his vote to increase ICE funding, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted on X that she would be investigating the protest to see “whether federal law has been broken.”

None of the activists involved in the Suozzi protest have been contacted by federal investigators, representatives for the group told The Intercept. Suozzi did not reply to messages. 

In 2023, then-Florida Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote a letter to then-FBI Director Christopher Wray and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking them to bar members of Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. from the U.S. in response to a report that the group planned to protest at federal properties.

“Among other things, the group will allegedly block highways and disrupt federal properties, but violence and terrorist acts cannot be discounted given the group’s past threats,” Rubio wrote in the 2023 letter. He also used similar language in proposed legislation against “antifa” protests in 2022.

Nate Smith, an Extinction Rebellion activist who took part in the Suozzi protest, objected to characterizations of the group’s activism as terrorism.

“Is petitioning an elected official at a public event what makes America great, or a federal offense?” Smith said. “I get if you don’t like it. That’s half the point, but ‘terrorism’?” 

There have also been scattered reports of FBI agents visiting anti-ICE protesters around the country. While the FBI’s interest in Extinction Rebellion remains unclear, the group pointed to Trump’s NSPM-7 directive. 

“We did not anticipate that we would be among the first groups of those who speak inconveniently to be targeted,” Extinction Rebellion NYC said in a public statement. “We did not anticipate the level of capitulation from our country’s hallowed institutions and political opposition.” 

The post FBI Counterterrorism Agents Spent Weeks Seeking a Climate Activist — Then Showed Up at His Door appeared first on The Intercept.

Saari, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, went to the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis less than an hour after federal agents fired the fatal shots. He was wearing his Marine camouflage and carrying a lawfully owned 9mm Glock handgun on his right hip, as he does every day, he told The Intercept. Agents on the scene “thought I was undercover,” Saari said. “They kept asking what agency I was with.”

When Saari told them he was not with any agency, their demeanor shifted. Federal immigration agents soon aimed M4-style rifles at his head, footage reviewed by The Intercept shows, their fingers on the trigger less than a minute’s walk away from where Pretti was killed.

“More and more Border Patrol and ICE agents gathered around me,” Saari said. “Then they moved in with rifles and handguns drawn.”

The encounter raises questions about how federal agents assessed threats, used force, and made arrest decisions in the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing. In Saari’s case, he and his attorney told The Intercept, federal agents took scans and samples of his biometric data and made a copy of his phone — without obtaining a warrant.

Related

“Uptick in Abductions”: ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers

Before the agents apprehended him, Saari said he was standing on the sidewalk observing events — not recording, protesting, or engaging with federal agents until they approached him. When they did, Saari said agents issued conflicting commands and attempted to handcuff him without first securing his firearm. He said officers briefly positioned his right hand on his handgun while pulling his arms behind his back, leaving him unsure how they expected him to comply.

Standard law enforcement firearms training typically emphasizes securing a weapon before attempting to restrain an armed person.

Saari said he feared agents might shoot him when his hand brushed the gun, even though he said officers, not his own movements, placed it there.

Agents arrested Saari and brought him to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, where he was detained for at least six hours before being released without charges.

Reached for comment, ICE referred The Intercept to Customs and Border Protection. Neither CBP nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment.

Inside the federal building, Saari said agents shackled his hands and feet, photographed him, scanned his face, and forced him to provide a DNA sample by depressing his tongue and swabbing the inside of his mouth. He said agents denied him access to an attorney, even though they were present elsewhere in the building and in contact with civilians and federal officials that day.

“I asked for an attorney probably a hundred times and was never given one,” Saari said. “I was never told why I was being arrested.”

Then, Saari said, “They took my cell phone and cloned it. They actually told me they did that.”

Saari said agents did not ask him to unlock the device, nor did they provide a warrant, paperwork, or explanation authorizing the search.

“Every step of this process raises red flags,” said Shauna Kieffer, the vice president of the Minnesota Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who is now representing Saari. “You don’t get to detain someone without cause, deny them access to counsel, seize their phone, and then search or copy it without a warrant.”

Law enforcement may seize a phone during an arrest, but officers generally cannot access or duplicate its data without judicial authorization, said Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He said the only exception involves narrow emergency circumstances, which typically do not apply once both a person and their phone are already in custody.

“Once the phone is secured and the person is secured, it’s very hard to imagine what kind of emergency would justify searching or copying it without a warrant,” Wessler said.

Failure to get a warrant raises serious concerns of violating the Fourth Amendment, Wessler added, pointing to the 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California, in which the court found police are generally not allowed to search an arrested person’s cell phone without a specific warrant.

“The government needs a warrant to search or copy the contents of a phone, just as it would need a warrant to look through it,” Wessler said. And that warrant “has to be particularized to the evidence the government actually has probable cause to seek,” he added. “You don’t get a blank check to rummage through someone’s digital life.”

About seven hours after his arrest, Saari was released into sub-zero temperatures without transportation, unsure of where he was. He said he didn’t know if he remained under investigation, nor whether the government would retain copies of his phone data or DNA sample.

“Finding out that someone who served our country was being denied access to counsel was heartbreaking,” said Kieffer, who was connected with Saari two days after his detention through a colleague. “He should never have been invisible to us.”

While he was in detention, Saari said, agents provided minimal food and water, and detainees with visible injuries did not receive timely medical care.

“I asked for water about a dozen times,” he told The Intercept. “At one point they brought three bottles of water for seven people.”

Saari said detainees had to use their drinking water to clean blood off of their injured peers, which is consistent with accounts from another civilian arrested that day and previously reported by The Intercept.

Related

He Witnessed an Earlier Shooting. Feds Arrested Him at the Scene of Alex Pretti’s Killing.

“There was a man with a golf-ball-sized contusion on his head who didn’t get medical attention,” Saari said. “There was a 70-year-old Marine Corps veteran with a deep gash on his elbow who was bleeding.”

Saari said the treatment he received stood in sharp contrast to how he handled detainees during his own military service, including during combat operations in Iraq.

During one raid in Fallujah, Saari said his unit detained men who surrendered without resistance. After the operation, he said, they reviewed video footage showing the detainees had recently planted an improvised explosive device targeting a U.S. convoy.

Despite the brutality of some operations in Fallujah, where U.S. forces repeatedly killed Iraqi civilians, Saari said his unit restrained, searched, and turned over the detainees without abuse or humiliation.

“We still treated them as humans,” Saari said. “To be treated worse here, at home, than people who had attacked our unit in a war zone, it’s been hard to understand.”

The post Marine Detained in Minneapolis Says Feds Copied His Phone Without a Warrant appeared first on The Intercept.

The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department’s largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records, according to an online federal database that covers the last 18 years. In a reversal of the more commonly seen direction for weapons transfers between the countries — in which the U.S. sends its weapons to Israel — the U.S. will pay the Israeli weapons firm Tomer over a period of three years to produce a new 155mm munition. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations.

The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning.

“The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying,” said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion, which pushes to ban cluster munitions. She recalled speaking with a 17-year-old boy who found an unexploded cluster bomblet in his neighbor’s garden in the aftermath of the Bosnian War.

“He said he played with it for quite a while. Suddenly it exploded. It blew up both of his hands; it blew away part of his face as well,” she said.

Known as the XM1208 munition, America’s new cluster shells are designed to have a dud rate — or risk of failure to explode — of less than 1 percent. They rely on more complex fuses and self-destruct features to reduce long-term danger to civilians, according to army procurement documents and weapons experts. But researchers say those low failure rates in testing do not reflect real-world performance, and advocates argue that cluster weapons’ battlefield effectiveness cannot justify their humanitarian costs.

“They are inherently indiscriminate,” said Brian Castner, an Amnesty International weapons investigator and former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer. “There’s not a way to use them responsibly, in that you can’t control where they land, and with this high dud rate you can’t control the effect on the civilian population afterwards.”

Related

The Indiscriminate Rain of Cluster Bombs

The Cluster Munition Monitor has documented more than 24,800 cluster munition injuries and deaths since the 1960s, three-quarters from unexploded remnants. In 2024, cluster munitions killed at least 314 civilians, the majority of them in Ukraine.

Both the XM1208 and the deal to buy them are atypical. The DOD awarded the contract without public competition under a “public interest” exception to federal contracting law, using recent amendments that loosened rules for awarding no-bid defense contracts involving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

“I found this to be rather unusual,” said Julia Gledhill, a military contracting researcher for the Stimson Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank. “I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million.”

Federal agencies are legally required to create a “determination and findings” document justifying the award of a no-bid contract, which can be requested from the agencies under public records law. The Army has not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for that documentation.

Tomer did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the new munition’s failure rate, U.S. Army public affairs officer Shahin Uddin wrote it has “has undergone all required testing to ensure it meets all performance requirements, including compliance with the DoD Cluster Munition Policy.”

A Weapon for the Next War

The Pentagon’s efforts to field the XM1208 comes against the backdrop of the Russia–Ukraine war, where both sides have blanketed battlefields with older cluster munitions — including some given to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Some Eastern European countries have considered withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions amid fears of conflict with Russia, and in 2024, Lithuania became the first country to abandon the treaty.

As a result, Castner said, “Both the cluster munitions convention and the anti-personnel land mine convention are under threat.” 

Related

With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More

But major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons. Rather than sign the 2008 pact, the U.S. enacted a policy that year to stop using its old, failure-prone cluster munitions by 2019 and develop new weapons with a dud rate of less than 1 percent. 

Progress was slow, and in 2017, the U.S. weakened its policy to allow continued use of older cluster bombs until it had sufficient stockpiles of safer models. That year, the U.S. military began testing the M999 cluster munition: a new shell developed by another state-owned Israeli arms company, IMI Systems.

“The U.S. wants all options,” said William Hartung, an arms industry researcher with the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft. “One of their arguments was it’s good if you’re in a close-packed artillery situation — a ground war. It clears more of an area.”

During its 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel drew international criticism for using cluster bombs, and IMI promised a new weapon that would lower collateral damage — both to civilians and Israel’s flagging global reputation. In 2018, IMI Systems was acquired by Elbit Systems, a privately owned Israeli defense contractor which has faced recent boycotts for arming Israel’s forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

After backlash from investors in countries that had signed the convention, Elbit canceled production of the M999 and pledged not to build any cluster weapons.

But the M999 program did not stay dead. The Israeli government established a new state-owned arms company, Tomer, in 2018, with no limitations on cluster weapon production. The U.S. Army then adopted the M999 as its new cluster shell for artillery, renaming it the XM1208. According to a 2024 army munitions publication, the XM1208 is designed to release nine bomblets which then detonate in the air, each containing 1,200 pieces of tungsten shrapnel.

That same document lists Elbit as a production partner for the XM1208, despite the company’s pledge to abide by the cluster convention. Elbit did not immediately return a request for comment, and the Army did not respond to an inquiry about whether Elbit was working on the munition.

Related

As Israel Bombed Gaza, Amazon Did Business With Its Bomb-Makers

Business at Tomer has been booming, due to both the genocide in Gaza and foreign arms sales, according to the Israeli tech news site Calcalist. It recorded $173 million in sales last year, making the DOD’s $210 million contract a massive windfall compared to its historical revenue. Tomer pays the Israeli government a 50 percent dividend on its profit, Calcalist reported.

The XM1208 is designed with multiple fail-safe fuses to reduce dud rates, according to U.S. Army documents published online. But little is known about how it actually performs in the field. Last year, The Guardian published photos showing an expended M999 shell in Lebanon, suggesting Israel had used the weapon in its recent attacks on Hezbollah. But there is currently no public data on its real-world failure rate, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the munitions analysis firm Armament Research Services.

Real-world dud rates are generally much higher than those found in controlled testing, which does not account for battlefield conditions like soft soil or older, degraded fuses, said Taslidžan, of Humanity & Inclusion. The manufacturer of Israel’s M85 cluster munition, which includes a self-destruct feature to reduce long-term risk to civilians, touted a “hazardous dud” rate of less than 0.1 percent. But researchers with Norwegian People’s Aid who analyzed the aftermath of M85 strikes from the 2006 war in Lebanon found that about 10 percent failed to explode.

And even if the XM1208 meets its 1 percent failure rate target, it would still be inhumane, said Taslidžan, leaving large numbers of lethal duds behind.

“That’s why the Convention on Cluster Munitions bans these weapons as a class,” she said. “The area effects and residual contamination are fundamentally incompatible with protecting civilians.”

The post Pentagon Makes Largest Known Arms Purchase From Israel — For Banned Cluster Weapons appeared first on The Intercept.

It was May 2023, the third year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Alvarado, his relatives and legal counsel told The Intercept, is still incarcerated in El Salvador.

Two years before the second Trump administration targeted Kilmar Ábrego García over his tattoos and sent him to a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Biden State Department was made aware of Alvarado’s detention — and, for reasons of diplomacy and optics, did nothing. Today, the world has seen the viral images of men lined up at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT — heads shaved, crammed front-to-back and forced to straddle each other — as a result of Donald Trump’s brutal deportation regime. But according to lawyer Jorge Palacios, the total number of U.S. citizens and residents detained in El Salvador’s less prominent prisons and jails is unknown.

Palacios, who brought Alvarado’s case before the United Nations, said that members of his group, Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, “have had people come to them saying their detained relatives are U.S. citizens who were visiting,” as was the case with Alvarado. Families often lose touch with their loved ones after their arrests, so “exact details are limited.”

In Alvarado’s case, a Salvadoran police report, testimony from two of his closest relatives, and insight from legal experts offer a relatively clear picture of what happened. At the police station in Moncagua, officers disregarded his American citizenship and stomped on his passport, telling him it was worthless. Alvarado had a tattoo of the letters “L.A.” — the city of his birth — but officers insisted it represented the city where MS-13 was formed. A “W” — his first initial — was actually an inverted “M,” they said, and a dollar sign was an obscured “S.”

The police report says Alvarado’s tattoos were “ambiguous, and there is no documentary or evidentiary support indicating that Mr. Huete Alvarado belongs to any gang, organization, or structure involved in the commission of criminal acts.” It was determined that “the police procedure may have been dysfunctional due to the lack of certainty regarding the individual’s belonging to or links with gangs.” 

Related

CECOT Is What the Bukele Regime Wants You to See

Alvarado has been shuffled between a handful of prisons and penal institutions in the nearly three years since then, never receiving a trial. His situation is in many ways exceptional, given his nationality, but it reflects the broader crisis facing countless families in El Salvador struggling to understand their loved ones’ perpetual, often inexplicable detentions. As similar models of criminalization are being rolled out across Latin America, Alvarado’s case may offer a preview of things to come. 

When Alvarado was detained, the country of his birth was led by a Biden presidency that had, from the beginning, pitched its commitment to “upholding universal rights” as the “grounding wire of our global policy, our global power.” But since the Biden administration neglected to intervene in Alvarado’s detention, the authority with the best shot at saving him now is the second Trump administration, ideologically aligned with El Salvador’s reactionary leadership and its sweeping gang crackdown. Now, the Salvadoran regime that has effectively disappeared thousands into an opaque network of prisons without trials is more emboldened than ever. 

Alvarado’s family was initially supportive of Nayib Bukele, the bearded, grinning, bitcoin-boosting millennial and self-described dictator who rose to power the first time Trump was in office and has held onto it, despite a Salvadoran constitutional prohibition, into a second consecutive term. Murder was declining when Bukele became president in 2019, but many Salvadorans still felt trapped by widespread gang violence and drug trafficking. Bukele, like his predecessors, at first brokered a clandestine truce with gang leaders — providing “financial incentive” to artificially reduce the number of homicides. 

The pact fell apart in early 2022, and murders hit a 30-year high in a single day. Bukele enacted his “state of exception,” which allowed his government to suspend constitutional rights for 30 days, paving the way for an unfettered war on organized crime. Bukele and his governing Nuevas Ideas party have renewed the suspension 39 times. 

Related

She Exposed Government Abuse. Now She’s Locked Up in an El Salvador Prison. 

El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Bukele’s government has arrested more than 90,000 Salvadorans, close to 2 percent of the population, including thousands of minors. Human rights experts and lawyers estimate that as many as half of everyone detained under the state of exception have no known gang connections. Prisons are overflowing, with the cumulative system operating at over 300 percent capacity.

By some standards, El Salvador is now considered one of the safest countries in Latin America. Bukele touts record lows in homicide and last year claimed 861 consecutive days without a murder — though, as the Washington Office on Latin America noted, the tally did not include the more than 427 people who have died in custody since the state of exception was decreed. Voters, in turn, have expressed overwhelming support: Bukele had an 85 percent approval rating as of June 2025. 

Others, like Alvarado’s family — with members in both El Salvador and the U.S. — soured on the regime once their relatives disappeared under the state of exception.

The Biden administration soured on Bukele, too. Initial optimism that the young right-wing leader would bring much-needed reform soon turned to criticism of El Salvador’s “democratic backsliding.” In May 2021, then-Vice President Kamala Harris denounced Bukele’s illegal removal of the country’s attorney general and the dismissal of five of its Supreme Court judges who had tried to stop him from overriding the constitution. The State Department sanctioned several members of Bukele’s inner circle for bribery and undermining democratic processes, and the Treasury Department sanctioned two more for their role in the secret gang truce. 

Bukele came into conflict with the interim U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Jean Manes, claiming on social media that Manes had tried to pressure him into freeing a politician charged with corruption. In November 2021, Manes temporarily suspended diplomatic relations with El Salvador.

Yet Alvarado’s case didn’t get the treatment of a high-profile American detained by an authoritarian pariah state, like Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, imprisoned in Russia just two months before Alvarado traveled to El Salvador. By May 2023, the Biden State Department had decided that Bukele’s mercurial nature and tendency to lash out warranted a softer touch. No longer would they scold out in the open. Instead, according to a former State Department official familiar with the matter, the National Security Council emphasized back-channeling over public condemnation.

State Department apparatchiks hoped that smoothing relations with Bukele would help them maintain El Salvador’s cooperation on immigration enforcement and counternarcotics, an official who worked under the Biden administration explained to The Intercept, and that an impending loan from the International Monetary Fund would trigger more transparency. The Bukele administration maintained that the state of exception would at some vague point be wound down, and Manes’s replacement, William H. Duncan, insisted on handling any concerns about the country’s punitive turn behind closed doors. 

Duncan, per two former State Department employees who asked not to be named for fear of professional consequences, “was very difficult to work with.” He insisted on being the only point of contact to Bukele. Efforts by members of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, or WHA, to bring attention to Alvarado’s case proved ineffective. Duncan’s embassy was aware of the case, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about efforts to push for more visits from embassy legal counselors for Alvarado. Duncan shut down anyone who tried to push for any other lateral communication, “especially any criticism,” one of the State Department sources said.

These tactics would culminate in an almost subservient brand of appeasement. In June 2024, after Bukele had successfully run for a consecutive (and constitutionally prohibited) term as president, a robust delegation of Biden officials led by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas — and flanked by Duncan and the WHA’s Assistant Secretary Brian Nichols — attended the Salvadoran strongman’s second inauguration. (Duncan and Nichols did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

“During the visit, Secretary Mayorkas met with President Bukele to discuss the many cultural, and economic ties our two countries share and reaffirmed the mutual commitment to address our common challenges,” a DHS press briefing reads. 

Alvarado had spent just over a year behind bars.

Alvarado’s absence has been especially difficult for his daughters. His stepdaughter “feels guilty,” said a relative, who requested anonymity for fear of targeting by the U.S. government. “At first it was really, really hard, because she was like, ‘I feel like it’s my fault.’” After getting support at school, she showed signs of improvement, the relative said, but “when she turned 15, she was like, ‘I don’t want to have anything, because Walter’s not here.’” 

His youngest daughter was just 2 when her father was arrested. She has started asking if Alvarado has passed away. 

Bukele’s army of internet trolls has mocked the family, expressing loyalty to a president they see as an effective leader against gang violence. When they posted about Alvarado’s detention, the family told The Intercept, they would be greeted by accusations that he was, in fact, a gangster who deserved to be punished.

Related

El Salvador’s Embrace of Bitcoin Didn’t Bring Prosperity — It Rode in With Waves of Repression

The Salvadoran president’s popularity can be explained, in part, by previous administrations’ inability to reckon with the country’s post-war contradictions. El Salvador’s reconciliation process in the early 1990s, overseen by the United States and the ultra-conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA, party, paved the way for the selling of the country’s telecommunications, banking, and energy infrastructure off to the highest bidder and exported the country’s natural commodities through the use of cheap labor. 

The austerity regime made prime breeding ground for an intricate network of organized crime in the country. The U.S. expelled Salvadoran refugees who had gotten caught up in Los Angeles drug trafficking scene, allowing La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, to blossom in El Salvador’s urban centers. Successive governments implemented tough-on-crime policies dubbed mano dura, Spanish for “iron fist,” to no avail, and populist, left-wing politicians found it difficult to unravel this Gordian knot through redistributive politics alone. 

“It’s perfectly understandable that people support Bukele because he resolved an issue that was really hurting people,” Vicki Gass, the executive director of the Latin America Working Group, told The Intercept. “You’re not making a lot of money. You get remittances from your dad living in the United States. It gets extorted. A friend of mine had his whole workshop and tools stolen. You know, his livelihood, right? It was tough, but replacing gang violence with state violence is not the answer.”

Boosting the image of state violence has become a useful propaganda tool of the Bukele government. The strategy is most clearly captured by CECOT, the state-of-the-art supermax prison where Ábrego García was sent last year. But it is only one of 24 prisons in the country.

Alvarado was first sent to the Centro Penal de Izalco, an older prison where detainees are fed a spartan diet and beating and medical neglect are common. These carceral facilities, where a majority of the individuals caught up in the state of exception have been sent, have been the site of hundreds of deaths from violence and lack of medical care. In 2024, Socorro Jurídico Humanitario reported that of the 235 deaths they had recorded in prisons like Izalco, 94 percent of those who died were not affiliated with any gangs. 

According to the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, “torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions” were rampant in Izalco. 

Alvarado smuggled messages to his family through the U.S. embassy in El Salvador, saying he cried every night and that he could not stomach the food. He told his infant daughter to behave herself, and mentioned he was forced to sleep on the concrete floor in only his boxers. His family would send him food to supplement his nutrition, but he would report often not receiving the goods — reflecting a common practice in Salvadoran prisons, according to the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal, which found that goods sent to the country’s detention centers are often diverted by prison staff.

Related

ICE Said They Were Being Flown to Louisiana. Their Flight Landed in Africa.

After the Biden era cool-off period, Democrats are again incensed by “the world’s coolest dictator.” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen made a personal trip to El Salvador to lay eyes on Ábrego García, who was a Maryland resident, and the party has lambasted the cruelty of so-called “third-country” deportations under Trump. Some have been pursuing their efforts since Biden was in power: In November 2023, a group of Democratic congress members petitioned the State Department to determine how many Americans had been detained under El Salvador’s state of exception. It remains unclear if they received a response.

Bukele, meanwhile, again renewed the decree in August that allows his government to detain those captured under the state of exception without trial. The tentative date for those hearings was pushed back to 2027. 

Just four months into his incarceration, Alvarado became so ill that he was transferred to the Granja Penitenciaria de Rehabilitación de Zacatecoluca, a lower security facility just a 15-minute drive from CECOT. Since then, he’s been moved multiple times, most recently to the Centro Industrial de Cumplimiento de Penas y Rehabilitación, where the state holds many political and foreign prisoners. Primarily, the facility is a work camp for detainees who are considered free of any gang associations.

The post An American Citizen Has Been Stuck in El Salvador’s Prison System Since the Biden Administration appeared first on The Intercept.

The incident, a video of which The Intercept reviewed and corroborated with an independent eyewitness, occurred not long after Kelly and his wife arrived in the area where Pretti was killed. With protesters amassing and agents from Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement flooding the area, the couple told The Intercept, they just wanted to observe the scene. 

“All of a sudden,” Kelly said, a federal agent “started running toward me, pointing and yelling, ‘That’s him. Get him.’” 

Ten days earlier, Kelly had watched as an immigration agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during a federal enforcement action in north Minneapolis. As Kelly told the local outlet Sahan Journal, an SUV with police lights chased another vehicle, and then, “They went into a house. … I heard two shots before the area was just being swarmed by ICE immediately.” Sosa-Celis was injured — and Kelly’s account contradicted the official narrative released by the Department of Homeland Security.

At the scene of Pretti’s killing, Kelly told agents they would find themselves “on the wrong side of history,” he recalled. After the exchange, he and his wife, Alana Ericson, began walking toward another section of Nicollet Avenue where people were congregating, and as soon as Kelly turned his back, that was when agents began shouting and running toward him.

“I had my hands up. I kept saying, ‘I’m leaving. I’m leaving,’” Kelly said.

Kelly is far from the only civilian to be brutalized by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. But his detailed account of his beating and detention offers a clear example of how the agents, ostensibly deployed to carry out immigration enforcement, have instead shifted their purpose to encompass a crackdown on dissent. In Kelly’s case, it raises the question of whether he was facing retaliation for acting as a witness.

In December 2025, a group of Minnesota residents and the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed a federal class-action lawsuit, Tincher v. Noem, alleging that federal agents participating in Operation Metro Surge used excessive force, intimidation, and arrests to deter civilians from observing, recording, or protesting immigration enforcement. 

Related

Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota

The complaint alleges retaliation against people engaging in constitutionally protected conduct, including arrests of observers who were not interfering with federal operations. In January, a federal judge issued a limited injunction barring agents from retaliating against peaceful protesters and observers.

While federal agents pinned Kelly down, given Pretti’s recent shooting, Ericson feared they could kill her husband.

“I kept telling them he’s a U.S. citizen. They said, ‘We don’t give a f—,’” she said.

Kelly had previously undergone fusion surgery in his thoracic spine, a procedure that permanently joins vertebrae to stabilize the back. “Several agents piled on top of me,” Kelly said, and one put his knee on the site of his surgical wounds. “They were sitting directly on my spine.”

“I was screaming that I couldn’t breathe, but I had almost no air left,” Kelly said. “An agent pushed the pepper spray nozzle right into my left eye and sprayed. I turned my head so I wouldn’t get it in both eyes, but my left eye was completely burned.”

Pinned beneath multiple agents, Kelly said panic quickly gave way to fear that he might not survive. He said he was unable to catch his breath and felt his limbs go limp beneath the weight on his body.

Kelly was then forced to his feet and handcuffed, leaving deep indentations on both wrists that were still visible in photographs taken three days later and shared with The Intercept. At some point, his phone fell out of his pocket. He was dragged to a vehicle and placed in the back seat, where he said agents told him he was being taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis for detention.

After being pepper-sprayed, Ericson said she was unable to drive. A bystander offered her a ride home, where she and her mother-in-law spent the day calling attorneys and trying to determine where Kelly had been taken and whether he was alive.

An independent eyewitness who said they did not know Kelly or his wife said they were standing nearby when agents rushed Kelly, tackled him to the ground, and deployed pepper spray, corroborating Kelly’s account of the arrest. After Kelly and Ericson were gone, the witness remained near Nicollet Avenue as federal agents continued clearing the area.

Moments later, the witness said they were grabbed from behind, thrown to the pavement, and sprayed in the face. Medical records from Hennepin County Medical Center reviewed by The Intercept show the witness sustained a fractured shoulder. According to the documentation, the injury will require surgery and months of physical therapy.

The Intercept reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and ICE with detailed questions about the use of force by federal agents in Minneapolis, the detention and processing of civilians, the seizure of phones and other personal property, and policies governing crowd control. DHS, CBP, and ICE did not provide responses by publication time.

Kelly was transported to the federal building in downtown Minneapolis, a facility commonly used by immigration authorities for detention and processing.

Several of the people detained alongside him, Kelly said, had directly witnessed or recorded the fatal shooting of Pretti earlier that morning.

Kelly said detainees were never told why they were being held and were not informed of any charges. He said federal officials discussed possible criminal violations but ultimately filed none.

Shauna Kieffer, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who is now representing Kelly, said her client was never read his Miranda rights. They’re required only when law enforcement seeks to obtain a statement, she said, so a person may be detained without being advised of those rights if officers are not questioning them and no statement is taken. At one point, Kelly said, ICE agents asked whether detainees would be willing to give interviews. All declined and invoked their right to remain silent.

According to Kelly, no medical care was provided upon arrival, even though multiple detainees had visible injuries and repeatedly asked for assistance. One older man, Kelly said, was bleeding from his elbow when brought into custody. Kelly said detainees used their drinking water to clean blood from the man’s arm while the staff ignored their requests for assistance, and that the man didn’t receive treatment until after a shift change.

Related

Even the Top Prosecutor in Minneapolis Doesn’t Know the Identity of the Agents Who Killed Alex Pretti

Kelly and his family have been unable to recover his phone. At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Kelly said agents later showed him the phone, asked whether it belonged to him, and told him he would not be getting it back. According to Kelly, no one listed the device on his property inventory, and agents told him they would seek a warrant to access its contents. 

A copy of the property inventory receipt reviewed by The Intercept does not list a cellphone among Kelly’s belongings. Additional photographs show his belongings placed in an ICE-labeled property bag bearing his name and a U.S. citizen designation.

In an affidavit he signed with his attorney, Kelly said the confiscated phone contained photos he took of the January 14 shooting of Sosa-Celis that he witnessed, a detail he says underscores its evidentiary value and why he wanted it returned.

Attorneys representing several detainees said federal officials told them they were considering charges of assaulting, interfering with, or resisting federal officers, according to Kieffer and another detainee’s attorney. Kieffer said the statute is often interpreted broadly, but verbal objections, mere presence at a scene, or passive conduct alone do not meet its standard.

In Kelly’s case, “any movements of his body are simply because a bunch of grown men are pummeling him,” Kieffer said, referring to the video of his arrest.

Kelly estimated he was detained for roughly eight hours before being abruptly released. After a brief stop at home, he sought medical treatment at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park. Discharge paperwork from that visit, reviewed by The Intercept, documents his injuries as assault-related.

Kelly said he continues to fear retaliation following his detention.

The following morning, he said, several federal vehicles drove slowly down the residential street where he and his wife live, an occurrence he described as highly unusual for their area.

Kieffer said her client’s fears are not unfounded.

She described instances in Minneapolis in which attorneys and civilian observers reported being followed by federal vehicles after monitoring immigration enforcement activity, and in some cases later saw federal agents parked outside their homes. One attorney shared video of ICE agents following him and parking outside his house with The Intercept.

In Kieffer’s view, the sheer number of people taken into custody while observing or documenting federal activity has made Minneapolis stand out.

The emotional toll of the arrest, Kelly and his wife said, has not ended with his release.

“I’ve been having nightmares. This doesn’t feel like real life. It feels like a really bad dream that I can’t wake up from,” Ericson said. “After he spoke publicly about that shooting, I felt like he was already on their radar.”

The post He Witnessed an Earlier Shooting. Feds Arrested Him at the Scene of Alex Pretti’s Killing. appeared first on The Intercept.

“As President Trump has said, nobody wants to see chaos and death in American cities,” wrote Doug Collins, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, on X Sunday. “Such tragedies are unfortunately happening in Minnesota because of state and local officials’ refusal to cooperate with the federal government to enforce the law and deport dangerous illegal criminals.”

A Border Patrol agent with eight years of experience shot Pretti on Saturday, commander-at-large Gregory Bovino said over the weekend. According to a New York Times analysis, multiple agents wrestled Pretti to the ground, and two agents shot him at least 10 times in total. Department of Homeland Security officials claim the shooting was a defensive response after Pretti approached agents with a firearm, but videos from the scene suggest that agents had removed Pretti’s gun from his hip before killing him.

Sworn eyewitness declarations from the scene also contradict DHS’s narrative. Two witnesses swear that Pretti, a U.S. citizen, was filming agents with a cellphone when he was forced to the ground and shot multiple times. One declaration was submitted by a licensed pediatrician who said they attempted to render medical aid after agents initially blocked access to the victim.

When The Intercept reached out to the VA for a statement about Pretti’s killing, press secretary Peter Kasperowicz directed inquiries to Collins’s post, which offered condolences to Pretti’s family before shifting blame to Minnesota officials. The secretary’s post did not acknowledge that federal agents fired the shots.

The Intercept also asked whether the VA was providing counseling or support services to Pretti’s co-workers or family, and whether the department had initiated any internal review following the violent death of a federal employee.

Related

Trump’s Cronies Threw the VA Into Chaos. Millions of Veterans’ Lives Are on the Line Again.

Kasperowicz did not answer those questions, nor did he respond to follow-up questions asking whether the VA had contacted Pretti’s family, notified staff at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, or taken steps to provide employee assistance services.

Pretti’s death has prompted public expressions of grief from co-workers. In a social media post, Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, who identifies himself as a physician at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, wrote that he had known Pretti since nursing school, before Pretti became an ICU nurse caring for critically ill veterans.

“We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together,” Drekonja wrote. “Will never happen now.”

The shooting has prompted multiple investigations and legal actions. Minnesota officials have accused federal agents of restricting access to the scene, detaining witnesses, and seizing cellphones before leaving the area.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Related

Right-Wing YouTuber Behind Viral Minnesota Fraud Video Has Long Anti-Immigrant History

Walz, who earlier this month announced he would not seek reelection amid a statewide fraud scandal spurred by right-wing influencers, wrote on X Sunday that “Minnesota believes in law and order. We believe in peace. And we believe that Trump needs to pull his 3,000 untrained agents out of Minnesota before they kill another American in the street.”

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office have sought a temporary restraining order to preserve evidence related to the shooting.

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly addressed the sworn declarations or released body-worn camera footage from the agents involved.

The post After CBP Killed Alex Pretti, His Federal VA Boss Blamed Minnesota Leaders appeared first on The Intercept.

The post is part of a growing trend in which the federal government openly embraces the visual language of white supremacy and pop culture cited in instances of racial violence. Over the past year, DHS and its component agencies leaned on mainstream pop music in their social media outreach, pairing enforcement footage with recognizable songs. The approach backfired repeatedly, and the department now appears to be leaning on niche, neo-Nazi-beloved music.

“There was a sense of plausible deniability before,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society. Anti-immigrant backers of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement have long been known to spread extremist language and media, but in the past, “those dog whistles were being done by supporters,” she said. “Now they’re being done directly by the administration.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lyrics from “We’ll Have Our Home Again” opened the manifesto of Ryan Christopher Palmeter, a 21-year-old white supremacist who entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2023, and killed three Black people. Palmeter’s 27-page document echoed the writings of other mass killers, including Brenton Tarrant, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, had praised the former white ethnostate of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and framed his attack as part of a broader racial struggle.

Many recent attackers have been shaped by online extremist culture, Marwick pointed out. “These are young men who were embedded in online communities where memes and songs and books and slogans become part of this cultural fabric,” she said.

The decision to pair official recruitment messaging with music so closely tied to extremist identity politics, just days after one of its agents fatally shot a civilian, raises questions the department’s cultural awareness and basic judgment.

Brian Hansbury, a social media commentator who tracks far-right activity and posts through his Substack, Public Enlightenment, said the timing of the post stood out as particularly jarring. In online extremist spaces, he said, such juxtapositions are often read not as mistakes but as signals. 

Related

Bill Ackman Gave $10,000 to Jonathan Ross GoFundMe Created by User Linked to Nazi Salute Image

“When something like this appears immediately after a high-profile killing, it’s understood as intentional,” Hansbury said. “It reads as a message about who the agency is speaking to and the audience it is trying to reach.”

In other cases, the department has faced backlash for its attempts to use less controversial works of music. Pop singer Sabrina Carpenter condemned a White House/ICE video that used her song “Juno,” calling it “evil and disgusting”; the backlash prompted its removal. Olivia Rodrigo blasted DHS for using her song “All-American Bitch” to promote self-deportation, calling the move “racist, hateful propaganda.” Grammy winner SZA rebuked the Trump administration after her track “Big Boys” was used without permission in a recruitment video. And rock group MGMT had an ICE video featuring “Little Dark Age” removed from X after a copyright takedown request.

Even while making use of mainstream pop music, DHS’s official social media accounts were experimenting with language and imagery centered on national decline, territorial reclamation and cultural threat over the past year. In July 2025, the agency shared an image titled “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending” alongside the 19th-century painting American Progress, a work frequently cited in white nationalist and “great replacement theory” circles for its depiction of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement. The painting is closely associated with the ideology of manifest destiny.

In December 2025, DHS shared a meme bearing a watermark from iFunny, a platform that has faced repeated criticism and removal from major app stores for hosting racist and extremist content. It mirrored themes that appear in so-called “Agartha” memes, a niche strain of far-right fantasy content that imagines a hidden, racially pure civilization beneath the Earth’s surface. Researchers who track extremist visual culture note that such narratives often romanticize white isolationism and technological superiority. 

“Memes are often used to mainstream white supremacist ideas by starting with beliefs that are more socially acceptable, and then gradually pushing boundaries,” Marwick said.

Those strategies are often deployed with precision. “You see something like a micro-targeted advertising campaign where they test out messaging that they believe will be more palatable to different demographics,” Marwick said.

The imagery in the post aligns closely with “collapse and reclamation” memes that circulate in far-right online subcultures. Those memes frequently depict floating monuments, pyramids, and hidden homelands as symbols of civilizational rebirth. Researchers who track extremist visual culture have documented how such motifs are commonly used in racist and accelerationist meme ecosystems to frame narratives of decline, replacement, and territorial recovery.

Originally written by the Männerbund, a nationalist group associated with Germany’s Völkisch movement, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” has found a second life in modern far-right online culture, reposted and remixed by accounts with names like “Patriot Archive” and “Visigothia” and circulated across YouTube and platforms popular in far-right circles, where versions and videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views with endless comments referencing Rhodesia.

Members of the Proud Boys have been recorded chanting “By God, we’ll have our home,” the song’s refrain, at rallies in Northern California. 

DHS isn’t the only department in the Trump administration to openly embrace white nationalist rhetoric. Earlier this week, the Department of Labor drew flak for a post that mirrored a Nazi slogan.

It isn’t new to see extremist right-wing ideology perpetuated in online culture. What is new is seeing it echoed in official messaging from a federal law enforcement agency with the power to detain, deport, and use lethal force. 

“Now there is no plausible deniability,” said Marwick. “It’s really clear that the message they’re trying to send is meant to be read one way.”

The post DHS Used Neo-Nazi Anthem for Recruitment After Fatal Minneapolis ICE Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.