“I just think in terms of who’s going to be most likely to be a spy: somebody from Cullman, Alabama, or somebody from Kenya?” Sessions asked, appearing on the conservative Lars Larson show in April 2014.

He explained: “We’re going in the wrong direction in a lot of ways, our head isn’t thinking clearly, at a time when this country needs a good military, last thing we need to be doing is turning out of our military of people who served and bringing in people who are illegally in the country,” Sessions said.

Sessions, currently serving as a senator from Alabama, has been a vocal opponent of most immigration measures, and has often said that immigrants take jobs away from Americans.

He argued: “We don’t have a difficulty getting American citizens to fill our military slots. That is unbelievable that in a time of high unemployment and we get a lot of calls — ‘Help my son get in the military. He’s been turned down, can he get in?’ So I just think this is not the right thing to do right now,” he said.

Sessions was specifically taking issue with a bill that would have made certain undocumented immigrants eligible for military service and citizenship. The legislation failed, but the Pentagon later that year began allowing a very limited number of undocumented immigrants to serve anyhow.

In addition, an untold number of undocumented immigrants have served in the military over the years either by accident, with false documentation, or due to deceptive practices by recruiters.

The U.S. has a long record of immigrants serving in the military, and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act allows immigrants who served in the U.S. military during periods of conflict to apply for naturalization. The U.S. has been in one of those periods since September 11, 2001. Still, some veterans who do not follow through with their service-earned naturalization end up being deported.

“Non-citizen service members offer several benefits to the military,” a military publication explained in 2012. “They are more diverse linguistically and culturally than citizen recruits, which is particularly valuable as the U.S faces the challenges of the Global War on Terrorism.”

Sessions shared an anecdote about Edwin Kigathi Gitau, a man from Kenya who served in the Navy and was arrested in Alabama in 2014 on a charge of extortion. He was charged with threatening a local bank president, asking for $50,000 to protect his family, but was found not guilty the following year.

“How did he get in the Navy?” Sessions asked. “I’m wondering: could you get good test scores from his high school? Could you get a good grade point average from Kenya or wherever?”

Sessions is at odds with Trump on the matter, who said at NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum in September that he is not opposed to allowing undocumented veterans to legally stay in the U.S.: “I think that when you serve in the armed forces, that’s a special situation, and I could see myself working that out. Absolutely,” he said.

The post Trump Attorney General Pick Jeff Sessions Said Immigrants in the U.S. Military Might Be Spies appeared first on The Intercept.

When I take off my VR headset, a smiling young woman hands me a round token: Distinguished Gunner A14, it says. I’m not exactly the target audience —  and neither are the high school boys I saw enjoying the game later.

AUSA features a who’s who of the military-industrial complex, and the extreme excess of money in the industry is evident everywhere.

There were other video games in addition to General Dynamics’s. I watched Nathan Stoddart, a software engineer, show two congressional staffers a virtual reality game called Project Argus. The game places the character in a battle on an island. There are battleships nearby and a Predator drone overhead. L-3 envisions using the game for planning and post-mission analysis.

The staffers didn’t want to talk to me, but they were clearly having a good time.

DSG Tech showed off its bullets in a glass case like jewelry. “This is the coolest, newest, hottest ammo ever,” said Jon Andre Garberg, founder and CEO of the company. He said that his product is used frequently by the Navy, but they’re hoping to attract the Army as well.

Back at the General Dynamics booth, three high school boys were enjoying the cannon game.

“This is what people do in real life. It’s pretty cool,” said Brian Hoffman after taking off the headset. Hoffman is a senior at Bishop Ireton High School who came to the exposition as part of a school trip.

Many of the displays allow you to interact with the merchandise. I saw soldiers in Brazilian army uniforms picking up machine guns and pointing them at each other, for example.

Australian company Electro-Optic Systems positioned its M230 LF chain gun, so its 30mm cannon was trained on the crowd. Visitors could adjust and aim the weapon toward nearby visitors in real time, watching them on a screen.

“It has a significant jump in lethality,” CEO Warwick Holloway told The Intercept. Holloway said his company focuses on U.S. and Middle East markets, and is trying to use the exposition to sell to the American military.

Boeing had a green screen where visitors could pose next to Boeing products — like a bomb, a missile, or a helicopter. At General Atomics, visitors chatted under a rotating models of the Gray Eagle drone, which was developed as an upgrade to the Predator drone.

This is the best that war is ever going to look. It’s flashy, exciting, and seems to have no downside.

Top photo: Soldiers from the U.S. Military adjust a 30 mm canon at the EOS booth at the at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting & Exhibition.

The post To Sell Weapons, Defense Contractors Make War Seem Fun appeared first on The Intercept.

VIDEO: Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing…" https://t.co/NEGclzLXtP

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 27, 2016

But it’s not the first time he has endorsed hacking to uncover information that he wants. Trump previously asked for hackers’ help in his obsessive quest to prove that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.:

Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama's college records (destroyed?) and check "place of birth"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2014

ObamaCare is a disaster and Snowden is a spy who should be executed-but if it and he could reveal Obama's records,I might become a major fan

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2013

For the record, Obama released his birth certificate in 2011.

Meanwhile, Trump slammed Sony for getting hacked in 2014. “If North Korea has that sort of power that they can do things on the internet that we have no idea what’s happening, that is not a good thing,” Trump told Fox News.

As for the emails that Trump described as “missing,” there are 31,830 emails written or received by Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State that her staff determined to be “private, personal records” — not related to her work — and destroyed.

FBI Director James Comey said this month that investigators had “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails” sent or received by Clinton using her personal server that her staff had not turned over to the State Department.” While that encouraged Clinton’s critics to suggest she must be hiding something, Comey added that “we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

The post This Isn’t the First Time Donald Trump Has Asked Hackers for Help Taking Down His Enemies appeared first on The Intercept.