As the conflict has engulfed the region, the military has grappled with a growing list of challenges: Iranian attacks on U.S. bases and warships in the Middle East, depleted stockpiles of defensive munitions, increasing casualties, maintenance issues on ships, lengthy troop deployments, complicated logistics, flagging morale and a host of other issues that have taken a heavy toll on troops, damaged military readiness, and a strained Pentagon budget — contradicting months of rosy pronouncements by the Trump administration.

Both officials said that Iran is facing extreme economic pressure, according to intelligence reports. The first official characterized recent Iranian attacks on warships with ballistic missiles as a “go for broke” strategy to increase economic pressures on America ahead of the U.S. midterms. That official said it was unclear which country would “blink first.”

Trump suggested on Sunday that the U.S. could “stay and keep the oil” in Iran, like the neo-colonial resource grab the administration is carrying out in Venezuela. The second official said that a U.S. occupation of Iran would be “almost impossible” and that the idea was “nonsensical obviously.”

Iran’s ability to overwhelm U.S. air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the U.S. military in a precarious state. The Trump administration failed to appreciate Iran’s military prowess, said the first official. The other pointed to a “complete lack of planning” for the war. Since July 7 alone, there have been hundreds of U.S. casualties caused by Iranian attacks, according to official Pentagon statistics.

The officials said the military’s ability to function at peak capacity was crippled in the opening hours of the conflict when an Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations, but last week acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted “they blew the hell out of Bahrain.” More than six months after the attack, Naval Support Activity Bahrain remains a shambles. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer, during a recent town hall.

A Wall Street Journal investigation previously found that rebuilding the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, and communication towers at NSA Bahrain may cost more than $400 million, which the second official said could be an underestimate if it’s ever attempted. Naval Forces Central Command referred questions about the cost estimate to Central Command, which did not respond.

Trump has touted the destruction of Iran’s navy as one of his signature accomplishments of the war, but the officials pointed to the severe strain placed on U.S. naval forces in the region. With the home of the Fifth Fleet knocked out and other ports in the region within range of Iranian missiles and drones, the Navy found itself facing the daunting challenge of maintaining a flotilla of more than 24 ships — including two massive aircraft carriers and numerous guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, attack submarines, or supply ships deployed at any one time.

While aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters on them, as well as the other ships, require millions of gallons of fuel each week. And the sailors aboard the ships require hundreds of thousands of meals. This means Navy ships need to haul supplies more than 2,000 miles from a longtime U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. A War Department inspector general report released on Monday noted that the shift in “naval bases and support ports posed significant challenges,” pointing specifically to the “issue with shifting logistics support and infrastructure to Diego Garcia” and the challenges of “extended sea transit requiring 14- to 18-day logistics cycles.”

“It’s difficult and ultimately unsustainable,” said the second official, who told The Intercept that White House assumptions that Iran would “crack” before the Navy have yet to be borne out.

The Navy has just 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, and amid the ongoing strain of extended deployments, its oldest carrier, the USS Nimitz, has seen its service life extended. So far, four of the 11 carrier strike groups have already been deployed to the Middle East during the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing substantial repairs and will not be ready to deploy again for years.

The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group completed a record-breaking, 11-month deployment that also included the invasion of Venezuela. (Under normal conditions, a carrier would visit port about once a month to allow its crew to rest.) The ship was, according to a Presidential Unit Citation, under “persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones” during its deployment to the Middle East.

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Early in the Iran war, the Ford suffered extensive damage from a laundry fire and a malfunctioning fire-suppression system that forced crew members to manually fight the blaze for around 30 hours. The fire halted sorties for two days, and around 600 sailors lost access to their bunks due to the damage. The Navy claimed few casualties from the blaze, but reports soon emerged that the more than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations.

The Ford has also been plagued by plumbing issues for years. During just a four-day span in 2025, there were 205 breakdowns. Before the Ford left the Caribbean, it was facing constant issues with the nearly 650 toilets aboard. And then in the Middle East, the carrier again suffered from clogged, excrement-filled toilets, according to video obtained by CNN. 

Another carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, spent most of its nine months at sea with no port calls, leading to reports of rampant morale problems, supply shortages, and suicide attempts, with at least one crew member going overboard. At an August 11 town hall in San Diego, families expressed deep concerns about their loved ones to Cao, the acting Navy secretary. But Trump dismissed worries about the sailors, saying the Lincoln’s deployment was “not nearly long enough.” Last month, the Lincoln was relieved by the USS George Washington, allowing the heavily rusted Lincoln to pull into Thailand for a port call. 

Those ships have left the region but sailors remain under persistent threat. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted a U.S. aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer with ballistic missiles this month, according to Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request for additional information about the strikes.

Despite months of claims by Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East, according to information from U.S. officials and Iranian reports.

Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, according to U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept as well as numerous press reports.

Trump and Hegseth have pushed back on these claims. Trump posted on Monday that the U.S. is “producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History,” but the aforementioned inspector general report immediately contradicted the president, revealing that the conflict has resulted in “strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.”

“I have all the munitions necessary to both defend our forces as well as conduct a broad range of contingencies,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM chief, told Congress in May. But even the Pentagon admits that 410 U.S. troops have been killed or wounded since July 7 alone. Three U.S. soldiers were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on July 17 and 18, for example. And an Iranian drone attack on Erbil Air Base, Iraq, on July 18 killed one soldier and left another injured during what CENTCOM called a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft.

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The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. About 65 percent of Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 remaining from a pre-war total of 2,330, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The number of THAADs dropped from more than 450 to less than 270.

On Sunday, Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, continued to downplay the risks of depleted stockpiles and told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he wasn’t worried for the safety of U.S. troops. “I’m not concerned at all,” he replied when asked about defending against Iranian attacks. CENTCOM did not reply when asked if Cooper would resign if U.S. troops were killed or wounded in future attacks.

In addition to the destruction of NSA Bahrain, the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. Iran also struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan last week, damaging multiple U.S. military aircraft, according to the second U.S. official. In response, U.S. forces fired a “significant” number of Patriot interceptors to protect U.S. forces, the second official said.

U.S. officials confirmed that Iran has also attacked Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost on the northern Jordanian border with Syria. Satellite images as well as photos and videos circulating online indicate the base suffered extensive damage. (In 2024, a drone attack on Tower 22 by an Iran-backed militia killed three U.S. troops.) 

Iran says it has also attacked U.S. military facilities at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base and King Faisal Air Base; and Kuwait’s Al-Adiri base, Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, Camp Doha, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Arifjan. Last week, the IRGC announced its forces had “simultaneously attack[ed] the American bases in Jordan, Bahrain, and Erbil,” including “a combined missile-drone attack on the headquarters and residence of the American commander of the Ali al-Salem base.”

CENTCOM failed to respond to a request for comment about attacks on its outposts or provide its own official count of the number struck. But the Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” It also disclosed that “dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged,” including four F-15 fighter aircraft, 12 KC-135 refueling aircraft, and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

The post Iran War Has the U.S. Military on the Brink of a “Breakdown” appeared first on The Intercept.

How Two Trust-Fund Terrorists Destroyed America

I can still remember the smell. But I’m at a loss to accurately describe it to you. It wasn’t the unmistakable odor of death, although that must have been some tiny part of it. It wasn’t like burning tires or plastic or even metal. It was all that, but it was more.

In the quarter century since, I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never experienced anything like the smell near the rubble pile at Ground Zero in September 2001. The air was acrid and thick, a swirl of toxins and carcinogens made possible by turning two large, jet-fuel laden planes into cruise missiles and aiming them at gigantic office towers. As it burned, we all inhaled a haze of pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), and whatever else. It remains a part of us still.

The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.

Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump.

The so-called Pearl Harbor of the 21st century was no surprise. Long before President George W. Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a classified intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,” the Al Qaeda leader had been honest about his plans. “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,” he announced in a 1998 TV interview, castigating the U.S. for stationing troops in the Middle East and its support of Israel. “The Western regimes and the government of the United States of America bear the blame for what might happen. If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests.”

When bin Laden made good on his threats, slaughtering thousands on 9/11, he knew it was bound to trigger a response. One possibility was a measured law-enforcement action that would end with arrests and legitimate legal proceedings. The other was a president standing on a rubble pile, vowing revenge, a never-ending fruitless war against a tactic (terror), a secret torture gulag, a forever prison, and a kangaroo court. One would be ruinous for bin Laden. The other, an answer to his prayers.

Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to attack the U.S. after it had elected a lightweight nepo-baby president and a power-mad vice president who had cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s criminal-packed White House. While he came to be an enemy of Donald Trump, it was Dick Cheney who paved the way for America’s current would-be tyrant, with the vice president’s relentless campaign to concentrate power in the White House, creating an imperial presidency predicated on the “unitary executive theory,” a misbegotten notion that the Constitution grants the president unrestrained authority over domestic and foreign policy, such as unilaterally removing government officials and waging wars.

In both style and substance, Cheney prefigured Trump. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Cheney went on TV to announce the government would now operate on the “dark side,” as he put it, claiming “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”

America has never emerged from those sinister shadows. Cheney was arguably the leading cheerleader for the ruinous war on terror, which began in Afghanistan, spread across the globe, and grinds on a year after his death; a prime architect of the disastrous Iraq War and the faulty, unverified, and cherry-picked intelligence that underpinned it; an enthusiastic supporter of torture, calling the waterboarding of detainees “a no-brainer”; a vocal supporter of domestic surveillance; a promoter of undemocratic, unprecedented, and unparalleled secrecy; and a belligerent bully.

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“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a 2022 ad for his daughter, Liz, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term. He might have been right — and he was certainly responsible. Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.

After weakening American democracy during his first term, Trump launched a full-scale assault — literally — on it. Despite knowing he lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, worked to subvert vote counts and undermine the certification process, pressured state officials to “find” votes, and orchestrated what special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on it called an “unprecedented criminal effort” to remain in power.

Bin Laden was never able to raise an army in America, lead an insurrection, and launch an attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The plane meant to carry out that attack on 9/11 crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) But on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s encouragement, MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the “domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and issues relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power” concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It found that Trump, for hours, deliberately failed to act to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Smith said that the evidence gathered by his team “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” had the American people not reelected Trump.

Bin Laden would have no doubt cheered the attack on the Capitol and endorsed Trump’s reelection run, had he been alive. And he would not have been disappointed by the results. Upon returning to office, Trump unleashed a coordinated assault on American democracy, undermining the rule of law and fundamental freedoms by pardoning and rewarding insurrectionists; weaponizing the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, and the military against American citizens; firing government watchdogs; attacking the free press; engaging in naked and unrestrained corruption, such as violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause; engaging in due process violations, immigration lawlessness, and unconstitutional executive power-grabs; and launching a disastrous war with Iran and a murder-spree on the high seas amid a host of other foreign and domestic policy fiascos.

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Since January 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 separate authoritarian acts by the Trump administration including around 1,050 undermining democracy, more than 940 suppressing dissent, over 650 aggressive or destabilizing foreign policy efforts, about 600 acts weakening civil rights, around 500 centered around controlling information or spreading misinformation, and more than 320 acts of corruption, according to the Trump Action Tracker, which documents acts and statements of Trump and his administration that echo those of other authoritarian regimes.

A startling global analysis also discovered “autocratization” in America rose at a speed “unprecedented in modern history” last year. Under Trump, the researchers found, the U.S. has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy after the largest one-year drop in democratic principles in American history. This took the country back to 1965 levels, when Jim Crow racial discrimination in voting — including violence and intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests — were still commonplace. These results are bolstered by research by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which finds that the corrupting of elections, quashing of dissent, spreading of disinformation, and aggrandizing of executive power are all “escalating” in Trump’s second term, while both authoritarian actions and the politicizing of independent institutions in the U.S. are “rapidly escalating.”

In 2001, the U.S. government recorded a budget surplus of about $128 billion and was projected to pay off the national debt by 2009. But after miring the U.S. in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, bin Laden looked upon the fruits of 9/11 and took a victory lap in 2004, bragging that his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” had helped to push the U.S. deficit to “more than a trillion dollars.”

“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note,” bin Laden announced.

He could not have imagined just how closely and how long America’s leaders would hue to his plan, conducting commando raids, drone strikes, armed interventions, and outright wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor could Al Qaeda’s leader have foreseen how deep into financial ruin the U.S. would sink as a result.

Bin Laden’s 2004 trillion-dollar boast wasn’t actually accurate. The U.S. federal deficit was just $413 billion in 2004. But it wouldn’t remain that low for long. America’s post-9/11 wars have now cost or caused long-term obligations to taxpayers of an astonishing $8 trillion, according to a 2021 analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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And Trump has continued to expand America’s ruinous foreign interventions from Ecuador to Iran. An Intercept analysis found that Trump has presided over more than 20 armed conflicts and wars during his two terms in office. And the costs continue adding up. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told The Intercept that the excessive expenses of the Iran war, alone, would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. And Trump is also currently pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year.

In case you hadn’t guessed, the pre-9/11 projection that the national debt would be paid off in 2009 never came to pass. Instead, the Bush and Trump presidencies were marked by massive tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, depriving the Treasury of almost $10 trillion in expected revenue.

So after bin Laden’s attack; the forever wars of Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden; and Trump’s contributions in disastrous conflicts and gross fiscal mismanagement, the $5.8 trillion national debt of 2001 has now ballooned by 590 percent to a staggering $40 trillion. That’s $1 million, 40 million times over.

About 50 percent of the debt has been accrued since Donald Trump was first elected. This week, Trump pledged to pay every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in November, which would cost more than $1 trillion. And that $128 billion budget surplus from 2001? It’s been replaced by a projected federal budget deficit for this fiscal year of $2.1 trillion. This debt and deficit spiral is also occurring during a time of near-full employment when the government’s finances should actually be improving.

If bin Laden made it to paradise, as was his hope, he is no doubt smiling as the Trump administration dismisses the ballooning debt and the president peddles nonsensical claims that “growth will take care of that very easily.” The U.S. will actually spend more than $1 trillion this year just paying interest on the debt. The Peterson Foundation projects that total interest payments will more than double over the next decade — and that may be an undercount. And even if the debt remained steady at $40 trillion and the United States were to pay down $1 million per day, it would take almost 110,000 years to pay it off.

All this debt is also likely to keep interest rates high, raising the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and small business credit, hurting ordinary Americans. High deficits and debt — particularly if coupled with high inflation or interest rates — make it harder for the government to respond to crises like a recession, depression, pandemic, or other emergency.

Then there is the weakened safety net that comes from deficits and debt. Bin Laden doesn’t need to worry about his golden years, and Trump is living them right now at taxpayer expense. But in 2032 — just six years from now — the Social Security trust fund is on track to go bust, to take one example of shortfalls on the horizon. By law, when the trust fund hits zero, all retirees’ benefits are mandated to drop by more than 20 percent.

Looking back, I’ve come to think of the acrid odor of the collapsed Twin Towers as more than a mélange of burning paper, glass, concrete, and around 70 carcinogens. It was, instead, a harbinger of something even darker than the nearly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 — a long road of death and destruction stretching out into the future, beyond the vanishing point.

Even Bin Laden couldn’t have imagined long-term lethality of his attacks. Close to 9,700 first responders, survivors, and those who helped to clear nearly 1.8 million tons of debris at the World Trade Center have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. And more than 57,000 first responders and others have been diagnosed with 9/11-linked cancers. Around 155,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides care and health monitoring to people who were exposed to toxic air after 9/11. And an estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, the risk of physical injury, and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The vengeful war on the world that bin Laden managed to provoke has proved even more devastating than the effects of the toxic stew we inhaled near Ground Zero. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere between 2001 and 2023, alone. Another 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the toll to at least 4.5 million dead and counting. This quarter century of carnage and all that it unleashed has left the U.S. hollowed out and rotting from within; a deterioration in every conceivable measure from economics to democratic ideals to the spiritual health of the nation.

Bin Laden’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was designed to sink America’s economy — and it continues to work to great effect. And by ushering in the presidencies of Donald Trump, bin Laden left the United States morally bankrupt, too. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the country is a pale shadow of the superpower that emerged from World War II having been laid low not by the Soviet Union — the nuclear-armed power it long considered an existential threat — but by two trust-fund terrorists: the scions of a Saudi construction empire, and an outer borough New York City real estate developer, respectively.

“The wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House,” bin Laden said in 2004, referring to Bush. He likely couldn’t have imagined America choosing an even more inveterate liar, an even greater intellectual lightweight, and an even more ruinous president. A quarter century after 9/11, it’s clear that bin Laden won. But the victory was not his alone. And, in the end, his role in it turned out to be vanishingly small. Bush, Cheney, Obama, and Biden, as well as a raft of politicians, government functionaries, and all who went along with the madness unleashed by the attacks, played key roles in helping hobble the U.S. in the 25 years since the September 11. But it’s been Trump, more than anyone else, who has made bin Laden’s lofty 9/11 dreams America’s never-ending nightmare.

The post Osama Bin Laden Won appeared first on The Intercept.

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After the vessel exploded, two helpless survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull, drifting with the current for roughly 45 minutes. Bradley — then the head of the Joint Special Operations Command and now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance. Soon, a second missile screamed down, killing the survivors. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

That strike, carried out on September 2, 2025, began a campaign of attacks that has never ceased.

“It’s been a year of murders,” said a defense official who was horrified by the first strike and has remained so as the U.S. has targeted scores of so-called “drug boats” in the year since. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.” The official added: “It’s absolutely criminal.”

In all, the U.S. has conducted more than 65 attacks, resulting in over 225 civilians killed in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in the last year. The most recent strike, in the Caribbean on August 25, killed four people.

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — drawn up by an interagency lawyers working group including representatives of the CIA, State Department, White House, Department of Justice, and Defense Department — claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of “designated terrorist organizations.”

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A second government official who has reviewed the OLC opinion called it “flimsy yet expansive,” but said the Trump administration had “nonetheless managed to overstep” its bounds. The official said that despite being crafted to “excuse what is clearly murder,” the U.S. had killed people beyond those the OLC opinion claimed were legal targets.

U.S. Southern Command pushed back on the allegation. “Each operation is planned and executed within the full bounds of our legal framework,” said spokesperson Steven McLoud, “ensuring that every target meets the legal criteria established by our Office of Legal Counsel.”

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because people are deliberately slain outside the law. The strikes may also constitute crimes against humanity, violating fundamental rights to life and due process. “There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept.

The Intercept broke the story of the September 2 double-tap strikes, within days of the attack. Months later, follow-up reporting by the Washington Post, The Intercept, and others resulted in a public firestorm that forced the Pentagon to admit the survivors were killed while shipwrecked — a clear breach of international law — and provide members of Congress additional briefings and access to classified footage of the attack.

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The Intercept was also the first outlet to report on Hamaguchi’s identity and role in the attack, as well as an admission in a classified briefing by Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — that some of the 11 people aboard the boat could have been human trafficking victims. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who serves on both the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, sent a letter to President Donald Trump last month pressing for accountability and referencing The Intercept’s reporting on Bennett’s disclosure. Kaine found, after reviewing highly classified materials, that the “available evidence suggests that the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking.”

Even a year later, much about the attacks and the victims remains unknown. “This is probably one of the hardest U.S. campaigns to track — searching an area double the size of the continental U.S. for clues, with limited satellite imagery, few witnesses and little physical aftermath. The ocean swallows up all the information we would usually rely on,” said Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars, a U.K.-based group that monitors conflicts all across the globe. “The more than 200 people killed across these waters have a right to be remembered — and their loved ones have a right to know what has happened.”

Twenty-six of the 227 total killed have been identified by name, according to an Airwars analysis. All are apparently men and, for those whose ages are known, were between 24 and 46 years old. Of 41 victims identified by nationality, 18 were from Venezuela, 13 from Mexico, three from Colombia, three from Ecuador, two from Trinidad and Tobago, and two from Saint Lucia. Among those identified by a consortium of journalists from Venezuelan outlets were a bus driver, a mototaxi driver, men involved in fishing or the seafood trade, and a futsal player. They hailed from poor communities, and their ties to the drug trade were at the very lowest levels.

Reporting by The Intercept also found that claims by the White House and Defense Department about the boat strikes stopping the flow of fentanyl and saving more than 1 million American lives are baseless, phony, or both.

“The administration is killing for online content and spectacle,” said Finucane, referencing the Trump administration’s use of highly edited snuff-film footage of attacks on social media. At the same time, the Pentagon has consistently withheld basic information about the strikes, the legal justifications for them, the “designated terrorist organizations” being targeted by the campaign, and the victims. The administration has been so secretive that the bipartisan 2026 annual defense policy bill withholds 25 percent of travel funds from Hegseth’s office until overdue reports on execute orders and unedited video footage of strikes are delivered to Congress.

The boat strike campaign, dubbed Operation Southern Spear, hit its peak intensity just over a year ago. October 2025 was its deadliest month with 12 boats attacked and 44 declared deaths. December was the most active period, with 14 vessels struck. In almost all the attacks, between one and four people were killed. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

While all September 2025 strikes took place in the Caribbean, the attacks moved west. By December, all 14 were conducted in the Pacific Ocean. The Intercept’s boat strike tracker counts 50 strikes in the Pacific out of a total of 68 attacks in the past year.

In almost every month of the campaign, the U.S. failed to immediately kill all crew members in its initial strike. But of the 28 survivors, only three were successfully rescued and remain alive. In nine of 11 survivor announcements, the U.S. Coast Guard was named as the primary responder. The Intercept revealed that the U.S. rescue strategy was leaving survivors to drown. Eight men leapt into rough seas on December 30, 2025, for example, after the U.S. rained down a barrage of munitions, sinking three vessels. They required immediate rescue; chances were slim that they could survive even an hour. In announcing its strike, SOUTHCOM said it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard to launch search and rescue protocols to save the men. But an investigation by The Intercept and Airwars found that it took the Coast Guard almost 45 hours to begin searching the attack zone for survivors.

Strikes slowed dramatically in January 2026 — with just one strike that killed two people — during the same month that the U.S. invaded Venezuela and abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro. In late June, U.S. forces took a hiatus from attacks. Officials offered conflicting reasons for the pause, with some reports centering on equipment and personnel being used for earthquake relief in Venezuela. After 63 days, the U.S. resumed strikes on August 23, in the Pacific, quickly followed by the Caribbean attack on August 25.

The boat strike campaign was, in many respects, the opening salvo of an aggressive military and diplomatic effort in the Americas — dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — that has spawned more violence, increased impunity by local security forces, and heightened danger from cartels across the Western Hemisphere, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.

In addition to the war in Venezuela, the U.S. also launched or ramped up numerous initiatives and interventions. This includes the now 19-member Americas Counter Cartel Coalition — also known as the Shield of the Americas — which Hegseth recently christened with the motto: “We do bad things to bad people.” The U.S. also launched a CIA campaign — which may involve private contractors and authorities from other countries — targeting boats near the Galápagos Islands; covert CIA operations in Mexico; a military airstrike inside Venezuela in June that allegedly killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the head of the Tren de Aragua street gang; and joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador dubbed “Operation Total Extermination,” which include ground operations by elite U.S. troops.

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“I also want to commend Honduras and Guatemala for inviting the United States to partake in combined operations against narco-terrorists in their countries,” Hegseth announced recently, adding: “We look forward to working with you in killing bad guys.” Jamaica also signed a status of forces agreement with the U.S., which sets terms for troop deployments, including joint operations. Hegseth said the partnership would “cripple narco-terrorists that transit through the Caribbean.” Beyond this, the Trump administration has also repeatedly bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland.

Last month, SOUTHCOM chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan announced the creation of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, which the command called an “evolution from Operation Southern Spear.” JTF-WHEM will, said SOUTHCOM, “provide unified command and control at the tactical and operational levels, integrating military capabilities with the … partner nations of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.” SOUTHCOM failed to clarify if so-called A3C partner troops were under the operational control of U.S. officers, as is the case under other low-profile proxy-war programs. 

Hegseth told coalition partners that the new task force would “continue the targeting and killing of narco-terrorists,” whom he dubbed “the ISIS and Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.” Days later, the boat strikes resumed. And on Friday, JTF-WHEM and Ecuadorean forces interdicted what SOUTHCOM claimed was “a floating refueling station in support of illicit at-sea drug trafficking” linked to “the Los Choneros violent narco-terrorist organization” in the Pacific. Marines and sailors “boarded, searched, and cleared the vessel without incident,” turned the crew over to Ecuador, and then sank the vessel.

Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez did not reply to a request for comment on whether the U.S. had killed people beyond those the Office of Legal Counsel opinion claimed were legal targets.

“The boat strikes are, perhaps, the most stark testament to the lawlessness of the Trump administration,” Finucane told The Intercept. “It’s essentially serial killing at sea — murder under federal law — being carried out as a matter of state policy.”

The post The U.S. Has Killed 227 Civilians in Boat Strikes During “A Year of Murders” appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase of 60 wounded last week was called “an accounting trick,” by one U.S. government official who accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing airstrikes on U.S. bases last month that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks.

The office of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including when and where the injuries occurred.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, Hegseth’s department has posted the official count of casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the White House. Casualties since July 7 are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.” Combined with totals for Operation Epic Fury — the military’s official designation for the initial months of the Iran war — 18 service members have died and 758 have been wounded since the U.S. launched the war against Iran on February 28, according to DCAS. This official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what that same official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

In the face of the increasing number of dead and wounded troops, the military has been seeking a range of services related to personnel who are killed or wounded, according to new contracting documents analyzed by The Intercept. While the military regularly awards such contracts, the commands involved have not replied to questions concerning the possible relationship to the current conflict.

On Friday, for example, the Air Force announced it awarded a new contract for a full range of mortuary services at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. This includes transportation and refrigeration of remains, embalming, dressing, casketing or cremation, as well as funeral services. Last week, the Air Force also began looking into local firms that could fulfill a wide-ranging contract — including “mortuary services” — at Italy’s Aviano Air Base, a key hub for the war with Iran.

The public affairs offices at Robins Air Base and Aviano Air Base did not return requests for comment prior to publication.

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Last week, the Army also announced it “desires to procure” casualty administrative support, including casualty case management services, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division. Over 90 percent of the latest casualties are Army soldiers, and its storied Fort Knox base has been intimately involved in the conflict with Iran. The body of 26-year-old Sgt. Benjamin Pennington — who died of injuries resulting from an Iranian strike on a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia in March and was the first Kentuckian to die in the war — was sent home via Godman Army Airfield at Fort Knox. Six soldiers killed in an Iranian strike in Kuwait that same month were operating under the 1st Theater Sustainment Command which is headquartered at the base. 

Fort Knox did not respond to a request for comment and further information about the contract and the losses from the war prior to publication.

The recent casualty spike resulted from Iranian attacks on around 10 U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a second U.S. official who previously spoke to The Intercept. Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated.

Last month, the tally of wounded personnel fluctuated by the day in the wake of increased Iranian attacks. On July 21, the casualty count on DCAS for Operation Epic Fury stood at 500. Now, it has shrunk to 431.

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For months, The Intercept found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities in its casualty count.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also found DCAS is missing hundreds of wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures for Epic Fury show that 65 Navy personnel were wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

CNN was the first to report a significant increase in wounded troops last week.

The World Health Organization puts the Iranian casualty toll at an estimated 37,181, including 3,375 deaths. Iranian state and semi-official media reported similar figures — just under 3,500 killed by U.S.-Israeli air strikes. Last week, The Intercept reported on a family of eight, including five children, killed in one of those attacks.

The post Sixty More U.S. Soldiers Reported Injured in Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

The CENTCOM official who revealed the existence of the list threatened that this reporter could be added to it for calling the command too often.

“You’ll be put on a list of people to disregard,” Richard Allee, an executive assistant with CENTCOM public affairs told this reporter. When asked for clarification — “You have a list of people to disregard?” — he confirmed it with an emphatic: “Yes.” When asked which reporters or outlets were currently on the list, he replied: “I’m not privy to give you that information.” 

Under self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military has mounted the most aggressive assault on press freedom in memory, from an effort to outlaw “unauthorized” questions from reporters to imposing unconstitutional restrictions on journalists’ access to the Pentagon. Hegseth has compared reporters to “Pharisees,” who in the Bible call Jesus’s teachings into question, while the secretary’s minions regularly hurl insults at reporters. This is part of a broader war on press freedoms by the Trump administration, that includes demonizing journalists; filing so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, to intimidate and silence criticism through expensive legal proceedings; and employing grand jury subpoenas and search warrants to intimidate reporters. 

“Threatening journalists with placement on a blacklist in retaliation for reporting the government doesn’t like is as unconstitutional as it gets,” said Seth Stern, the director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. “This should put to rest the Pentagon’s prior claims that it’s anti-press policies — like its infamous requirement that reporters sign pledges to only print authorized information — are somehow content neutral.”

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Allee revealed the existence of the blacklist after this reporter was left on hold for more than two hours and complained about a long-standing lack of transparency by the command. In calls earlier that morning, Maj. Emma Thompson, CENTCOM’s media operations chief, repeatedly refused to answer questions about Iranian attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East, disparate U.S. casualty counts, and medical evacuation flights: “Nothing for you,” “Don’t have anything for you,” “No comment.” Thompson then hung up on this reporter mid-question.

The Intercept called back multiple times until Allee picked up the phone. “They’re not going to answer your call if you just keep calling and calling,” he told this reporter.

Allee chastised this reporter to be more respectful. He said a “less accusatory attitude towards the personnel here would go a lot further than badgering them when you don’t get something you want, when you want it.”

Allee then revealed the existence of the blacklist. He declined to provide additional details about the list but said, “It’s not a list that we publicize.” He also hung up on this reporter.

The command’s press office responded in an email to additional questions about the journalists who have run afoul of the command. “CENTCOM does not have a ‘blacklist,’” the agency wrote.

A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Hegseth’s office had a standing order not to engage with this reporter and would deny it if challenged.

“None of it has anything to do with security, all of it has everything to do with censorship and intimidation,” Stern told The Intercept. “CENTCOM needs to stop blacklisting journalists and tell the public who is on the blacklist and why they were placed there. Whoever was behind the blacklist should be blacklisted from government employment.” 

Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has mounted an unrelenting assault on press freedom despite the fact that the secretary began his tenure by sharing secret information on airstrikes in Yemen, hours before the actual attacks occurred, on a Signal group chat that inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

As part of his war on the press, Hegseth evicted the New York Times, NPR, and other outlets from their long-held desks in the Pentagon and replaced them with sycophantic fellow-travelers like the One America News Network, the New York Post, and Breitbart.

In May 2025, Hegseth issued a memo barring credentialed reporters from most of the Pentagon without an escort. (Last month, a federal appeals court said that the Pentagon can continue doing so.) The Pentagon later introduced a policy requiring journalists to pledge not to even gather, at the risk of their credentials, unclassified information unless the government authorized its release. (This drove nearly the entire Pentagon press corps to surrender their badges.) After the Times sued and a federal judge struck the policy down in March 2026 as unconstitutional, Hegseth shuttered a decades-old Pentagon pressroom and began conducting polygraph tests to prevent leaks.

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For his part, Trump has long cast reporters as the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,” a riff on a phrase employed by both Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (to refer to Jews) and Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin (in reference to dissenters). The administration defied a court order and blocked The Associated Press from presidential events over its refusal to use the Trumpian term “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico; moved to strip NPR and PBS of more than $1 billion in federal funding; utilized Federal Communications Commission merger approvals and “news distortion” investigations against ABC, NBC, and CBS; subpoenaed the phone records of multiple New York Times reporters and their relatives; and launched an official media “hall of shame” to discredit disfavored outlets.

Trump also filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit after the Wall Street Journal reported on a letter sent from him to convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein; he also banned WSJ reporters from flying aboard Air Force One. This year, Trump also told journalists to give up a source “or go to jail,” threatened the press with “Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information,” and praised FCC chief Brendan Carr for threatening “the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.” (The Intercept is currently suing Trump for restricting First Amendment-protected information in a scheme to enrich himself.)

While Trump and Hegseth have waged a pitched campaign to dismantle the free press, they are merely building upon decades of efforts by the government to curtail accountability journalism.

Military commands have regularly led this reporter on with promises of information only to renege months later; ignored calls and emails; feigned failing phone lines to end calls; hung up, lost Freedom of Information Act requests; and once even burned documents in lieu of releasing them.

This reporter was blacklisted in 2018 by U.S. Africa Command after exposing the torture of prisoners at a remote military base in Cameroon for The Intercept. “Nick, we’re not going to respond to any of your questions” then-Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, the head of U.S. Africa Command’s Public Affairs Branch, told me by phone. Asked if he believed AFRICOM didn’t need to address questions from the press in general, or just this reporter in particular, Falvo replied: “No, just you. We don’t consider you a legitimate journalist, really.”

The anonymous U.S. official said that sentiment extends to this day across multiple commands, as well as Hegseth’s office.

This reporter has unanswered questions pending with CENTCOM that date back to at least 2013 and extend to this week. For example, in July 2015, a CENTCOM spokesperson responded to an inquiry with this statement: “We will provide you response as quickly as possible.” Eleven years later, this reporter is still waiting.

The post Pentagon Spokesperson Admits There’s a Secret Blacklist of Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

That day, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates. Since a June ceasefire collapsed and the U.S. resumed attacks, Iran’s Health Ministry says U.S. strikes have killed or wounded more than 650 people.

Mohammad’s parents — Fatemeh Rostami, known to her family as Hannaneh, and Ali, her husband — brought him home to their apartment in eastern Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood. Despite the danger, Hannaneh’s mother, Tahereh Sarbaz, traveled almost 100 miles from the city of Qazvin to meet her newborn grandson, as Trump lobbed threats and missiles at Tehran. “Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time,” he wrote on Truth Social on March 7. Sarbaz witnessed the destruction that week and felt a blast wave firsthand while driving through the capital. “I was in Tehran. I saw what happened there,” she recalled. “People were being bombed every night. Families everywhere were losing their children.”

Pirouzi, a crowded working- to middle-class residential area, with a major shopping mall, hospital, sports complex, and several transit hubs, is home to around 600,000 people. When the war erupted, it was hit hard. As U.S. and Israeli munitions laid waste to buildings there, people flooded into the streets — Hannaneh’s family among them — seeking safety. Ali was still going to work each day but suggested that Hannaneh and the children decamp for the relative safety of Qazvin, which was not attacked nearly as much as the capital. “My daughter refused,” Sarbaz recalled. “She told him, ‘I will not leave you here alone.’” 

Sarbaz eventually headed across town, to northern Tehran, where her son, Mehdi Rostami, lived with his wife and their three children, thinking it would be safer. After a short visit, she returned, alone, to Qazvin.

On March 17, Sarbaz checked in with Hannaneh by phone. “I called her and asked how she and the baby were doing,” Sarbaz said. “I asked whether the fighter jets were still coming. Whether she was afraid. Whether there was a lot of noise. And I told her to be careful.”

The next day, Rostami’s whole family traveled across Tehran to visit Hannaneh and her children. Not long after, Sarbaz received a call from another daughter-in-law. “She sounded extremely distressed. She was trying to prepare me for something,” Sarbaz recalled. “Finally, I asked her, ‘What happened? Why are you so worried?’” The daughter-in-law said: “Mother, the thing you were afraid of has happened.”

Sarbaz was initially so stunned that she couldn’t process the news. It wasn’t until other family members broke down in tears that she could comprehend the enormity of her loss. An airstrike hit Hannaneh’s apartment building while her brother’s family was visiting. The attack killed Rostami; his wife, Manzar al-Sadat Zarrabadi; and their three children: Ali, 13; Fatemeh, 9; and Zeynab, 7. Also slain were Hannaneh and her two children: Mohammad Hassan Kialha, 7, and Mohammad Ali Kialha, who was just 20 days old. Ali, Hannaneh’s husband, survived; he was out at the time of the attack.

“They told me that my family in Tehran had been killed,” Sarbaz said. “Inside, I was heartbroken.”

Dr. Nader Azadeh, a high-ranking official with the Tehran Fire Department, was coordinating emergency response and rescue operations in the capital following airstrikes and deployed to the Pirouzi neighborhood just after the attack on the family’s apartment building. Amid all the carnage he witnessed over weeks of war in Tehran, the toll on the Rostami family — eight dead — had a lasting impact on him. He said he could not forget the scale of their loss.

A rescue worker who participated in the response said that the entire building was demolished by the strike. He estimated that 30 people, in total, died. It took hours to unearth what was left of the family and other victims from the rubble. Most of the dead had been exhumed when neighbors explained that an infant was still somewhere under the debris, prompting the search to begin anew. Hours later, they finally located the tiny body, he recalled.

No one knows how many survivors in Iran are grieving over loved ones killed in Trump’s war. Global attention has focused on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school — almost to the exclusion of the other schools, homes, hospitals, apartment buildings, and other civilian sites damaged or destroyed in other U.S.–Israeli strikes. The U.S. military has used this tunnel vision to its advantage, advancing the farcical claim that the elementary school strike is the only incident of civilian harm during the entire conflict. “There is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in May.

CENTCOM has continued these claims in response to queries from The Intercept. “We have no new updates at this time pertaining to current investigations or munitions that were expended during Operation Epic Fury,” a spokesperson said.

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Asked if CENTCOM was aware of any allegations of civilian harm in Iran on or about March 18, the command dodged the question. “The U.S. military takes all reports of civilian harm seriously,” a defense official told The Intercept. “All allegations of civilian harm reported to CENTCOM have been reviewed.”

While CENTCOM was tight-lipped, Sarbaz refused to stay silent. “I want people around the world to know that civilians died in this conflict. I want people around the world to know that the president of the United States, a man mired in corruption and scandal, came and took my children from me,” she told The Intercept. “What crime had my 20-day-old grandchild committed?”

It’s unclear if Hannaneh and Ali’s apartment building was the intended object of a U.S. or Israeli strike, a targeting error, or so-called collateral damage. The family says it knows of no regime officials who resided in the building or military uses of the site.

The Israel Defense Forces announced it killed “Mehdi Rostami Shamastam, one of the key commanders in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence” in Tehran on the same day that Mehdi Rostami and his family lost their lives in Hannaneh’s apartment. Sarbaz said her son was an academic, not an intelligence official. “I deny this,” she said of the assertion. “My son was a university professor. But if what Israel claims were true, I would be very glad.”

Sarbaz said that if her son was, in fact, a top intelligence chief, killing him alongside his family, including a baby, would make it an even graver atrocity. “The presence of a 20-day-old infant among the victims, and the killing of eight members of one family, is such an enormous crime,” she said. “Why didn’t they target him in the street?”

Following the attack, the Iranian regime did not treat Mehdi Rostami as it often does senior commanders or influential figures killed in enemy strikes, making no public acknowledgment of his service to the state. Mehdi and Rostami are also common names. The Israeli military did not respond to multiple requests for clarification if the Mehdi Rostami Shamastam it referenced and Mehdi Rostami were the same person. CENTCOM did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it or Israeli forces had conducted airstrikes in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood on March 18.

The strike that killed the Rostami family was part of an unrelenting blitz. The U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes near unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm monitoring group Airwars. In the first 24 hours of the war alone, the U.S. said it had struck more than 1,000 targets, and Israel 500. A May 18 report by Human Rights Activists in Iran counted 12,798 “unique attacks” by the U.S. or Israel, 77 percent of them involving civilian harm or damage to civilian infrastructure.

The U.S. bears some responsibility for all attacks as the chief of the coalition attacking Iran. “Only the United States of America could lead this,” self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on March 4. “But when you add the Israeli Defense Forces, a devastatingly capable force, the combination is sheer destruction for our radical Islamist Iranian adversaries. … Fighting shoulder to shoulder with such a capable ally is a true force multiplier and a breath of fresh air.”

After initially striking Iranian military assets in the opening rounds of the war, the U.S. shifted to targeting civilian infrastructure, Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy specializing in U.S.–Iran relations, told The Intercept. Targets included oil facilities; steel and pharmaceutical plants; universities; and even the headquarters of Iran’s space program. He noted that bridges were targeted, killing civilians as well as first responders.

This summer, as a second ceasefire imploded and Iran stepped up attacks on U.S. bases causing large numbers of casualties, Trump has increasingly unleashed unhinged rants, including threats to attack civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants, that would “affect 91 million people.”

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In July, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., cajoled chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine into what seemed like a half-hearted pledge to “not target, even in retaliatory sense, infrastructure that is generally considered to be primarily for civilian survival.” The very next day, Trump announced that “any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz … the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.”

Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer and intelligence official and now the associate director for campaigns and policy at Win Without War, drew specific attention to the attacks on the bridges and water reservoirs. It is “quite dangerous to be conditioning the U.S. military to carry out orders that are clearly war crimes,” he warned.

The World Health Organization puts the Iranian casualty toll at an estimated 37,181, including 3,375 deaths. Iranian state and semi-official media reported similar figures, just under 3,500 killed. Mansoureh Mills, a regional researcher with Amnesty International, noted that earlier government figures put the civilian toll at roughly 45 percent of the total, including 383 children. 

The total number of U.S.–Israeli strikes on apartment buildings is unknown, but certainly significant. Reports of civilian harm were recorded every day from the beginning of the war on February 28 to the first ceasefire on April 8, according to Airwars. This includes six strikes on March 18, the day that the Rostami family was killed. Airwars found that civilians were frequently slain in attacks on residential areas, with such strikes accounting for 147 out of the 297 — almost 50 percent — of the civilian harm incidents it tracked. Eighty-seven of these took place in Tehran province. A Washington Post investigation, relying on data from the Institute for the Study of War, counted 285 attacks across Tehran with strikes “blanket[ing] almost a third of all neighborhoods, some with upward of 11 strikes.”

Azadeh, the fire department official, recalled chaotic and emotionally overwhelming nights of bombardment that killed untold numbers of civilians. In one attack on an apartment building in central Tehran, on the first day of the war, he recalled the death of a mother, her daughter, and the child’s grandmother. In another strike on a 10-unit apartment building in the Pirouzi neighborhood, he recounted the slaying of most of its residents, including seven children and teenagers. “When our rescue teams arrived, the force of the explosion had thrown many of the bodies into the street,” Azadeh said.

Azadeh drew specific attention to the death of Saeed Shamghadri, an academic killed with his son and daughter in an attack on their home in northern Tehran in March. “To kill one person, they bombed a 14-story residential building and killed somewhere between 50 and 200 people living there,” Azadeh said. “To eliminate one person, many civilians were attacked.”

When asked how many civilians have been killed in U.S. strikes and, if the military did not know the answer, to explain why, CENTCOM told The Intercept: “The U.S. military does not deliberately target civilians.” After being told that response didn’t address the question, Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, said CENTCOM had “nothing additional to add.”

The WHO estimates that 229 healthcare centers, 49 hospitals, and 78 pharmaceutical facilities, laboratories, and warehouses were damaged in U.S.–Israeli strikes. “While I was on my way to my son’s house, Gandhi Hospital came under attack,” said Sarbaz of the medical facility in northern Tehran that saw its entire front facing torn off in a March 1 strike. Sarbaz said that the massive shockwave from the explosion rocked the car she was in. “The media are lying when they say ordinary people were not targeted. Gandhi Hospital, where pregnant women were present, was also attacked.” Videos of the private hospital, known for fertility treatments, show it sustained significant damage, and government sources noted it had to evacuate patients, including babies in incubators.

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These attacks came after Hegseth’s Pentagon spent a year slashing measures to prevent civilian casualties, including firing the military’s top lawyers, who advise leaders on international laws of armed conflict. “U.S. strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran, including the elementary school in Minab, have been absolutely devastating and completely inexcusable,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept. “I continue to have deep concerns about how the school in particular was targeted, especially as the strike was deliberately planned for the first day of the conflict and did not occur amid the fog of war. Secretary Hegseth’s catastrophic cuts to civilian harm mitigation efforts at the Department of Defense and his disdain for the rules of engagement will only continue to put innocent men, women, and children in danger.”

A group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth in a July letter that his “gutting civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts” has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” They added: “The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts.”

That letter, sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Gillibrand, and eight other lawmakers, echoed concerns raised by a War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” The May report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs.

These criticisms were echoed in an as-yet-unreleased official report revealed by The Intercept that found Hegseth’s Pentagon gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report. And cuts have been even more catastrophic at the tip of the spear.

When questioned by lawmakers about U.S. attacks on civilian targets in Iran, Caine dismissed the concerns. “We have a robust process which considers a target. It goes through a system that looks at a variety of considerations, to include what you’re alluding to around both purely civilian or dual-use targets,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair said. “I have trust and confidence in CENTCOM that they’re looking at the range of those things on a daily basis.”

There are good reasons not to trust that system. The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to just one individual, according to Cooper, the CENTCOM commander. Another recent yet-to-be-released Pentagon report on civilian casualties noted that 15 attacks in Yemen from early 2025 are still under review by CENTCOM. “How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?” a U.S. official lamented to The Intercept. Both current and former government officials told The Intercept that the massive cuts have left the Pentagon unable to protect civilians in war zones like Iran.

Asked if anyone would be held accountable for the February strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, Trump replied in June: “No. If it was a fault — and as you know that’s under investigation. It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date. You’re talking about a long time ago.”

The Rostami family was large and close-knit. Sarbaz said that 16 children and grandchildren made a pilgrimage from Tehran to Qazvin every Friday. “We would spread a large tablecloth and eat together,” she said. After the bodies of her children and grandchildren were pulled from the rubble, the eight deceased made a last trip to their ancestral home for a funeral procession and burial.

A large crowd gathered outside Sarbaz’s home on March 23. “They were crying,” she recalled. “People came from everywhere. They were chanting ‘Death to America’ and mourning my children.” Azadeh, who accompanied the bodies back to Qazvin, recalls being deeply affected as Sarbaz received the corpses. “When we returned the bodies, I saw the mother arrive carrying an Iranian flag. She was the only surviving immediate family member there,” he said of Sarbaz. “She said the reason she was crying was because she herself had not been martyred alongside them.” 

Footage from Iranian state television of the martyrs’ procession shows a huge crowd with women pushing children in strollers, men waving Iranian flags, and others carrying poster-sized photos of the dead, behind decorated funeral trucks bearing the bodies of the victims. Photos from the Iranian Students’ News Agency show crowds carrying coffins wrapped in the green, red, and white of the Iranian flag and a cleric clad in a black robe and turban holding the body of a white-shrouded baby aloft.

The funeral was attended by thousands of people, Sarbaz remembered.

In June, just after agreeing to a ceasefire that quickly collapsed, Trump returned to threatening to kill Iranians. “If they ​don’t behave,” he said, “we’ll go right back to dropping bombs ​right smack in the middle of their head.” Attacks followed. “We can knock down their bridges in one hour. We can knock out their energy supply,” he said in July. “We can knock out their electricity and power generating plants. … Every plant will be gone.” Later that month, Trump posted: “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!”

Sarbaz now lives with the fallout of Trump’s war of choice and his disregard for civilian lives. “After three sons, God gave me this daughter, and she was all my hope. We had named her Fatemeh, but because her father loved the name Hannaneh, we used to call her that,” she explained. “But today, I no longer say Hannaneh or Fatemeh.”

As his war in Iran has imploded, Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. “We’re knocking the hell out of it,” he said of Iran earlier this month. “I do not want to kill people. But at some point we’re gonna.” But Trump has already killed many thousands of Iranians — including school children, hospital patients, the elderly, and, in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood on March 18, most of a family, including its youngest member. “Knocking the hell out of them,” said Trump as he continued to rant about his attacks on Iranians last week. Mohammad Ali Kialha was one of those people; perhaps the youngest killed by Trump’s war.

And Sarbaz wants an answer from Trump about why he had to die: “What sin had my 20-day-old grandchild committed that he had to be martyred?”

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

The post The Short Life of a Newborn During the Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

The other official deemed the report, which covers allegations of civilian harm stemming from military attacks in Iran, Somalia, Yemen, and the campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, a “total whitewash.” It’s the latest in a series of recent Pentagon reports that have called attention to U.S. failures to prevent, mitigate, or adequately track civilian harm after self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation and response or CHMR programs.

Shockingly, the Pentagon’s review of its 2025 attacks found that no civilians were killed in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes, according to the officials, despite the fact that the U.S. killed more than 120 civilians last year in attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder. The Trump administration has asserted repeatedly and without evidence that the boat strike victims, who now number more than 220, were “narcoterrorists.” In a classified briefing last fall, a high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said that some of the people killed in the initial September 2, 2025, attack may have been the victims of human trafficking, according to an Intercept investigation.

“They have absolutely no credibility,” the second official told The Intercept about the boat strike claims, adding that the report was “sickening.”

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Known as the 1057 report, this year’s accounting of civilian casualties reflects a backlog of incidents from the Trump administration’s strikes against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. The report found that U.S. attacks killed 153 civilians and wounded almost 250 during the campaign of air and naval strikes, codenamed Operation Rough Rider. The second official called these “lowball numbers.” At least 238 civilians were killed and 467 injured, according to the Yemen Data Project.

One attack killed 68 people, the second official said. That attack on an immigrant detention center in Yemen killed and injured dozens of Ethiopian civilians and no combatants and was detailed in a report by Amnesty International shared with The Intercept last year. At the time, U.S. Central Command said it was still “assessing all reports of civilian harm resulting from operations during that time period.”

The 1057 report determined that three incidents “likely” harmed civilians, according to the second official. Another 15 attacks are still under review, he said.

“The idea CENTCOM still has fifteen cases on Yemen to adjudicate doesn’t bode well for the war in Iran,” said the first official. Both officials spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the report.

Under Section 1057 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon is required to provide Congress and the public with data on civilian harm, mitigation steps, and assessments. The officials said the Pentagon had sent the report to members of the Armed Services Committees.

The report does not cover Trump’s ongoing failed war on Iran, which the United States and Israel launched in February, because it includes only military attacks from 2025. The second government official said that the number of incidents of civilian harm to investigate from the current war with Iran will dwarf the number in Yemen. Reports of civilian harm were recorded every day from the beginning of the war on February 28 to the first ceasefire on April 8, according to the U.K.-based air strike monitoring group, Airwars. The World Health organization put the death toll in Iran at 3,375 people — before the ceasefire fell apart last month. 

The second official said the backlog would likely carry over several years, referencing the fact that the 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to just one individual. The first official echoed the same concerns. “How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?” they asked.

Currently, CENTCOM is clinging to the fiction that the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed more than 150 people, most of them children, is the lone civilian harm incident of the current war. “There is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions,” Admiral Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM chief, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in May.

The Annual Report on Civilian Casualties in Connection with U.S. Military Operations in 2025 comes after Hegseth’s Pentagon has spent more than a year slashing measures to prevent civilian casualties, including firing the military’s top lawyers, who advise leaders on international laws of armed conflict.

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A group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth in a July letter that his “gutting civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts” has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” They added: “The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts.”

That letter, sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and nine other lawmakers, echoed concerns raised by a War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” The May report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs. 

These criticisms were echoed in an another-yet-unreleased official report revealed by The Intercept that found Hegseth’s Pentagon gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence slashed its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report.

“In the coming months, the Department will submit its annual report regarding casualties resulting from United States military operations during the 2025 calendar year,” a Pentagon official told The Intercept when asked about the U.S. officials’ comments. “We have nothing to preview or announce at the moment.”

The post “Total Whitewash”: New Pentagon Report Claims U.S. Killed No Civilians in Boat Strikes appeared first on The Intercept.

The Real Cost of the Military’s Pacific Buildup

President Donald Trump and self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year, a sum so obscenely high that it is almost impossible to comprehend. The proposed $600 billion increase alone is almost twice the total annual military budget of America’s closest rival, China.

That supposed rivalry, despite the big spending gap, makes China central to justifying the Pentagon’s bloated budget. And Hawaiʻi is, in turn, central to the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific military strategy which assumes that deterring China requires a forward, offensive strike posture anchored by the archipelago. This not only puts a target on Hawaiʻi — as was the case during World War II, when Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan — but it also deepens long-standing economic hardships and environmental degradation produced by more than a century of U.S. military occupation, according to “The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi,” a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The report finds that as the Pentagon has shoved Hawaiʻi toward the front lines of a potential nuclear conflict, it has also poisoned the islands’ land and waters, lied about its economic benefits, tied Hawaiʻi’s financial well-being to an inefficient use of tax dollars, and failed to pay more than $130 billion in back rent. And now the Trump administration is extending its buildup in Hawaiʻi — which has long “been central to the architecture of U.S. imperial power” to expand facilities, build new bases, and secure access to air and naval bases from Guam to the Pacific island chain to the Philippines to Australia. And these moves in the Pacific are just one part of that multifaceted $600 billion boost being sought for the Pentagon.

The China Syndrome

In addition to greed, grift and pork-barrel politics — practices that have reached an astonishing level due to the unapologetic corruption and feverish insider dealings of the Trump family and its hangers-on — the biggest driver of the Pentagon’s enormous budget is America’s quest for unrivaled global military dominance. At the center of that effort are preparations to “win” a war with China, a mission that is likely impossible and would be extremely dangerous to undertake.

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The probable outcome of a war with Beijing — which is, after all, a sophisticated technological power armed with nuclear weapons — would be unprecedented devastation for all concerned, especially the people of Taiwan, the independent island nation of the coast of the mainland that China considers a breakaway province. Hawai‘i, Guam, and the other launching pads for a U.S. military operation against China would undoubtedly be targets, with dire consequences for the residents of those islands.

Well before recentering China as national security adversary No. 1, America’s quest for military supremacy was not going well, to put it mildly.

As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has shown, America’s post-9/11 wars have been an unmitigated disaster, costing or causing long-term obligations of an astonishing $8 trillion, as well as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the displacement of tens of millions more, Meanwhile, these wars failed miserably in meeting their stated objectives, leaving in power a sectarian regime in Iraq that opened the door to the rise of ISIS and a Taliban-led government in Afghanistan, a status quo ante bellum after more than 20 years of war.

It’s hard to envision a more complete mismatch between stated war aims and real-world results than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until we take a hard look at the illegal, immoral, and ill-conceived conflict with Iran which is fast becoming a new forever war.

Despite this dismal record, the Trump regime — and the Biden administration before it — has chosen to double down on a military-first foreign policy, with the demonization of China fueling the fire.

The Pentagon refers to China as the “pacing challenge,” even as military spending far outpaces Beijing’s defense budget. And in its most recent assessment, the Pentagon outlined a strategy to cow China into submission by “being so strong that aggression is not even considered.”

China hasn’t been involved in a major shooting war since the much smaller nation of Vietnam fought it to a virtual standstill in 1979, nearly five decades ago. China’s forces “severely underperformed” in the one-month conflict; according to one account, “PLA soldiers were so undertrained that there were reports of infantrymen tying themselves to tanks with ropes to avoid falling off, sealing their fate when they were ambushed.”

Presumably Chinese forces are much better trained now, but China is not a serial aggressor, and although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India, it has not been embroiled in virtually nonstop conflicts over the past half century, as the United States has, nor has it fought regime-change wars. So the question arises: Who is setting the pace in the U.S.–China arms race, Washington or Beijing?

Two Systems, Two Countries

In the real world, China’s military is not 10 feet tall, and throwing more money at the Pentagon is the worst possible way to address the greatest challenges posed by Beijing, which are actually not military in nature.

China’s vast global influence leans heavily on its economic clout, which is built on aid and trade, including the Belt and Road Initiative, a globe-spanning collection of interconnected infrastructure projects. (To be clear, the Belt and Road has too often involved dubious deals with unaccountable leaders who give Beijing long-term leases on their nation’s critical natural resources in exchange for roads, railways, port facilities, or other infrastructure projects — not exactly a model of free trade in action.) China is also the top trading partner to 120 nations worldwide, including key countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, alongside a brisk trade with Europe. This is the lynchpin of China’s global clout.

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But U.S. power projection in Hawai‘i and beyond, the entire Pacific strategy, is based on a different type of projection — the belief that China aspires to usurp the U.S. as the global hegemon through military might. Exaggerating the threat posed by China is a foolproof marketing scheme for the weapons contractors, Pentagon bureaucrats, K-Street lobbyists, and venture capital firms that profit handsomely from preparations for war with Beijing.

As military budget analyst Stephen Semler has documented, more than half the Pentagon budget goes to private companies, for everything from long-range bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles to F-35 combat aircraft that are virtually useless in modern warfare, to the unproven, overhyped products of the Silicon Valley military tech moguls, like the at least 686 artificial intelligence projects currently being funded by the Pentagon.

On the military front, China’s ability to challenge the U.S. is grounded in its nuclear forces, which are much smaller than America’s but are on the rise in an effort to keep Washington from having a large-enough edge to wipe out Beijing’s ability to respond to a first strike.

The U.S. may not be able to threaten China’s nuclear deterrent any time soon, but in the face of the U.S. military build-up in the Pacific, Beijing appears to be preparing for a worst-case scenario. Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to value nuclear weapons more than his predecessors, who were content to keep a few hundred nuclear warheads that could reach U.S. soil versus Washington’s much larger nuclear arsenal. China is also leveraging is technological base, including its faster pace at training scientists and engineers. This positions China to challenge Washington in an AI arms race.

And yet war is not inevitable, despite what many China hawks constantly suggest. Returning to a common understanding on Taiwan — one in which the U.S. agrees to limit its political recognition of the island or support for independence in exchange for a Chinese pledge not to seek reunification through military means — is the best way to avoid a catastrophic conflict. It would also clear the way for cooperation on urgent issues like addressing the climate crisis, preventing pandemics, and promoting equitable global arrangements to reduce poverty and inequality. At the same time, it would make things safer for hundreds of millions of people from Japan and South Korea to Guam and Hawai‘i.

Paying the Price

America’s military-first approach to China and the world at large comes at a high price, even when the guns are silent. History demonstrates that merely preparing for war costs lives, as the fate of victims of Cold War-era nuclear testing from New Mexico and Utah to the Marshall Islands attests. But as Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, has pointed out, the toll of nuclear weapons research, development, and production is global in scope, creating “a worldwide archipelago of radioactive wastelands” that have cost millions of lives since the dawn of the nuclear age. The military’s impact on lives and health is also exacerbated by the proliferation of non-nuclear toxins and unexploded ordnance created by generations of war.

In short, military buildups mean far more than moving money around, although that too poses serious risks when it comes at the expense of investments in public health, nutrition, education, and anti-poverty efforts. 

Military expansions involve constructing and maintaining new weapons factories and existing military bases, deploying new weaponry, engaging in costly training exercises, and, all too often, prosecuting senseless, devastating wars like the current conflict with Iran, the forever war in Somalia, and a new conflict percolating in Ecuador.

The Institute for Policy Studies report, prepared by both mainland and Hawai‘i-based analysts and advocates, offers a lesson in the perils of military expansion. Hosting facilities geared toward a future war against China come at a human and environmental cost that far outstrips the (routinely overstated) economic benefits that U.S. military bases and weapons deployments generate, according to the IPS analysis.

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The report reveals that decades of military use of PFAS (known as “forever chemicals”) have contaminated soil, groundwater, and nearshore waters far beyond the footprint of military bases. Remediation at just three installations is estimated to cost almost $500 million. A leak at the Navy’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility — which stored roughly 250 million gallons of jet fuel — in Oʻahu also contaminated the drinking water supply of 93,000 people. Due to these and other environmental disasters, residents of Hawai‘i have suffered unnecessary health risks and mortality and could suffer the effects of further accidents as preparations for war with China ramp up.

Trading short-term jobs for long-term environmental devastation and generational health risks is a terrible bargain that would never have been struck without Hawai‘i’s history as a colonial outpost and a pawn in a superpower competition over which the people of the islands have had far too little control. While military bases in the mainland U.S. have also caused enormous health damage, the sheer extent of Hawai‘i’s territory occupied by military facilities heightens the impact.

Meanwhile, the archipelago’s longtime status as a floating military base and the foundation for U.S. power projection in the Pacific makes it a primary target in any U.S.–China conflict, either in a first strike designed to hobble a looming U.S. attack or in retaliation once a U.S. intervention begins.

The IPS analysis also found that the Pentagon has overstated the military’s supposed $10 billion annual economic benefit to Hawai‘i by nearly 30 percent. On top of this, Hawai‘i is getting little bang for the buck. Military spending creates approximately 5.3 jobs per $1 million invested, compared to 12.3 jobs from the same investment in education, food production, healthcare, or housing. The researchers also found that the federal government owes Hawai‘i up to $133.7 billion in back rent on top of the massive environmental cleanup costs.

A non-militarized plan for Hawai‘i’s economy would supply more jobs and be far more sustainable than the current approach, according to IPS. And there is a unique opportunity to change, as two military leases of huge swaths of Hawaiian territory are set to expire.

Washington needs to thoroughly rethink its narrow, self-defeating approach to Beijing. A less aggressive, more cooperative posture toward China would help free Hawaiians politically and economically, and it would open the path to a safer, more peaceful, more prosperous future. It would also allow for a rollback of the extensive U.S. military buildups in Guam and the Pacific islands, activities that mirror and are at times even worse in their environmental damage and security risks than the situation in Hawai‘i itself.

A less aggressive foreign policy toward China requires the demilitarization of Hawai‘i and a rollback of America’s costly and ill-conceived buildup in the Pacific. The IPS report clarifies what is at stake and provides a starting point for what should be a thorough debate on Hawai‘i’s role in U.S. security strategy. It is, as one of the authors, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, put it: “a blueprint for reclaiming our nation here, in hope and faith in one another.”

The post The Pentagon’s Obsession With China Puts Hawai‘i at Risk appeared first on The Intercept.

Channeling His Inner-Martian

As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.

Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.

“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”

This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.

Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.

White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down like wild beasts,” according to the local press. When one of the white people were killed by locals, the Colonial Times reported that other settlers exacted revenge on the Indigenous people that left “sixty of them killed and wounded.” The next year, when members of settler police and military forces were pelted with stones, they responded with gunfire and a bayonet charge that “killed seventy of them, dragging the women and children from the crevices of the rocks, and dashing out their brains.”

The slaughter in Tasmania was the inspiration for author H.G. Wells’s late 19th-century sci-fi classic “War of the Worlds,” in which Martians with superior technology, advanced firepower, and no compunction about annihilating humanity invade England, laying waste to London and driving out its population. “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought,” the narrator says in the book’s open. “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

When lawyer Raphael Lemkin formulated the idea of “genocide” after World War II, almost 50 years after Wells wrote “War of the Worlds,” he considered Tasmania a historical case study of his concept. It’s unclear if Trump ever read “War of the Worlds,” though he attended the New York City premiere of the 2005 Steven Spielberg film adaptation; I doubt he understood Wells’s allegory, presuming he knows what an allegory is.

The Tasmanian carnage was part of an age of slaughter and genocide carried out across the globe by European powers and the United States. Trump has long been in the thrall of the precepts of this era of colonial conquest: Might makes right; territorial acquisition through armed intervention; and colonial relationships with, and resource extraction from, conquered foes and weaker nations.

Trump often invokes and praises Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century predecessor in the White House, who owned slaves and implemented a policy of “Indian removal” that culminated in the Trail of Tears, the military’s forced displacement of Native Americans, during which thousands died. Trump advocated “furthering President Jackson’s legacy, expanding his vision, [and] honoring his memory” earlier this year, pronouncing that Old Hickory embodied the “best of the American Spirit.” Trump has even employed America’s contribution to the eradication of indigenous peoples as a punch line. He has made light, on social media, not only of the Trail of Tears but also the Army’s massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

Even the Army’s official history portrays Wounded Knee as a Tasmanian-scale slaughter in which an effort to disarm a group of Lakota religious revivalists resulted in an errant shot, possibly an accidental discharge, that “led immediately to heavy and indiscriminate firing from soldiers,” including the use of artillery, “despite the presence of numerous noncombatants.” In the end, up to 300 Lakota, including women and children, lay dead while “Army casualties totaled 25 killed and 39 wounded, some of whom likely were hit by friendly fire.”

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Such disproportionate mass killings and exterminations were a hallmark of the 19th century. This “destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for the destruction of six million Jews in Europe,” as the author Sven Lindqvist observed, in his classic text “Exterminate All the Brutes.” We look back on these Holocaust-precipitating slaughters as beyond abhorrent. Or at least we did.

The death toll disparity at Wounded Knee doesn’t compare to the carnage of Trump’s war on Iran. The estimated 3,375 to 6,000 Iranian deaths dwarf the 19 U.S. deaths by 180 to 320 times, or more than two orders of magnitude. (The official U.S. Iran war death toll stands at 18, with the Pentagon omitting one widely reported loss.) The 60-to-1 Tasmanian toll of dead and wounded is a similar ratio as the estimated 39,806 total Iranian casualties compared to the official U.S. count of more than 700 troops who have been killed or wounded.

Trump has also repeatedly touted the lopsided nature of his punitive expedition in Venezuela, a short war in which the U.S. deposed and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, creating a de facto U.S. colony run by a quisling. “To have a few injuries, but no death on our side, is really amazing,” Trump bragged after the invasion, later comparing the lack of U.S. fatalities to the substantial death tolls of the (much longer) Korean and Vietnam wars. The 100 or more Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians killed compared with a handful of U.S. injuries shares a lineage of battlefield massacres like the 1863 U.S. slaughter of 250 to 500 Shoshone — including at least 90 women, children and infants — at Bear River at a cost of 24 U.S. troops, and the up to 6,000 Zulus armed with shields and spears cut down by Gatling guns and artillery compared with 10 British troops killed at Ulundi in southern Africa in 1879.

Trump’s 2025 war against the Houthi government in Yemen — Operation Rough Rider — was similarly lopsided. The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids combined. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. The U.S. also killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders, according to CENTCOM spokesperson Dave Eastburn, who referred to “credible open sources” citing 650 Houthi casualties. The U.S. did not suffer a single reported fatality during the campaign. And Trump’s relentless strikes in nearby Somalia have amounted to up to 420 deaths at a cost of zero American lives.

The Trump administration’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which has killed at least 221 people without the loss of even one U.S. life, is a still more egregious slaughter. In this case, only unarmed civilians are targeted, victims akin to the fleeing Tasmanian women and children who had their skulls bashed in.

There are, of course, myriad differences between Trump’s ongoing war on the world and 19th-century colonial extermination campaigns in Africa, America, Australia, and elsewhere. Trump doesn’t, for example, explicitly assert racial superiority as a reason for his military interventions even if he often lapses into racist rants and is making war in Somalia while deriding Somalis as “garbage.”

But Trump’s more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars have heightened the increasing trend toward “riskless warfare,” a term coined more than a quarter century ago by Paul Kahn, the director of Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights. “It is an image of warfare without the possibility of chivalry,” the prescient Kahn later observed. “At the heart is a violation of the fundamental principle that establishes the internal morality of warfare: self-defense within conditions of reciprocal imposition of risk. Without the imposition of mutual risk, warfare is not war at all.” 

Earlier this decade, in a study of drone warfare, Neil Renic, a scholar of military ethics, refined the concept as “radical asymmetry,” in which “one side has, in a practical sense, overcome the type and degree of physical vulnerability that has long been regarded as an expected and unavoidable feature of war.” Renic sees the drift toward unilateral violence leading to the increasing “perception of the weaker party … from an opponent to be fought and overcome, to one that must be hunted and done away with,” contributing to “dehumanization” of the enemy which, “in some cases … has led to a more severe decline in the targeting practices of the United States, from the morally questionable to the morally indefensible.” This feature of modern warfare harkens back to the age of extermination, when Tasmanians and others were also hunted and done away with.

As Trump has reveled in asymmetrical body counts and called for more disproportionate deaths, he has increasingly fancied himself an alien destroyer like Wells’s Martians; even if he himself doesn’t quite realize it. In one bizarre AI-slop image he posted on Truth Social as the Iran war went south, Trump appears to be striding from a spaceship — on some platform high above Earth — as legions of weapons-toting alien warriors flank him. In another, a gigantic Trump is seated at a command console in a space station floating high above the world. On screens above him, we see huge explosions apparently going off simultaneously back on Earth. On still another, an indistinct country is seemingly being ravaged by lasers.

“Then in a moment the Heat Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins,” wrote Wells in “War of the Worlds,” describing the Martians’ weapon of mass destruction. “The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar.” Wells referenced the “massacre of mankind” and “the rout of civilization.” As Trump has made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa, he has channeled his inner Martian. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote of Iran on Truth Social, promising the “entire country could be taken out” and warning he might bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”

Trump’s unhinged rhetoric is further driven home by the remaining imagery in the command-console post: a mushroom cloud from a monstrous nuclear blast with text on a screen announcing “target destroyed,” while a glowering Trump is poised to push a glowing red button that suggests he is about to incinerate the planet. Trump’s annihilationist fantasies are especially disturbing since he controls a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over. (“We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 150 times,” was how Trump put it.) 

Iranians, Latin Americans, Somalis, and Yemenis have all been in the crosshairs of America’s lopsided killing campaigns during his second term, but in this new age of slaughter, all of us are potentially targets in Trump’s war on the world.

The post When a President Promises a Massacre appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the start of the conflict, the Department of War has posted the official count of casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president. This official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what that same official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

But after a series of Iranian strikes on U.S. facilities in the Middle East in July, the Pentagon last week rolled out a new approach. Casualties since July 7 are now counted separately on a new webpage with a generic designation: “Overseas Operations.”

Two hundred and seventy-three U.S. troops were killed or wounded since July 7, according to the Monday total on the new Overseas Operations page.

When combined with the existing DCAS page for the Iran war, the official count stands at 704, an 83 percent increase in casualties since April 8, the day the first ceasefire deal was struck between the Trump administration and Iran. When counting known casualties overlooked by the DCAS page, the total exceeds 900 personnel.

For months, the Pentagon has failed to comment on DCAS anomalies reported by The Intercept nor the reason for the change in the way it now counts casualties, which was first reported by the New York Times. Last week, the Pentagon told the newspaper that “since Operation Epic Fury has concluded, the department classifies casualties as overseas operations in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.” Central Command oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

“This is certainly designed to conceal the count of the wounded,” the official said, while noting that “incompetence” has also caused confusion in the casualty count.

The change comes after a July 20 rant by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell who claimed reports of a Pentagon effort to withhold news of dozens of U.S. casualties were “baseless and malicious” and a U.S. official’s disclosure to The Intercept that same day that recent attacks on U.S. bases by Iran had wounded “far more” personnel than the Pentagon had acknowledged.

The casualty spike resulted from Iranian attacks on at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a second U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press.

Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated.

Last month, the tally of wounded personnel fluctuated by the day in the wake of increased Iranian attacks. On July 21, the casualty count on DCAS for Operation Epic Fury, the military’s official designation for the Iran war, stood at 500. Now, it has shrunk to 431.

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For months, The Intercept found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities in its casualty count.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also found DCAS is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel from Epic Fury. The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures for Epic Fury show that 65 Navy personnel were wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

Recent reporting by the War Horse, using Pentagon records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, found more than 400 casualties were recorded between February 28 and April 8. Seventy occurred on March 18 alone, but this huge single-day toll was never reported by the Pentagon.

The records provide more granular detail than DCAS, revealing that at least 17 troops sustained life-threatening injuries. They show that U.S. troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. The most common injury recorded, however, was head trauma — which affected at least 170 troops, according to the data.

President Donald Trump has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” 

The post The Pentagon Found a New Way to Undercount U.S. Casualties in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

The Me, Me, Me Presidency

There’s no I in war. But there is in Iran. And in Iraq, too. Both these wars were about ME — that is, the Middle East. It’s a region rife with supposed American security interests, but this wordplay points to another very all-too-real dynamic: These wars are as much about the “I” and “ME” of the White House as they are about the countries we attack. Or to put it another way: It’s the presidential psyche, stupid.

Way back in 2002, then-President George W. Bush warned that Iraq, Iran, and outlier North Korea comprised a grave threat. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he warned. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.” North Korea built a nuclear arsenal, and with it, purchased a guarantee of security. The other two countries produced no nukes, and the story has been radically different.

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The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003. Two months later, the war was won. Except it wasn’t. Despite President George W. Bush’s unforgettable May 1, 2003, “mission accomplished” moment when, from the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, he declared “major combat operations in Iraq … ended,” the American war there somehow never actually stopped. An insurgency was raging, U.S. bases were being mortared, and American officials feared a civil war between the country’s formerly reigning Sunni minority and its rising Shiite majority was brewing. It became a forever war that lived up to the moniker. Last week, almost a quarter century since Bush made the case for war in Iraq, a U.S. soldier was killed in an Iranian attack on an American base there.

President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to say goodbye to all that. American-style wars of choice were going to be a thing of the past: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end.” And yet Trump’s America is now deeply involved in a seemingly ever-escalating and never-ending conflict with — yes! — Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.

No one, I suspect, not even Trump, has the faintest idea why he did this, though maybe he felt left out of the club of forever-war makers, co-chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe he just sensed that he had to give this country a shot at being globally competitive when it came to making endless (and endlessly unsuccessful) war, if the U.S. was to remain the superpower on this planet.

Not everyone thinks, however, that you need to fight ruinous wars to be a superpower. There’s China, which is the quietest rising power in recent history because — except for a few border flare-ups with India early in this decade, and saber-rattling when it comes to Taiwan, the island nation off the coast of the mainland — it hasn’t been at war since 1979.

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In lieu of pursuing fruitless conflicts around the world, it’s been silently leading the global production of green energy technology. China’s exports of green tech shot up by more than a third in the first six months of the year. This included a reported rise in shipments of lithium batteries and wind turbines by 38 percent and 36 percent, respectively. “In the first half of this year, the situation in the Middle East was tense and global supply of chemical products was tight,” Wang Jun, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Customs said at a recent press briefing. “China, with its complete industrial system and full-chain supporting capabilities, quickly seized the sudden external demands.”

And this Chinese green technology boom was in full swing even before Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen declared a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia and began attacking the kingdom’s oil ships in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, briefly driving the price of oil back above $100 per barrel, about 40 percent higher than before the conflict began.

As his war with Iran has gone off the rails, Trump has begun redefining the conflict from a war to “a little excursion,” which just kept going on and on, leading him in March to sum things up this way: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long running danger once and for all.”

You’ll recall that Trump also said on March 2 that the war was set to last “four to five weeks.” And three days later, that the U.S. and Israel continued “to totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule.” By March 9, Trump said that the conflict was “very complete, pretty much.” And two days later, the president declared victory. “Let me tell you, we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won,” Trump announced at a rally in Kentucky. “We won.”

Like Bush’s “mission accomplished” moment, Trump’s was also decidedly short-lived. On March 15, the president said Iran still had “a little bit of fight back, but not much.” In a Truth Social post five days later, he wrote: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down” the war. On April 1, Trump announced the U.S. was “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly” and on the 6th said the war “could end very quickly.” But it didn’t. “The war in Iran is going along swimmingly,” he declared on April 16. And in a May 1 letter to Congress, Trump said: “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.” Except Iran never got the memo.

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As the war has simply gone on and on, Trump has continued to tweak his terminology and rebrand the conflict with Iran as “a skirmish.” (Tell that, of course, to all the dead Iranian children!) Here’s how he put it, in fact, on July 22: “I call it a skirmish. This is, with this skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that, because, let me tell you, they’re getting hit so hard and they want to make a deal. But I say they’re not ready to make a deal.” And if the Iran war doesn’t end in the coming weeks, Trump will undoubtedly have to tweak terminology further, perhaps relabeling his skirmish with Iran a tussle, a scuffle, or even a full-scale kerfuffle.

As Trump insists the war is a minor engagement, he continues to dish out immense amounts of pain on Iranians and threatens even worse. He seems increasingly eager to blast civilian infrastructure and smash Iran into submission. As he put it all too bluntly when it came to those civilian targets: “Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by missile, rocket, drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant.” And he’s also been threatening to launch “a massive attack. Bigger than ever before.”

His Secretary of War Pete Hegseth certainly understands the president, or why would he start insisting on checking the testosterone levels of American troops and begin referring to what, in the Trump years, had already gone from the Department of Defense to the Department of War as “the High-T Department of War”?

But while Hegseth is hoping to amp up the military’s potency, Americans want to bring the Iran war to a close. Only 29 percent of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the Iran war, according to a recent Washington Post poll. Even a Fox News survey (yes, Fox News!) found disapproval ratings hit a record high in July, with 56 percent of Americans opposing U.S. military action against Iran, including 40 percent who “strongly” oppose it. Nearly two-thirds of respondents now think the conflict will last at least a year.

Even worse was a recent CBS News/YouGov poll that found 21 percent of Americans think the conflict will last multiple years! That same poll found that 67 percent of respondents say the U.S. should end the war with Iran now. Young people are the most fed up, with 83 percent urging the president to stop the war posthaste.

And even among his most fervent followers, support had already dropped by 13 percent over the previous two months, according to a Politico poll, while almost 1 of every 5 MAGA voters had come to believe that the U.S. should end its war in Iran, no matter the cost or results.

Of course, Trump doesn’t really care about young voters or Republican voters or even MAGA devotees. As he put it last week: “A poll just came out: Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war.” His war in the ME is wrapped up in his egocentric narcissism and his me, me, me world. The phrase “wars of choice” now means wars of Donald’s choice. But the Iranian government has a say in the matter and has made a choice to hold out amid renewed threats and attacks. And despite what Trump seems to think, the public in the U.S. can make choices, too. If Trump keeps on fighting in Iran, he may sooner or later also find himself in a distinct “skirmish” with the American people.

The post Donald Trump and Wars of Choice appeared first on The Intercept.

The military personnel, clad in a mix of combat fatigues and gym attire, piled into a bunker, huddling in the darkness. “Guys, off the walls if we can,” a woman, likely a medic, advised, warning about the danger of traumatic brain injuries.

The footage, reportedly from Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where three U.S. troops were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on July 17 and 18, offers a glimpse of the dangers faced by U.S. forces across the Middle East.

The attacks are continued demonstrations of Iran’s ability to target U.S. bases across the Middle East and kill U.S. troops, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated. As this fiction has collapsed, U.S. Central Command has refused to discuss the number and scale of the strikes. “I have nothing for you on that,” Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, told The Intercept.

Iran has attacked at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. Several of these bases suffered “significant” damage in the attacks, the source said.

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Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, according to the official. Numerous factors make the missiles difficult to defeat, the source said: They travel at hypersonic speeds, have complex navigational capabilities including methods to circumvent jamming, and some can be guided or steered.

Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, the official said, referencing a Friday report by NBC News that revealed the tactic. The official told The Intercept that the U.S. allows missiles through its defenses only in cases where a strike is judged not to imperil U.S. lives.

The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. The report predicted then that U.S. forces were about a month away from running out of THAAD interceptors. An April report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that “diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk.” A follow-up report the next month warned that it would “take three or more years from today to return to prewar inventory levels” of Patriot and THAAD missiles.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, said that “Patriot systems have been weakened to such an extent that Iranian missiles and drones are reaching their targets without being intercepted.” He said that during a flurry of attacks from July 8 to July 22, Iran struck numerous air defense and radar installations, including six “Patriot air-defense radars.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on the claims by the U.S. official or Mohebbi.

The official confirmed that Iran also recently attacked Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost on the northern Jordanian border with Syria. Satellite images as well as photos and videos circulating online indicate the base suffered extensive damage. (In 2024, a drone attack on Tower 22 by an Iran-backed militia killed three U.S. troops.) 

Iran says it also attacked U.S. military facilities at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base, King Faisal Air Base, and Al-Azraq Air Base; Kuwait’s Al-Adiri base, Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, Camp Doha, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Arifjan; Naval Support Activity Sheikh Isa in Bahrain; and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Thompson refused to confirm Iranian attacks on various U.S. bases across the Middle East. “We don’t comment on battle damage assessments,” she said.

Iran has fired between 8,000 and 9,000 drones and missiles at targets across the Middle East since the U.S.–Israeli war began in February, according to the official. Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps recently warned residents of countries that host American forces to keep at least 1,650 feet away from any buildings housing U.S. personnel. The group is also fielding crowdsourced information on “new locations of the American occupying forces” from people in these countries.

The IRGC specifically mentioned “covert and secret” facilities in a statement posted on their website. CIA sites in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region were reportedly struck, possibly with Russian assistance, according to Reuters. A former Pentagon consultant with ties to the defense industry told The Intercept that Russia has certainly provided “targeting support” to Iran during the conflict but did not comment directly on attacks on CIA facilities.

Despite Trump’s insistence that Russia and China are “not participating” in the Iran war, Hegseth recently said both are “enabling some of the things Iran is doing.” In March, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told senators that the “Iranians are requesting intelligence assistance from Russia, from China and from other adversaries of the United States,” but said he would only talk about what they might have provided in a classified setting.

The lethal strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas; Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii; and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York. All three soldiers were from air defense units. They were “not actively engaged in anti-aircraft activity” during the attacks, according to a different “defense official” who spoke on background because they were not authorized to disclose the information.

An Iranian drone attack on Erbil Air Base, Iraq, on July 18 led to the death of Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and left another soldier injured during what CENTCOM called a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft.

In April, Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “CENTCOM had every possible measure they could to ensure that our troops are protected.” The U.S. official would not address possible failures of force protection measures that led to the most recent deaths, due to operational security. But the official said that Hegseth’s claims “obviously were not true.” They noted that it was no secret that earlier casualties were caused by a lack of sufficient overhead protection, referencing a March 1 drone attack on the U.S. base at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, that killed six troops.

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Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or wounded in the war. Months of reporting by The Intercept found the Pentagon’s official casualty tally is a gross undercount, which another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.”

Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Qatar said they intercepted attack drones on Monday, two days after the United States abruptly suspended a two-week campaign of airstrikes against Iran amid concern over the dwindling stocks of air defense missiles and a reported dearth of Iranian targets. Trump insisted on Tuesday that there had been some “very good talks” with Iran but failed to offer evidence when confronted with Iranian denials.

Saudi Arabia said on Monday that the drone attacks it suffered were “carried out by Iran-backed militias operating in Iraq.” On Tuesday, Jordanian authorities said they downed a drone in the east of the country, near its border with Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The post Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses appeared first on The Intercept.

The Low-T Issue

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth has a problem with low testosterone. It’s left him suffering from what you might call an acute crisis of masculinity. And I’m pretty sure that he caught it from Teddy Roosevelt.

Bear with me. I’ll explain.

Last week, the Trump administration’s preening, strutting, wanna-be he-man announced a new mandatory annual screening for troops age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency. Troops under 30 can volunteer to be screened, and anyone with low hormone levels will have the option to receive testosterone replacement therapy.

“It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capability,” said Hegseth, by ensuring “you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight” on the “brutal and unrelenting” modern battlefield. Like all Hegseth initiatives, he linked it to “lethality” — now the animating feature of his life. He called topping off troops’ testosterone levels a “sacred duty.” 

Anyone who has observed Hegseth for more than 15 seconds in the last 15 years could tell you the man is riddled with deep insecurities. His quest to fully transition the Defense Department to what he calls “The High-T Department of War” is just the latest manifestation of nagging anxieties about himself and the wheel-spinning, never-winning military he leads. 

Poor Pete’s woes have been piling up since he headed off to college at Princeton, if not before. Hegseth acts like he was drafted against his will by the Ivy League and escaped it by joining the Army National Guard as an infantry officer in 2003. He fondly recalls guarding “Islamic assholes” at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, alongside “hard-working, God-fearing, America-loving middle-class men” whom he contrasts with “millionaires at Princeton,” a school he derides whenever he can.

Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt. This long love affair with TR has continued over the decades. Pete wrote a ridiculous 2016 book, “In the Arena,” based on the “timeless truths of Teddy Roosevelt’s iconic ‘Man in the Arena’ speech” from 1910. And he still references that speech to this day and routinely works Teddy into his public remarks whenever he can.

Last year, Hegseth wanted the Pentagon to cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America because, he believed, “the organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt” had strayed from their mission to “cultivate masculine values.” (He later bullied the Scouts into submission.) And just last month, he talked up TR to U.S. troops in Cuba — where Roosevelt fought during the Spanish-American War — using his hero as proof of America’s right to intervene “in the affairs of Latin American nations.”

No one more exemplified the anxieties of privileged men of his time than Teddy Roosevelt, who grew up in the swirl of post-Civil War America in which urbanization, industrialization, a new emphasis on “brainwork,” and new technologies led to a crippling novel condition dubbed neurasthenia: nervous exhaustion, or a deficiency of “nerve-force.” This affliction was “modern and originally American,” according to the then-most influential expert on the now-archaic medical diagnosis.

Rich, white Anglo-Saxon men like Teddy professed complete cultural, racial, and sexual superiority but grew extremely anxious it was being stolen from them. (Yes, you guessed it: Immigrants, radicals, and independent, unduly educated, or otherwise unruly “new” women were prime culprits.) Men were fast becoming feeble and feminized; only through manly endeavors like weightlifting, hiking, hunting, sports, horseback riding, and excursions into the wild could they counteract the debilitating effects of over-civilization. Roosevelt, for example, transformed himself from a frail, sickly weakling who was called a “sissy” by peers and “Jane-Dandy” by the press into a man’s man via boxing, shooting, wrestling, and travel out West, where he reinvented himself as a cowboy.

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The scholar Yeonsik Jung summed up the neurasthenic age nicely, writing: “Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men’s racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s.” These white American men had to win back, as another scholar put it, “the potency of their violent masculinity—their ability to out-savage the savage” on the American frontier before turning overseas to places like the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua. Roosevelt’s own expansionist imperialism and his campaign against “race suicide” were firmly rooted in this toxic ferment. When the United States initially failed to annex Hawaii after a group of missionaries and pineapple plantation interests took over and set up their own government in the 1890s, for example, Roosevelt called the reluctance “a crime against white civilization.”

The framed quote Hegseth stuffed into that Gitmo duffle, which he also took to the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are lines from “The Man in the Arena” speech:

Am I striving valiantly?

Is my face marred by dust and sweat and blood? Am I spending myself in a worthy cause?

Am I daring greatly?

Am I in the arena?

“Spending myself” is an intriguing phrase here that’s key to my diagnosis of Hegseth. I’m not a medical doctor, but long ago I studied the intersection of medicine and masculinity in the late 19th and early 20th century en route to my Ph.D. A great panic of the era surrounded what historians came to call the “spermatic economy,” the belief that a man’s semen was a finite reserve of vital energy — like money in a bank account — and “spending” this essential life force through masturbation or excessive sex would leave him depleted, leading to nervous exhaustion’s below-the-waist variant: sexual neurasthenia. (President Donald Trump, who espouses pseudoscientific claptrap about good and bad “genes” also reportedly believes humans are closed-loop systems that, like a battery, have a finite amount of energy.)

Such fin de siècle fears of debilitation led to “rejuvenation” cures like French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injecting himself and others with crushed guinea pig testicles — launching the field of “organotherapy” — and Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach’s surgical procedure, a partial vasectomy to restore vigor which found favor with patients from psychoanalysis founder and noted head case Sigmund Freud to William Butler Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet. (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”)

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Hegseth is heir to this utter nuttery — obsessed as it was with limits on semen spending and banking one’s virility. His hysteria over the military becoming “effeminate” has led him to conclude that those who wish to “master the profession of arms” must have their testosterone tanks topped off. And he claims, without evidence, that pumping troops full of this hormone — which people of every sex and gender produce — will improve “combat readiness.” Hegseth also thinks his new policy will make troops “strong, resilient and capable.”

But while testosterone is tied to muscle mass, it isn’t linked with actual strength. A 2019 study found that men who received injected testosterone while engaged in intense exercise and a restricted diet — meant to mimic “strenuous military operations” — did not see gains in strength or endurance; a 2022 follow-up also found no increase in physical performance. Moreover, supplementing testosterone actually signals the body to shut down its own natural production, which can shrink the testicles and reduce one’s sperm count. (Paging Dr. Steinach!)

Hegseth appears to believe more is better, advocating for a “high T” fighting force. But high levels of testosterone — which is currently classified as a controlled substance with potential for abuse — can lead to acne, balding, breast tissue growth, impaired ability of the heart to pump blood, infertility, erectile dysfunction, and increased risk of death.

Of course, it’s hard to say what’s normal if you’re testing millions of healthy people. Testosterone levels can change depending on when a patient is tested, whether they have recently eaten, exercised heavily, or are sick, among other factors, Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine, recently told The Intercept. For example, in about a third of men whose testosterone initially tests low, a second test produces a normal result. Tests also have high inter-lab variability. On that front, doctors usually assess testosterone levels only when symptoms of low T appear, and less than 6 percent of men between 30 and 79 actually have a deficiency.

Last week, a group of senators called out Hegseth for his bizarre obsession with troops’ testosterone, noting his department “provided no evidence that this sweeping new policy will improve force readiness or health, nor has it explained the scientific basis, costs, or risks associated with implementing it across the force.” They also pointed to “recent repeated efforts to redefine military culture around an exaggerated conception of masculinity.”

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Exaggerated masculinity is an apt description for Hegseth. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” he bemoaned a plot to manufacture “soft men, and a weak military.” He describes an effort to make the armed forces “fatter,” “slower,” and “effeminate” by those “obsessed” with “neutering our military,” and delves into the dangers posed by “Pentagon pussies.”

After 18 months of crackpot policies and puerile posturing at the helm of the War Department, Hegseth’s hysteria has only grown. Like Roosevelt, Hegseth is forever struggling to display his manhood through physical exertion — posting videos of himself engaging in humiliating fitness challenges. Similarly, he’s been propping up America’s long-sagging martial prowess by beating up on the likes of Venezuela, attacking elementary school kids in Iran, blowing up unarmed boats packed with civilians in the Caribbean Sea, and threatening tiny Cuba, where his hero Teddy won fame for a Spanish-American War charge up San Juan Hill.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was Roosevelt’s foreign policy prescription. But from the war against the Houthis last year to the war on Iran today, Hegseth has found that his stick just doesn’t measure up. The resulting insecurity has led the emasculated War secretary to fire women and Black men from top leadership positions, block the promotion of women military officers, banish transgender service members, and denounce “fat generals and admirals” and “females” whom he believes “can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men.” He has now added low-T troops to the list of scapegoats for his department’s underperformance, instead of examining his failings as a leader.

Hegseth believes you can measure manhood by testing testosterone, the same way he believes you can kill your way to victory on the battlefield. It’s part of a mélange of flaccid fallacies and fantasies that seem to dominate the worldview of a man who paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of raping her, whose former sister-in-law accused him of “abusive” behavior toward his second wife, and whose own mother once called out the fact that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” And as America’s wars go south, Hegseth has become ever more unhinged and his public tantrums more pronounced. “You have Trump derangement syndrome!” he snapped at Michigan Sen. Gary Peters this week, after failing to admit earlier claims about victory in the Iran war were premature. 

Hegseth is exactly where he wants to be — “in the arena” — even though it’s abundantly clear his crisis of masculinity is becoming a catastrophe for his department, the rest of America, and great swaths of the globe, from the Caribbean to Iran. All the testosterone in the world isn’t going to win America’s wars, achieve Hegseth’s dream of turning “soft men” hard, or transform “Pentagon pussies” into something more in line with his fantasies, much less cure the crushing insecurities swirling in the brain of America’s fragile war secretary and the deep deficiency that has long plagued him.

The post Pete Hegseth’s Crisis of Masculinity appeared first on The Intercept.

The disclosure came one day after a U.S. official told The Intercept that recent attacks by Iran had wounded “far more” personnel than the Pentagon had acknowledged, with “dozens” receiving medical attention. 

After ranting that reports of a Pentagon effort to withhold news of dozens of U.S. casualties were “baseless and malicious,” Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, admitted on Monday that “nearly 100 service members were deemed to have some degree of injury since July 7.” But as of early Tuesday morning, the official Pentagon database tracking U.S. casualties continue to show no U.S. forces were wounded in action during July.

The U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss American casualties, called this “official ineptitude” in the service of the Trump administration.

The disclosure comes after three Army soldiers were killed in ballistic missile attacks on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan over the weekend. Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, and Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, were killed in action. The third soldier is provisionally listed as missing, but the official said that “unidentified remains” found after the attack were “certainly” those of the missing soldier. A second official confirmed this assessment and said the soldier’s body was so badly disfigured that a “complete investigation” had to be conducted in order to confirm the identity.

In Iraq, Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed and another soldier was wounded over the weekend “during a controlled detonation” of an Iranian attack drone at Erbil Air Base.

U.S. bases across the Middle East suffered “significant” damage over the last week, according to the official speaking on the condition of anonymity. In addition to attacks in Jordan and Iraq, Iran struck U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Syria according to the semi-official Tasnim News Agency, which is associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The attacks came after the U.S. failed to achieve any of its war objectives and April and June ceasefires crumbled. The official said Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and attack drones.

Both Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept about the attacks and U.S. casualties.

Parnell said on X that further casualty updates would be posted to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president. Prior reporting by The Intercept found DCAS is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel. DCAS was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation. For months, the Pentagon has ignored requests by The Intercept for comment or clarification.

Parnell said on Monday morning that “casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.” But DCAS was, uncharacteristically, not updated on Monday morning and instead offered outdated figures posted on Friday. On Monday afternoon, the count of wounded on some DCAS webpages rose from 427 to 447, but the Pentagon’s official tally of troops “wounded in action” during July remained at zero as of early Tuesday morning.

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The U.S. official called the Pentagon’s confused casualty count “official ineptitude” that “serves the interests of this administration.” The source said errors, conflicting information, and disappearing data were tolerated because it “floods the zone” with misinformation and adds to confusion among the press and public.

Parnell claimed that the “vast majority of injuries experienced [this month] were minor concussions,” and that 96 percent of personnel have returned to duty. But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.

The Trump administration has often discounted head trauma. President Donald Trump himself has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq in January 2020, Trump said, “We suffered no casualties.” The Pentagon would later acknowledge casualties resulting from the attack and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with Central Command ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. A November 2021 inspector general report indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

The post “Cover-Up” Unravels as Pentagon Admits Nearly 100 Injured in Iran Strikes appeared first on The Intercept.

A crushing wave of attacks in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait left U.S. forces in “disarray,” causing significant damage to facilities, dozens of injuries, and the first troops killed in action since a June ceasefire collapsed, according to a U.S. official. Three Army soldiers were killed in “devastating” ballistic missile attacks on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, said the official whom The Intercept is not naming because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, was killed in action on Friday. Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, was killed on Saturday. The third soldier is provisionally listed as missing, but the official said that “unidentified remains” found after the attack were “certainly” those of the missing soldier. A second official confirmed this assessment. At least four and as many as 10 troops were also injured in the attacks in Jordan, according to the first official.

In northern Iraq, a U.S. service member was killed and another wounded on Saturday when ordnance from a downed Iranian drone exploded. CENTCOM claimed that the injuries occurred during a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft. 

The surge in deaths and injuries raise the official U.S. casualty count to at least 446. U.S. casualties have increased by more than 15 percent since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. The first official told The Intercept that recent attacks had wounded “far more” personnel than are reflected in the Pentagon’s current casualty count. They did not provide numbers but said “dozens” had received medical attention.

Neither CENTCOM nor the Pentagon replied to numerous requests by The Intercept for information on the casualties, nor would either address the effort to cover up U.S. losses.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel. The official tally was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation. For months, the Pentagon has ignored requests by The Intercept for comment or clarification.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon withheld information on “dozens of U.S. military injuries in Iran War.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the article “baseless and malicious.”

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U.S. bases across the Middle East suffered “significant” damage over the last week, according to the official speaking on the condition of anonymity. That source said Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and attack drones. They said multiple U.S. aircraft had also been damaged in the attacks. Videos circulating on social media showed the impact and aftermath of Friday’s missile strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.

“They’ve got some missiles. They’ve got some drones,” Trump said on Sunday of an Iranian military he has insisted, for months, had been annihilated. “We hit them very hard, again, tonight and we did that in honor of the probably three, probably three as opposed to two, great patriots.” 

U.S. Central Command announced later on Sunday night that it had “successfully completed the ninth consecutive evening of strikes,” claiming that the “U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction.”

The office of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to keep information about the new casualties under wraps. “We have nothing to provide beyond what is listed on the website,” a representative of Hegseth’s office told The Intercept late Friday night, without specifying which website, when questioned about U.S. casualties. Hours later, U.S. Central Command acknowledged “two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action” on Friday amid “Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks.” The command also disclosed that four other troops “were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals,” an unspecified number of other troops were evaluated for injuries, and “one service member is currently missing in action.” CENTCOM later stripped “in action” from the announcement of the missing soldier but would not explain the reason to The Intercept.

“Godspeed, heroes,” Hegseth wrote on X. “Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.”

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The spike in U.S. casualties over the last week followed the Pentagon quietly adding another fatality to its rolls earlier Monday. After Iran claimed to have killed three U.S. personnel in Kuwait last weekend, U.S. Central Command said last Sunday that there were “zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.” But last Monday, the Pentagon’s official toll of injuries and deaths in the war quietly climbed upward.

After ignoring numerous requests for clarification, an official from Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs intimated the fatality added last week was Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards, the commanding officer of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 5 who went missing almost two weeks prior, following his “helicopter’s emergency landing in the Arabian Sea.” But that official refused to confirm it.

Historically, there was little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the DCAS system, according to two people who used to work on the official casualty tally.

Asked why it took a week after the search for Edwards ended to add him to the casualty rolls, the second official said a blend of incompetence and deliberate slow-walking of casualty data has slowed down the process of updating publicly available statistics. 

For months, the Pentagon list of the names of the dead has also been missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

Counting Davius and the “missing” soldier in Jordan, the U.S. has suffered 19 deaths during the Iran war. Parnell said on Monday that “casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.” DCAS was, uncharacteristically, not updated as of Monday afternoon and instead offered outdated figures posted Friday morning.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 68 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, in Caine’s words, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

The casualty numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

On April 21, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department. Despite repeated questions over three months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count.

The Trump administration began undermining transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties almost a decade ago. Not long after Trump first took office in 2017, and following an uptick of violence in the conflict, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan.

After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” he said at the time. CENTCOM ultimately admitted that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report indicated that the number of wounded may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump claimed that for a year and a half of his first presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghan war. “In 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,” he said. But an Associated Press investigation found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump’s first term when there were no combat deaths.

Last spring, The Intercept reported on an effort by CENTCOM, the Pentagon, and the White House to keep casualties of the U.S. war against Yemen’s Houthis under wraps. It represented a departure from the Biden administration, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM had provided the total number of strikes, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured, and even individual synopses of more than 150 attacks.

The post U.S. Official: Iran Attacks Injured “Far More” Troops Than Pentagon Admits appeared first on The Intercept.

The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence has reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report. Two current defense officials confirmed that staffing levels remain the same today. Current and former government officials say the massive cuts have left the Pentagon unable to protect civilians.

The tiny contingent that remains at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the officials said, are also prevented from investigating major civilian casualty incidents like the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

Wes Bryant, who served as the Center’s chief of civilian harm assessments, was one of the more than 30 people pushed out last year by the War Department. He told The Intercept that the Center was being kept on life support to provide cover for the Pentagon.

“The Hegseth regime held on to a thread of the program mostly in effort to be able to say they are following the law, but the reality is the Center and its efforts have had little to no influence on or oversight or visibility on operations,” Bryant said. “As long as they sit in the seat, they are continuing to try to put out good work, but the reality is, most of it is being thrown into the wind, and neither institutionalized nor operationalized.”

Before civilian harm mitigation and response (CMHR) efforts were sidelined and the staff downsized last year, the Center completed basic civilian harm mitigation training for 212 personnel from military combatant commands like Central Command and Africa Command, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other agencies, according to the report.

Established in 2023, the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was just “hitting its stride” in late 2024, a defense official told The Intercept. When the center was staffed by 40 civilians, troops, and contractors at the beginning of last year, it was on track “to achieve Full Operational Capability” by the end of 2025, according to the report. That never came to fruition, as the Center saw its staff slashed to seven civilians and two members of the military. 

“The COE was cut down shortly after becoming fully operational,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager at Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “They had minimal time to show value, but they were still able to inject critical CHMR expertise to all corners of the U.S. military, even as their staff dwindled down to a handful of people.”

The report also details financial constraints that have crippled the entire civilian harm mitigation and response enterprise across the War Department. “DoW-wide budgets for CHMR in FY26 were cut,” reads the report which notes that staff and programs across the entire Department of War — including at combatant commands like AFRICOM and CENTCOM — “were gradually reorganized, reduced, and/or terminated by the end of FY25.”

The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM, for example, has been reduced to just one individual, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the command’s chief. Reporting by The Intercept also found U.S. Southern Command was unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports after the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January. When the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, they learned the command had no mechanism for dealing with such reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

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While the Pentagon slashed the center’s staff, the military has made greater efforts to utilize artificial intelligence for targeting and civilian harm mitigation, according to the report. It specifically references the Maven Smart System, a product of the defense firm Palantir that serves as the War Department’s signature AI-enabled software platform. The Center of Excellence “leveraged the rapid adoption of the AI-enabled Maven Smart System (MSS)” within the military to advance the development of a tool to give field commands a more complete picture of the civilian environment, the report notes. A current defense official said it provided a “better layer of protection” for civilians in war zones. 

The report also details the Center’s development of “an AI Assistant prototype that helps military staff rapidly analyze civilian environment data during operations by equipping AskSage, the Army’s enterprise AI platform,” with the CHMR data. During an Army training exercise, the AI assistant reportedly shortened the timeline to produce civilian assessments by 97 percent. Several additional Army units have requested access to the assistant, according to the report.

The report also references a database used for tracking civilian harm that the Pentagon abandoned last year. It notes that “progress on the development of a standardized CHMR data management process and a repository of civilian harm information stalled due to the cessation of the CHMR Data Management Platform (DMP) project during Department-wide realignment of priorities and resources.”

Without a database like the DMP, the Pentagon is unable to effectively track civilian harm. In May, Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools and was aware of just “one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions.” Months later, CENTCOM still has no additional information about civilian harm, telling The Intercept: “We have no new updates at this time pertaining to current investigations or munitions that were expended during Operation Epic Fury.” Airwars, by contrast, has chronicled hundreds of civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.

As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed and wounded thousands of civilians across the world, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East. The World Health organization put the death toll in Iran at 3,375 people — before the ceasefire fell apart this month. The U.S. military has also conducted more than 220 extrajudicial killings during a campaign of boat strikes targeting civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

Airwars also tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that the U.S. reportedly killed as many civilians in 52 days as in the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.

The Center of Excellence conducted a “qualitative lessons learned study” on Rough Rider, examining “how the operational environment shaped civilian harm mitigation and assessment to identify lessons for scenarios lacking air and information dominance.” The classified study, according to the report, is supposed to help commanders “safeguard civilians while maintaining operational effectiveness in contested environments.” But Bryant said the COE’s input to the study was “nominal,” and a current defense official said the Center was “boxed out” when it attempted to examine strikes during Rough Rider.

Hegseth’s office did not return a request for comment on the findings of the study.

For months, the Pentagon has failed to reply to requests to interview experts about civilian harm policies at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Policy, or the Office of the Secretary of War.

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The “Annual Report on the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for Fiscal Year 2025” is dated April 4, 2026, and states it will be made “publicly available on an appropriate website of the Department” but has yet to be posted online. On Friday, Hegseth’s office told The Intercept: “We anticipate release of the 2025 CPCoE report in the summer of 2026.”

In a letter sent earlier this month, a group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth that his “gutting civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts” has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” They added, “The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts.”

The letter, sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and nine other lawmakers, echoed concerns raised by a recent War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” That May report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs. 

Hunke said the war with Iran demonstrates the need for a fully-funded and staffed COE. “Given adequate resources, the Center has so much potential to transform how the military thinks about and implements civilian protection,” she said. “This is needed now more than ever as the U.S. engages in ongoing and harmful operations in Iran.” A defense official was less sanguine, stating that Hegseth’s underlings would have sidelined even the efforts of a fully staffed and funded COE.

“This was never meant to succeed — whatever that means,” the official said. But that official and Bryant also praised the remaining COE staff and were strenuous in their support for their work.

Bryant, who was forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on the Pentagon’s dismantling of its CHMR enterprise, decried the department’s “tyrannical and imperialistic uses of lethal military force internationally.” He told The Intercept that the remaining personnel at the Center of Excellence are “supposed to shut up, keep their heads down, and pretend that the civilian harm mitigation and response mission isn’t simply a shell for legal CYA,” using shorthand for “cover your ass.” Asked to assess Bryant’s comments, a current defense official replied: “Yup. No notes.”

The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of civilian harm mitigation and response efforts. Last spring, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties. One of the then-current officials said that it could result in “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.” His warnings were prescient.

The post Hegseth’s War Department Slashed Civilian Protection Staff, Brought in AI Assessments appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump Adds to America’s Lethal Legacy of Treachery

Who can even remember it now? That giddy moment less than five months ago when President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and take on the ruling regime. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. America is backing you with overwhelming strength,” Trump promised on February 28. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

Like a million Trump pledges before it, it was part bluster, part bullshit. Last week, Trump admitted as much, stating he knew the Iranian opposition had no chance against the ruling regime. “Nobody is gonna take over. They have no guns, and the other side has machine guns,” he said at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They can’t take over because they’re dead.” This was not, however, just a routine Trumpian lie; it was also part of a grand American tradition.

They say baseball is America’s national pastime, but you could make a solid case that it’s actually betrayal. Washington loves nothing more than to sell out its friends, betray its partners, leave its allies in a lurch, and call people into the streets and then abandon them to slaughter.

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In an interview with the Washington Post on the Iran war’s first day, Trump said that “freedom for the people” of Iran was the goal of the conflict. It never was. But what would be lost in luring Iranian activists into the streets — aside from Iranian lives?

This type of lethal double-cross has been America’s stock-in-trade since its infancy — and has continued across the globe no matter the conflict, era, or president.

During the American Revolution, most Native peoples viewed America’s colonial rebels with skepticism and attempted to remain neutral or sided with the British. But some placed a bet on the revolutionaries, assuming that they would be rewarded with fair, if not preferential, treatment in the event of a win by the colonies. They were, in the end, wrong to assume their allies would act honorably.

The Oneida, for example, split from most of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and others — who allied with the British. “There would have probably been a lot more death for the Continental Army,” according to Heather Bruegl, a public historian and citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin who noted that the Oneida altered the tide of the war by breaking the famine at Valley Forge.

Even the Pentagon lauds the Oneida Nation, noting its “support for American independence saw the Continental Army through its lowest point in the Revolutionary War” but admitted that while Congress offered thanks, “that gratitude did not always translate into equitable treatment.” This is nothing but a mealy-mouthed reference to the fact that at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Oneida Homelands were estimated at between five to six million acres of land but were reduced to just 32 acres by the early 1900s.

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The Lenape people also threw in with the American rebels, signing a treaty that pledged their backing to the nascent United States in exchange for protection and the creation of a 14th state, governed by Native Americans. The agreement fell apart within weeks. As the official State Department history puts it:

First, the Lenape leader White Eyes died. While American officials insisted White Eyes died from smallpox as the cause, evidence indicated members of the [colonial] militia murdered him, and the circumstances remain unclear to this day. This act showed the Lenape that the Americans did not value nor honor the importance of kinship alliances.

Despite a failure by the Americans to protect Lenape lands, some Lenape warriors nonetheless assisted the Continental Army and a delegation went to the Continental Congress to attempt to repair the pact. But the Americans made no effort to salvage the agreement and said the Lenape had broken the treaty. Worse still, in 1782, Pennsylvania militia massacred a neutral, pacifist Christian Lenape community in Gnadenhutten, bludgeoning 96 unarmed people to death. Thirty-nine of those killed, many with a hammer to the back of the head as they prayed for mercy, were children.

Deception and Disloyalty

Still, it wasn’t until the 20th century that America hit its stride, selling out allies at an unbelievable clip. Approximately 250,000 Filipinos joined the U.S. military, for example, and fought for America during World War II. Washington promised them the same health and pension benefits as their American counterparts, a pledge that was even reaffirmed at the close of the war. But then Congress passed and President Harry Truman signed the Rescission Act of 1946 that said that the service of Filipinos “shall not be deemed to be or to have been service in the military or national forces of the United States or any component thereof or any law of the United States conferring rights, privileges or benefits.”

Also during World War II, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, armed, trained, and supported a guerrilla force in French colonial Vietnam fighting the Japanese and their French quislings. In 1945, with the Japanese defeated, the top local OSS agent — the charismatic Ho Chi Minh — proclaimed Vietnam’s independence, using the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as his template. “All men are created equal,” he told a crowd of half a million Vietnamese in Hanoi. “The Creator has given us certain inviolable rights: the right to life, the right to be free, and the right to achieve happiness.”

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Ho thought his allies would back him. He was wrong. They instead turned on Ho and his comrades, funded the French reconquest of Vietnam, and spent the better part of the next three decades propping up an ever more corrupt and repressive rump state in South Vietnam while advising, arming, training, and funding an allied South Vietnamese military, and fought a long, destructive war against revolutionaries in the South and Ho’s North Vietnam that left millions dead, wounded, or displaced.

Eager to turn the conflict over to the Potemkin state they fostered and extricate the U.S., President Richard Nixon pledged to re-enter the war with the “full force” of American power, to induce the despotic South Vietnamese government to sign a 1973 peace agreement with the North. Two years later, the U.S. ignored this guarantee and abandoned South Vietnam and millions of allies, collaborators, and hangers-on.

No single moment sums up this betrayal better than an incident recounted by Stuart Herrington, a counterintelligence officer who spent 30 years in the Army. Herrington made a vow to hundreds of Vietnamese who crowded onto U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon on the final day of the U.S. evacuation in 1975. “Nobody is going to be left behind,” he assured them. One of the 420 Vietnamese who was there remembered his words: “I promise me and my soldiers will be the last ones to leave the embassy.” Herrington promised them that a large helicopter was coming to rescue them and then excused himself to go “take a leak.” Scurrying off into the shadows, Harrington slipped into the embassy building and onto a helicopter, abandoning those to whom he’d just given his word.

A U.S.-backed military regime in neighboring Cambodia also crumbled in 1975 and was abandoned to face the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. A proxy army in neighboring Laos was similarly discarded in the 1970s. Decades later, surviving troops and their families were still in hiding and on the run. “We want America to give us a place to live,” Va Chang, a then-60-year-old veteran found in the jungle in the mid-2000s told a reporter. “If the Americans don’t want to do that, they should drop a big bomb on us and end our misery.”

Prior to a 1956 uprising, the CIA air-dropped leaflets into Hungary with messages like “The regime is weaker than you think.” János Rainer, director of Hungary’s 1956 Institute Foundation, said, “Hungarians clearly got the impression that, in the event of a rebellion, the U.S. would support them effectively.” But the U.S. stood aside as the Soviet Union crushed the uprising, killing and wounding almost 20,000, imprisoning 13,000, and executing 229 others following trials, according to one count. The writer Tamás Aczél, who fled to the U.S. in 1956, wrote that Hungarians had been naive to put their faith in U.S. calls for “liberation” in Eastern Europe, writing: “[W]e learned what we didn’t know — that the West had written off these countries and only their propaganda machines pretended otherwise.”

In an even more egregious exercise, the CIA trained and armed Cuban exiles, landing them at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The counterrevolutionaries were promised ample air cover — “the sky will be yours” — and led to believe they would be supported by 15,000 American troops. But the invasion of Cuba went south quickly, President John F. Kennedy canceled a second round of airstrikes, and the exiles ran out of ammunition, were pushed back into the sea, and were abandoned. Grayston Lynch, a CIA operative who participated in the landing, recounted that he called two American destroyers on the scene for help but was told by the captain of one: “My orders are not to become involved.”

While the U.S. has betrayed people the world over, one group stands preeminent in the sheer amount of American treachery. “Nothing in this world is certain except death, taxes, and America betraying the Kurds,” wrote Jon Schwarz for The Intercept in October 2019, recounting eight instances from the 1920s to that very moment when the U.S. used independence-seeking Kurdish peoples to further American aims and then cut them loose.

One of the most craven of these instances was a Nixon-era plot with then U.S.-allied Iran to use the Kurds to bleed the then-Soviet-aligned Iraqis.

Once the Kurds outlived their usefulness, however, U.S. aid was then cut and the Iraqi military killed thousands as the Kurds begged for help. As a congressional report later admitted, “Even in the context of covert action ours was a cynical enterprise.” But Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shrugged at the slaughter, explaining “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

As the U.S. bombed Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on “the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Both Shias in southern Iraq and Kurds in northern Iraq answered the call, expecting U.S. military support. It never came, Hussein stayed in power, and some 20,000 Kurds and up to 60,000 Shias who rose up were slaughtered by the Iraqi military.

More than a decade later, another failed U.S. war in the Middle East fostered the rise of the Islamic State group and the creation of a brutal caliphate across a wide swath of Iraq and Syria. Between 2014 and 2017, Kurdish-led forces dismantled this quasi-state for the U.S. But after 93 percent of Iraqi Kurds voted for independence in 2017, America was nowhere to be found. Within weeks, Iraqi federal troops and Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi militias launched a coordinated offensive. The Kurds lost the city of Kirkuk, the Nineveh Plains, and roughly 40 percent of the territory their fighters had held. Washington offered no military response and no assistance — not even a diplomatic protest to the government in Baghdad. Then in 2019, President Donald Trump withdrew U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, opening the door for a Turkish invasion of the very land the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had taken from ISIS at the cost of more than 20,000 lives.

Hundreds of thousands of locals also served alongside U.S. troops, diplomats, intelligence officers, and contractors during the failed Afghan War. Despite 20 years of Americans mouthing the phrase “shohna ba shohna” (“shoulder to shoulder” in Dari), it meant very little. In the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, most Afghans who fought on the side of the U.S. and its coalition partners were left behind as the Taliban retook the country.

But even those who made it out have been abandoned. In April, the Trump administration floated plans to send Afghan allies stranded at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar to the Democratic Republic of Congo. While that plan was reportedly shelved, rumblings of casting them to the winds elsewhere remain. And in May, the Department of Homeland Security formally ended Temporary Protected Status for roughly 10,000 Afghans who fled after the Taliban’s return to power.

“We made a promise to those who helped America in our time of need, and it’s wrong to turn our backs on them,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a combat veteran who fought in Afghanistan, said last month, noting that they will likely face torture, persecution, and even death if they are returned to Afghanistan.

Won’t Get Fooled Again?

The principal proverb of personal responsibility has been kicking around since at least the 1600s: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But what happens if the “you” — in this case the United States — is always the same, and the “me” is always someone or somewhere different?

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Trump’s Formula for Forever Wars

The viceroys, envoys, and foot soldiers of American empire talk a good game. And the carrots offered and sticks wielded by the superpower are immense. But the U.S. hasn’t won a significant military conflict since the 1940s and when its wars go south, its proxies and partners — particularly smaller, weaker nations that it sees as disposable — are the ones sacrificed. People around the world need to take this long history into account when the United States comes calling with money, weapons, and offers of friendship.

The Trump administration is currently waging a war on history, white-washing America’s past to cast the country in a more favorable light. But other nations would do well to study — really examine — how America treats its friends. The people of Iran, even dissidents and those with a grudge against the ruling regime, resisted the urge to put their faith in the United States earlier this year. But many in Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere have forged closer ties with the Trump administration. History suggests those taken in by Americans bearing gifts will pay dearly for it. For 250 years, Americans have been double-crossing partners and selling out allies; betrayal — the past has shown — is in the nation’s DNA.

The post The United States of Betrayal appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase followed the collapse last week of the ceasefire with Iran amid tit-for-tat attacks between the countries.

As hostilities escalated, Iran called for revenge on the U.S. for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war in February.

The numbers for both wounded and dead U.S. service members in the war increased on Monday, according to the Defense Department.

Iran claimed Sunday that it “demolished the U.S. Army’s surface-to-surface missile base” in Kuwait, killing three American military personnel.

U.S. Central Command responded: “There are zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.”

On Monday, however, the Pentagon’s Iran war death toll, which was last updated Friday, went up by one.

Pentagon statistics show a sailor died in what was provisionally deemed a “non-hostile” fatality with a “pending” caveat, meaning it could later be revised to a hostile death.

It marks the first U.S. fatality on the Pentagon rolls since March. It was not immediately clear whether the new death listed occurred in Kuwait.

The U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, CENTCOM, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ceasefire Collapse

Iran’s military said on Monday that it launched strikes aimed at American military targets in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Hours before, U.S. forces attacked Iran in response to strikes on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

President Donald Trump renewed his past protection-racket threats to seize the Strait and begin charging a 20 percent toll on all goods passing through it.

“We’re gonna keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it,” he said on Monday. “We’re gonna get paid for guarding it, a lot of money.”

Following a week of public funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei called for retribution for the late supreme leader’s assassination.

“We pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars from the criminal and disgraced killers,” he said. “This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.”

In addition to killing Khamenei, Trump’s war on Iran has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, including more than 150 — most of them children — in an attack on an elementary school.

U.S. Death Toll

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 428, a more than 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official count of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

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The number of casualties in the DCAS system fluctuates from time to time. On Monday, the number of U.S. deaths during Operation Epic Fury, the military’s name for the campaign in Iran, increased by one, to 14 total.

For a short time in May, however, the count was already at 14 before dropping back to 13, without explanation. Following the drop, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths.

The Pentagon list of the dead is missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who reportedly died of a sudden illness in Kuwait on March 6.

Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly recognized Davius as a fallen service member.

Wounded U.S. Personnel

On Monday, the number of U.S. wounded from the Iran war rose by one, to 414.

Like the official U.S. death toll, it has fluctuated, rising from 385 to 428 during a pause in hostilities in April. Later that month, the number suddenly declined by 15 without public comment from the Defense Department, leading to questions about manipulation of the figures or incompetence at the Pentagon.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries.

The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. More than 200 sailors injured during a fire aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford in March are, however, missing from the tally.

The post Iran Claims to Kill 3 U.S. Service Members in Kuwait appeared first on The Intercept.

Maybe.

“To me, I think it’s over,” President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, referring to a preliminary truce inked in Islamabad, Pakistan, in June. That ceasefire, an American capitulation intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a key oil and gas shipping route whose closure by Iran was wreaking havoc on the global economy — never quite took effect. The price of oil spiked to its highest level in weeks following Trump’s Wednesday remarks.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” said Trump, referring to Iran’s leaders, as he wrapped up his trip to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They’re cuckoo.” At one point in his remarks, the 80-year-old president claimed that a U.S. warship was attacked by the “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”

The June agreement between the United States and Iran, designed to usher in further negotiations toward permanently ending the war that Trump began on February 28, echoed another faux ceasefire, signed in April, which was also largely a fiction.

Trump’s statement that he “thinks” the ceasefire has concluded surprised one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Shouldn’t he know?” the source said.

That official said the Trump administration had mismanaged the conflict and been repeatedly outmaneuvered by Iran, leading to a “twilight state” between war and peace, which has allowed Tehran to fortify its defenses and reconsolidate power. “He must be trying for the record of how many times you can lose the same war.”

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An Intercept analysis found that, despite celebrating the June agreement as a victory, the Trump administration failed to achieve any of its war aims. For weeks, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests for confirmation that the June ceasefire had collapsed and no goals of the war were reached. The White House did not reply to a question on Wednesday concerning the collapse of the ceasefire nor Trump’s claim of an attack by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”

The United States attacked Iran on Tuesday, after reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil sales. U.S. Central Command said that it had struck “over 80 targets with precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” Iran did not claim responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks on commercial ships, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Qatari ship carrying liquefied natural gas in waters off Oman’s coast.

CENTCOM also claimed to have attacked “more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait.” U.S. officials have previously claimed to have completely annihilated Iran’s naval forces. “Their Navy is gone,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 11, just after the first ceasefire was announced and fell apart.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and Parliament speaker, accused the United States of multiple violations of the June ceasefire agreement, in a Tuesday post. “The era of bullying and extortion is over. It leads nowhere. We don’t fold,” he wrote. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement published on state media on Wednesday, that in response to U.S. violations of the ceasefire, it had attacked 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait and also shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone.

“They’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said during his remarks in Ankara.

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During the president’s war of choice on Iran, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes almost unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm-monitoring group Airwars. On the first day of the war, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more civilians would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates. 

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran war is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known American casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

Trump vowed more attacks on Iran at the NATO summit. “I’ll give them a little warning we’re going to hit them hard tonight,” he said. On Monday, Trump threatened attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure that would “affect 91 million people,” almost all of them civilians.

“The child-killing and terrorist U.S. military in the early hours of this morning openly violated the ceasefire and violated the Islamabad understanding by launching an airstrike on a number of coastal bases and civilian stations,” the IRGC said in its statement.

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CENTCOM claimed to have struck Iranian air defense systems, “command and control networks,” coastal radar sites, and other targets and threatened further attacks. “CENTCOM forces remain postured and prepared to hold Iran accountable when the agreement is not adhered to or obeyed,” the command posted on X.

After previously failing to make good on his pledge to ensure Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” since Tehran still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium, Trump said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “de-nuke it.”

The U.S. official laughed when appraised of Trump’s pledge. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked of Trump’s denuclearization statement. The official said Trump had painted himself into a corner. “There is one word that describes this man and this war: a trainwreck.”

The post Another Trump Ceasefire With Iran Crumbles appeared first on The Intercept.

In a highly unusual move this weekend, the international soccer federation reversed a suspension of a top U.S. player after a personal intervention by Trump, undermining the integrity of the game, according to experts.

Trump personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino, following a win by the U.S. men’s soccer team in the FIFA World Cup last week, and asked him to review the one-game suspension of striker Folarin Balogun, the team’s top goal scorer. On Sunday, FIFA reversed course, announcing Balogun would be eligible to play in the upcoming U.S. match against Belgium. It was the first time that FIFA has nullified a suspension for a red card received during the World Cup in 64 years.

“Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. 

The Union of European Football Associations expressed “disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision” that it said undermined not just the tournament but soccer itself.

“Football, like any other sports, relies on rules, which are the basis for fair, honest and transparent competition,” UEFA said in a statement. “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.”

On Monday, Trump described FIFA referee Raphael Claus, who gave Balogun the red card after a review suggested by the video assistant referee, as “very suspect” — an apparent reference to past accusations of match fixing.

Asked if his intervention with Infantino created a troubling precedent which would lead other world leaders to attempt to exert influence over soccer, Trump dismissed concerns. “I had nothing to do with the decision,” he said on Monday. “What I did have to do is, I said, I think this should be reviewed.”

The red card reversal is not FIFA’s first concession to Trump. After years of lobbying and begging by Trump failed to win him a Nobel Peace Prize, FIFA created its own peace prize last year and presented it to Trump.

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FIFA signed a partnership agreement with Trump’s so-called Board of Peace to “foster investment into football for the purpose of helping the recovery process in post conflict areas,” Infantino announced earlier this year. Trump controls the Board of Peace’s finances as its chair, creating what looks to be a massive slush fund. For the past year, FIFA has also leased office space at Trump Tower in New York City.

For more than six months, FIFA has ducked questions from The Intercept about the Peace Prize and the organization’s fealty to Trump. FIFA spokesperson Jhamie Chin did not reply to repeated questions about the federation’s recent capitulation over Balogun’s suspension.

Trump undercutting the credibility of the single largest and most-watched sporting event in the world mirrors his long-running efforts to weaken the electoral process in the United States and undermine the integrity of elections. Trump is currently attempting to force Congress to pass legislation — the SAVE America Act — which threatens to increase the difficulty or block the ability to vote for millions of eligible American citizens, justifying the legislation with false claims of voter fraud. According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 21 million citizens do not have ready access to a birth certificate, a passport, or naturalization papers that would be needed to comply with a so-called “show your papers” provision.

For years, Trump has regularly peddled fictions about “rigged” elections, including his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden. After the 2020 election, the results were certified, and 61 of 62 lawsuits challenging the results of the election failed. Trump refused, however, to accept the facts and continues to peddle the lie that he won the 2020 race. Since then, Trump has regularly claimed, without offering evidence, that Democratic electoral victories are the result of fraud. Most recently, he claimed, without any proof, that the Los Angeles mayoral race was “rigged” against former reality star Spencer Pratt.

Trump said on Monday that he would view a victory by Belgium in the same light. “If they beat us, I say it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020,” he announced.

In awarding him its inaugural peace prize, FIFA said that Trump was “recognised for his tireless efforts to promote peace.” In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House, alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars, according to an analysis by The Intercept.

Chin deflected when asked in February how FIFA could ignore Trump’s constant war-making. The spokesperson failed to respond to repeated follow-up questions on Monday.

The post FIFA Gives Trump Exactly What He Wants appeared first on The Intercept.