Yet after back-to-back earthquakes rocked multiple Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, toppling scores of buildings and killing at least 188 people and injuring at least 1,520, Trump merely offered assistance.

“The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help! I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “We will be there for our new and great friends.”

One U.S. government official told The Intercept that Trump’s offer doesn’t go far enough since Venezuela is now a U.S. “vassal state.” “Don’t we run that country?” the official asked, speaking on background and referencing Trump’s comments. “That’s an obligation that exceeds friendship.”

At the same time, Venezuelan American organizations and progressive foreign policy groups are about to circulate a letter calling on the Trump administration to provide massive, unconditional humanitarian aid to Venezuela in the wake of the 7.2 foreshock and 7.5-magnitude quake, as well as long-term economic damage from U.S. sanctions, according to details of the letter shared exclusively with The Intercept by Just Foreign Policy, one of the groups that drafted the letter. The organizations argue that the United States bears a unique obligation to Venezuela and that U.S. aid “must match the scale of the harm the United States has played a role in creating.”

This all comes after Trump seemed to suggest earlier this week that the U.S. has reaped billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil wealth in the last six months.

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After ousting Maduro, Trump’s installed a puppet government run by former Maduro ally Delcy Rodriguez. She has carried out day-to-day governance under the threat of a looming U.S. criminal indictment alleging corruption and money laundering charges. Trump also warned that the U.S. might attack again if Rodriguez did not comply with his demands.

The costs of Absolute Resolve — the military operation and abduction of Maduro — topped $206 million, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and claims to be exploiting it for massive returns. This week, Trump said that the U.S. has recovered its war costs 28 times over through oil extraction; this equates to roughly $5.7 billion.

“The people are happy in the country. They have smiles,” Trump said of Venezuelans on Tuesday, prior to the earthquakes. He claimed Venezuela has shared in the economic rewards.

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But the letter being drafted by the Venezuelan American and progressive groups cites a recent economic analysis by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez showing that U.S. policy has failed to produce the economic recovery Trump has claimed. The letter notes that sanctions have left Venezuela operating at a “diminished capacity,” that “the buildings that collapsed were not maintained,” and “the hospitals that must now treat nearly a thousand injured were not adequately supplied” as a direct result.

In the port city of La Guaira, for example, more than 100 buildings were destroyed in the twin earthquakes. “Should the U.S. be responsible for rebuilding?” the U.S. government official mused. “Any word from Trump on that?”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the U.S. would ease sanctions or help to rebuild Venezuela.

U.S. Southern Command, which spearheaded the war on Venezuela earlier this year said on Thursday that it was “working with the Department of State to support U.S. government relief operations in Venezuela.” The command added that it “has established an operational planning team that includes experienced subject matter experts from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, who are advising staff and leadership responsible for disaster relief planning and mission-related decisions.”

But disaster aid is inadequate, according to Just Foreign Policy and the other groups. “Emergency relief alone will not be enough. Venezuela’s recovery will require access to its own financial resources and the ability to import the equipment, construction materials, medicine, fuel, spare parts and other goods needed to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, roads, ports and critical infrastructure,” they wrote.

Even before the earthquakes, almost 8 million people in Venezuela were in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. The letter from Just Foreign Policy and others calls on the Trump administration to “provide immediate, massive humanitarian assistance with no political conditions attached,” to release Venezuelan oil revenues currently held in U.S.-controlled accounts, and to suspend remaining sanctions impeding disaster response and reconstruction.

The post Trump Claimed to Run Venezuela. After Earthquakes, He’s Walking That Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a second ceasefire and the eventual reopening the Strait of Hormuz under a preliminary deal scheduled to take effect on Friday. “Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said on Monday, one of several Iranian leaders taking a victory lap after outlasting the Trump administration.

Trump’s war has already killed thousands of Iranian civilians — including more than 150, most of them children –  in a strike on an elementary school. 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. This tally, however, is missing hundreds of casualties, including two soldiers wounded in action earlier this month.

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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, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over almost two months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count. A defense official told The Intercept that it was impossible to tell whether Pentagon casualty analysts were “grossly incompetent” or had been ordered to manipulate the figures.    

Since the 15 wounded vanished in April, the DCAS casualty count has steadily crept upward to top out at 413, where it stood on Tuesday morning. This includes one sailor wounded in action this month. Central Command did not reply to a request for further information about the injury.

The official figures appear to be missing two soldiers who were recently wounded in action. CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told NBC News last week that two crew members from a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter downed by an Iranian drone on June 8 were receiving medical care. And a CENTCOM social media post said they were in “stable condition.” But DCAS lists no Army personnel wounded in action this month.

The official tally of war dead also appears to be an undercount. For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. DCAS briefly raised the total to 14 last month before dropping it back to 13, without any explanation on the fluctuation.

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 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.”

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. 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 ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, last month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

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, two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions about why more than a dozen casualties had been disappeared by the War Department, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them. After almost two months, The Intercept has yet to receive a response from the duty officer.

The Pentagon did not reply to a request for clarification on Monday about whether the duty officer ever returned to their desk.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran Are Still Rising appeared first on The Intercept.

With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.

If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.

Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.

On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.

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“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”

“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”

“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.

The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.

The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.

Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

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“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday.  That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.

Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”  

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.

Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. The president said the U.S. was still negotiating whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years but hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension.

Trump has consistently criticized the JCPOA. “Barack Hussein Obama gave them 1.7 Billion Dollars in ‘Green” Cash,’” he wrote during a social media rant in April. Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that the U.S. would release $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of nuclear negotiations. “The accord secures the unfreezing of all Iranian assets and addresses compensation for wartime damages,” said Baghaei.

Trump said that if the U.S. does not sign a final nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States might assume the role of “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. The proposed extortion scheme appears akin to the 19th-century Barbary States, which practiced state-supported piracy to exact tribute from other nations. The United States fought two separate wars against two of these North African states: Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, and Algiers from 1815 to 1816.

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A Point-by-Point Breakdown of Trump’s Failed Iran War Objectives

A recent Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, his stated objectives, and supposed American achievements found the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted.

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out his most ambitious objectives. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

Since April, the White House has not replied to requests for further information about Trump’s inability to achieve world peace. Trump has also failed to accomplish even his more modest goal, as the region remains mired in conflict. Israel continued its war on Lebanon on Sunday and said it was not involved in the new pact. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. … We are not party to this agreement,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “He should be very thankful to us for doing this,” he said of the war, lapsing into typical hyperbole. “Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

The post Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

This week, U.S. forces bombarded Iran after the downing of an American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded with strikes on targets across the Middle East and threats to “turn the entire region into hell.” Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst on Wednesday night that the U.S. fired 49 Tomahawk missiles at targets inside Iran, in addition to bombing raids by fighter jets. Yingst reported that Trump also said, “We’ll bomb the S out of them tomorrow night'” if Iran did not sign a peace agreement. Trump followed this on Thursday by declaring the U.S. would be “hitting Iran … VERY HARD TONIGHT.”

The burgeoning forever war contradicts months of reassurances by Trump that a peace deal with Iran is imminent.

An Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, stated objectives, and supposed achievements finds the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted. 

A Promise of World Peace

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out, with complete clarity, his most ambitious objectives. Claiming Iran was already “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated,” Trump said his war would bring peace to the region and, somehow, the globe. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

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The bombing campaign was, indeed, “heavy.” The “pinpoint” attacks included a strike on an elementary school that killed between 150 and 175 civilians, most of them children. And thousands more civilians died in other strikes. Almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, including homes, hospitals, and schools, have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war, according to an April report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society. An estimated 400,000 people have been affected by damage to houses and apartments. But Iran was not “very much destroyed,” much less “obliterated.”

Peace in the Middle East, it goes without saying, never came to pass. The U.S.–Israeli strikes actually kicked off a regional war that grew to include more than a dozen countries, including Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Beyond this, the inability of the self-proclaimed “peace president,” head of the world’s newly created Board of Peace, and recipient of the first FIFA Peace Prize to achieve “peace throughout … the world” may stand as Trump’s grandest failure.

Just two days after setting out his topline goals, Trump began publicly vacillating and dramatically scaling back U.S. aims. “Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities,” he said during a March 2 White House ceremony. “Second, we’re annihilating their navy. … Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon. … And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”

Months later, these objectives remain unmet.

Eliminating Missiles

While the United States claims to have struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran, leaked U.S. intelligence assessments found evidence that Iran restored 30 of the 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz to operational status, and retained 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and 70 percent of its mobile launchers. Reports emerged that in April and May, Iran began efforts to repair its Yazd Missile Base. In just one day last week, Kuwait says it was targeted by an Iranian barrage of “13 hostile ballistic missiles.” On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel. And on Thursday, Iran attacked multiple countries in the region, including Jordan which said it shot down 20 Iranian missiles.

During an aborted interview with NBC News that aired on Sunday, even Trump admitted he had failed. “They have some missiles left,” he said. “I would say, percentage-wise, maybe 21, 22 percent of their missiles. It’s a lot of missiles.” 

Annihilating the Navy

While the U.S. sunk many Iranian ships, the Iranian Navy has not been annihilated. In fact, U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the war effort, has repeatedly referred to actions by Iran’s Navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy in the months since Trump laid out his aims, demonstrating that both still exist, upending Trump’s frequent boasts to the contrary.

Just last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is no Iranian Navy,” and in the next breath admitted there was, referencing Iran’s “Boston Whalers with machine guns on them.”

Ending the Nuclear Program

Iran also still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium. And there is no evidence that nuclear sites that were not attacked during Trump’s 2025 Iran war, such as Pickaxe Mountain, were ever damaged. Last week, in fact, Rubio confirmed that Iran’s “nuclear program” still exists. And during his recent NBC interview, Trump acknowledged that Iran still possessed its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and “they can get it, I guess, with years of work.”

Last week, Rubio even suggested Iran might be allowed to continue enrichment at some later date, noting it would need to accept “severe and long-term limitations, and/or cancellation, of enrichment.”

Halting Funding of Militias

The Trump administration has also failed to ensure “that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Days after Trump declared this war aim, House Republicans introduced legislation stating that “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and provides substantial financial and military support to groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.” In the months since, even the Trump administration says the president’s goals haven’t been achieved.

In mid-April, the State Department said that Iran still “funnels the wealth of the Iranian people to Hizballah and other terrorists in the Middle East.” That same month, the Treasury Department took action against a “constellation of Iran-backed terrorist militias,” specifically “seven Iraqi militia commanders responsible for planning, directing, and executing attacks against U.S. personnel, facilities, and interests in Iraq,” including leaders of Kata’ib Hizballah, Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada, Harakat Al-Nujaba, and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haqq. In May, the Treasury Department again targeted “Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq,” sanctioning “leaders of Iran-aligned terrorist militias Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada and Asa’ib Ahl Al-Haq” and referencing still “other Iran-aligned terrorist militias in Iraq.”

Unconditional Surrender

This assemblage of failures has been compounded by other unmet war aims. On March 6, Trump set the terms for an agreement with Iran. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he wrote on Truth Social. In the months since, that hard-line stance has turned to mush.

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“There is the prospect before us — which could happen today,” Rubio said last week of a potential peace deal, in a weak-kneed explanation to lawmakers. “We’re hopeful that something like that could happen in which the straits would reopen, we would enter into a period of negotiations on very specific topics — delineated negotiations in the hope of reaching an outcome that’s acceptable to us, and something they would be able to do as well.”

Reopening the Strait

The “straits” in question have become another sticking point and catastrophe. After failing to achieve all his initial war aims, Trump added another that was nothing more than a return to the status quo antebellum in the Strait of Hormuz: opening the waterway to traffic after Iran imposed a wartime blockade.

Before the war, the average number of vessels crossing the strait — a critical artery for the world’s oil, fertilizer, helium, critical materials for microchips, and numerous other goods — was more than 120 per day. It has never been close to that level again.

“I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out,” Trump declared on April 4. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire on April 7, Trump wrote on social media that he would “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran” on the condition that Tehran agree to the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”

The next day, the White House declared: “Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump Administration negotiates a broader peace agreement — once more proving Peace Through Strength victorious.” But that same day, Iran closed the strait, following continued Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. 

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In response to Iran’s blockade, the U.S. imposed its own blockade of the strait on April 13, barring commercial vessels from entering or leaving Iranian ports. Then on April 15, Trump posted: “I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz.” Two days later, Trump claimed, “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again.” On April 19, Trump said Iran had launched attacks in the strait and noted Iran had announced a blockade. On April 23, Trump ordered the Navy to attack Iranian ships laying mines in the strait. On May 6, Trump teased that the war might be “at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran.” A day later, Trump said U.S. warships came under Iranian fire in the strait. The situation was still dragging on when Trump wrote, on May 29: “The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.” On Monday, a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the strait was downed by Iran. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains functionally closed, except for a tiny trickle of traffic. “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted on Wednesday. “More than 200 Commercial Ships have safely traveled through the Strait.” (About 3,000 ships normally traverse it every month.) On Thursday, Iran announced that it, again, closed the strait to oil tankers and commercial ships.

Oil industry analysts say that global oil reserves are dwindling and that if the war doesn’t wrap up in the near term, petroleum prices could skyrocket to $150 a barrel. “The oil will go down,” Trump said on NBC, but acknowledged the war had driven up prices. “We’re going to have higher gasoline. We’re going to have a little higher fertilizer,” he admitted, before equivocating further when asked if gasoline prices had peaked. “Well, it depends. I mean, it depends where the war goes. It could be,” he waffled. “If we sign an agreement, it’ll go down now. Otherwise, it’ll go down after we’re finished.”

Oil prices rose to about $95 a barrel on Thursday as the U.S. and Iran continued to launch attacks. Trump said on Wednesday that the price of oil would have been at $250 a barrel had the U.S. government not been siphoning off “millions of barrels” of Iran’s oil over the course of the war. On Thursday, Trump posted that the U.S. would also soon seize Iran’s “oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.” Despite the rampant oil theft and threats of more to come, U.S. inflation accelerated for a third straight month in May, driven by energy prices which rose 3.9 percent over the month.

A Peace Deal

The “agreement” in question is still another failed aim. On March 23, Trump told reporters about supposed peace talks and cited “major points of agreement, I would ​say — almost all points of agreement.” Iran denied negotiations had taken place. Two days later, Trump claimed Iran wanted to “make a deal so badly.” On March 26, he said Iran was “begging to make a deal.” On April 15, he said the war was “very close to over.” On April 17, Trump claimed that Iran had “agreed to everything” and that “we will get a deal in the next day or two.” 

“An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization,” Trump announced on May 23. On June 2, Trump wrote: “as I told Iran, ‘It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal.’” Then Trump told NBC late last week: “We’re very close to having a deal.” But on Monday, Trump said a “Final Deal” has yet to be “reached.”

What such a “deal” will end shines a bright light on another flip-flop failure by the president. Trump went from claiming, in early March, that the U.S. won the war with Iran, to attempting to convince Americans that he never even went to war in the first place. “We don’t call it a war,” he said before the end of that month. “We call it a military operation.” By early May, Trump was calling it a “mini war” or “a little detour.”

Just Give Him Two Weeks

The deadline for when this “mini-war” will finally end may be the most telling of Trump’s failed aims and achievements. It’s well known that Trump’s lying and laziness coalesce around one simple phrase: two weeks. “We’ll have something in two weeks,” Trump said in January of an agreement with Europe to extend U.S. control over Greenland, to take one example.

Trump has long used this two-week delaying tactic when faced with vexing questions about anyone and everything, from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war on ISIS to international trade and the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks really means later. Except when it means never.

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The ceasefire with Iran, announced on April 7, was initially supposed to last “two weeks” while the two countries inked a deal to end the war, according to Trump. He claimed at the time that they were already “very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”

On Monday evening, Trump held a tele-rally for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham where he addressed his failed war with Iran. “We’re negotiating now, and they want to make a very good deal. They’re willing to give us everything,” Trump claimed, noting, “It’ll happen very soon.” The president then added in his favorite faux time frame: “I think we are winning that battle, but you’re really going to win it over the next two weeks when we declare total victory.”

The post A Point-by-Point Breakdown of Trump’s Failed Iran War Objectives appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

A 40-foot go-fast boat with four 200-horsepower engines sped off from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula deep in the night of September 1. It was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio would later say.

As the peñero cut through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, a secret U.S. Special Operations plane flew high above. Its transponder was “squawking” its military identity by radio. But to the 11 people on the boat below, the plane — a secret Special Operations aircraft with a non-military appearance — would have looked like a civilian aircraft. Its munitions were hidden inside the fuselage, rather than affixed visibly under its wings.

A month earlier, War Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an execute order directing Special Operations forces to attack suspected drug smuggling boats and kill their crews, according to three government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to attack the boat to Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, who presided over the September 2 mission — according to four sources.

Now, Hegseth and numerous military officers were watching live video of the boat as it plowed through the Caribbean waters. The Americans gathered at the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could see the men in the boat clearly, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

The secret plane dove low enough that those on the boat noticed it, said three government officials familiar with the operation. It apparently unnerved the men aboard so much that they turned the boat around and headed back toward Venezuela.  

Bradley — now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — consulted with Col. Cara Hamaguchi, JSOC’s staff judge advocate, before ordering SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed speedboat, according to government sources. In an instant, the vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. Two survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull as the Americans watched from above.

According to officials, Bradley explained in briefings that because the September 2 attack was the initial strike of the campaign and was conducted by the secret plane, the survivors would have had no idea they were attacked by the aircraft. They probably believed the explosion was caused by a catastrophic engine malfunction, Bradley said in the briefing.

The two men were shipwrecked, helpless, or clearly in distress, six people who saw video of the attack said. Bradley watched as the injured men clung to what remained of the boat. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on CNN after viewing video of the attack.

Three sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as well as the Senate and House Armed Services committees confirmed that the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for roughly 45 minutes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources.

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Bradley again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance on whether he could legally attack the shipwrecked men. Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including that lawmaker who viewed the video, said that the survivors waved their arms and, logically, must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All believed the men were signaling for help, rescue, or surrender. “Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” said one of the sources, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising one’s hands is a universal sign of surrender for members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked — are considered hors de combat, the French term for those no longer in the fight, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit on this point. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

Bradley found a workaround. While he declined to comment to The Intercept, a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.” About 45 minutes after the men had been thrown into the water, a second missile screamed down on Bradley’s order, killing them. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that those killed by U.S. forces were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” and members of a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But from the very beginning, questions swirled among members of Congress and their staffers about the identities of those killed in the attack — and why there were so many of them.

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing. 

One of the government officials at the briefing explained that questions arose about the few boats targeted by the U.S. with greater-than-expected numbers of people on board; the September 2 strike was singled out due to the especially large number of passengers.

Out of more than 60 strikes since, only four involved boats with six or more people aboard, almost all of them in the initial wave of attacks. In October 2025, there were two strikes on boats with six crew members and one with eight people on board. Since then, just one other vessel has had as many as six crew.

Sources and methods of identification were a major topic of the fall briefing, where it became increasingly clear that JSOC did not positively identify everyone on the boats, said the official. “Questioning then led to trying to understand who these people could be,” that official said.

The second source at the briefing said they were astonished by Bennett’s candor that victims of human trafficking might have been among those killed. “I was surprised. But only by the admission,” said that official.

Military officials with knowledge of the strikes also discussed the likelihood that some of those on board were being trafficked, were part of a more generalized smuggling operation, or had simply hitched a ride on the vessel, said another government official who was not at that briefing.

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In later classified briefings, the Pentagon’s story of who was aboard the vessel changed — but only marginally, said two government officials. Just one person aboard the go-fast boat on September 2 was a member of a so-called “designated terrorist organization,” while 10 were “DTO affiliates,” according to the officials who received those later briefings. Both said that they were under the impression that little more than a conversation with a DTO member might confer affiliate status but said that the military’s explanations were vague.  

For weeks, The Intercept has sought to speak to Bennett, the deputy director for Special Operations on the Joint Staff, about the strikes and his briefings. “RADM Bennett is unavailable for an interview,” Maj. Annabel Monroe, a spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Intercept. “As a matter of policy, the Joint Staff does not confirm specific operational details or comment on ongoing or potential future military actions.”

Asked specifically for comment from Bennett and the Joint Staff about the trafficking remark and about how many victims of U.S. boat strikes may have been passengers of any sort, such as trafficking victims, smuggled persons, or paid passengers, Monroe replied: “Nothing further to add.” 

Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, said the command was unaware of any allegations of victims of trafficking being killed on September 2 or in subsequent strikes.

“Targeting decisions are based on comprehensive assessments and reviewed through established processes,” a spokesperson for U.S. Southern Command told The Intercept. “Every narco-terrorist killed … was an affiliated member of a Designated Terrorist Organization actively transporting illicit material along known trafficking routes in international waters.”

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, the State Department, White House counsel, Department of Justice, and the Department of War — claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels with whom the Trump administration claims they are in a “non-international armed conflict.” Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attack. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

Six current and former government officials briefed on the boat strikes or with experience in counter-narcotics smuggling efforts said that while the vessel struck on September 2 might have had cocaine on board, the sole intent of its voyage was not drug trafficking.

“No one would smuggle cocaine with 11 people on board their drug-running boat,” said one of the current officials, noting that it was a waste of space, fuel, and created security risks. “It just is not done. Full stop.”

That official, who talked with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said that the vessel’s profile more closely matched that of a ship smuggling various types of cargo, including people. 

Retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin, said the number of passengers was an obvious red flag. “I’m disappointed in the quality of planning for this operation,” he told The Intercept. “There appears to have been a lack of knowledge and expertise in what cocaine smuggling operations look like.”

The vessel that would become the target of the first Trump administration boat strike reportedly left San Juan de Unare in Venezuela on the night of September 1. The 11 men aboard all hailed from that town or nearby Güiria, coastal communities on the Paria peninsula in Venezuela’s Sucre state. It’s an impoverished region where 90 percent of the population is food insecure; the nongovernmental organization Transparencia Venezuela identified the area as the country’s prime center of, and transit hub for, human trafficking.

Reporting by Venezuela’s El Nacional identified Güiria and San Juan de Unare as having gone from fishing and tourist centers to “corridors of organized crime,” as the economic crisis in the country “drove many fishermen to replace fishing with smuggling gasoline, migrants, and eventually, drugs.” Some boats are known to carry mixed cargos of drugs, weapons, and people.

A 2020 report on human trafficking in the Caribbean found that Venezuela was “the greatest supplier of trafficking victims to Trinidad and Tobago” — and that 43 percent of those trafficked from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago travel from Sucre. It cited a Venezuelan government official who drew specific attention to Güiria due to its proximity to Trinidad and Tobago, stating it was “frequently used clandestinely for human trafficking.” A 2025 U.S. State Department report also highlighted the “long-standing allegation that national guard and coast guard members active in coastal states, such as Sucre and Falcon, facilitated the transport of trafficking victims to Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago.”

A recent investigation by a consortium of journalists from Venezuelan outlets noted immigrant transport, people smuggling, and human trafficking is integral to the desperately poor population of Güiria and “as ordinary a job as teaching school — only far better paid.” The journalists wrote:

In this Venezuelan town, people do not call the illicit transportation of drugs and other goods … to neighboring Caribbean islands or Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula “drug trafficking” or “smuggling.” They call them vueltas—literally “runs” or “jobs”—borrowing the slang Colombian traffickers use for narcotics shipments, contract killings, or debt collections.

For many people in Güiria, those vueltas are the only path to a decent life.

According to a 2025 analysis by InSight Crime, a think tank that studies organized criminal activity in the Americas, gangs from Sucre are involved in “cocaine trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, arms trafficking, and the contraband of animals and minerals.” Roughly 30 percent of trafficking victims who pass through the region wound up in sexual exploitation networks, Transparencia Venezuela found.

While trafficking victims are often assumed to be women and girls forced into sexual slavery — and many are — men and boys represent nearly half of the total number of human trafficking victims worldwide. And males are frequently mentioned in reports on Venezuela. A 2019 State Department investigation of human trafficking, for example, noted Venezuelan men were “increasingly vulnerable to forced labor in destination countries, including islands of the Dutch Caribbean.” A 2023 State Department report noted “an increase in male Venezuelan labor trafficking victims” in Trinidad and Tobago. It also details “migrant smuggling, which serves as traffickers’ primary method of transportation of victims from Venezuela.”

Between 2019 and 2022, 69 percent of Venezuelan immigrants in South America interviewed by the Mixed Migration Center reported having hired smuggling services to leave their country.

In 2023, the Curaçao Public Prosecutor’s Office also put out a warning about child trafficking, particularly from Venezuela: “Trafficked children range in age from 4 to 15 years old and are often transported in boats that also carry drugs and firearms on board.”

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An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those slain in boat strikes examined the life of one of the men killed in the September 2 attack: Luis “Che” Martínez. The AP found that Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss, made his living smuggling both drugs and people across borders, according to several people who knew him. He had been incarcerated in late 2020 on human trafficking charges after a boat he had operated capsized, killing almost 25 people — including two of his sons and several other relatives, according to local reporting at the time. He was eventually released from custody and returned to smuggling people and narcotics, acquaintances told the news outlet.

In the aftermath of Trump’s first boat strike, the size of the death toll immediately surprised those knowledgeable about illicit trade in the region. “With 11 people on board, there could have been a human smuggling element as well,” InSight Crime observed just after the September 2 attack, noting that such go-fast boats generally have a crew of two or three people. “You do not need 11 people on board a single vessel to smuggle drugs, even for a very big consignment.”

“I would have expected much more attention to what smuggling operations look like and how to distinguish serious bulk cocaine smuggling boats from inter-island smugglers that might be primarily carrying passengers,” said Baumgartner, the retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

When questioned just a day after the initial strike, at a press conference in Mexico City, Rubio explained the reasons for the attack by first mentioning human trafficking. “The President of the United States has determined that narcoterrorist organizations pose a threat to the national security of the United States,” he explained. “They are traffickers of people, they are traffickers of deadly drugs,” he said.

Facing outrage over the extrajudicial killings, Bradley has attempted to quiet questions about who the U.S. has targeted.

In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bradley confirmed significant involvement in the boat strikes by the National Security Agency. He has also reportedly told lawmakers that U.S. intelligence officials had verified the identities of the 11 people on the boat on September 2 and validated them as legitimate targets. But Special Operations Command would not confirm what Bradley told lawmakers about the identities of the 11 people killed. And numerous government officials who spoke to The Intercept said that claims that intelligence “confirms who these people are” — as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson asserted in December — is a rhetorical sleight of hand, if not an outright lie.

JSOC did not know the names or supposed affiliations of all persons aboard the vessel struck on September 2, numerous government sources told The Intercept.

Two sources specifically mentioned that some passengers were identified only by an obvious nom de guerre. “I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two. … But we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in December. “I don’t think we have any idea, who precisely, any of the individuals in these boats are.”

“Srikes [sic] are deliberate, lawful, and precise — aimed squarely at narco-terrorists and their enablers, not civilians,” a Southern Command spokesperson told The Intercept by email. “SOUTHCOM has full confidence in the operational and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”

SOUTHCOM routinely claims, in fact, that “intelligence” confirms that targeted vessels are “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” But last week, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, revealed that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria” involved in the boat strikes.

Behind closed doors, in fact, Pentagon officials don’t even pretend that they need to know who they are attacking. “They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate.”

Most of the government officials, including lawmakers briefed on the attacks, who spoke with The Intercept said that they believed the vessels targeted in the campaign are involved in illicit trafficking and are not simply fishing boats. But without stopping and searching boats, many said it was impossible to know for certain who and what is aboard a particular vessel.

In late April, Bradley told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the boat strikes are built upon the targeting procedures of the post-9/11 drone wars. “It is based off of the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,” he said, referring to strikes targeting people. Over that span, the U.S. has consistently killed civilians the world over — from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Somalia and Libya to Yemen — due to intelligence failures and targeting errors.

“There has never been a ‘perfecting’ of persona targeting. Just because the U.S. military — and other U.S. forces — conducted many strikes against known targets under the moniker of counterterrorism does not mean that they became significantly better at it over time,” said Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser to the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Over those same two decades being lauded as a time of learning lessons for the U.S. military, human rights groups documented repeated civilian deaths tied to flawed intelligence or assumptions or bias.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept, for instance, revealed a raft of errors leading up to a drone strike in Somalia that killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Special Operations forces who conducted the strike were confused, despite months of “target development,” and argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. They mistook a woman and child for an adult male and never even knew how many people they killed.

“When Adm. Bradley references ‘the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,’ he’s actually invoking an architecture that human rights groups criticized regularly for overconfidence in the intelligence, confirmation bias and assumptions, and institutional incentives to interpret ambiguity as threat confirmation,” Yager said.

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Five experts, including current and former government officials, say that it’s impossible that the U.S. has not killed innocent people in its boat strike campaign given the long-standing limitations of U.S. targeting procedures, such as an overreliance on signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio admitted that the U.S. has erroneously identified boats as possible targets, only to pull back. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” he said. “There are multiple times that I’ve been aware of … because it doesn’t meet the criteria or because there’s doubt.”

“Secret planes and SIGINT aren’t the answer. Confirmation bias continues to be a problem,” one government official briefed on the boat strikes told The Intercept. That official said it was far more likely that U.S. forces had misidentified or outright failed to notice a person aboard one of the boats that have been struck than that they knew the names and affiliations of everyone they had killed.

Government statistics confirm the limitations of intelligence, profiling, and the ability of U.S. personnel to identify supposed drug traffickers from afar. Between September 1, 2024, and October 7, 2025, the Coast Guard interdicted 212 boats headed toward the U.S. that it suspected of drug-trafficking. Forty-one of them, or about 20 percent, had no illicit contraband on board, according to official statistics. As for ships just off the coast of Venezuela, the amount wrongly suspected of carrying drugs was a shade higher: 21 percent.

When asked about the statistics showing 1 in 5 vessels had no drugs aboard, Yager told The Intercept that “positive identification of both targets and civilians has been a known problem in the U.S. military kill chain.”

“In the case of the boat strikes, that’s a high rate of mistaken identity,” she said. “My guess is that the U.S. military has no idea who these people actually are before moving to kill them.”

The post Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking appeared first on The Intercept.

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.

“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.

In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.

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Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.

On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.

Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”

Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protocols, states have the obligation to declare an outbreak after which the WHO informs the rest of the world and begins providing support. “There is a clear, well-defined methodology and it is clearly outlined in the international health regulations,” she told The Intercept.

The response is markedly quicker than in some previous outbreaks. During the 2014–16 Ebola crisis in West Africa — when more than 28,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in the largest ever outbreak of the disease — WHO became aware that Ebola was spreading in Guinea in March 2014 but did not declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” until almost five months later.

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Blame for any lag in response is not the fault of WHO, argued Harris, noting that USAID previously supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “Dr. Tedros declared it without even calling the emergency committee together, so he wasted no time once they had information about the extent of the outbreak and the fact that clearly it had been running silently for a long time,” said Harris. “But the silence of the outbreak is not something you could lay at the feet of WHO. You lay that at the feet of a very fragile health system in the middle of a conflict that the rest of the world should be doing something to stop.”

The number of suspected Ebola cases in Congo has been reduced from over 1,000 last week to 116 as teams work through a backlog of tests. Experts say many suspected cases turned out to be malaria. This large number of people with untreated malaria demonstrates, they note, the chronic healthcare deficiencies in the region and a need for a comprehensive focus on public health there.

“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face,” said Tedros. “One of the things I heard from the community leaders is that they worry that the response to Ebola may take resources away from the health and humanitarian services they rely on for their many other needs.”

The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for pouring money into an Ebola quarantine and treatment center for infected Americans being built in Kenya, as a group of distinguished physicians, nurses, public health professionals, and humanitarian workers, including former top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for Americans exposed to Ebola to be brought home for treatment. “We are deeply concerned by reports that the United States government is pursuing a policy under which American citizens with Ebola exposures requiring quarantine, isolation, or medical care would be transferred to a facility in Kenya,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, noting the “profound legal, ethical, and human rights concerns associated with preventing American citizens from returning home for care or diverting them to third-country facilities.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on plans to bar Americans with Ebola from being treated in the U.S. “We cannot and will not allow any ‌cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” he said.

“It really sends the wrong message — that it’s a terrifying thing that you can’t possibly allow to arrive at your borders,” said Harris. Kenya has never experienced an Ebola outbreak, making it a perplexing choice of location for a treatment facility.

The U.S. could have set up a facility in Congo, Harris said, which has the most experience and expertise, having stopped 16 previous outbreaks. Or it could bring its citizens home for treatment and quarantine.

“If you’re going to not treat U.S. citizens on-site in DRC, bring them back to the U.S.” said Harris. “You’ve got one of the best health systems in the world, and you’ve got some of the brightest and best in the world in your country. So why aren’t you mobilizing them and showing that America is truly great?”

The post Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response appeared first on The Intercept.

It was eight days after Donald Trump took office for a second time, and Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s National Security Council, walked into the Oval Office accompanied by a member of his own counterterrorism team and his boss, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz. The group approached the Resolute desk and laid an intelligence “place mat” with information about a man in Somalia in front of the president.

“Sir, ISIS leader, killed Americans, planning to kill more Americans,” is how Gorka recalled the summary they provided to the president. “We informed him that the Biden administration had been watching him for about a year and a half.” According to Gorka, Trump replied: “What do you mean, we’ve been watching him? Kill him!’”

Gorka said Trump ticked off the “go box” on the operation orders with one of his signature presidential Sharpie markers. Moments later, outside the Oval Office, Gorka recalled, a call was made to Fort Bragg and “elsewhere” to arrange the attack. Less than 30 hours later, Gorka and his colleague were in the White House Situation Room watching the target on massive television screens. “It was Tom Clancy, but it was real,” Gorka recalled recently. “Go time was 8:45 in the morning.” Two minutes before the scheduled attack, there was still no sign of Waltz. A minute later, he walked in, and 60 seconds after, Gorka’s quest was complete.

“Eight forty-five the platform launches what it launches and this individual just disappears from the earth,” Gorka recalled recently in a version of the account told during a softball interview with Dean Cain, a MAGA influencer best known for his role in the 1990s TV series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.” Gorka told the story again and again on Breitbart’s Alex Marlow Show, and to other pro-administration outlets.

In the aftermath of that first strike, Trump took to social media to boast about the attack. “This morning I ordered precision Military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia,” he wrote. “The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that ‘WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!’” In honor of this line — which he said has become the motto of his directorate and is arguably the mantra of the second Trump administration — Gorka and his team wear custom lanyards that say: WWFY & WWKY. Gorka calls it the “most coveted lanyard in the U.S. government.”

Since that strike, the Trump administration has taken the murderous motto to heart, proclaiming versions of it in avenues from Pentagon social media posts to Trump’s foreword to Gorka’s recently released “Counterterrorism Strategy” — and conducting a global killing spree. “Since our first operation on day 11 of this administration, a scant 15 months ago, we have killed 860 jihadis across the globe,” Gorka told Newsmax, noting elsewhere that this figure does not include those killed in the wars in Iran, Venezuela, or Yemen. (Gorka also claimed, two days later, that the number killed in lethal strikes was actually 815. The White House did not reply to a request for clarification.)

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While the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the war with Iran, and even the so-called boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean have been front page news, Trump has supercharged America’s longest ongoing forever war — the conflict in Somalia — with very little notice. But as Trump’s attacks in Somalia have skyrocketed, so has terrorist violence there, according to the Pentagon. War Department statistics show that attacks and fatalities in Somalia have reached epic proportions, even though the War Department seemed to claim that ISIS-Somalia has been annihilated and Trump claims ISIS was wiped out years ago.

“Somalia saw the biggest surge in reported fatalities across all regions,” according to an April report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “The 8,813 deaths linked to al Shabaab and the Islamic State (ISIS) over the past year represent a 93-percent increase from the previous year.” This record throws into broad relief the failure of Gorka’s and the president’s primary counterterrorism strategy and the inability of the administration to kill its way to victory.

Loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect in Somalia, where strikes tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s first four years in the White House, a more than 350 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that for attacks in some countries, a requirement for “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations” was reportedly enforced only if the civilians were women and children. A lower standard was applied to adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. 

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. military conducted 51 strikes in Somalia over four years, according to D.C.-based think tank New America. Last year alone, Trump oversaw 126 attacks, exceeding the previous one-year record of 66 under Trump in 2019. He has already conducted 64 attacks in Somalia this year, and a total of at least 190 there so far in his second term — including an attack that one top U.S. commander called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.” Trump and Gorka are on pace to eclipse the 219 strikes of his first term in just a year and a half in office.

Gorka frames the Biden administration’s failure to conduct wholesale strikes on supposed “jihadis” as a soul-crushing experience for national security professionals from the Intelligence Community and special operations forces. “The morale was so bad,” he recently told Cain. “I’ve got a targeter on my team, an amazing lady, who are in the bowels of an intelligence agency and their job is … for 10 hours a day with headphones watching a screen tracking jihadis.… And for four years, they’re basically not allowed to kill people.” He added: “You say, ‘Hey, we’ve got the coordinates. Can we do something?’ And the White House says, ‘No.’”

Wes Bryant, who called in thousands of strikes against ISIS as a special operations joint terminal attack controller, scoffed at Gorka’s assessment that the Biden administration was negligent in its war on ISIS and capriciously allowing terrorists to operate freely.

“Often, we gain more by watching senior operatives for extended periods because we can then piece together more of an entirety of an operation or organization. Otherwise, all it becomes is whack-a-mole,” Bryant told The Intercept. “Targeting and intelligence collections operations can be likened to an undercover operation against a criminal organization in law enforcement — where we are watching and monitoring and gathering evidence and characterizing every single associate and activity in order to build the big picture of the organization and take every piece of it down versus just one guy that we found.”

Bryant was skeptical of Gorka and his motives. “I’m not sure if he doesn’t know better and just wants to deliver the superfluous talking point to his uneducated far right audience that ‘Trump kills more bad guys’ and is therefore keeping America safer.”

The Intercept sought to interview Gorka through Anna Kelly, the special assistant to the president and White House principal deputy press secretary. She did not reply to that request or to questions about Gorka’s claims.

Trump, who campaigned on ending foreign wars during his 2024 presidential run and pledged to measure success “by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” has conducted military interventions in Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and CIA operations in Mexico.

While claiming to be “the peace president,” Trump — with Gorka as his point man — has actually been attempting to kill his way to victory. “We are bringing down the hammers of hell on our enemies,” Gorka told Newsmax. But official pronouncements from the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and even the White House demonstrate that Trump’s lethal strikes have failed. 

ISIS was, for example, one of the top threats in Trump’s 2018 counterterrorism strategy. He battled the group during his first term and eventually declared victory. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Despite this, the first lethal strike of Trump’s second term — in February 2025 — was on “the Senior ISIS Attack Planner … in Somalia,” according to Trump himself. Three months later, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Trump was back to claiming ISIS had been wiped out. “I defeated ISIS in three weeks,” he said.

This claim has, however, been undermined by the nation’s Africa Command on a regular basis in the year since, amid scores of pronouncements of attacks “targeting ISIS-Somalia.” This month, AFRICOM commander Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson even admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria remain a threat to the homeland today” and that “ISIS-West Africa and ISIS-Sahel [are] becoming increasingly more collaborative.” The next day, Trump undercut his own claims by announcing on Truth Social that U.S. forces had “eliminate[d] the most active terrorist in the world … Abu-Bilal al-Minuki,” a top figure within ISIS–West Africa whom Trump claimed was “second in command of ISIS globally.”

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Despite Gorka’s consistent fawning praise of Trump — he told Cain his boss is the “most incredible commander-in-chief we’ve had of the modern age” — even Gorka’s recently unveiled “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” rebutted Trump’s assertions. That document lists ISIS as one of the “top five Islamist terror groups that have the intent and capabilities to execute External Operations against the United States,” and it spotlighted yet another branch of the group, ISIS-Khorasan, which is active in South Asia. The National Counterterrorism Center also lists a host of additional Islamic State threats: ISIS’s network in Bangladesh, ISIS–Central Africa, ISIS–East Asia, ISIS–Libya, ISIS–Mozambique, and ISIS–Sinai among them.

Trump’s ongoing campaign against the supposedly defeated ISIS and spiking violence in Somalia offers clear evidence of the administration’s failures, even as Gorka touts success to outlets that fail to push back on his claims.

“The find, fix, finish model is peerless,” Gorka said of lethal strikes on the New York Post podcast “Pod Force One.” He boasted that the U.S. is “crushing it when it comes to jihadis.” 

The post Trump’s War on ISIS Is Failing, No Matter How Gorka Spins It appeared first on The Intercept.

“U.S. pressure on organized crime is accelerating the spread of militarized security approaches in the region,” according to Sandra Pellegrini and Tiziano Breda, senior Latin America analysts with the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, known as ACLED. “Growing volatility in the organized crime ecosystem will likely fuel an increase in violence throughout the rest of Trump’s term, potentially undermining any short-term improvements achieved through hardline approaches.”

President Donald Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone as part of what he and others have called the Donroe Doctrine. This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine has been used to justify strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; CIA operations in Mexico; joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador dubbed “Operation Total Extermination”; and increased military and intelligence operations elsewhere in Latin America.

“In countries where cartels’ revenue sources are most diversified, the spread of militarized security strategies has led to counterproductive results, such as group fragmentation and intensified competition,” according to the ACLED analysis. In Ecuador, the capture or killing of gang leaders has led to a proliferation of splinter groups. The reported number of gangs there increased from 24 in 2023 to 37 by the end of last year. And after José Adolfo Macías, the leader of the gang Los Choneros, was extradited to the United States, another group — Los Lobos — was able to push into its rival’s strongholds, fueling more violence, the analysts noted.

Cartels are also increasingly waging a light-footprint air war strategy, similar to the tactics employed by the U.S. military during the War on Terror and now in its boat strike campaign. Armed groups in Mexico and Colombia are employing weaponized drones to target security forces, write Pellegrini and Breda, “in an effort to maximize the impact of their attacks while minimizing the costs of a direct confrontation.” In Mexico, drone attacks by cartels have jumped 567 percent from 2023 to 2025. In Colombia, such attacks have spiked an astounding 10,600 percent, from one strike in 2023 to at least 107 in 2025.

For its part, the U.S. military’s illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean has resulted in 59 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing 195 civilians. The latest strike, on May 8 in the Pacific Ocean, killed three people.

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Regional security forces aligned with the U.S. have also employed attacks from afar. “Forms of remote violence, namely aerial bombardments and, in the case of Haiti, the use of drones by a special task force, have exposed civilians to shelling and caused the number of people killed from clashes between security forces and gangs to skyrocket,” according to the ACLED analysts. 

Pellegrini and Breda note that Trump is fostering both a “hardline response to crime across the region” and “a climate of impunity” that has led to runaway state violence. Operations by security forces reportedly killed almost 6,900 people last year, the highest total since 2018.

Under the Donroe Doctrine, the Trump administration has repeatedly bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland. It has also increasingly threatened Cuba.

Last week, federal prosecutors in Florida unsealed an indictment charging former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and five others in connection with the Cuban military’s fatal downing of two planes 30 years ago. The administration has also been making claims that the tiny island nation is a military threat. Democrats in Congress have pushed back and repeatedly warned that the administration is crafting a pretext to justify an invasion.

“Look, the Cuban regime is an appalling regime, but it is no more a national security threat than Nicaragua is. It’s just insane to say that it is, and especially if it’s done in the service of military action,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. 

The post Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” Supercharges Violence in the Americas appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase in casualties came as Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a written statement that the war had exposed the vulnerability of U.S. military bases across the Middle East and as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened to respond to any U.S. strikes.

“The hands of time do not turn backward, and the nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases,” Khamenei said in his statement. “America, in addition to no longer having a safe place for aggression and military bases in the region, is moving further away from its former status day by day.”

The U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, as President Donald Trump — who previously threatened to commit genocide in that country — has oscillated between claims that a peace agreement is imminent and talk of renewed hostilities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that talks to end the war were continuing but that a peace agreement could take “a few days.” 

Reporting by The Intercept found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War 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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On April 8, the day the ceasefire deal was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over the last month, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparity in its casualty count.

Since then, the casualty count has crept upward, with the number of dead increasing by one and the number of wounded topping out at 409 on Tuesday, yielding a combined total of 423 dead and wounded U.S. personnel.

On Thursday, CENTCOM told The Intercept, “13 service members were killed in action and one service member passed due to a non-combat related medical emergency during Operation Epic Fury” — the military’s name for the campaign.

For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. Most DCAS webpages still claim 13 U.S. deaths but one put the tally at 14 as of Tuesday.

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 chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on whether Davius was the recently referenced non-combat fatality.

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 64 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, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Va., this month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

The 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.

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses. CENTCOM did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for clarification concerning the casualty figures.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran War Rise as Military Strikes Begin Again appeared first on The Intercept.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have further undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned of emerging cases in urban areas, including reports of cases in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and Goma, a crossroads city in Congo that borders Rwanda.

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The Intercept reported on the porous borders and worrying  public health responses in Goma during an Ebola outbreak in 2019. At the time Anthony Fauci — then the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — laid out the dangers of Ebola spreading in that urban center. “Since Goma is a city of millions of people, and since it has an international airport, it is a great concern,” he explained. “If Ebola could get into Goma and spread in Goma, that increases the likelihood that it could spread beyond the DRC into neighboring and distant countries.”

Experts have expressed alarm that the virus has been spreading undetected for weeks at least — and likely months — in Ituri Province, a remote area of eastern Congo that borders South Sudan and Uganda. The region, long riven by conflict, is home to many displaced persons and a haven for itinerant workers and smuggling operations. It has weak medical and public health infrastructure, making contact tracing is extremely difficult.

“The province of Ituri is highly insecure. … Conflict has intensified since late 2025, and fighting has escalated significantly over the past two months, resulting in civilian deaths. Over 100,000 people have been newly displaced, and in Ebola outbreaks, you know what displacement means,” said Tedros. “The area is also a mining zone, with high levels of population movement that increase the risk of further spread.”

Previously, USAID supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “They’re the people standing between us and disaster,” said Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s.

Harris praised the past work of USAID, and the U.S. in general, in responding to previous outbreaks of Ebola. This current outbreak can be managed, she said, but that it will take funding, training, equipment, and supplies — like personal protective equipment, medications, and fluids — for local healthcare workers. Harris, now a global health specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research said that while some might argue that governments should pay for their own healthcare workers, she noted such front-line personnel provide a service that extends far beyond a nation’s borders. “They are protecting global health security,” she told The Intercept, adding: “And they were also simply doing good for ordinary people.”

A U.S. government official with experience working with foreign non-governmental organizations, who spoke on background because they were not authorized to talk with the press on the subject, told The Intercept on Tuesday that there was “no question” Trump administration policies have helped to undermine the global public health response. This indictment was echoed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, the ranking member on the House Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies subcommittee.

“The Trump administration has systematically dismantled much of our global health infrastructure, without giving a thought to the consequences. Now, we are seeing those consequences play out,” DeLauro told The Intercept, noting that the administration dissolved USAID, cut the United States off from the WHO, and carried out mass layoffs across the domestic global public health space.

“This will not be the last outbreak of a deadly infectious disease,” DeLauro said. “We must invest in global health infrastructure. Not only to be reliable and effective partners, but to be prepared for the next outbreak. In public health, isolation is not a strategy. Infectious diseases do not respect political borders.”

On Monday, the State Department announced that on “May 15, 2026, within 24 hours of learning of the confirmed cases, the Department leveraged its outbreak response and humanitarian assistance capabilities.” The WHO actually issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Ituri, which included deaths among healthcare workers, 10 days prior. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.  

“I cannot help but wonder if the administration had not taken such drastic action to dismantle so much of our global health infrastructure, that we would have been able to identify this outbreak earlier and stop it from spreading as much as it has,” DeLauro said in a separate press release.

“It is false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept. “In fact, by bringing USAID global health functions under the new GHSD bureau at the State Department, our efforts are more aligned and effective. Funding and support to combat Ebola continue, working with allies and partners.”

When asked about the lag between the first notification of a disease outbreak and the U.S. response, the spokesperson did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

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On his first day back in office last year, Trump began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO and cutting all funding for the U.N. health agency. “World Health ripped us off,” Trump said at the time. The withdrawal process was completed January of this year.

Tedros announced that WHO has a team on the ground supporting the national responses to the African outbreak, noting his organization had “deployed people, supplies, equipment and funds,” including millions from an emergency fund.

“The outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus in the past two weeks show why international threats need an international response,” Tedros said on Tuesday, also referring to the recent outbreak on an expedition cruise ship of a rare virus carried by rodents. “They show why the world needs the international health regulations, and why it needs WHO.”

The post Ebola Outbreak Rages After Trump Gutted Global Health Safeguards appeared first on The Intercept.

Thursday’s scathing analysis by the Department of War’s inspector general came on the same day that the top U.S. commander overseeing the war in Iran dismissed reports of civilian casualties and said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools. The inspector general specifically notes that the military stopped funding a database that tracks civilian harm that could be used for such verification.

While damning, the former chief of harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence nonetheless called the new report a “whitewash” that downplays the evisceration of the Center and the entire enterprise devoted to reducing civilian casualties.

The report focuses on the implementation of the Pentagon’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR‑AP, which was mandated by the department to take full effect by the end of 2025. The inspector general found serious deficiencies and a chronic failure to meet timelines for 11 objectives consisting of 133 incomplete “implementing actions” by the end of last year. The inspector general found that the Department of War “did not fully implement any of the CHMR-AP objectives by the end of FY 2025.”

“This is a crisis of the Trump Administration’s own making: They slashed the staffing and funding for civilian harm mitigation, and now they can’t adequately follow the law and implement the CHMR-AP, leaving civilians and our own military personnel at risk,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, told The Intercept. “The Inspector General’s report is clear about what that means: wasted munitions, failed strikes, damaged alliances, and propaganda wins for our adversaries. The Trump Administration needs to reverse course immediately so we can save lives and protect our national security.”

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The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of CHMR efforts. More than a year ago, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties.

The 43-page inspector general report details continuing efforts to hamstring protections for civilians in war zones, noting that “DoW Components ended funding for the CHMR data management platform, stopped holding Steering Committee meetings, lost or reassigned many of the personnel dedicated to CHMR, and lost personnel and leadership” at the Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and employing tools for preventing civilian casualties.

Wes Bryant, who until last year served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Center of Excellence, is one of those “lost personnel,” having been forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on efforts to dismantle CHMR efforts.

“It is completely whitewashed of the truth,” Bryant said of the report. “It reads as if the IG is completely deliberately ignoring the fact that the center and the entire CHMR enterprise was targeted for immediate shutdown, that 90 percent of billets were either terminated or forced out, and that what exists of the Center of Excellence since March 2025 is a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority and is completely locked out of visibility and oversight on all investigations and operations.”

The watchdog’s evaluation noted that Hegseth’s War Department “may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy” — which is required under federal law. The investigation also found that eliminating CHMR funding and personnel also “decreases readiness and increases risk to DoW personnel, mission success, and military objectives,” according to officials at the Joint Staff, which is headed by Gen. Dan Caine, and at geographic combatant commands, which oversee U.S. operations in various corners of the world.

While couched in stilted language, the report details dangers to civilians due to cuts to CHMR efforts. It makes note of deficiencies in “personnel and capabilities” to protect civilians under Pentagon regulations that are mandated by federal law. And it mentions a lack of necessary “tools” at the Center of Excellence, including a “data management platform” meant to track civilian harm incidents. The report notes that “according to Joint Staff and [combatant command] officials, eliminating CHMR funding and personnel makes mitigating or responding to civilian harm more difficult.” Such officials also noted that “eliminating CHMR funding and personnel reduces battle space awareness and increases the risk of civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.”

“This report makes it clear that the DoD is not complying with the law, nor its own policies, both of which were built on a bipartisan basis upon years of hard-learned lessons from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “As Congress develops the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they must ensure that it not only provides the DoD with the resources it needs to comply with law and policy but also conduct rigorous oversight to keep the DoD accountable for implementing these critical programs.”

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Reporting by The Intercept found a combatant command that has gone from a military backwater to one engaged in regular kinetic activity — U.S. Southern Command — is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports. After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January , the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, which oversees military operations in Latin America. The organization learned that SOUTHCOM has no mechanism for submitting these reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Center of Excellence.

The report specifically mentions the Center’s “support for organizations such as the U.S. Southern Command,” despite the fact that the Center “lost large numbers of personnel and leaders,” does not have “the tools designed to meet its statutory roles and duties,” and that the Army had developed plans, early last year, to euthanize it.

The report notes that an official from an unnamed combatant command “stated that they largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025.” Another said that they did not “want to spend resources on actions or make future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed.”

As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world — from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East — during Trump’s second term. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

Airwars 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 almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.

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The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school. More than 150 civilians were killed, most of them children.

Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, according to a report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society last month; this includes 763 schools. The Red Crescent also reported that more than 334 medical, health, pharmaceutical, and emergency centers have been damaged, including 18 of its own centers. Twenty-four health workers have been killed and 116 injured, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

“U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing late last month.

On Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper — the senior officer overseeing U.S. combat operations in Iran — told senators that the strike on the school in Minab was the only civilian casualty incident he knew of after more than 13,600 U.S. strikes.

Airwars has chronicled more than 300 civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.

“How do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals?” asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., citing a New York Times report. “There’s no way we can corroborate that,” Cooper replied.

The inspector general’s report specifically says that a database used for tracking civilian harm — which could be used in verification efforts — was abandoned. The “Army stopped funding the data management platform,” it notes.

Cooper said that preventing civilian harm is “a matter that I’m passionate about.”

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Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force last year, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.

Late last month, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.

While the U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, Trump has previously threatened to commit genocide there. “We’ll go back and finish them off. And, by the way, more than that,” he said on Friday.

Bryant believes that efforts by congressional Democrats and press coverage of civilian casualties — and the ensuing pressure on Hegseth — has kept the lights on at what remains of the Center of Excellence and held CHMR on life support. “Given all the controversy and heat that Hegseth and the administration have since received for civilian casualties, it has behooved them to be able to technically say that some semblance of the program still exists,” he told The Intercept. “However, I can tell you with 100 percent confidence that it exists at this point entirely on paper and as a legal CYA,” or cover your ass.

The post Internal Pentagon Report Reveals Hegseth Is Willfully Putting Civilians in Danger appeared first on The Intercept.

The brainchild of National Security Council official Sebastian Gorka, the “Counterterrorism Strategy” weaves together Trump’s war on the wider world — which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Iran to Nigeria and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea — with the administration’s war on dissent at home, which has targeted immigrants, legal observers, activists, protesters, and the press.

Under the guise of protecting America, it takes aim at wide swaths of Americans, putting targets on the backs of the most vulnerable.

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The “Counterterrorism Strategy” formalizes a drastic shift in focus for counterterror efforts. Now, according to the Trump administration, the nation is battling three major types of terror groups: “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” the long-standing focus of America’s counter-terror efforts; “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs”; and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”

This last group is defined in the document as people the administration deems to be “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” This puts antifa — a fictional foe that is actually a collection of ideas and not an organization — on par with actual terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, and drug-trafficking syndicates such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. 

The memo makes no mention of right-wing extremist groups, despite rafts of research, from the U.S. government and others, demonstrating that such groups have been responsible for the majority of violent attacks in America in recent years.

Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration published the first official National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The 2003 document purported to set “the course for winning the War on Terror,” with a focus on “destroying the larger al-Qaida network,” by defining the threat and laying out big-picture goals and objectives. New strategies have been issued numerous times, over multiple presidencies, since.

Explaining the 2026 strategy last week, Gorka leaned into the lies which permeate the Trump administration’s document. “Very simply, it’s common-sense counterterrorism based on reality not fake threats,” he explained. “In the president’s foreword and in chapter one, we make it very clear we will not permit the use of the most powerful national security tools in the world including the counterterrorism enterprise to be used as political weapons.”

Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., had a very different interpretation, calling the strategy “a plan on how they’re going to attack people on the left,” noting that antifascists are “not a real terrorism threat in the United States.” She added that the effort is “completely corrupt.”

To contextualize the U.S. government’s radical new approach to counterterrorism, The Intercept analyzed the document, highlighting revelatory passages that show how the Trump administration is bringing the war on terror home.

“We Will Kill You”

History ultimately judges presidents by their priorities, both deeds and words.

While calling out slavery as the cause of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln still focused his second inaugural address on reconciliation over retribution. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations,” he pronounced.

On the eve of World War II, as the threat of fascism loomed over the world, President Franklin D. Roosevelt readied a nation for war, not with ferocious rhetoric but by envisioning a new world founded upon the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress on January 6, 1941. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

These presidents were deeply flawed. Both committed grave injustices, were responsible for immense harm, and neither lived up to their most laudable words. But those words survived for a reason and are now part of the American canon.

For President Donald Trump, the “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” is as good as any collection of words in defining him. Nothing better illustrates his vision of America’s role in the world than Trump’s capstone quote. He concludes the foreword with words that ring true from the streets of Minneapolis, where federal agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti during anti-ICE resistance; to a school building in Minab, Iran, where more than 100 children were killed in a U.S. airstrike; to the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, where close to 200 civilians have been killed in attacks on alleged drug boats; and should follow him forever: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

Treating Americans as Terrorists

Under U.S. law, the government can designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” a process that typically entails a formal declaration by the secretary of state at the direction of the president, allowing the Treasury Department to impose financial penalties and the Justice Department to prosecute people for providing “material support” to such groups. Congress has not passed any law creating a domestic terrorism designation, nor is there a standalone crime of “domestic terrorism.” 

This has not stopped Trump from aiming the counterterror apparatus at domestic targets in his second term. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which Trump issued last September, vaguely defined enemies are not only typified by “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also advocacy of opinions clearly protected by the First Amendment including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

In this document, the Trump administration makes clear it considers any American who it believes has “adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life” to be a terror threat.

“The Trump administration has repurposed the ‘terrorism’ framing and applied it to new boogeymen, like alleged narcos as well as a caricature of their domestic political opposition,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept.

White-Washing Right-Wing Terror

What’s notable here isn’t just the “major terror groups” included — it’s the type of groups the Trump administration omitted. 

“Absurdly, the document incorrectly labels drug cartels, ‘legacy Islamist terrorists,’ and violent left-wing extremists as the top counterterrorism threats — despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. 

In fact, a 2025 analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, over the past decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing militants. Islamist jihadist-inspired attacks resulted in 82 deaths over the same span.

“Radical Ideologies”

The new “Counterterrorism Strategy” signals a jarring shift in the priorities of the national security apparatus. Instead of having the security state primarily focus on foreign actors and those domestic threats responsible for the most violence in recent years — like white supremacists and violent militias — the president is effectively siccing them on anyone who dares to disagree with him or his supporters. 

“This is a very severe degradation of freedom of thought [and] freedom of speech in the country, and it should be raising alarm bells,” said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute.

“It does look like a very straight blueprint drawn from white evangelical Protestant Christian circles,” said Jones, the author of the forthcoming book “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”“What they call radical ideology is essentially anything that differs from that conservative, white evangelical Protestant worldview.”

The Narcoterrorist Boogeymen

By labeling drug-trafficking networks as terrorists, Trump is operating in a long tradition of using the rhetoric of war to refer to an issue that is rooted in public health. The terrorism framing is simply the logical next step in the decadeslong war on drugs that is, more often than not, used as a cudgel by U.S. policymakers to keep Latin American countries in line, said Alexander Aviña, a historian at Arizona State University.

“They’re using drug war counterterrorism as a cover,” Aviña said. “They’re effectively maintaining control over the region through a bunch of proxy right-wing governments, but it’s being framed as counterterrorism, as an anti-drugs operation. The innovation here is that they’re applying war on terror legislation and laws to drug trafficking organizations”

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The problem with labeling drug networks as “terrorists,” however, is that the vast majority of drug traffickers differ from organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group in that they have no real membership, and they operate for profit, not to achieve an ideological objective.

Legacy Islamist Terrorists

Despite Trump’s boasts of his prowess at fighting terrorism, both Al Qaeda and ISIS were the top threats in his 2018 counterterrorism strategy. They are called out specifically in the new document as well.

In fact, Gorka’s inclusion of ISIS directly contradicts longtime claims by Trump. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Last year, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he said: “I defeated ISIS in three weeks.”

“Politically Motivated” Killings of Christians

The idea that Christians, who make up two-thirds of the U.S. population, are under siege is belied by the data. Hate crimes motivated by anti-Christian bias are far rarer than attacks motivated by racism or xenophobia in the United States, and other religious groups are far more likely to report being the victim of a religiously motivated hate crime than Christians. An analysis of 2023 FBI hate crime data found that less than 10 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes were believed to be motivated by anti-Christian bias. 

“There’s really no evidence-based reason why a report focused on the domestic front would disproportionately feature violence against Christians. There’s just no evidence that that is the most pressing problem facing us in the United States today,” said PRRI’s Jones.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, right-wing influencers and media outlets rapidly spread misinformation about the shooter’s gender identity and supposed “pro-transgender” ideology based on unverified claims about the bullet casings used in the shooting. Trans people are far more likely to be victims of gun violence than perpetrators. In mass shootings carried out between 1966 and 2025, less than 1 percent of the shooters were transgender, according to the Violence Prevention Project. The overwhelming majority of shooters were cisgender men. 

“In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, news outlets and people with large platforms online raced to share unconfirmed reports that wrongfully tied the LGBTQ+ community to the shooter,” Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Brandon Wolf told The Washington Blade. “Jumping to those conclusions was reckless, irresponsible, and led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right wing influencers, and a wave of terror for the community that is already living scared.”

“Neutralization” of Adversaries

While Trump has frequently threatened his political opponents in public, experts in extremism told The Intercept that “this kind of language” in a national security document should raise alarm bells. It’s one thing when the president rants about “radical gender ideology” at a rally, said Jones. “But when it gets put into a national presidential security memo, when it gets put into a report that’s led by a task force at the U.S. Department of Justice, and when it’s put into a counterterrorism document … these are laying the legal framework for prosecution.” 

This language of “neutralization” in this new strategy harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program, which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among other domestic groups and individuals and, according to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.

A 1967 FBI memo notes that purpose of this type of “counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” African American groups and leaders. Efforts included “sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages,” “encouraging gang warfare,” “falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers,” and other means to “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the committee. Their investigation found that civil rights leader “Martin Luther King, Jr. was, for instance, the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him” and that “the man in charge of the FBI’s ‘war’ against Dr. King” said they used the same methods employed against Soviet agents.

An Antifa Obsession

Antifa, short for antifascist, is a decentralized, leftist ideology, a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism. Over the last decade, however, Republicans have used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists — as if it were an organization with members and a command structure. They have increasingly blamed antifa for terrorist violence.

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In 2019, during his first term, Trump floated the idea of declaring antifa “a major Organization of Terror,” likening it to the group MS-13, an international criminal gang that originated in the U.S. and that the administration added to the foreign terrorist organization list last year. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” Trump tweeted in 2020, during protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said, however, that antifa was “not a group or an organization” but a “movement or an ideology.” Trump lashed out, calling antifa “well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the … FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source.” After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, Trump blamed “antifa people” for inciting violence. 

Finally, last September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” He followed it by issuing NSPM-7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism … movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” 

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On his press tour touting the new strategy, Gorka said “left-wing violent radicals like antifa and the anarchists” were the “most ascendant” terror group and — without evidence — claimed they were “the people who killed our friend Charlie Kirk.” He said these leftists are “people who think that if you don’t agree with them politically, they get to kill you.”

Locking Up Trump’s Enemies

The new document detours to discuss the wrongful detention of Americans abroad. Ironically, the Trump administration has unlawfully detained thousands of people residing in the United States, including those with legal status, targeting everyone from perceived political dissidents to racial and ethnic minorities. 

Last year, the Trump administration detained Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed, as revealed by legal documents unsealed as a result of litigation from The Intercept and other parties. 
Also in 2025, the administration sent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran national with an order preventing his deportation to his country of origin, to CECOT, a prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses. He has since been released to his home in Maryland, but the administration has continued to target him, including with criminal prosecution.

The Monroe Doctrine

Issued by President James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine is a foundational principle of U.S. foreign policy opposing any foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere — except by Washington. It’s seen by American nationalists and by modern “America First” Trump ideologues as marking a “golden age” of U.S. power in the region, according to historian Greg Grandin.

“Going back to World War I and World War II, America First nationalists have liked the Monroe Doctrine because they saw it as an alternative to liberal internationalism,” Grandin said. “They were never isolationists, even though that word is often applied to them, because they’ve long claimed the right to intervene and project power in the Western Hemisphere.”

Now, Trump is using the spectre of terror to justify extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers at sea and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Boat Strikes and Bogus Stats

The U.S. military has conducted 58 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September 2025, killing more than 190 civilians. 

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The assertion that this campaign has resulted “in a more than 90% decrease in maritime drug smuggling” into the U.S. slightly tempers similarly outlandish and false figures from Trump, who regularly claims that “drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent.” Experts say these claims are meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told The Intercept.

Even the Pentagon’s own figures refute Trump’s numbers. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” said Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The “Trump Corollary”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an attempt by the administration to enshrine a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, with the term also appearing in the administration’s national security strategy document in December. But it’s not entirely clear what, precisely, this corollary means, said Aviña, the historian.

“It’s supposed to be an addition to the Monroe Doctrine, but we don’t get a very precise definition of what that is,” said Aviña. “It harkens back to the Roosevelt Corollary, but Teddy Roosevelt was very clear about what his addition was: international police power.” Trump makes no claim to a new power. “So Trump is working in that tradition, but in a weird and imprecise way.”

Loosened Rules and Civilian Deaths

The loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones spiked. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a more than 329 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. Trump is already on the cusp of eclipsing those numbers in less than a year and half. Since taking office last year, Trump has overseen at least 190 attacks in Somalia.

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that, in some countries, “operating principles,” including a “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations,” were reportedly enforced only for women and children, while a lower standard applied to civilian adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. 

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Using Europe to Promote Bigotry

The document employs its section on Europe to shamelessly promote racism, white nationalism, and Christian supremacy employing a stilted worldview that ignores the U.S. role in the immigration it rails against.

“Trump officials are clearly weaponizing anti-Muslim bigotry in their campaign to heap pressure on Europe. They are baselessly insinuating that European policies that welcomed migrants — who largely fled their home countries due to the impact of U.S. backed wars and regime changes — created an incubator for terrorism,” Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told The Intercept. “At the same time, however, the White House continues to implement the exact kind of violent, interventionist policies that drove mass migration and generated extremism in the first place.”

“There is this kind of praising of Western culture and values, the denigration of ‘alien cultures,’” said Jones. “What’s behind those is really a sense of European superiority, and that gets translated into the U.S. in racial terms. So it really is a white Christian worldview here that’s being projected and protected.”

A Bid to “Protect Christians”

Experts on white supremacy and Christian nationalism told The Intercept that the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about a Christian genocide in Africa in order to stoke white Christian nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments at home. “In Nigeria, it’s genocide against Christians, and in South Africa, it’s the supposed genocide against these white Afrikaners,” Christine Reyna, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told The Intercept. “And so in absence of an actual genocide in the United States against either of these two groups, you can keep that narrative of that existential fear of extermination and genocide and oppression that is alive and well within a certain subset of white Americans.”

In addition to using the conflicts in Africa to spread propaganda domestically, experts on Christian nationalism tell The Intercept that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth believes in waging war to achieve Christian supremacy abroad, without respect to international laws or norms. “Hegseth believes that he is carrying out a spiritual and actual war to vanquish a Christian nation’s enemies and protect and promote a Christian nation,” Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist covering the Christian right, said on The Intercept Briefing podcast. “For Hegseth, biblical law is the only law he feels obligated to obey. The law of war, international law governing military conflicts, and human rights and civilian rights in war — he believes don’t apply to him.”

Trump’s Holy War in Nigeria

While Christians have been the victims of violence in Nigeria, they have not been the primary target, and experts overwhelmingly reject the idea that a Christian genocide is occurring in that country. Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent global monitor of conflict and protest data, found that of the 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria that occurred as of November of last year; 50 of those attacks targeted Christians because of their religion. According to experts, the majority of the violence has focused on land disputes. 

Trump’s Christmas Day attack was another in a long string of failed and futile U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa documented by The Intercept over the last decade This includes blowback from U.S. operations and failed secret wars, civilians killed in drone strikes, coups by U.S. trained officers, increases in the reach of terror groups, surging fatalities from militant violence, human rights abuses by allies, massacres of civilians by partner forces, and a catalogue of other fiascos.

Doubling Down on Failures in Africa

The document casts Trump’s strategy as a departure from the failed forever war interventions of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But Sarah Harrison — who served as an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, where she oversaw the Africa portfolio, and as counsel to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs — sees little difference. “Setting aside the bombast about protecting Christians, the fundamentals of Trump’s Africa CT policy isn’t that distinct from his predecessors: a light military footprint to facilitate intel sharing and drone strikes with an emphasis on supporting the partner nation. These policies fail because they ignore the drivers of conflict and refuse to acknowledge the need for a political solution,” she told The Intercept.

The U.S. government’s own statistics bear out this record of futility and failure. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted 23 deaths from terrorist violence in 2002 and 2003, as U.S. counterterrorism efforts began to ramp up on the continent in the wake of 9/11. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase since the early 2000s, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.

“Reality-Based” Counterterrorism

The document ends as it began, with unserious bombast that reads like little more than AI slop fashioned from administration talking points. Evoking the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which called for a restoration of “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity,” the Trump administration appears to be making up for its own insecurities with claims that the president has restored America’s “civilizational confidence” through a baptism of fire. In reality, the document projects a heady blend of weakness and anxiety and espouses a counterterrorism strategy akin to a 12-year-old boy’s vision of foreign policy: boasts about killing one’s way to victory.

In a post-release media tour where he spoke with MAGA outlets and administration sycophants, Gorka expressed amazement at how little negative reporting there was about the new counterterrorism strategy. “Even the left, they’re so on their heels. I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy,” said Gorka. “Fifty articles were written. … Only one of them … was even slightly negative.” (The Intercept’s invite must have been lost in the mail.) He continued: “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us — which is delicious.” His interviewer, Dean Cain, best known for playing second fiddle in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” responded, “That’s wonderful.” 

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“If the U.S. government counterterrorism enterprise hadn’t jumped the shark before, it certainly has now,” said Finucane. “The administration has repurposed the terrorism framing and applied it not only to alleged narcos but also perceived domestic political opponents — as we saw with the way the administration baselessly smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti as ‘terrorists’ after gunning them down. The whole situation would be much funnier if the Trump administration wasn’t currently engaged in a lawless killing spree under the guise of ‘counterterrorism.’”

The post How Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Puts You at Risk appeared first on The Intercept.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”

Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”

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Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”

Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.

An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.

The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs, according to the report. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

Recently, 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, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacked U.S. ships guiding vessels through the Strait of Hormuz as part of Trump’s ill-defined “Project Freedom.”

The following day, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said Iran had launched numerous attacks. “Since the ceasefire was announced, Iran has fired at commercial vessels nine times and seized two container ships. They’ve attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times,” he told reporters on Tuesday. He explained that despite attacking U.S. troops, the strikes were “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”

Trump suggested to reporters on Tuesday that Iran knew what actions constituted red lines that would violate the ceasefire, but refused to go on record on what they were. “Well, you’ll find out, because I’ll let you know,” he said, without letting anyone know.

“One of Trump’s standard plays with respect to Iran is resorting to belligerent threats of potentially illegal violence in the hopes of coercing Tehran,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “Notwithstanding Trump’s threat, attacks on U.S. ships are a real possibility and a potential vector for the breakdown of the ceasefire.”

At the press conference alongside Caine, War Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if the truce ended, since the U.S. and Iran had fired at each other in the last 24 hours. “No, the ceasefire is not over,” he replied. “Ultimately, this is a separate and distinct project.” Both he and Trump have also repeatedly claimed victory in the war, that they simultaneously claim is paused.

Hegseth suggested last week in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the ceasefire undercut a 60-day legal deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution for the U.S. to exit the war. (The deadline expired on Friday, though the White House can also extend the timeline for another 30 days to assist with the withdrawal of forces.)

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a ceasefire,” said Hegseth. He reiterated this erroneous contention on Tuesday.

“I do not believe the statute would support that,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., replied, adding that he has “serious constitutional concerns and we don’t want to layer those with additional statutory concerns.”

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Only two ships were known to have passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, and none did so on Tuesday. “As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait,” said Hegseth on Tuesday. Iran’s state broadcaster dismissed Project Freedom as a failure and said Iranian control over the waterway had tightened.

“There’s this ongoing denial of reality by the administration about the global and domestic consequences of this conflict,” said Finucane. “This war is very unpopular. The president’s own popularity has fallen, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better as the economic consequences worsen. The current status quo is untenable, but it’s unclear how the president is going to find his way out of this mess of his own making.”

The post Hegseth Clings to Phony Ceasefire to Help Trump Evade War Powers Pressure appeared first on The Intercept.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.”

Fentanyl is generally produced in the United States or Mexico, Baumgartner said. “I have not seen any evidence that fentanyl has ever been smuggled from South America to the United States,” he told The Intercept. “Cartels would not smuggle fentanyl down to South America just to smuggle it back by boat.”

While bales of cocaine float in water, Baumgartner said, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities and would not be seen floating in the aftermath of an airstrike.

Fentanyl or not, Trump has also touted astounding decreases in drug smuggling due to the boat strikes. “Drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent,” Trump said at a January 29 White House briefing. Experts said that Trump’s claim is ridiculous, invented, or involves disingenuous numbers meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Baumgartner noted that even the Pentagon figures put the lie to Trump’s claim. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” he said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

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The word “deterrence” has become a popular Pentagon euphemism for the use of lethal strikes, in contrast to previous U.S. government efforts to marshal economic, diplomatic, and military means to convince adversaries to change their ways. “Deterrence has a signaling effect on narco-terrorists, and raises the risks with their movements,” Humire claimed. But last month, for example, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, including five in five days. “That shows that traffickers, even along that high seas route, are not being deterred,” said Isacson.

The amount of cocaine seized by U.S. authorities suggests the strikes have had little impact on the trade. “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” said Isacson. While data is limited, figures from Customs and Border Protection show that seizures at U.S. borders and along coasts have increased amid the Trump administration’s airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. “CBP’s cocaine seizures have actually gone slightly up since the boat strikes began. Cocaine seized at all U.S. borders in the seven months before the strikes began was 38,000 pounds. In the seven months since, it’s 44,000 pounds — 6,000 pounds more,” Isacson explained.

The Coast Guard recently announced “record-setting interdictions” of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific under Operation Pacific Viper, indicating that large quantities of the narcotic are still transiting through that maritime corridor. Since last August, that service has seized more than 215,000 pounds of cocaine as part of this operation, Coast Guard spokesperson Brandon Hillard told The Intercept. “Narco-terrorists continue to go to great lengths to traffic illicit narcotics within and out of the Western hemisphere,” he said, highlighting “the seizure of hundreds of tons of cocaine.”

The general stability of the drug’s wholesale price also suggests it remains widely available. “The Coast Guard recently seized 1.2 tons of cocaine and reported a wholesale value of $19.3 million. This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner explained of a seizure announced this month. “This report may be using old pricing information, but I would expect a significant spike in prices with even a 20 percent reduction in the cocaine flow.” 

According to the drug-testing company Millennium Health, use of stimulants, including cocaine, is climbing sharply and was detected in urine samples at nearly twice the rate of fentanyl in 2025.

“A 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean that cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States,” said Baumgartner. “The price of cocaine would have skyrocketed. Addicts would be fighting each other over what little cocaine or crack they could find.”

Trump has also advanced absurd statistics about lives saved by attacks on boats. “When you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat,” Trump claimed. This echoed his previous assertion that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Experts say that there is no way of knowing how many lives are saved due to drug interception efforts, but that Trump’s claims are nonetheless untethered from reality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths for the 12-month period ending in November 2025. By Trump’s math, the drugs on the 54 boats would have been responsible for 1,400,000 deaths — 20 times the number of overdose deaths in one year. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

While not as egregious as Trump’s claims, Humire also offered up overdose numbers that appeared calculated to deceive. “As early as September 2025, the Administration had also achieved a nearly 20% drop in deadly drug overdoses in the United States compared to the previous year,” said Humire, crediting Operation Southern Spear with a share of the success. Left unsaid is that the first boat strike occurred that September, meaning the strikes would have had little or no impact on the numbers. The Pentagon did not provide any details on the source of Humire’s figures.

Experts say Humire’s statistics appear to be rhetorical sleight of hand, since Operation Southern Spear is not actually preventing the flow of fentanyl — the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Baumgartner called it “misleading” to link Operation Southern Spear to decreases in overall drug overdoses and drug flow because it “only impacts cocaine smuggling, not fentanyl or other drugs.”

Humire claimed Southern Spear and National Defense Areas on the U.S. Southern border “diminished the flow of fentanyl,” telling Congress it is “down 56% since the same period last year.” In actuality, CBP’s seizures of fentanyl at the U.S.–Mexico border have been declining since 2023. Halfway into fiscal year 2026, fentanyl seizures are almost exactly half of the total for 2025.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also claims that the boat strikes have significantly impacted the drug trade. “Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM AOR have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean,” he wrote in a February post on X. The Pentagon won’t name these “top” traffickers, failing to respond to repeated requests for information from The Intercept.

Lawmakers and other experts say that the Trump administration completely misconstrues the nature of the drug trade. “They have a fundamental misunderstanding that drug trafficking is a business. And that means there is no military solution,” Jacobs told The Intercept.

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Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, echoed this. “They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem, as if there is a command structure of the global drug economy where the person at the top finally says, ‘We’ve had enough. Everyone, stop what you’re doing now. We surrender’ — as if a cartel boss could command users, growers, smugglers, money launderers, and dealers, to all give up. It doesn’t work that way,” he explained. “Even if you did find a case or two of someone deciding to get out of the business, there are an infinite number of replacements willing to step up because that’s where the money is. Smuggling is the business. There’s always going to be a Han Solo.”

The Trump administration’s killing of civilians on alleged drug boats contrasts with the administration’s ongoing embrace of drug traffickers, drug dealers, and certain cartels, as well as its cuts to drug enforcement efforts. Justice Department records show, for example, that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6 percent since 2024. And more than 5,000 FBI and DEA agents have been reassigned from combating drug cartels to immigration enforcement, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump’s then-Attorney General Pam Bondi also scuttled the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces which allowed the department to coordinate investigations of cartels and transnational criminal networks. And last year, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.

To justify January’s U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump administration prosecutors charged him with numerous crimes, including “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and “Cocaine Importation Conspiracy.” The Trump administration is now running the country via a puppet regime that includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who was indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking, having “partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world, and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the United States,” according to the Justice Department. 

Trump has also granted clemency to around 100 people accused of drug-related crimes, including kingpins. He gave, for example, a “full and unconditional” pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted in 2024 for using his office to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked: “Why would we pardon this guy then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?”

On Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., questioned Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the boat attacks. “What legal justification could there possibly be that would allow the U.S. military to strike boats in international waters and kill the occupants of those boats without a showing of evidence that there’s narcotics on those boats?” he asked, before being met by a stream of doubletalk about the legality of the attacks. Unable to elicit a straight answer, Kaine responded: “I think there’s a profound mismatch between what is occurring and the underlying assumptions in the legal opinion.”

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Military briefers have admitted to members of Congress that they cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute survivors of the boat strikes, leading the U.S. to repatriate, hand off, or leave injured victims to drown. Similarly, those killed — if they are involved in the drug trade — are hardly drug kingpins. An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those killed in U.S. strikes found that while they had been smuggling drugs, they were not “narco-terrorists” or gang leaders but laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, two were low-level criminals, and one was a local crime boss. All were from a desperately poor area, and most were crewing such boats for the first or second time. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” said one government official of those killed.

Asked about the disconnect between the Trump administration pardoning drug kingpins and killing low-level persons who may be associated with the trade, Tree said it was par for the course. “The punitive aspect of the drug war has never been about logical consistency,” he said, noting that tobacco will kill close to 500,000 Americans this year, six times the number of overdoses. “Does that mean Trump is going to drone strike the homes of tobacco executives in the U.S.? Can other countries target them since Trump lacks the political will? That would be absurd because we don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

“These are visceral knee-jerk responses designed to make politicians appear tough,” Tree said, “but being tough is not the same as being effective.”

The post Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House, including a furious blitz during his second term. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents over three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean.

On Wednesday, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.

“Secretary Hegseth has presided over an expansion in U.S. military operations that has caused devastating civilian harm globally, from Yemen, Iran, and Somalia to extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific,” said Annie Shiel, U.S. director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “This is against the backdrop of a serious reduction in the United States’ capacity and will to prevent civilian harm, including statements from administration officials threatening civilian infrastructure and decrying ‘stupid rules of engagement,’ and the slashing of U.S. military offices and staff tasked with preventing civilian harm.”

The U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world during Trump’s second term from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a U.K.-based organization that tracks civilian harm across the world, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

“Even excluding Iran, we saw that at least 381 civilians were killed by the Trump administration so far, with harm recorded across seven different theaters,” Karlshoej-Pedersen, who is also the co-founder of the Civilian Protection Monitor, explained. “Even if the Trump administration is only responsible for a proportion of those deaths, it looks as if the first year-plus of this Trump administration has been even more deadly for civilians than his whole first term,” she said.

Adding in the 1,700 civilians killed in Iran, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, pushes the death toll — and the overall threat to civilians — to a historic level.

Other counts of civilian casualties in Iran push the death toll even higher. “U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing. This includes an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.

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The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted the attack on the elementary school in Minab, contradicting assertions by Trump that Iran struck the school.

“The girls’ school that got hit in the first days of this war, there is absolutely no question at this point what happened. We made a mistake,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, on Wednesday. “We identified this target based on earlier charts. And yet, two months after it happened, we refused to say anything about it, giving the world the impression that we just don’t care.”

The Pentagon has deflected questions on the Minab attack for almost two months. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Hegseth’s office told The Intercept on Wednesday, while the war secretary said the same to members of Congress, refusing to answer questions about the attack.

“U.S. authorities must ensure that the investigation they announced into the unlawful strike on Minab school is impartial, independent and transparent,” said Bahreini, adding that America “must also repudiate all threats to commit war crimes and other crimes under international law and commit publicly to full respect for international humanitarian law, particularly the prohibition of directing attacks at civilians and civilian objects.”

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to commit genocide in Iran, ahead of warnings of a wave of attacks on civilian infrastructure. After backing off, Trump lobbed new threats on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Iran can’t get their act together,” Trump wrote, above an AI-generated image of himself, donning sunglasses and carrying an automatic rifle, with explosions going off in the background. The caption of the image reads, “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”

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During his testimony on Wednesday, Hegseth lobbed his own bellicose threats. “The days in which these narco-terrorists — Designated Terrorist Organizations — operated freely in our hemisphere are over,” he said. “We are tracking them. We are killing them.” Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 55 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, destroying 56 vessels and killing more than 185 civilians since last September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

The casualties in Yemen include an attack on an immigrant detention center last year, killing and injuring dozens of Ethiopian civilians, according to an investigation by Amnesty International. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the U.S. military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” said Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the U.S. military has taken to address it.”

When it comes to the Trump administration’s neglect for civilian harm, experts say Yemen was the canary in the coal mine. Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes 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 almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured.

Hegseth spent Wednesday defending the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation machinery in the face of evidence that he has consistently taken steps to undermine it.

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“I know that there is no country on Planet Earth that takes more measures to ensure that civilian harm or civilian casualties are minimized than the United States of America and this War Department. And that is a fact,” he told the House Armed Services Committee. But Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon offices responsible for civilian harm mitigation and fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of military legal counsel and subvert military justice.

The Intercept also found that U.S. Southern Command is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports stemming from the military mission to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to two government officials. Instead, the Pentagon itself is accepting reports directly.

On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, raised the issue of the war secretary’s cuts to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response efforts. “You eliminated the department’s civilian harm reduction staff,” she said, then asking, “Would you not agree something failed because almost 200 children died in Iran as a result of our bombing?”

Hegseth replied, “You’re insinuating something where an investigation is not complete.”

The post Hegseth Brags of a Deadlier War Machine as U.S. Unleashes “Devastating Civilian Harm Globally” appeared first on The Intercept.

By the most cautious estimate, the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion.

The Costs of War analysis is the most comprehensive accounting of the U.S. air, naval, and Special Operations expenses — including some troop deployments and munitions — used in the two campaigns between August 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026. The need for such an estimate stems from the refusal of the Department of War to provide a tally of costs to lawmakers or The Intercept.

The researchers behind the Costs of War estimate say it’s almost assuredly an undercount.

“Operations do not have a clear end date and are actively expanding. They carry significant human, financial, and strategic costs and risk,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group.

“American taxpayers, who are increasingly unable to afford basic needs, have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent,” they noted.

Homestead and Kavanagh observe that the largest costs might still be on the horizon.

“We expect that if comprehensive information were available, our cost estimate would likely increase significantly,” they wrote.

Kavanagh told The Intercept that the expenses were “enough to fund Medicaid for 500,000 people for an entire year.”

“Though the Trump administration is right to focus more on the Western Hemisphere, most needs in the region are economic or require investment in regional law enforcement. The United States is not clearly safer or more prosperous as a result of Operation Southern Spear or Operation Absolute Resolve,” she said.

The Naval deployment — which comprised the largest concentration of U.S. ships in the region since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 — constituted the single largest expense, an estimated $3.8 billion. This includes the ever-growing cost of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group which consists of the USS Iwo Jima, USS Fort Lauderdale, and USS San Antonio, which remain deployed in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the USS Lake Erie guided-missile cruiser. Costs of War puts the daily operating costs of these ships at around $9 million per day.

The steep Naval expenditures are followed by at least $616 million spent on the deployment of aircraft, including P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, F-35A Lightning II fighters, and MQ-9 Reaper drones used in both operations. The continuing daily cost of operating the at least 20 aircraft that are assumed to remain deployed in the region is $2.6 million.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Costs of War analysis puts the price tag of the munitions employed in these attacks on boats at between $12.5 million and $50 million, the range owing to the lack of transparency surrounding the strikes. The report notes that the individual cost of armaments used in each strike may top $1 million and could actually be far higher if multiple munitions or aircraft are used.

Beyond expenses captured under Southern Spear, ancillary costs of Absolute Resolve, a large-scale air campaign and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, top $206 million. This includes the deployment of at least 150 aircraft — fighter jets, bombers, and Special Operations aircraft, and more — along with precision munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and JASSM-ER missiles.

The approximately 200 Special Operations forces who played a key role in Maduro’s kidnapping cost about $16 million, to include the costs of daily operations and combat. As yet unknown are the costs of deployments of U.S. commandos in Ecuador, another front in America’s Western hemispheric war.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as what Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed designated terrorist organizations. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Humire announced last month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3. In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in Ecuador, the White House also informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

America’s wars in the Western Hemisphere are part of what President Donald Trump and others have termed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. While President James Monroe’s policy aimed to prevent Europe from meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has employed his version as a license for America to do exactly that.

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The National Security Strategy, released late last year, decrees the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine a “potent restoration of American power and priorities,” rooted in the “readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” Last month, Humire told members of the House Armed Services Committee that “America’s immediate security perimeter” extended from “Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” The Trump administration has, in fact, bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland, while conducting counter-cartel CIA operations in Mexico.

The Pentagon refuses to provide insights into its expenditures for conflicts in Latin America.

“For any information regarding budgetary costs for Operations Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve, I’ll have to refer you to OSW,” U.S. Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud told The Intercept. When asked about the costs, the Office of the Secretary of War said it does “not have anything to provide currently.” 

Homestead and Kavanagh admit that the $4.7 billion price tag placed on Operations Absolute Resolve and Southern Spear is likely a low-ball figure. “This is a conservative estimate based on the limited information about the operation that is available,” they wrote. “Full data for several cost categories are not publicly available, and certain operations — such as the details of a CIA operation in Venezuela referenced by President Trump — remain classified or incompletely reported in the public domain.”

Costs are mounting by the day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Trump has said he expects the U.S. will be running Venezuela for years. (He recently teased the possibility of making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state, before saying he could run for president of that country.) The Intercept previously reported that Pentagon procurement documents indicate the U.S. plans to maintain a massive military presence in the Caribbean until late 2028.

“Much of the military forward presence involved in these operations appears to now have become the ‘steady state,’ that is, it is likely to remain in the region for the foreseeable future,” said Kavanagh. “This means that the costs will continue to accumulate.”

The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” write Homestead and Kavanagh. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

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Recently, 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, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

“Across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of health care, but the U.S. government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations — from Venezuela to Iran — without any regard for human rights, life or rule of law,” Homestead told The Intercept. “This situation illustrates why greater restraint on Pentagon spending — which primarily benefits private contractors — is so necessary.”

The post Trump Has Already Spent at Least $4.7 Billion Attacking Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

On the day the ceasefire between the Trump administration and Iran took effect, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number had slowly risen to 428 on Monday, according to Pentagon statistics. Yet on Tuesday, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 troops without public comment from the War Department, dropping the total to 413. The count held steady on Wednesday, except for one public War Department tally that put the “grand total” of wounded and dead at 411.

The casualty conundrum came as President Donald Trump extended the truce with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire.

Two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions on the 15 casualties disappeared by the War Department on Tuesday, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them.

A day, and multiple follow-ups, later, The Intercept has yet to receive an explanation of why 15 wounded personnel were scrubbed from the War Department’s casualty rolls.

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Whatever the actual number, the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official has 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.

“These numbers, it is obvious, are important. That they don’t want the public to have them says something,” the official said. “That’s the definition of a cover-up.”

The Intercept spoke with two people who used to work on DCAS who said that there was historically very little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the system. “We got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,” Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. 

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions about the slow accumulation of casualties over two weeks or the reason the number of those wounded-in-action has increased by 43, or 28, or 26 since the cessation of hostilities on April 8.

Since The Intercept began asking hard questions about undercounts of dead and wounded personnel, the slow-walking of statistics, faulty accounting measures, and arcane casualty-counting procedures, both U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War have clammed up, failing to answer questions or grant interviews with experts. It follows long-running efforts by Trump to mislead the American people about U.S. military casualties.

Setting aside the question of disappearing wounded, the Pentagon’s official casualty statistics offer a distorted image of the conflict. 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 at least 63 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 which had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations, said Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, to “project combat power.” The 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.

Crenshaw said that DCAS data during the 2000s and early 2010s included the numbers of wounded, injured, and ill. She questioned why the smoke inhalation injuries from the USS Ford were missing from the publicly reported data. “That should have been entered into DCAS,” she said. “My concern is why that piece is now missing.”

A second person who also worked on DCAS during the war on terror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to their employment, expressed similar concerns and questioned what the Pentagon “had to hide.”

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. And the military’s own studies have shown — as a 2025 article in Military Review, the U.S. Army’s professional journal, put it — the “profound impact of disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) on lost duty days and overall lethality.

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During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DNBI accounted for 80 to 85 percent of evacuations, significantly outpacing battle injury evacuations, even during spikes in combat. Another military study found that more than one-third of the casualties and almost 12 percent of all deaths of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through 2014 were caused by DNBI. And as a 2024 meta-analysis in Military Medicine observed, “disease and non-battle injury (DNBI) has historically been the leading casualty type among service members in warfare and a leading health problem confronting military personnel.”

In addition to ignoring untold numbers of sick and wounded personnel, the Pentagon has undercounted the dead during the Iran war.

“We will always honor the fallen,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, announced at a Pentagon press conference last week. “And the 13 who lost their lives really helped steel the resolve and congeal the motivation of the forces.”

DCAS similarly lists 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war and provides their names. But missing from Cooper’s count and the Pentagon tally is 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, 2026.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

For weeks, the Pentagon has ignored requests for comment on why Davius is missing from its casualty rolls.

During a Tuesday interview, Trump repeatedly said that 13 male service members had died during Operation Epic Fury. “We lost 13 men,” he said on CNBC. “But if somebody would have said, ‘We’ve done this and obliterated that country — obliterated it — and we lost 13 men,’ people would’ve said, ‘That’s not possible.’” According to DCAS, three of the dead are actually women: Maj. Ariana Gabriella Savino, Technical Sgt. Ashley Brooke Pruitt, and Master Sgt. Nicole Marie Amor.

Almost a decade ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to undermine transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties. Not long after Trump first took office, in 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan — an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.

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. “We suffered no casualties.”

Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 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.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump also peddled casualty disinformation, claiming that for 18 months of his presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghanistan 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. The AP determined that there were, however, 45 combat deaths among U.S. service members reported in Afghanistan, as well as 18 “non-hostile” deaths during Trump’s first term.

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 attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon had offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops, but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

The post Pentagon Erases Wounded U.S. Troops From Iran War Casualty List: “Definition of a Cover-up” appeared first on The Intercept.

The American personnel died in a vehicular crash in the mountains of the Sierra de Chihuahua following a drug raid, alongside two Mexican officials, including Román Oseguera Cervantes, the director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson announced the deaths of the Americans on Sunday, referring to them in a post on X as “two members of staff from the United States Embassy.”

The State Department refused requests for additional information on the Americans’ activities or the agencies that employed them. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a Monday press conference that she was unaware of “any direct work between Chihuahua state and personnel from the U.S. embassy.”

Two U.S. government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said the CIA has been running covert operations in Mexico, working alongside vetted Mexican state-level police forces and other government agencies. The sources said the Americans died after a raid on a synthetic drug lab.

“You may note that CIA declined to comment,” a CIA spokesperson told The Intercept by email in response to questions about the deaths.

Mexican authorities told the press that the Americans were not involved in the raid, after earlier stating they died following the operation against the labs.

Western Hemisphere Front

Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone, as part of what he and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — which Trump has turned into a unilateral license to militarily meddle in the U.S.’s backyard — has led to strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; and increased military operations elsewhere in Latin America.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. He said his elite troops “remain postured to provide … support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  

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In a little-noticed move in January, U.S. Northern Command, on Trump’s order, established Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel, or JIATF-CC, to coordinate U.S. government intelligence “to identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel networks.” Among other things, the task force was established for “developing cartel targets for action by USNORTHCOM’s partners and providing direct support to law enforcement.” 

Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM’s commander, said then that the task force would be operating “via traditional and non-traditional means to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant intelligence to execution elements.” Last week, he told lawmakers that the force would “provide actionable intelligence to the Government of Mexico and federal law enforcement counterparts acting domestically based on leads developed from foreign intelligence operations.”

“Trump has reportedly been pushing for U.S. direct action against drug labs and traffickers in Mexico since his first term,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “In his second term, he now has some officials in his administration eager to do a ‘Sicario’ — making Mexico a battlefield in the new GWOT,” or global war on terror, “against the narcos.”

Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire was unable to tell members of the House Armed Services Committee how many land strikes were being conducted across almost 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations. “I don’t have an exact number,” he replied to a question last month. But when asked by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the committee, if the War Department would “be moving to a lot more terrestrial strikes,” Humire replied, “Yes, ranking member.”

Trump mused last year that he might send U.S. commandos into Mexico to battle cartels.

“Could happen,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also threatened military action on Mexican soil.

Over the Precipice

The Americans died at around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning in the town of Morelos after their multi-vehicle convoy departed from the site of the drug raid. The vehicle reportedly drove off the road and over the side of a ravine, exploding upon impact. 

The Americans killed in the wreck in Mexico are some of the first known casualties since Trump ramped up military and CIA operations in and around Latin America last year. A number of U.S. military personnel were injured in the U.S. attack on Venezuela in January. In February, Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, fell off the USS Iwo Jima while it was conducting operations in the Caribbean and was declared deceased on February 10.

The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office claimed that the Americans in Mexico were only conducting training on drone operations, according to Mexican press reports. Sheinbaum said at a news conference Monday that she would ask Johnson, Washington’s ambassador, to meet with Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco Álvarez to discuss the incident. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said that Mexico will not accept U.S. boots on the ground.

“It’s outrageous that U.S. operatives were working to blow up drug labs in Mexico and President Sheinbaum’s security cabinet wasn’t informed of their activities,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

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Last year, the State Department declared six Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Northeast Cartel, the Michoacán family, the United Cartels, and the Gulf Cartel — to be foreign terrorist organizations. The Salvadoran MS-13 and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gangs were also named. The designation activates U.S. sanctions, including restrictions on financial transactions and bans on U.S. citizens from providing support to the groups.

The drug war deaths in Mexico follow the announcement of new joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador last month. Humire said that the Defense Department supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” — Pentagon-speak for March 3 strikes on unnamed “Designated Terrorist Organizations” previously reported by The Intercept.

“The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” he said.

The attacks in Ecuador are also part of, and an expansion of, Operation Southern Spear: the U.S. military’s illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people.

Gen. Francis Donovan, the chief of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers last month that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even broader campaign.

“What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Correction: April 21, 2026, 3:10 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article misstated how many Mexican cartels the State Department designated as foreign terrorist organizations; it was six, not eight.

The post U.S. Personnel Who Died in Mexico Were Working for the CIA, Sources Say appeared first on The Intercept.

On April 11, the U.S. conducted attacks on two boats in the Pacific Ocean, killing two people in the first strike and leaving one shipwrecked. The search for that survivor has been abandoned and that person is presumed dead. Three people were killed in the second strike that day. These attacks were followed by another strike in the Eastern Pacific on April 13 that killed two more people.

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As part of Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has now destroyed 51 vessels and killed 171 civilians. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called “bilateral kinetic actions” along the Colombia–Ecuador border. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced last month.

“There’s a danger that these lawless killings just become background noise,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept in the wake of the 50th boat strike. “The U.S. Congress remains the institution best situated to bring these to halt — if not now, then at least after the midterms. And members of Congress and 2028 hopefuls should be vowing accountability for those who participated in unlawful killings.”

Finucane and other experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

After blowing up one of the boats on Saturday, U.S. Southern Command sent a message to the Coast Guard alerting them to “a person in distress in the Pacific Ocean,” Coast Guard spokesperson Kenneth Wiese told The Intercept.

The Coast Guard “immediately commenced search efforts,” calling on ships in the area to divert to search for the survivor of the U.S. attack. The next day, a French-flagged cargo ship, MV Marius, diverted to the scene but “completed its search with negative results and departed the area due to operational and fuel constraints,” according to the Coast Guard. On Monday, a U.S.-flagged research vessel, RV Sikuliaq, “completed two search patterns provided by the Coast Guard with negative results.” The same day, at 10:43 Pacific time, the Coast Guard suspended its efforts after having found “no signs of survivors or debris.”

Most boat strike survivors have been purposefully killed or left to drown by the United States. Two survivors, for example, clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked on September 2, 2025, for roughly 45 minutes. Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC. He then ordered a follow-up attack, first reported by The Intercept in September, that killed the shipwrecked men.

Search efforts for survivors have seldom resulted in rescues. After a U.S boat strike on December 30, a Coast Guard plane did not head toward the site of the attack for almost two days, reporting from Airwars and The Intercept revealed. A total of 11 civilians died following that attack— including eight who jumped overboard.

The Coast Guard atypically rescued the survivor of a March 19 attack that killed two civilians. The Costa Rican press recently identified the deceased as Ecuadoran citizens Pedro Ramón Holguín, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Solórzano, 34. The injured man was identified as José David Torres Hurtado, 21, a Colombian national. He reportedly remains hospitalized in the burn unit at San Juan de Dios Hospital, “where, according to medical reports, his condition is critical but stable,” said Costa Rican authorities.

The Intercept reported on Monday that the U.S. is waging a pressure campaign against the leading pan-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into the illegal boat strike campaign. After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the U.S. campaign of extrajudicial killings.

The post The U.S. Is Still Routinely Killing Civilians in Boats appeared first on The Intercept.