“These actions reflect great courage because it is the Americans they are fighting, the Americans whose fleets, aircraft carriers, and bases fill the region,” Nasrallah said of his Iraqi allies. “If you Americans want these operations on the supporting fronts to stop, if you don’t want regional war, you must stop the aggression and war on Gaza.”

Nasrallah’s words indicate growing unity among the so-called axis of resistance, a network of Iran-backed actors in the Mideast that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian government, the Houthis in Yemen, and armed groups in Iraq and Syria. Though this unity and the violence it threatens to unleash has not yet translated into major military action, it marks the most significant backlash to the U.S. presence in the region in recent years.

The resistance narrative has found appeal beyond members of the axis, many of whom the U.S. considers terror organizations. Even in more moderate circles, America’s unfettered support for Israel, in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, has fueled anti-American sentiment in a region where many people see Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza as an extension of decades of unjust U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Gut-wrenching images of bombing victims in Gaza have brought back memories of bloody conflicts the U.S. has waged or supported in places like Iraq and Yemen, with Western reluctance to condemn Israel for massive Palestinian casualties reminding Arabs and Muslims how little their lives seem to factor into Western policymaking.

The lackluster response of Arab nations has allowed militant groups to capitalize on popular outrage and bolster their resistance credentials by positioning themselves as the only ones willing to stand up to Israel and its backers. 

In Iraq, Israel’s war on Palestine has regalvanized armed factions that formed in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion, an anti-occupation cause they see as directly linked to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In just the last 24 hours, there have been several engagements between Iraqi militants and U.S. forces.

In his Baghdad office, Kataib Hezbollah military spokesperson Jaafar al-Husseini arrived for our meeting at the end of October in an upbeat mood that seemed at odds with the bloodshed that engulfed the region since October 7. “To the contrary, this is the easiest of times,” he explained. “This is a straightforward battle. Palestine is the fundamental issue.”

Kataib Hezbollah is the most secretive and most powerful of the Iraqi resistance groups. Although they’ve been partly incorporated into the government security apparatus as part of what Iraqi officials describe as a gradual demobilization — critics call it state capture at the hands of Iranian proxies — they relapse into violence during times of perceived Western meddling. The Pentagon’s recent decision to deploy aircraft carriers and personnel to the Middle East was taken as evidence of direct U.S. involvement in the Israel–Palestine conflict.

“America is a partner in this battle and in killing Palestinians, and therefore, they must pay the price,” al-Husseini said. “What is happening now in terms of targeting American bases is a natural response of the resistance fighters.”

Iraq’s “resistance” factions have momentarily put aside rivalries to jointly claim responsibility, via a newly established Telegram channel, for dozens of rocket and drone attacks on American troops stationed in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State group, which the Pentagon says have resulted in several light injuries.

These ripple effects were part of Hamas’s calculus to help shatter what the Palestinian group regarded as an untenable status quo in the occupied territories. The prospect of a political solution had faded in recent years amid increased violence and expulsions by Israelis, especially in the West Bank, under the watch of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.

“The U.S. administration provided full cover for the Netanyahu government to work on the judaization of Jerusalem and attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, to expand settlements, to continue the siege on Gaza and to end the Palestinian cause,” Osama Hamdan, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told The Intercept in an interview in Beirut last week.

With its surprise attack in October and Israel’s predictable retaliation, Hamas has succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the geopolitical table while generating greater unity between allies in a region polarized by decades of conflict and ethnic and sectarian strife. “There is no doubt that there’s an evolution in relations amid this confrontation,” Hamdan said, adding that it has helped bridge the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites.

While the U.S. portrays the “resistance” as Iranian proxies acting at Tehran’s behest, decisions in the alliance aren’t centrally imposed, Hamdan and other resistance officials said; instead, each actor is balancing regional and domestic issues. “We don’t ask for specific actions because we recognize that the environment varies from country to country, and conditions vary from country to country,” said Hamdan. “But we demand efforts to support the Palestinian cause.”

Hezbollah is the most potent non-state actor in the “axis of resistance.” It was formed in 1982 with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to resist Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon at that time. Hezbollah fought a second war against Israel in 2006 and is now engaged in a limited exchange of fire across Lebanon’s southern border, with carefully calibrated strikes aiming to divert Israeli military resources while avoiding a full-scale war.

Nasrallah’s depiction of a united front has been accompanied by some level of operational coordination in Lebanon’s south, with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad being allowed to use Hezbollah’s areas of control to attack Israel amid reports that an operations room has been set up for this purpose.

“This is part of Hezbollah’s battle tactic. It is delivering messages to Israel that the opening of the front is possible at any moment. The presence of non-Shiite groups is part of this message, meaning that the battle will be widespread,” said Azzam al-Ayoubi, the former secretary general of Lebanese Sunni Islamist party al-Jama’ah al-Islamiya, whose previously dormant military wing has also joined the fray, claiming responsibility for several attacks on Israel.  

Relations between Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni groups like al-Jama’ah al-Islamiya and Hamas frayed during the Syrian war, with Hezbollah seen as complicit in the mass killings of Sunnis because it fought alongside President Bashar al-Assad, Ayoubi said. Those differences have been at least temporarily set aside in what some interpret as a sign of sectarian rapprochement. “It is possible that we are now at least somewhat on the side of Hezbollah,” Ayoubi acknowledged. “It is Hezbollah who is facing Israel, and we also have this principle.”

The latest events have ended a period of relative quiet during which the U.S. had hoped to redirect its attention and resources to other parts of the world, especially China. The new tumult risks undermining years of diplomatic efforts to repair strained relations with Arab countries like Iraq and has put on hold a U.S. push to normalize ties between Israel and Arab nations. It has also renewed calls for the withdrawal of American troops stationed in the region.

The operations in Iraq mark the end of a unilateral truce during which the factions ceased attacking American troops in Iraq to let the government, which their political affiliates brought to power, manage the relationship through diplomacy. As part of this latest setback in U.S.–Iraq relations, there have been renewed demands to implement a January 2020 parliamentary vote to oust foreign troops. “These operations will not stop until the last American soldier is removed,” al-Husseini said.

American troops returned to Iraq in 2014 to help the government fight ISIS; the U.S. has since tried to shed its legacy as an occupying force and portray itself as a strategic partner. Those efforts were derailed when a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi paramilitary chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020, an act Iraq viewed as a violation of its sovereignty. Since then, a series of bilateral negotiations has aimed to smooth tensions and ensure continuity of U.S. troop presence in spite of the parliament decision to expel them.

Although Iraqi factions have threatened further escalation, they, like Lebanese Hezbollah, are constrained by domestic interests and do not want a wider war. “They don’t want to get involved in this conflict,” said an Iraqi security official who asked not to be named to speak openly about a sensitive matter. “They have too much to lose,” he added, alluding to political and economic interests that have served to moderate the conduct of some armed groups in recent years.

In an apparent attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2020 unraveling that followed Soleimani’s and Muhandis’s assassination, the Biden administration at first avoided hitting back at factions inside Iraq, only carrying out limited strikes inside Syria, where Iraqi resistance groups also operate. That changed on Tuesday, when an American air strike killed one Kataib Hezbollah operative in Baghdad shortly after the group carried out a missile attack on Ain al-Assad base in Western Iraq, followed hours later by a second, more lethal strike on a Kataib Hezbollah stronghold near Bagdad that left five dead.

In a statement, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the earlier strikes in Syria were “separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas” and urged “all state and non-state entities not to take action that would escalate into a broader regional conflict.” Such remarks fuel the perception among the “resistance” that the U.S. is refusing to acknowledge and fix the root cause of the crisis, instead further inflaming grievances by trying to suppress what these groups, and many Muslims, regard as a legitimate struggle.

Last week’s decision to impose fresh sanctions against seven members of Kataib Hezbollah, including al-Husseini, as well as another group, has been met with defiance and mockery. Nasrallah has also dismissed U.S. appeals to governments in Iraq and Lebanon to rein in the paramilitaries.

“This intimidation did not stop the operations of the Iraqi resistance, did not stop the operations of the Yemeni brothers, did not stop or stop the resistance operations in Lebanon,” the Hezbollah leader said. “The one who can stop the aggression is the one who leads it, and that is America.”

Update: November 22, 2023 9:28 a.m.
This story was updated with news of another U.S. attack in Iraq.

The post America’s Unwavering Support for Israel Fuels Iran-Backed “Axis of Resistance” appeared first on The Intercept.

Activist hackers known as the “Cyber Resistance” and allied to the Ukrainian government recently infiltrated the personal email account of a Russian officer in the Western Military District who was involved in the recruitment of Cubans. The stolen data offers rare and previously unseen insight into how Russia operates its pipeline of foreign mercenaries into the Ukraine conflict.

Within the cache of hacked documents are approximately 122 passport scans and images of Cuban nationals, all fighting-aged males, along with a series of Spanish-language enlistment contracts in with a section of the Russian Armed Forces headquartered in the city of Tula, where a military school and airborne soldiers are known to be located. The contracts are templates, not fully executed agreements, but they sketch the incentives Russia appears to be offering foreign fighters.

The contracts promise “a one-time cash payment in the amount of 195,000 rubles,” about $2,000, for the Cubans signing on to serve in the zone of the “special military operation” (the Kremlin euphemism for the war in Ukraine) and monthly payments starting at “204,000 rubles per month,” or just over $2,000, depending on rank, along with several spousal and family benefits. So far, these types of official Russian military contracts geared toward foreign nationals have mostly been discussed in regional media reports (such as those targeting ethnic Russian men in former Soviet republics, according to the British Ministry of Defence).

One set of images in the hacked documents shows single passports with a hand holding up entry cards into Russia above them, revealing that a group of at least five Cuban men entered the country through Belarus, a key Kremlin ally, on July 1. A little over a month before that arrival date, a senior Belarussian military official made a public show of pledging to train Cuban troops on its territory.

While the hacked documents do not include signed enlistment contracts for the Cubans, some of the Cubans in the array of passport scans were easily found through Facebook profile searches, and some of them openly posted about relocating to Russia and posed in locations around the Tula region. One of them not only updated his Facebook profile with details that he traveled from Santiago de Cuba to Russia in early July, but also posted a flurry of videos with a new Russian passport and in front of tank columns with the trademark Russian “Z” spray-painted on the sides. 

Only weeks ago, that same Cuban man put out a video from the center of Tula in a popular square that was easily geolocated by The Intercept. Similarly, another apparent recruit from Havana posed at an outdoor shopping center in Tula and, in a separate image, with a fresh buzzcut in front of a Pyaterochka market – a popular grocery chain in Russia – just last week.

Three of the Cubans from the hacked cache also appeared in a Facebook story from early September smiling together, with one of them sporting the famous striped telnyashka undershirt worn by Russian airborne soldiers and paratroopers, the types of soldiers stationed in Tula where the Cubans are suspected of being trained. The aunt of another one of the Cuban nationals posted a birthday photo of her nephew (that matched his passport date of birth) and said that he had been “in Russia” and alluded to “fighting in Ukraine.” 

Among the many details in the hack of the Russian officer’s inbox are email exchanges with military accounts and the translators who processed the Cuban passports; images of internal meetings with high-ranking uniformed officers; and an Excel spreadsheet with nearly a hundred recruitment contacts across four of the five official military districts of Russia.

For his part, the hacked Russian officer, Maj. Anton Valentinovich Perevozchikov, did not deny his role in recruiting the Cubans. He instead sent an expletive-laced reply to The Intercept denouncing NATO and declaring, “Russia will win.”

According to a senior officer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces with direct knowledge of the hacked materials, “We can see that a group of Cuban citizens are going to participate in some activities related to the Russian military.” He added, “Their efforts remain focused on enticing new recruits voluntarily to prevent a fresh wave of mandatory mobilization.”

According to the same officer, at the outset of the full-scale war in 2022, amid the massive failures in Russia’s initial offensives on Kyiv, the Ukrainian military observed that limited numbers of volunteers “willing to risk their lives under the leadership of ineffective Russian officers” came from abroad. The latest push with Cubans, he added, could be aimed at bolstering the perception that there is international support for Russia, though economics are a factor too.

“It’s possible that Cuban citizens are being enlisted due to cost considerations as they are simply cheaper,” he said. “Apart from salaries, the Russian government is obligated to provide additional compensation in cases of injury or death for its citizens. However, this responsibility doesn’t extend to Cuban citizens. When you come here for financial gain, your death is your headache.”

Global Volunteers in Ukraine

Since the beginning of the total invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been persistent talk that the Kremlin was soliciting the help of global volunteers. While Kyiv has made no secret of having its own International Legion, made up of NATO veterans and volunteers from around the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin has remained mostly tight-lipped on his use of foreign fighters. 

That didn’t stop early reports swirling of Syrian mercenaries, adept in urban combat from years of sectarian warfare, being enlisted into the Russian war effort, or Pentagon claims of Iranian operatives in Ukraine, and other rumors that soldiers from the Central African Republic (an ally of the Kremlin) were fighting on behalf of Moscow. 

But the hacked material, dating from this summer, suggests that Putin and his military apparatus have made real efforts to recruit foreign fighters for a bloody war that is causing mass casualties on both sides. While the Kremlin has often accused the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of hiring foreign mercenaries for its International Legion, the cache illustrates that Russia is also enlisting foreigners from its own allied countries.

On Monday, the Cuban government said it had uncovered a criminal “human trafficking network” that was ferrying some of its citizens to the Russian war effort and denied Cuba’s involvement. “The Ministry of the Interior detected and is working on the neutralization and dismantling of a human trafficking network that operates from Russia to incorporate Cuban citizens based there, and even some from Cuba, into the military forces that participate in military operations in Ukraine,” according to the statement. “Cuba has a firm and clear historical position against mercenarism and plays an active role in the United Nations in repudiating that practice.”

The Cuban government did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

It is unclear whether Havana’s statement on Monday was prompted by the recruitment effort revealed by the hacked documents, or by a report in a Miami newspaper on how Russia had allegedly forced a pair of teenaged Cuban migrants into its military in the Ryazan region, which neighbors Tula.

Emails to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the apparent channeling of Cuban mercenaries into the war in Ukraine went unanswered.

In September, Russian media reported Cuban immigrants already living in Russia had signed up for the war effort after Putin decreed an easy path to citizenship for foreign nationals who enlisted in the military. But the records from Perevozchikov’s inbox show that this group of men was recruited into Russia this year.

While the war in Ukraine has invigorated NATO and spurred on the addition of two new member states, Finland and Sweden, it has also reawakened other geopolitical alliances. Russia and Cuba were strategic allies during the Cold War, when Cuban leader Fidel Castro sent his troops to fight in the Soviet-backed war in Angola.

The two sides have strengthened their bonds since the broader invasion of Ukraine started a year and a half ago. Cuban leaders have time and again sided with Russia and have not publicly denounced the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine. Putin, for his part, has refused to rule out deploying troops to the island nation just over 100 miles from the Florida coast. 

The post Hacked Documents Reveal Russia’s Contracts for Cuban Mercenaries in Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept.

For years, Kapustin has maintained public links with two notorious American neo-Nazis: Robert Rundo, the founder of the street fighting gang Rise Above Movement, and Christopher Pohlhaus, an ex-Marine and leader of a group that terrorizes drag events in the U.S.

While Kapustin has been a regular fixture for years among European extremists, he gained minor popularity among American neo-Nazis when he started co-hosting a podcast in January 2021 with Rundo, a Charlottesville riot defendant now facing extradition to the U.S. from Romania. On the multiepisode show, the two men — avid mixed martial artists — discussed the benefits of “active clubs,” which are essentially fascist fight clubs that have sprouted up all over the U.S.

But Kapustin, who also goes by his call sign “White Rex” (his personal MMA brand) or uses the last name “Nikitin,” has contacts that go further into stateside neo-Nazism.

In July 2021, he also appeared in another two-and-a-half hour podcast with Pohlhaus, a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps who only months ago, with a revolver strapped to his hip, led his so-called Blood Tribe in a protest of a drag event outside Akron, Ohio. The relationship appears ongoing: Pohlhaus has told his followers on the Telegram app in recent weeks that he wants to help his friend “Denis” in Ukraine and plans to travel there to establish a neo-Nazi pipeline of volunteer soldiers to the cause.

In the wake of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s regime weeks ago, Kapustin illustrates just how radical some of the faces of armed opposition to Putin really are. Following RVC’s cross-border operations, which featured American-supplied Humvees and other armored vehicles, reports rightly pointed out that the RVC and its politics could provide a boost for Russian propagandists who frequently accuse Kyiv of being a kind of Fourth Reich.

Mostly composed of Russian ultranationalists with the stated goal of overthrowing the Russian Federation, the RVC is undeniably affiliated with the far right, with members often seen wearing patches with neo-Nazi symbols. Kapustin is also a known figure to German authorities, who allegedly had him banned from the European Union’s Schengen area for his violent neo-Nazism and connections to the extremist MMA scene. The Ukrainian government, for its part, has repeatedly maintained that the RVC isn’t officially part of its war effort or under its control, though the government admitted that it cooperates with and feeds intelligence to the controversial Russian partisans.

Pohlhaus, known to his followers as “The Hammer,” has recently emerged as one of the more public and militant figures in the world of online American neo-Nazism. With confirmed links to Riley June Williams, the January 6 attacker who allegedly stole a laptop from Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office, Pohlhaus moved to Maine last year and began building a property for an all-white community where his Blood Tribe could “train.”

This year, Pohlhaus and his group made headlines for twice showing up to drag events in Ohio and allying with NSC-131, another underground neo-Nazi group based in New England that recently threatened a New Hampshire drag story hour. At his last Ohio protest in April at a fundraiser for LGBTQ+ youth in Columbus, Pohlhaus, who never saw combat as a Marine, paced with his masked followers as they waved a swastika flag and did the “Sieg Heil” salute to eventgoers.

Anti-Putin Fighters

Though he previously showed little interest in the war in Ukraine, Pohlhaus told his followers this week, in both an interview on an underground neo-Nazi podcast and in a lengthy message on Telegram, that now was the time to join the war and help neo-Nazis like Kapustin.

“I will be going personally with a squad of mostly vets who have committed to the task,” Pohlhaus wrote in a message viewed thousands of times on Telegram, explaining that “if everything goes correctly,” he would become the “[neo-Nazi] liaison for the anglosphere in Ukraine.”

In almost daily statements, Kapustin and the RVC publicly ask for recruits with military experience to “join the corps” and provide forms for direct contact to their recruiters through Telegram. (The RVC press account on Telegram has not replied to The Intercept’s requests for comment about links with Pohlhaus and the Blood Tribe.)

“We see the glorious opportunity in this conflict,” said Pohlhaus. “Because the American military is staying out of it, we get the chance to participate [under] OUR banner.”

Though Pohlhaus has been known for grandstanding online, he is an extremist who translates his words into activism: He once organized a national counterprotest on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and explained how to hypothetically use sniper attacks on the food supply chain in a streamed video.

He told The Intercept that his pledge to join the fighting in Ukraine is serious.

“I love Denis and I want to do everything I can to help him succeed,” Pohlhaus wrote in a text message. “It’s going to probably take us a couple years to be there equipped.”

He claimed that he will visit Ukraine to assess the situation firsthand.

“Of course,” he said. “A vacation.”

Whether Pohlhaus would be allowed entry into Ukraine is another question. With an ongoing civilian flight ban in Ukraine, Pohlhaus would have to enter the country through bordering nations like Poland, the usual border of entry for foreign volunteers, or Romania, a country that has recently shown a willingness to arrest extremists from abroad. Both countries are in the NATO alliance, with policing and intelligence apparatuses that cooperate with U.S. authorities.

The Ukrainians, for their part, have shown very little interest in allowing neo-Nazis like Pohlhaus to join their war effort. As far back as October 2020, Ukrainian intelligence made a public show of deporting two American members of neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division. Both men (one of whom was a Marine dropout) were attempting to join elements of the country’s military efforts in the eastern Donbas region, which at the time was the site of trench warfare with pro-Russian forces.

Kacper Rekawek, an expert on the flow of foreign fighters to the war in Ukraine and a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project, says that while there are neo-Nazis from abroad in Ukraine, the problem shouldn’t be overblown.

“It’s certainly not as bad as the Russian propaganda wants us to believe,” said Rekawek. “The caution is warranted, and what I see is there is excitement amongst those far-right types, online and offline.”

According to Rekawek, there are very few neo-Nazi foreigners fighting on the front lines, while groups like CasaPound in Italy, another fascist and nationalist political organization, have sent “observation” missions to Ukraine.

“Some of them take some supplies, they’re usually medical, or some tactical gear, but of course, not weapons,” Rekawek said, who added that “talk of a pipeline” of neo-Nazis into the war is exaggerated. While groups like the RVC have called for new recruits, non-Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking foreigners who once joined the war in droves, regardless of political ideology, don’t typically last on the front lines, nor can they be trained as effectively for combat.

“The capacity of these guys to offer meaningful change on the front lines is limited,” said Rekawek, referring to far-right travelers operating within the Ukrainian war effort. “These organizations are no charity, they’re not there to train you.”

There were initial fears among counterterrorism experts that the war in Ukraine could potentially attract a global movement of neo-Nazis, leading to the formation of an Islamic State-like network. But a year and half into the war, most authorities acknowledge that Ukraine hasn’t yet become a destination for the far-right movement.

Nonetheless, American law enforcement officials have voiced serious concerns about people like Pohlhaus traveling to Ukraine, fighting in the war, and then coming home. At the outset of the invasion in March 2022, an internal Customs and Border Protection report warned that American extremists interrogated at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York before their departure flights were on their way to “join the conflict.” The bulletin openly wondered what kinds of skills those types of “foreign fighters” could learn in Ukraine that could then “proliferate” in “U.S.-based militia and white nationalist groups” once they returned home.

Whatever the outcome of his latest call to volunteer for the conflict, or if it’s simply a bluff to attract more funding to his personal cause, Pohlhaus acknowledged it could be a while before the Blood Tribe appears in Ukraine. He told his followers that it would take time to pool resources and even vehicles in order to be autonomous on the front lines.

“At the end of the day, this is very much Ukraine’s issue,” said Rekawek, who thinks that far-right elements within the Ukrainian military structure could be a problem when it comes to European Union or NATO membership for the country. “It’s up to Ukraine to call the shots. And it will certainly be an issue, but further down the line.”

The post Russian Militia Has Links to American Neo-Nazi and Anti-Trans Figures appeared first on The Intercept.

A young man with a tired smile, Emhamed joined the army in 2020 when a 29-year ceasefire between the Polisario Front and Morocco came to an abrupt end. The Front has fought for nationhood for Western Sahara’s indigenous Sahrawi population for 50 years; Morocco occupied Western Sahara in 1975, and Emhamed grew up on stories of a lost land while living in refugee camps near Tindouf, a town in an inhospitable desert corner of southwestern Algeria. When the ceasefire ended, Emhamed jumped at the opportunity to join the armed forces

He became part of a small unit of mobile fighters sleeping in the open between a smattering of thorny acacia trees amidst a ceaseless repetition of flat, brown, and black-pebbled plains. On a November morning in 2022, he saw the drones far in the sky. It was a beautiful and quiet time of day, and his team sat down to make tea while they waited for orders. Sahrawis prepare tea by pouring it boiling hot in and out of cups in a practiced waterfall until each small glass is filled with a thick topping of foam. By the time the chink of the glasses was interrupted by the buzz of the returning drone, it was already over. Emhamed started to run as the rocket reached ear-piercing levels. He was just feet away when the blast bowled him over. When he got up, the little metal tea kettle and the glasses were gone; only a smoking hole remained. Around him, bodies were scattered. Four men from his unit of 10 were dead.

In December 2020, a month after the end of the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario, then-President Donald Trump declared U.S. support for Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. The recognition contravened the United Nations’ position, which considers Western Sahara a “non-self governing territory,” a euphemism for a colony. In return for U.S. support on Western Sahara, Morocco joined the Abraham Accords, a series of diplomatic deals brokered by Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that resulted in the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco normalizing relations with Israel. Since then, Rabat has gone from having covert ties with Tel Aviv to becoming its open ally, and Israel has sold at least 150 drones to Morocco.

The proliferation of drones in Morocco makes an already unequal war between Morocco and the Polisario completely asymmetrical. The Polisario fight with mortars, drive in repurposed sand-brown Toyotas and old Land Rovers, and rely on traditional guerrilla tactics to try and melt back into the desert. Meanwhile, Morocco has purchased drones from Israel, Turkey, and China, enabling them to carry out attacks deep in Sahrawi territory. Chinese and, especially, Turkish drones appear to be carrying out the majority of strikes, but the Israeli ones are more sophisticated when it comes to surveillance technology.

“Sahrawi people feel that every day, we become similar to Palestinians,” said Mohamed Sidati, the foreign affairs minister of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the name Sahrawis have given their state. Morocco controls an estimated 80 percent of Western Sahara, including the areas rich in phosphate and other valuable resources. To control that territory, Morocco built a 2,700 km sand wall, known as a berm, that snakes through Western Sahara and divides the land in two. On the Moroccan-controlled side of the berm, in what Sahrawis call the “occupied territories,” Sahrawis live under surveillance and face harassment, detention, and torture if they lobby for independence, according to human rights organizations. On the Polisario-controlled side of the wall, Sahrawis have been largely ignored by the international community, while the Abraham Accords have enabled Morocco to heighten its attacks with the help of the latest in drone technology, fresh from Israel.

Heron Drones

While Morocco’s purchase of Israeli drones has been reported since 2014, their use in Western Sahara is less well documented. A local journalist shared photos with The Intercept that had circulated on social media and show an Israeli Heron drone at Dakhla airport, a city on the Moroccan-controlled side of Western Sahara; the photos were dated from late 2020 and early 2021. Details from the hangar in the photos match images of Dakhla airport. Additionally, commercial satellite images show what strongly resembles a Heron drone outside the hangar in October 2021.

Israel first sold three Heron drones to Morocco in a one-time French-brokered deal six years before the official rapprochement between the two states. But after the Abraham Accords, the military deals were ramped up. In November 2021, then-Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited Rabat to sign the first defense memorandum of understanding between the two countries. Days later, Haaretz reported a $22 million sale of exploding Harop drones to Morocco. In September 2022, Morocco purchased 150 more Israeli drones.

Federico Borsari, a researcher specializing in unmanned technologies at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said that Morocco owns or has bought 150 WanderB and ThunderB vertical takeoff and landing drones produced by BlueBird Aero Systems, three Heron TPs and Harop loitering munitions produced by Israel Aerospace Industries (decommissioned by France and transferred to Morocco), and four Hermes 900s produced by Elbit Systems. Borsari used publicly available information to make this assessment. Morocco also owns Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and Chinese Wing Loong drones, both of which are used for combat.

It is unclear whether Israeli drones that are apparently being used in Western Sahara solely provide surveillance and target recognition, or if they also directly attack targets. Sidi Owgal, a senior military official within the Polisario who currently serves as the head of presidential security, told The Intercept that Israeli drones do both. Abwa Ali, a commander within the Polisario who regularly leads attacks against Moroccan bases along the berm, said that he had personally seen missile fragments with Hebrew lettering on them. Some of Morocco’s Israeli drone arsenal could indeed be used as attack drones: The Heron TP and the Hermes 900 can be used for both surveillance and attacks, while the Harop is only for strikes. “The Harop are what we call ‘loitering munitions’; they are expensive and they can hit only once because they destroy at the impact,” said Borsari. “They would most likely be used against high-value targets.”

While it’s unclear whether Israeli drones are being used to launch missiles, Morocco has acquired drones from other countries that appear to be used for that purpose. For instance, Turkey sold 13 Bayraktar TB2 attack drones to Morocco in 2021. In the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, The Intercept examined missile scraps that indicate the TB2s are being used to attack targets in Western Sahara. Some fragments bear the label “MAM-L,” while one piece had the word “Roketsan” written on it. “MAM-L” is the name of a laser-guided bomb manufactured by the Turkish defense ministry contractor Roketsan, and the bomb is typically launched from the Bayraktar TB2. “The sensors on Israeli drones are very sophisticated,” said Borsari. “It is possible that Morocco uses Israeli drones for target recognition followed by an attack with other drones, like the Turkish ones.” He added that “in general, the performances of the Turkish and Chinese sensors are currently absent or lower.”

Owgal and Sidati, the foreign affairs minister, claim that Israeli advisers are on the ground on the Moroccan side of the berm counseling the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces on their use of drone technology. “They are there … not far from the berm,” said Sidati, though he declined to share any evidence, saying it was secret. Borsari believes “it is not only possible but very likely that Israel sent advisers on the ground in Morocco to train the Royal Armed Forces in the use of drones.” Moroccan media has also stated that Rabat plans to manufacture “kamikaze” drones in partnership with Tel Aviv, and Israeli company Elbit Systems recently announced the opening of the two factories in Morocco to produce “defense systems.”

Officials from Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces refused to comment on any of these allegations.

Gaici Nah, the operations manager of Polisario-linked Sahrawi Mine Action Coordination, claims that between 80 and 100 civilians have been killed and injured since the end of the ceasefire in 2020, but did not say how many of each. Nah claims to have documented over 60 drone strikes using a combination of witness statements, news reports, and Polisario military statements. (No Polisario official would comment to The Intercept on the number of military casualties.) Not only Sahrawi citizens have been targeted.

In November 2021, Algeria claimed Morocco used “sophisticated weaponry” to strike three Algerian truckers as they were reportedly passing through Polisario-controlled Western Sahara. In 2022, two Mauritanian citizens were reportedly killed by Moroccan drone strikes. Sidati also alleged that there were many civilian casualties. “The Moroccans have a scorched-earth policy,” he said.

The U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara — or MINURSO, a peacekeeping mission established at the start of the ceasefire to monitor the conflict and carry out an independence referendum (that never happened) — stated in their most recent report, in October 2022, that they were only able to independently confirm casualties in one drone strike and observed traces of human remains at four other sites. They additionally documented 18 drone strikes and confirmed aerial strikes in eight instances. However, U.N. officials said they have limited access to the ground. “Because of the military operations and restrictions on the east side of the berm, patrolling does not account for all of the incidents,” said Yusef Jedian, the head of MINURSO’s Liaison Office in Tindouf.

While reporting in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, The Intercept spoke to a witness of a strike against civilians. Abd Jaleel, a goat and camel farmer, fled his home in November 2021 as the war with Morocco made living in Polisario-controlled Western Sahara too dangerous. Near the Mauritanian border, he saw his neighbor, 29-year-old Salih Mohamed Lamis, another goat trader who had also fled their town as the war heated up. Lamis was about 6 km ahead of him, driving a Land Rover carrying water supplies. As they approached the border, around 11 in the morning, he heard a muffled explosion. At first, he did not realize it was a drone strike, but in the evening, others retrieved Lamis’s body and brought it to Jaleel. Lamis’s face was mangled so badly that it resembled ground meat; his body was completely burned; and when Jaleel attempted to move him, his skin stuck to his own hand. Since the strike, Jaleel has lived in fear of hearing the sound of a drone again. He grows anxious when he is outside in the open, thinking he could be hit at any time. “You can’t hide from the sky,” he said.

In a comment to MINURSO, Morocco had denied targeting civilians in Western Sahara, while also stating that no civilians should live there. “There is no reason to justify the presence of civilians or Algerian nationals, or of other nationalities, in this area,” wrote the permanent representative of Morocco to the United Nations to MINURSO in November 2021. This type of statement is rare, as Morocco generally does not publicly acknowledge the war. During The Intercept’s visit to the Sahrawi camps at the end of May, news spread of a new drone strike against Polisario soldiers; six reportedly died.

“Morocco says they don’t have a war. But why do they have drones attacking on the other side of the berm then?”

“Morocco says they don’t have a war,” a U.N. official told The Intercept, asking that their name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue. “But why do they have drones attacking on the other side of the berm then? They say they don’t have a war. So, this is how they are enjoying peace.”

Camp David Host

Contacts between Morocco and Israel have always been quite friendly compared to the average Israel-Arab world relationship. Jewish communities have historically been present (and well accepted) in Moroccan cities. Last December, Israeli President Isaac Herzog wrote a letter to King Mohammed VI of Morocco to thank him for the shelter the kingdom gave to Jews during the Holocaust. After World War II, most Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel, but the bonds remained strong.

Morocco hosted some of the Israel-Egypt secret talks that would lead to the Camp David Accords in 1978, and King Hassan II was a firm sustainer of the détente between Tel Aviv and Cairo. Israel and Morocco established low-level diplomatic relations in 1994 when Tel Aviv opened a liaison office in Rabat. The office closed after the Second Intifada in 2000, but informal relations never stopped. In 2021, the Israeli representation office in Rabat reopened.

The Abraham Accords opened the way to official relations, and it seems that Morocco and Israel were just waiting for an opportunity to start doing business together. Since 2020, the two countries have implemented a long series of economic and military agreements beyond the sale of drones. For the first time, Israeli troops from the elite Golani unit participated in Africa Lion, an 18-country joint military drill in Morocco, which completed on June 18. In 2021 and 2022, respectively, Gantz, Israel’s then-minister of defense, and then-Head of Israel Defense Forces Aviv Kochavi visited Morocco and signed several military deals, including a $500 million contract for the delivery of the Barak MX missile defense system to Rabat. Early this year, one of the Pentagon Discord leaks allegedly revealed that the system was scheduled to arrive in Morocco in mid-2023. Morocco is reportedly also in advanced negotiations to receive Israeli Merkava tanks. Rabat and Tel Aviv are also cooperating at an intelligence level. Morocco has widely been reported (and accused by other countries) as one of the most eager users of the Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli NSO Group.

Meanwhile, economic cooperation is booming. According to U.N. data analyzed by The Intercept, in pre-Abraham 2019, trade between Israel and Morocco was at $70.7 million. In 2022, the figure reached $178.7 million, and Tel Aviv has declared it is targeting $500 million. From 2019 to 2022, exports from Israel to Morocco increased tenfold, from $3.8 million to $38.5 million. Western Sahara plays an important role in the love story between the two countries. In 2021 and 2022, two Israeli companies, Ratio Petroleum and NewMed Energy, obtained from Morocco rights to research and potentially exploit two separate offshore blocks in the Atlantic Ocean just off Western Sahara’s coastline. Moroccan local news also announced Israel’s Selina group would soon open a hotel in Dakhla. For Morocco, foreign investments in what it considers its “southern province” mean external recognition of its claims on the territory.

Israeli businesses, like other foreign actors, don’t seem concerned about international law when investing in Western Sahara. A 2002 U.N. legal opinion deemed illegal the exploration and exploitation of mineral resources in a “non-self governing territory” like Western Sahara without the authorization of the people of that territory. In three following rulings, the European Union Court of Justice has, in various forms, condemned trading in Western Sahara without the consent of the Sahrawi people. At the end of 2022, Western Sahara Resource Watch, a pressure group that monitors resource exploitation in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, asked NewMed Energy about the legitimacy of the deal. The company replied that “all our actions in the past and in the present are done in accordance with and subject to international law and Israeli law and the laws in force.” When WSRW asked three times “which country’s laws” are applicable to Western Sahara, NewMed Energy stopped replying.

In March last year, WSRW reported the first shipment of phosphate rock from Western Sahara to Israel. Erik Hagen, board member of WSRW, told The Intercept that the cargo was very small, and it is the only one they observed toward Israel. OCP, the Moroccan company extracting and exporting phosphate rock in Morocco and Western Sahara, hasn’t replied to a request for comment about the episode.

Morocco’s drone attacks do not appear to have sapped any energy from the Polisario’s long war; if anything they are adding fuel to the fire. Emhamed, the drone strike survivor, had to get treatment for a shrapnel injury, but he has already returned to the camps to participate in a military parade for the Polisario’s 50th anniversary. He remains haunted by the people he lost in the strike. A quiet man who wears his military fatigues even when at home, Emhamed seems perennially exhausted. He stays up late at night and chain-smokes L&M reds. A few hours after drawing lines in the sand outside his home to show The Intercept where the strike scattered the bodies of his unit, he took a drag off a cigarette. “No one can understand the front unless they’ve seen it with their eyes,” he said. Despite the drones, he is planning to go back to the front line, attacking the Moroccans on the other side of the berm.

The post Israel Ramps Up Drone Sales to Morocco for Its Colonial War in Western Sahara appeared first on The Intercept.

I asked what the impacts would likely be if pictures of people killed by the U.S. military’s bombing campaigns were on the front pages of American newspapers.

“But why were they lied to? How much would they do if they weren’t lied to?”

“I am in favor, unreservedly, of making people aware what the human consequences are of what we’re doing — where we are killing people, what the real interests appear to be involved, who is benefiting from this, what are the circumstances of the killing,” Ellsberg replied. “I want that to come out. It is not impossible, especially [with] social media, where people can be their own investigative journalists and they can get it out and so forth. Where I have been somewhat disillusioned is not to think that can’t help, but to be aware it’s very far from being a guarantee that anything will change. There’s no question that the media, like the government, collaborates in keeping this from the [public’s] awareness and attention — and that, to some extent, is surely to the credit of the American people, who are surely less responsible having been lied to, than the ones doing the lying. But why were they lied to? How much would they do if they weren’t lied to?”

Ellsberg died today from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 92. While he is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War to the world, he went on for 52 years to expose other types of secrets — including hidden truths about the psychology and culture of U.S. militarism. His stunning intellect and vast knowledge of the American warfare state were combined with great reservoirs of emotional depth and human compassion, enabling him to lay bare the social pressures and fear operating within the media and politics of a country addicted to waging aggressive war. After his disclosure in early March that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, media coverage of him and his life was extensive. Yet the public discourse scarcely touched on core aspects of the ongoing “war on terror” that he explored when we spoke for an interview that appears in my new book, “War Made Invisible.”

Ellsberg talked about differences between media coverage of September 11 and, later, the U.S. military’s “shock and awe” missile attack on Baghdad that began the Iraq invasion. In response to the horrors of 9/11, he recalled, the Times “did something very dramatic. They ran a picture, a head picture, of each person who had been killed — with some anecdotes from their neighbors, their friends, and their family. This person liked to skydive, or this person liked to play in a band, or little anecdotes about what made them human, what people remembered about them in particular, very gripping, very moving.”

After the Iraq War began, Ellsberg had an idea: “Imagine if the Times were to run a page or two of photographs of the people who burned on the night of ‘shock and awe.’ … It wouldn’t be that hard, if you were on the ground, we weren’t then but we were later, to find the people who were relatives of those people. And say, look, each one had friends, had parents, had children, had relatives — each one had made their mark in some little way in the world until that moment when they were killed — and these were the people we killed, and these were the people who were dying under the bombing, exactly as in our case, where two planes filled with gas burned two buildings.” But such U.S. media coverage was unthinkable. “Of course it’s never happened — nothing like it,” Ellsberg noted.

Looking back at patterns of American attitudes toward war deaths, Ellsberg was not optimistic: “It’s fair to say, as a first approximation, that the public doesn’t show any effective concern for the number of people we kill in these wars. At most, they are concerned about the American casualties, especially if they’re too many. They will put up, to an almost surprising degree, [with] a considerable level of American casualties, but especially if they’re going down and especially if the president can claim success in what he was trying to do. But in terms of people killed in the course of that, the media don’t really ask the question, the public doesn’t ask the question of the media, and when it does come out, one way or another, occasionally, nothing much changes.”

“How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them.”

What is concealed from Americans, he went on, “is that they are citizens of an empire, they are in the core of an empire that feels itself as having the right to determine who governs other countries, and if we don’t approve of them because of their effect on corporate interests, or their refusal to give us bases, or through pipelines of a kind that we need, we feel absolutely right and capable of removing them, of regime change.”

Ellsberg added, “Virtually every president tells us, or reassures us, that we are a very peace-loving people, very slow to go to war, very reluctant, perhaps too slow in some cases, but very determined once we’re in, but it takes a lot to get us to accept the idea of going to war, that that’s not our normal state. That of course does go against the fact that we’ve been at war almost continuously. … That there is deception, that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game, in the approach to the war, in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war, is the reality. How much of a role does the media actually play in this, in deceiving the public, and how difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

This article is an adapted excerpt from the new book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine,” by Norman Solomon (The New Press, June 2023).

The post Daniel Ellsberg Wanted Americans to See the Truth About War appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s biggest weapons dealer, accounting for about 40 percent of all arms exports in a given year. In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.

The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They’re the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government’s approval.

Country-level data for last year’s DCS authorizations was released in late April through the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. FMS figures for fiscal year 2022 were released earlier this year through the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. According to their data, a total of 142 countries and territories bought weapons from the U.S. in 2022, for a total of $85 billion in bilateral sales.

How many of those countries were democracies, and how many were autocracies? That question can be answered by comparing the new U.S. arms sales data to political regime data from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which uses a classification system that’s called Regimes of the World.

The system classifies regimes into four categories: closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, and liberal democracy. For a country to be classified as a democracy, it must have multiparty elections and political freedoms that make those elections meaningful. According to this methodology, the dividing line between democracies and autocracies is whether a country’s leaders are accountable to their citizens through free and fair elections.

Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57 percent, of them. The “at least” qualifier is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of U.S. weapons sales. The State Department’s report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious use of “various” in its recipients category; as a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed.

These findings contradict Biden’s preferred framing of international politics as fundamentally a struggle in which the world’s democracies, led by the United States, are on “the side of peace and security,” as he called it in last year’s State of the Union address. Opposing the United States and its democratic allies are the autocracies that collude to undermine the international system, Biden has stated. In a speech in Warsaw last year, he said the battle between democracy and autocracy is one “between liberty and repression” and “between a rules-based international order and one governed by brute force.” The White House’s 2022 National Security Strategy adds, “The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.”

Despite that rhetoric, a review of the new data suggests instead a business-as-usual approach to weapons sales. Former President Donald Trump based his arms sales policy primarily on economic considerations: corporate interests above all else. In his first foreign trip as president, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and announced a major arms deal with the repressive kingdom. Trump’s business-first approach resulted in a dramatic upturn in weapons sales during his administration.

Rather, the new figures reveal the continuity between Republican and Democratic administrations. While Biden signaled early on that his arms sales policy would be based primarily on strategic and human rights considerations, not just economic interests, he broke from that policy not too long after entering office by approving weapons sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian regimes.

The post Biden Is Selling Weapons to the Majority of the World’s Autocracies appeared first on The Intercept.

It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Carlson was fired because he used the C-word. Carlson was fired because he prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Fox despised him.

That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.

In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”

One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenoweth wrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused to back policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.

That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his son Lachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson even dined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned just a few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.

This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.

The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelter explained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on his second book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”

That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPR reported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.

The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.

It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.

The post The Ejection of Tucker Carlson Is a Classic “Reverse Ferret” by Rupert Murdoch appeared first on The Intercept.

That question, which has lurked behind the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News, was answered today in an unsurprising fashion: no.

Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement just moments before opening arguments were set to begin in the Delaware trial. A jury had been selected, and everyone was preparing for what seemed likely to be a six-week trial that would scrutinize Fox’s broadcasting of false conspiracy theories that Dominion machines stole votes from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox.

The settlement is not a total shocker. Just days ago, there was a flurry of speculation that Fox wanted to settle, with the goal of avoiding a court’s verdict that it had lied with malice when it aired false accusations — from its hosts and guests like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani — that Dominion had tried to rig the presidential election.

The settlement is unlikely to be welcomed by Fox critics who believed that a guilty verdict would serve a mortal blow to the network’s reputation. The idea was that Fox, on the ropes, should not be allowed to slip away by writing a settlement check and mumbling an insincere apology. As a headline from The New Republic pleaded amid the settlement rumors a few days ago, “Don’t Settle, Dominion! Drag Fox News Across the Coals.” It argued that with a guilty verdict, “we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.”

Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest. It is a for-profit company owned by a small private equity firm.

But Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest or liberal magazines. It is a for-profit company owned by Staple Street Capital, a small private equity firm. Staple Street has fewer than 50 employees and claims $900 million of assets under management (a modest amount in its industry). It was founded in 2009 by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and Stephen D. Owens, who previously worked at Carlyle Group and Cerberus Capital Management, giants in private equity. Yaghoobzadeh and Owens graduated from Harvard Business School and have no records of political donations or political activity; they are business people, not pro-democracy agitators.

The size of the settlement represents a windfall on Staple Street’s investment in Dominion: Its controlling stake cost just $38.3 million in 2018, according to a filing in the case. While Dominion’s lawsuit has attracted an enormous amount of attention, it’s actually not a large company, as the market for its vote-counting services is limited; its expected revenues in 2022 were just $98 million, according to the filing.

While Dominion and Staple Street have not explained why they agreed to the settlement, the rationale is pretty clear. Their case was strong, but it wasn’t certain that a jury would deliver as much as they were seeking, and it also was not certain how quickly they might see any award, as Fox would likely appeal. The owners of Staple Street — along with John Poulos, who is Dominion’s chief executive and has a 12 percent stake in the firm — were unlikely to have been strapped for cash before the settlement, but now their companies will reap an immediate and significant bounty. In its discovery efforts, Fox unearthed a text message from a former Staple Street employee to a current executive that noted, “Would be pretty unreal if you guys like 20x’d your Dominion investment with these lawsuits.”

Speaking to reporters after the settlement was announced, a lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, said, “The truth matters. Lies have consequences.” A statement from Fox said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

It’s not uncommon for a company to turn its back on the public good for the sake of enriching its owners (a transaction that’s traditionally known as maximizing shareholder value). That’s essentially what happened, for instance, when Twitter’s board eagerly decided to sell the company to Elon Musk for the generous sum of $44 billion. The board lunged at the lucrative transaction even though it was widely predicted that Musk would diminish the usefulness of the social media site, which has indeed happened (Musk recently admitted the company is now worth half as much as he paid for it).

Triumph of American Capitalism

The discovery process that preceded the trial’s opening was a nightmare for Fox, because it exposed in detail the levels of deceit practiced by hosts and executives as they pumped out the conspiracy theory that Trump actually won the 2020 election. But those disclosures appear to have had zero impact on the network’s ratings, which remain strong. While Fox’s reputation is at rock bottom with its critics, its viewers have remained loyal, and it’s not clear that a jury’s verdict would have influenced them any more than the bounty of evidence that emerged in discovery. It’s pretty certain, however, that a settlement will have even less sway.

The high hopes that were riding on the trial reflected the exasperated state of the longtime — and so far unsuccessful — effort to counteract the deceptive and racist programming that has been Fox’s hallmark since its founding in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, who is now 92 years old and oversees the network with his eldest son, Lachlan (both were deposed and were expected to testify in the trial). Despite years of criticism from journalists and politicians — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., memorably described Fox as a “hate-for-profit racket” — the network has prospered. While most advertisers have fled its airwaves, Fox remains profitable because the bulk of its income consists of exorbitant payments from cable and satellite providers (so-called carriage fees). Despite several years of attempts to pressure those companies, there has been little success, though a renewed push is underway.

“Cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue,” noted The New Republic. “If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.”

These hopes, while widely held among Fox’s detractors, constitute the kind of magical thinking that circled around earlier efforts to undo the lies and violence of the Trump era. Just as the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to deliver the knockout blow that was hoped for by its supporters, the now-settled lawsuit filed by Dominion is unlikely to alter the nature of Fox News, as the network has escaped the legal, moral, and financial punishment of a judicial verdict. We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this outcome: One terrible limb of American capitalism was always unlikely to save us from another terrible limb.

The post Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From Fox News appeared first on The Intercept.

Like clockwork, after a set of secret national security documents burst into public view last week, the Washington Post reported a “high level of panic” at the upper echelons of the Department of Defense, with officials “stunned” and “infuriated.” According to Politico, one Pentagon aide even said he was “sick to [his] stomach” over the alleged betrayal. The Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation, while John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, warned, “This is information that has no business in the public domain. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”

The intelligence documents appear to have entered the public domain in an unusual way — someone began sharing them, starting late last year, on an obscure Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. While several hundred documents were shared there, according to the Post, about 100 later spilled into a Discord chatroom affiliated with a YouTuber named wow_mao. Most of those relate to the war in Ukraine — though some cover the Middle East and Africa — and they reached a broader public when they spread onto Telegram and Twitter last week, drawing the attention of journalists and the U.S. government. The alleged leaker, Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested this afternoon.

It is traditional for the government to exaggerate the alleged harms of classified information becoming public, and this appears to be happening again. It first occurred in a big way back in 1971 with the Pentagon Papers, which the government sought to have squelched by the Supreme Court. But the court ruled in favor of the media’s right to publish the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, and the release of the Pentagon Papers is widely regarded as an essential act of transparency that revealed the hidden truth of America’s conduct in Vietnam.

More recently, the releases of classified information by Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency, and Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, were treated by the government as catastrophes that jeopardized human lives. This did not turn out to be true. Documents released by Snowden revealed that the government was engaged in unconstitutional spying on Americans, while information that Manning provided to WikiLeaks showed that U.S. forces killed journalists and civilians in Iraq and lied about it afterward. Despite the government’s dire warnings, subsequent reviews showed that no deaths could be linked to the disclosures by Manning and WikiLeaks. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates even called the government’s rhetoric about those leaks “significantly overwrought.”

What’s somewhat unique about the new documents is that they are quite fresh — some appear to have been written and distributed inside the government as recently as February and contain time-sensitive information about battlefield developments in Ukraine. While transparency experts told The Intercept that some intelligence of this sort might justify the protection of the classification system for a short while, other documents from the leak are either banal or of genuine public interest — in other words, their publication causes no harm or some good.

On the totally boring side, one of the documents contains a section titled “Worldwide: 5G Services May Pose Satellite Interference Risk” and explains that “the expansion of 5G services worldwide is increasing the risk of satellite interference that would disrupt commercial and military communications.” This information is widely known in the public sphere and has been extensively discussed for years, but its classification marking is “S//NF,” which means it is secret and should not be shared with foreign nationals (NF is short for “NOFORN”).

Another document lists the number of U.S. and NATO soldiers in Ukraine. These numbers are sensitive and interesting because the U.S. and its allies have been coy about their military footprints in Ukraine — and even whether they are in the country at all. The numbers are relatively small, according to the document: The U.S. has 14 special operations soldiers in Ukraine and a total of 100 military personnel. Publication of the document appears to be clearly in the public interest by clarifying the size of U.S. and NATO forces in a country that is at war with Russia.

Several documents that have received significant media attention reveal that the U.S. government was surveilling private communications of officials in the Israeli and South Korean governments, both close U.S. allies. While those disclosures have proved embarrassing, it is an open secret that friendly governments spy on each other. The awkward conversations that are now taking place between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Seoul will soon be overtaken by other matters.

Sky Not Falling

It’s not just the government that hypes the allegedly negative consequences of leaks; the media can play an unhelpful role too.

“I can’t even name a time in which there was a leak to the news media in which the government’s damage claims absolutely bore out.”

“The journalists covering this story probably know there is a massive overclassification problem, and they almost certainly know that any time there is a leak of any magnitude, the government goes on TV and claims that national security will be forever damaged,” noted Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Almost inevitably, we find out later that [government officials] were exaggerating. … I can’t even name a time in which there was a leak to the news media in which the government’s damage claims absolutely bore out. You can go all the way back to the Pentagon Papers.”

Yet the government’s claims are weakly challenged, if at all. Timm pointed to a 16-paragraph New York Times story about the likely damage from the new leaks, noting that it wasn’t until paragraph 14 that a crucial fact was mentioned: “In the past, U.S. officials have overstated the damage from leaks.” The media coverage has been so overwrought that a former CIA official, John Sipher, felt obliged to tell everyone to calm down. “The sky is not falling,” he wrote on Twitter, responding to a somewhat alarmist editorial in the Washington Post. “Our most sensitive collection doesn’t make it into documents like this.”

What’s often overlooked is that the real problem isn’t what’s leaked, but what’s classified. Almost every news story about the latest disclosures has noted that the Pentagon and other government agencies will now put tighter lids on secret documents, even though, as historian Matthew Connelly points out in his new book, “The Declassification Engine,” the government already puts way too much material behind its moat. “One way to look at it is to be more discriminating in what needs to be kept secret,” Connelly told The Intercept. “If [government officials] weren’t trying to protect hundreds of millions of records, some dating back to the 1940s, they might be able to protect information that could really get people killed.”

In fact, the human harm caused by unauthorized leaks is almost always inflicted by the government itself in the form of egregious prosecutions of leakers. Although Snowden, Manning, and, more recently, Reality Winner, revealed secrets that the public had a right to know, the government charged all of them under the draconian Espionage Act. While Snowden sought safety in Russia, Manning served seven years in prison (she was originally sentenced to 35 years), and Winner was sentenced to more than five years for leaking just a single document that revealed Russian interference in U.S. voting systems.

Update: April 13, 2023 7:14 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with the arrest of alleged leaker Jack Teixeira.

The post In Pentagon Leak, the Problem Is What’s Classified, Not What Gets Out appeared first on The Intercept.

If you write a 4,500-word article about a 20-year war, you might want to mention how many people were killed.

While that seems obvious, Max Boot, an energetic backer of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has written a lengthy article on the war’s 20th anniversary that fails to note the number of deaths. The toll is in the hundreds of thousands, if not more — the carnage is too vast for an exact count — but Boot merely mentions a “high price in both blood and treasure” and quickly moves on.

How high a price? Whose blood? There is no explanation.

Boot is hardly the only anniversary writer unable to mention the apparently unmentionable. Peter Mansoor, a retired colonel with several deployments to Iraq, likewise failed to squeeze a reference to the death toll into his 2,000-word assessment of what happened. Mansoor’s story, like Boot’s, was published by Foreign Affairs, which is funded by the Council on Foreign Relations and is pretty much the true north of establishment thinking in Washington, D.C.

Their failure, which is replicated in about 99 percent of America’s discussions about Iraq, is a lot more than sloppy journalism. The Pentagon and its enablers prefer to turn the killing and maiming of civilians into an abstraction by calling it “collateral damage” so that it becomes a detail of history that we can pass over.

Ignoring civilian casualties is a necessary act of erasure if you wish to avoid a frank assessment of not just the Iraq War, but also the legacy and future of U.S. foreign policy. If you specify those casualties — which is not just hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in an illegal war begun with lies, but also millions of people injured, forced out of their homes, and traumatized for the rest of their lives — the discourse must change. The “high price” reveals itself as so grotesque that discussions can no longer center around the finer questions of how to better fight an insurgency or why “mistakes were made” by supposedly well-intentioned leaders. It becomes a matter of when do the trials start; who should be in the dock with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice; how large should Iraq’s reparations be; and when can we impose on ourselves something like the constitutional ban on the use of military force to settle disputes that we imposed on Japan after World War II?

Killing Ourselves

Until Covid-19 came along, I thought the willful ignorance of Iraqi casualties was principally a matter of Americans not caring about the deaths of foreigners, especially those who are not white and not Christian. And that’s certainly true: We don’t care enough about those deaths, even if (or especially if) we are responsible for them. But the larger truth is that we also don’t even care about the deaths of our own citizens. Choices have been made that caused America to have one of the highest per-capita rates of Covid deaths, with more than a million dying so far, and probably another 100,000 dying this year. The numbers tick upward, but most of us hardly notice.

We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations.

In addition to the Covid toll, there is also the violence America inflicts on itself with guns, cars, opioids, and a predatory health care system that yields the highest maternal mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations. The situation is getting worse, not better, because life expectancy in the U.S. is plummeting while in comparable countries it is increasing.

It would take more than 4,500 words to get to the bottom of why America is so ruthless to itself as well as others. We certainly have a long history of externalized as well as internalized violence, thanks to the many wars we fought in the past century and a system of slavery that endured for generations. But it’s not as though the rest of the world is composed of quiet Luxembourgs: Whether we look at what happened in Germany in the 1940s or Rwanda in the 1990s or what Russia is doing now to Ukraine (and did to Chechnya), we are not unique.

Anniversary Lessons

In the early hours of March 19, 2003, which was 20 years ago, I drove to the Iraqi border in a Hertz SUV, and when I got there, a U.S. soldier whose face was daubed with camouflage paint yelled from the predawn darkness, “Turn off your fucking lights! Turn them off now!” He ordered me back into Kuwait, but after a few hours, I managed to sneak across the border at Safwan and joined the American march to Baghdad. Three weeks later, I watched as Marines toppled a statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square.

Since then, I have written a lot about Iraq. My goal is to make Americans care about the violence committed in their name and to hold to account the political and military leaders whose orders our soldiers and mercenaries were carrying out. One of the lessons I have learned is that the stories I and other journalists write about those victims — and Afghan and Yemeni and so many other victims of American warfare — are insufficient, on their own, to turn the tide.

It is naïve to expect us to stop killing foreigners in large numbers if we remain complacent about killing ourselves in even larger numbers. Even if every story about Iraq noted the civilian casualties, I don’t think it would make everyone suddenly wake up (though it would still be the right thing to do). We’re not going to start caring about the lives of others until we start caring about our own lives.

The post Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own. appeared first on The Intercept.

It was November 9, 2020, the day President Donald Trump fired his secretary of defense, Mark Esper. It was widely assumed that Trump would install an acolyte who would do whatever was needed to help the defeated president stay in power. Esper, just days before, had confided to a journalist, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real yes man. And then God help us.”

Trump appointed Miller, an unknown whose rise was so far-fetched that the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, had to Google his new boss to figure out who he was. Wikipedia was useless because at the time, Miller didn’t merit an entry.

After retiring from the Army as a Special Forces colonel in 2014, Miller moved from one mid-level job to another in Washington, D.C., a nobody in a city of somebodies. Things began to pick up after Trump’s election, and by August 2020, he was promoted to director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Just three months later, he was summoned to the Oval Office and put in charge of the world’s most powerful military.

“I’m at work on a Monday morning, and the phone rings, and they’re like, ‘Get your ass down here,’” Miller said in an interview, referring to the moment he was called to the White House. “I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”

Miller knew his name was circulating in the White House, but the announcement came abruptly and was not greeted with warmth by his life partner. “Yeah, my wife is like, ‘The only thing we have is our name and you’re ruining it,’” Miller recalled. “She’s like, ‘You’re an idiot. I think this is the stupidest thing that’s ever happened.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes dear, I know that.’”

As improbable Washington stories go, Miller’s blink-and-it’s-over journey from Beltway nothingness to what his detractors regard as a semi-witting participant in a plot to overthrow the constitutional order — well, it’s quite something. Miller was in charge of the Pentagon on January 6, 2021, and is accused of delaying the deployment of National Guard troops so the mob that beat its way into the Capitol might succeed in creating more than a pause in the Senate’s count of Electoral College votes. At a combative oversight hearing a few months later, Democratic members of Congress derided Miller as “AWOL,” “disgusting,” and “ridiculous,” to which he responded, “Thank you for your thoughts.”

As is customary, Miller has written a memoir of his extremely brief time in power, “Soldier Secretary,” published last month by Center Street, whose other authors include Newt Gingrich and Betsy DeVos. It’s a typical Washington book in many ways — revealing at times, suspect at others. For instance, Miller describes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as suffering a “total nuclear meltdown” during a phone call with him on January 6, but there is no evidence for that characterization. His book sticks closely to the Beltway norm of having a principal character who displays calmness and reason while others go nuts; the principal character is the author.

His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

But just as Miller’s journey to the top is atypical, so too is his obscenity-flecked memoir, because the retired soldier emerges as a scorched-earth critic of the institution he served for more than three decades and presided over for 73 days. He wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex, and he describes the invasion of Iraq as an unjust war based on lies. His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

“Today, there are virtually no brakes on the American war machine,” Miller writes. “Military leaders are always predisposed to see war as a solution, because when you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail. The establishments of both major political parties are overwhelmingly dominated by interventionists and internationalists who believe that America can and should police the world. Even the press — once so skeptical of war during the Vietnam era — is today little more than a brood of bloodthirsty vampires cheering on American missile strikes and urging greater involvement in conflicts America has no business fighting.”

I was as surprised as everyone else when I heard the news about Miller’s appointment, but it’s not because I had to Google him. I knew who he was. We first met in Afghanistan in 2001, when he was a leader of the Special Forces unit that chased the Taliban out of their final stronghold, and I was reporting on that for the New York Times Magazine. I got to know him and wrote an article in 2002 about his Afghan combat and his preparations for the Iraq invasion the following year. With the publication of his memoir, Miller is now making the media rounds, so we got together again.

After more than two decades of the forever wars, Miller is pissed off in the way a lot of former soldiers are pissed off — and, I have to say, in the way a lot of former war reporters are pissed off too. It’s hard to have been a participant in those calamities and not feel betrayed in some fashion, as pundits attempt to whitewash the disaster and promotions are announced for officials who masterminded it. Miller’s evolution from Special Forces operator to Trump Cabinet member is a forever wars parable that helps us understand the moral injury festering in our political corpus.

A Historic Error

Miller’s 9/11 journey got into literal high gear when he roared into Kandahar in a Toyota pickup with blown-out windows. It was December 2001, he was a 36-year-old major in the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, and this was his first combat deployment.

I spotted Miller at the entrance to a compound on the outskirts of the city. Until a few days earlier, it had been the residence of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban who, after Osama bin Laden, was the most hunted man in the country. The scene was surreal because the compound was now the temporary home of Hamid Karzai, the soon-to-be leader of Afghanistan, whose security was guaranteed by Miller’s soldiers. These just-arrived Americans were dressed half in camouflage, half in fleece jackets, and they sported the types of accessories that ordinary GIs were prohibited from having, such as beards and long hair. Mixed among them were Afghan fighters with AK-47s who had fought with the Taliban not long ago but switched loyalties, which is an accepted practice in Afghanistan when your team is losing.

I struck up a conversation with Miller, a tall officer with bushy red hair and a wicked-looking assault weapon slung over his shoulder. Most of his soldiers were silent and grim — they weren’t happy about the journalists who had shown up — but Miller, who recognized my name because he had read my memoir on the Bosnian war, was friendly and answered a few questions. I asked if he had been to Bosnia, and he gave me a vague special operator laugh and said, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” As it turned out, he’d worked undercover in Bosnia in the late 1990s alongside CIA operatives tracking Serb war criminals.

I stayed in Kandahar for a while longer, as did Miller. We were both spending time around the city’s U.S.-installed warlord, Gul Agha Shirzai, whom Miller describes in his book as “a self-serving piece of shit,” which is totally accurate. After we both returned to America, I got Miller to invite me to spend a few days at his battalion’s headquarters at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We talked for hours about what happened in Afghanistan, about the soldiers he lost, about the Al Qaeda fighters he helped kill, and about the next war on the horizon (this was a year before the illegal invasion of Iraq). Miller was as friendly and transparent as I could hope for from a Special Forces officer. His favorite word was “knucklehead,” which he sometimes used to describe himself.

Miller didn’t know it at the time, but he was at the cusp of a profound disenchantment with the country’s military and political leaders, a disillusionment he shared with a lot of soldiers, thanks to the deceptions and errors embedded in the wars they fought. Miller is exceptional only in his Cabinet-level end point. While it’s important to remember that the vast bulk of these veterans are law-abiding, a small but influential group have been radicalized to violence rather than government service.

Veterans are one of the key subjects in historian Kathleen Belew’s lauded book about right-wing extremism, titled “Bring the War Home.” American history teaches us a consistent lesson: There will almost always be blowback at home from wars fought elsewhere. Of 968 people indicted after the storming of the Capitol, 131 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Due to the respect military service generates among civilians in right-wing movements, veterans composed a disproportionately large number of the ringleaders on January 6, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy last year.

Soon after we met in 2001, Miller noticed omens of dysfunction in the American war machine. It began, he wrote in his book, with a visit to the airport that U.S. Marines seized outside Kandahar a few days after the Special Forces sped into town in their four-wheel-drive vehicles. Miller and one of his sergeants had to pick up supplies at the airport, and they saw Marines putting up a big tent. The sergeant told Miller, “Sir, it’s time for us to get the fuck out of here.” Miller asked why, and the sergeant replied, “They’re building the PX. It’s time for the Green Berets to leave.”

“We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater.”

He meant the military was settling in for the long haul. Sprawling bases would be constructed with Burger King and Pizza Hut outlets, staffed by workers flown in from Nepal, Kenya, and other countries. There would be more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the peak of President Barack Obama’s surge, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the country, yielding decades of full employment for generals and executives in the weapons industry. Miller had a front-row seat at this carnival. “We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater,” he told me. In other words, quickly arrange a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban rather than try to eliminate the Taliban and leave a small number of special operators to find and kill Osama bin Laden and the remnants of Al Qaeda.

I don’t think Miller sensed all this when he saw that tent going up; nobody knew what was going to happen that early in the game. And remember, you can’t trust Beltway memoirs; they’re a racket of myth construction. But locating the exact moment of Miller’s awareness is less important than the fact he eventually recognized, as most of us did, a historic error that he blamed on his leadership. “As soon as we went conventional, that war was lost,” Miller said. “That’s what I’ll take to my grave. As soon as we brought in the Army generals and all their big ideas — war was over at that point.”

Christopher Miller in old photos from his time in Afghanistan, left, and Iraq, right. Photos: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

The Betrayal

Like many veterans, Miller participated in not just the Afghanistan disaster, but also the one in Iraq. There he had an even stronger sense of betrayal.

As the invasion neared, Miller was responsible for operational planning for his Special Forces battalion, and he put together a blueprint for seizing an airfield southwest of Baghdad as an advance position for the capture of Iraq’s capital. He thought the buildup was a bluff to coerce Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein into giving up the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration insisted he possessed (though he did not). In Miller’s telling, it wasn’t until he was geared up in an MH-53 helicopter at night, heading deep into Iraq, that he knew it was on. The future acting defense secretary turned to a soldier next to him and said, “We’re really doing this. I can’t believe we’re fucking doing this.” According to Miller, the soldier replied, “Me neither.”

Miller and I were sitting in a café at the public library in Westport, Connecticut — he lives in northern Virginia and was visiting this wealthy suburb for a fundraiser for a play about the Special Forces. He was dressed in khaki pants and a casual shirt, and his shag of red hair from 20 years ago was gone; it had thinned out to a distinguished-looking silver. He is 57 years old now and looks no different from any other close-to-senior citizen killing time at a library (same goes for me, I should confess). He sipped his coffee and continued, “Invading a sovereign country is a big deal, you know. We typically don’t do that except in extenuating circumstances. I thought it was all coercive diplomacy. Then when it goes down, you’re like, ‘Damn.’” As he writes in his book, “I had been an active participant in an unjust war. We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a god-damned lie.”

“You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army. But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If your nation calls on you to send your comrades to their deaths in battle, you expect it will be for a good reason; soldiers have a lot more at stake than Beltway hawks for whom a bad day consists of getting bumped from their hit on CNN or Fox. That’s why Miller describes himself as “white-hot” angry toward the leaders who lied or dissembled and suffered no consequences; many have profited in retirement, thanks to amply compensated speaking gigs and board seats. “You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army,” Miller told me. “But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If that line came from a pundit, it would be a platitude. But Miller described to me the case of a soldier he knew well who was forced out of the military for not having the paperwork for a machine gun he left in Afghanistan for troops replacing his unit. The soldier was trying to help other soldiers who didn’t have all the weapons they needed. It didn’t matter; he was gone, and Miller couldn’t stop it.

Miller trembled a bit as he narrated this story. Maybe he was on the verge of tears; I couldn’t be sure. There’s a saying in journalism that if your mother says she loves you, check it out. Never trust a source, especially one selling a book and an image of himself. As these things always are, our conversation was a bit of a performance by each of us, both trying to get out of the other as much as we could. Miller’s intentions were hard to pin down, but his anger was not. I had seen some of what he had seen.

In 2014, after three decades in the Army and more than a dozen deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bosnia, and elsewhere, Miller retired. He had a lot of baggage to deal with. As he writes, “For years I had been cramming unpleasant memories into a box and storing them on a shelf deep in the recesses of my psyche, knowing that someday I’d have to unpack each one.”

He set a goal: Complete a marathon in less than three hours. His long practice runs of 15-25 miles were, as he put it, therapy sessions to work through the wreckage of the wars he fought and “a simmering sense of betrayal that every veteran today must feel — the recognition that so many sacrifices were ultimately made in the service of a lie, as in Iraq, or to further a delusion.” After running that marathon, he entered a 50-mile race on the Appalachian Trail and finished in less than eight hours, ranking second in his age group.

There were no epiphanies at the end. Physical exhaustion would not eliminate his bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan. “It still makes my blood boil,” he writes, “and it probably will until the day I die.”

More Juice

While Miller describes himself as falling “ass-backwards” into the job of acting secretary of defense, you don’t rise to the top by mistake in Washington, and people who run ultramarathons don’t tend to be lily pads just floating along. Miller has a gosh-darn way of talking, and even his detractors describe him as affable, but he’s a special operator, and you shouldn’t forget that. After retiring from the military, he made a series of canny moves to join the National Security Council at the White House and pair up with a key figure in Trump’s orbit, Kash Patel.

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Patel became Washington famous in the first years of the Trump era because, as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, he played a behind-the-scenes role in the GOP effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In early 2019, Patel was rewarded with a job on the NSC, reportedly on direct orders from Trump. Miller had joined the NSC the previous year as senior director for counterterrorism and transnational threats, and Patel became his deputy. Miller claims that initially, he was wary.

“I got online and Wikipedia’d him, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is the crazy guy,” he told me with a laugh.

What happened next could be a how-to guide for Beltway strivers.

“I just had convening authority,” Miller recalled of his time at the NSC. “I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit.’ So I went to the Pentagon and took a job as a political appointee because I needed to have money and people.”

It was early 2020 when he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism. This gave him greater influence over the hunt for ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, which had been his obsession at the NSC. Yet it wasn’t enough. As Miller describes it, “Now I had people, now I had money, but still not being very successful. … I still need more juice.”

One of his friends in the administration made a suggestion: Why don’t you shoot for a Senate-confirmed position?

“I was like, ‘That gives me more wasta, right?’” Miller said, using an Arabic word for clout. “And I’m like, ‘Shit yeah.’”

Trump nominated him to head the National Counterterrorism Center, and on August 6, the Senate confirmed him in a unanimous voice vote.

“So now I’ve got more fucking throw weight,” Miller continued. “Patel’s working in the National Security Council with the president. We’re starting to grind down the resistors.” The resistance, he said, was against a heightened effort he and Patel advocated to finish off the remaining leaders of Al Qaeda and rescue a handful of remaining American hostages.

Miller was invited for a talk with Johnny McEntee, the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. In the twilight of the Trump era, McEntee was one of the president’s most loyal confidantes; though just 29 years old at the time, he was described, in a magazine article, as the “deputy president.” Miller knew through the grapevine that he might be in line for Esper’s job because the administration had just a few Senate-confirmed officials with national security credentials. McEntee was sizing him up.

“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ because I didn’t want the job,” Miller told me.

This was part of Miller’s “ass-backwards” shtick. Why grind as hard as he did to stop short of the biggest prize of all? I pushed back, and he acknowledged that while the job might “suck really, really badly,” it could be worthwhile even if Trump lost the election. “I had a work list,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘I can get a lot of shit done.’” His main tasks, he told me, included stabilizing the Pentagon after Esper’s ouster; withdrawing the remaining U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia; and elevating special operations forces in the Department of Defense’s hierarchy.

Just before the election, he heard the shuffle was imminent.

“The word comes down: They’re getting rid of Esper, win or lose,” Miller said. “It’s payback time.”

On Monday morning, six days after Trump lost the election, Miller’s phone rang. Come to the White House, now.

Murderer’s Row

Miller suffered a literal misstep his first day on the job: Walking into the Pentagon, he tripped and nearly fell on the steps in front of the mammoth building. That prompted laughs online, but the bigger issue was the entourage that surrounded him as he took charge of the nearly 3 million soldiers and civilians in the Department of Defense.

He was accompanied by a murderer’s row of Trump loyalists. Patel was his chief of staff. Ezra Cohen, a controversial analyst, got a top intelligence post. Douglas Macgregor, a Fox News pundit, became a special assistant. Anthony Tata, a retired general who called Obama a “terrorist leader,” was appointed policy chief. Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was reportedly so alarmed that he told Patel and Cohen, “Life looks really shitty from behind bars. … And if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.”

Miller, when I asked about his advisers, waved off the concerns and said, “Complete misappreciation of those people.”

Cutting the U.S. footprint overseas was one of his top priorities, the residue of his long journey through the forever wars. It was a big part of his support for Trump, who was far more critical of those wars than most politicians. In the 2016 primaries, Trump distanced himself from other Republicans by accusing the George W. Bush administration of manufacturing evidence to justify the Iraq invasion. “They lied,” Trump declared at a debate in South Carolina, drawing boos from the Republican audience. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.” This was an occasion on which Trump’s political interests — trying to embarrass front-runner Jeb Bush, the brother of the former president — aligned with something that was actually true.

Once he got to the White House, though, Trump didn’t make a lot of changes. Since 9/11, the generals who oversaw America’s wars had resisted when civilian leaders said it was time to scale back. And Trump actually quickened the tempo of some military operations by offering greater support to the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and taking an especially hawkish position on Iran. But he was stymied on Iraq and Afghanistan, not just by active-duty generals at the Pentagon, but also by the retired ones he appointed to such key posts as national security adviser, chief of staff, and secretary of defense. They were all gone by the final act of his presidency.

By the time Miller left the Pentagon when President Joe Biden was sworn in, U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq had been cut to 2,500 troops in each country (from about 4,000 in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq). The approximately 700 soldiers based in Somalia were withdrawn. But that would not be Miller’s most memorable legacy.

The Phantom Meltdown

It was mid-afternoon on January 6, 2021. A pro-Trump mob had bashed its way through police barricades and invaded the Capitol. Ashli Babbitt had been shot dead. The rioters who occupied the Senate chamber included a half-naked shaman wearing a horned helmet and carrying a spear. Where was the National Guard?

Miller was the one to know, which is why he was on the phone with Nancy Pelosi at 3:44 p.m.

“I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon holding a phone six inches away from my ear, trying my best to make sense of the incoherent shrieking blasting out of the receiver,” he writes on the first page of his book. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on the line, and she was in a state of total nuclear meltdown. To be fair, the other members of congressional leadership on the call weren’t exactly composed either. Every time Pelosi paused to catch her breath, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Congressman Steny Hoyer took turns hyperventilating into the phone.”

That passage in Miller’s five-page introduction got a bit of attention on social media when it was first excerpted in January, and not all of it was positive. Wonkette described Miller’s account as “verifiably false” and pointed its readers to a video released by the January 6 committee showing Pelosi and other congressional leaders speaking in urgent but calm voices with Miller. They asked him to send troops immediately and demanded to know why it was taking so long. Pelosi is intense but not melting down; McConnell, Schumer, and Hoyer are not hyperventilating.

When I met Miller in Westport, I asked if he was aware of this discrepancy. He became slightly agitated.

“The one they show is a different call,” he replied. “The one used [by] the January 6 committee is a later phone call where they’re much calmer. The first call was frantic. Like literally losing their shit. … So that’s bullshit, dude.”

He told me to look into it.

The January 6 committee released partial footage of two calls that show Pelosi speaking with Miller. The first call, according to the time stamp on the committee’s video, occurred at 3 p.m. The sequence begins with Pelosi sitting near Schumer, who is holding a cellphone and saying, “I’m going to call up the effing secretary of DOD.” The next shot shows Schumer, Pelosi, and Hoyer huddled around the phone talking with Miller in measured voices; McConnell is not shown in this clip. The second call for which the committee released some footage is the one Wonkette pointed to. The participants in this second call are the ones mentioned by Miller in his book: McConnell is in this footage, along with Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer. There are no meltdowns. The committee’s time stamp for this call is 3:46 p.m., which is a nearly exact match for the time Miller provides in his book: 3:44 p.m.

What this means is that the phone call Miller described in his book almost certainly is the one Wonkette pointed to and did not occur the way Miller describes, unless there is an incriminating portion of the video we have not seen, which is what Miller claims. Yet that seems unlikely because there is no mention, in the multitude of testimonies and articles about that day, of Pelosi melting down at any moment. And that makes another passage in Miller’s introduction problematic too.

“I had never seen anyone — not even the greenest, pimple-faced 19-year-old Army private — panic like our nation’s elder statesmen did on January 6 and in the months that followed,” Miller wrote. “For the American people, and for our enemies watching overseas, the events of that day undeniably laid bare the true character of our ruling class. Here were the most powerful men and women in the world — the leaders of the legislative branch of the mightiest nation in history — cowering like frightened children for all the world to see.”

Except they weren’t cowering. They had been evacuated by security guards to Fort McNair because a mob of thousands had broken into the Capitol screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Pence!” Miller makes no mention in his book of the speech Trump delivered on January 6 that encouraged his followers to march on the Capitol. There is no mention of the fact that while Pelosi and others, including Vice President Mike Pence, urged Miller to send troops, Trump did not; the commander in chief did not speak with his defense secretary that day. Although Miller has elsewhere gently described Trump’s speech as not helping matters, his book mocks the targets of the crime rather than criticizing the person who inspired and abetted it.

“Prior to that very moment, the Speaker and her Democrat colleagues had spent months decrying the use of National Guard troops to quell left-wing riots following the death of George Floyd that caused countless deaths and billions of dollars in property damage nationwide,” he writes. “But as soon as it was her ass on the line, Pelosi had been miraculously born again as a passionate, if less than altruistic, champion of law and order.”

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

This is unbalanced because the violence in the summer of 2020 — on the margins of nationwide protests that were overwhelmingly peaceful — did not endanger the transfer of power from a defeated president to his duly elected successor. The buildings that were attacked were not the seat of national government. And there weren’t “countless deaths” — there were about 25, including two men killed by far-right vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The rhetoric in Miller’s book has the aroma of reheated spots from Fox News.

The contours of his political anger comes into clearer focus after reading a passage from his chapter on Iraq. He recalled his pride in the swift capture of Baghdad, but as he flew home in a C-17 aircraft, he couldn’t fully enjoy the triumph, couldn’t really unwind. “The further we got from the war zone, the more my stress turned into burning white-hot anger,” he wrote. He returned to an empty house in North Carolina — his family was in Massachusetts for the July 4 holiday — so he worked out, drank some beer, and read a lot. It didn’t help much. There was, as he put it, “a rage building inside me” that was directed at two groups. The first was the group he regards as the instigators, “the neoconservatives who bullied us into an unjust and unwinnable war.” The second was Congress “for abrogating its constitutional duties regarding the declaring, funding, and overseeing of our nation’s wars.”

Miller’s homecoming was reenacted by a generation of bitter soldiers, aid workers, and journalists. His list of culprits is a good one, though I would add the names of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the top, because they issued the orders that destroyed Iraq. Their omission from Miller’s list, combined with his rant against Pelosi, reveals how his outrage follows a strange path, focusing on a political party that, while energetically backing the wars, was not the one that started them. And Democrats did not foment the storming of the Capitol either.

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

The Clusterfuck

Just as the Watergate scandal had its 18-minute gap, there’s a now-infamous gap of more than four hours between the storming of the Capitol and the arrival of National Guard troops around 5:30 p.m. Miller is at the center of the controversy because the singular status of the District of Columbia means the Pentagon controls its National Guard — and Miller was the Pentagon boss on January 6.

The January 6 committee, which deposed Miller and other military and police officials, said in its 814-page final report that it “found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard.” The committee blamed the delay on “a likely miscommunication” between multiple layers of civilian and military officials. The abundant depositions reveal that the committee was being extremely kind when it chose the word “miscommunication.” Soldiers have a special word to describe what seems to have happened at the Pentagon: a clusterfuck.

At 1:49 p.m., as pro-Trump demonstrators beat their way past police lines, the head of the U.S. Capitol Police force called the commander of the D.C. National Guard, Gen. William Walker, and notified him there was a “dire emergency” and troops were needed immediately. Walker alerted the Pentagon, and a video conference convened at 2:22 p.m. among generals and civilian officials, though not Miller. Walker told the January 6 committee that generals at the Pentagon “started talking about they didn’t have the authority, wouldn’t be their best military advice or guidance to suggest to the Secretary that we have uniformed presence at the Capitol. … They were concerned about how it would look, the optics.”

The “optics” refers to the Pentagon being sharply criticized after National Guard soldiers helped suppress Black Lives Matters protests in the capital on June 1, 2020. Lafayette Square, just outside the White House, was violently cleared in a controversial operation that even involved military helicopters flying low at night to disperse protesters. At one point, Trump triumphantly emerged from the White House with a retinue that included Defense Secretary Esper and Milley; later, both men apologized for allowing themselves to be connected to the crackdown. After that debacle, the Pentagon was reluctant to involve troops in any crowd control in the capital, and local leaders made clear that they opposed it too; there was no appetite to amass troops that Trump might misuse.

Yet the storming of the Capitol, taking law enforcement by surprise, created an emergency that justified using the Guard. As Walker told the committee, “I just couldn’t believe nobody was saying, ‘Hey, go.’” Walker testified that he admonished the generals and officials on the 2:22 p.m. call: “Aren’t you watching the news? Can’t you see what’s going on? We need to get there.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy — who two months earlier had to Google Miller’s name to figure out who he was — testified that he joined the 2:22 p.m. call and then ran a quarter mile through Pentagon hallways to Miller’s office, arriving there out of breath (“I’m a middle-aged man now,” he told the committee. “I was in a suit and leather shoes.”). At 3:04 p.m., Miller gave a verbal order for the mobilization of the D.C. Guard. It was an hour-and-a-quarter since the Capitol Police’s first plea for help, but it would take more than two additional hours for the troops to get there. This is the delay Miller has been particularly blamed for, though it does not appear to have been his fault alone.

Miller regarded his 3:04 p.m. order as final; Walker and his direct civilian commander, McCarthy, now had a green light to move troops to the Capitol, Miller testified. Some troops were already prepared to go there, according to the committee report. A ground officer, Col. Craig Hunter, was ready to move with a quick reaction force of 40 soldiers and about 95 others who were mostly at traffic control points in the area. Despite Miller’s 3:04 p.m. order, it would be hours before Hunter would be told to roll.

The committee’s report includes a 45-page appendix that’s a catalogue of recriminations among Walker, McCarthy, Miller, and others. Their depositions offer conflicting accounts of what was said in chaotic conversations that day, and they even disagree about whether certain conversations took place. They also express contrary views on who had the authority to issue orders, precisely what orders were needed, and what some orders even meant. The depositions were taken under oath, so despite their contradictions, they are the best record we have about what happened and far more reliable than most of the books and interviews that some of the principals have produced.

McCarthy prioritized the time-consuming task of drawing up an operational plan that doesn’t appear to have been necessary because Hunter’s troops were already equipped for riot control and knew what to do and where to go. McCarthy also spent a lot of time talking on the phone to politicians and journalists, as well as joining a press conference. As he told the committee, “So it went into the next 25 minutes of literally standing there, people handing me telephones, whether it was the media or it was Congress. And I had to explain to all of them, ‘No, we’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming.’ So that chewed up a great deal of time.”

Meanwhile, Walker said he couldn’t reach McCarthy to find out whether he had permission to send his troops to the Capitol. Testifying on April 21, 2022, Walker said he was never called by McCarthy and was unable to contact him directly because the work number he had for McCarthy didn’t function: An automated message said, “This phone is out of service.” One of his officers happened to have McCarthy’s private cellphone number, but there was no answer on it. “The story we were told is that he is running through the Pentagon looking for the secretary of defense,” Walker testified. “That’s why he wasn’t answering his phone.” (McCarthy insisted in his testimony that they had talked.)

The delay wasn’t due to faulty telecommunications alone. McCarthy told the committee that he believed he needed another order from Miller, beyond the one issued at 3:04 p.m., before he could tell Walker to move. Miller issued an additional order at 4:32 p.m., but McCarthy failed to immediately inform Walker; the order didn’t reach the National Guard commander until 5:09 p.m., when a four-star general happened to notice Walker in a conference room and said, “Hey, we have a green light, you’re approved to go.” By the time Walker’s troops arrived at the Capitol, the fighting was over, and they were asked to watch over rioters already arrested by the bloodied police.

Toward the end of his testimony to the January 6 committee, Miller was asked why Walker had not scrambled his troops sooner. “Why didn’t he launch them?” Miller replied. “I’d love to know. That’s a question I was hoping you’d find out. … Beats me.”

“Blah Blah Bluh Blah”

One of the people I interviewed for this story was Paul Yingling, who, in 2007, became famous in military circles for writing an article titled “A Failure in Generalship.” Yingling was serving as an Army officer at the time and broke the fourth wall of martial protocol by calling out his wartime commanders. In a line that’s been quoted many times since — Miller repeated a variation of it to me — Yingling wrote, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Yingling wasn’t particularly flattered by Miller’s embrace of his idea. Miller is right about the generals, Yingling said, but “much of the criticism he’s made has been made elsewhere earlier and better. … It’s not original work.” That wasn’t Yingling’s main beef with Miller; he was incensed over what he regards as a fellow officer’s involvement in an effort to overturn a presidential election. “I don’t think he is aware of his role to this day,” Yingling said. “He has spun a narrative for himself that justifies his actions on J6. He was in over his head in a political world that to this day he doesn’t understand.”

Yingling mentioned the story of Caligula appointing his horse as a consul in ancient Rome. That myth goes to the strategy of discrediting and disempowering institutions by filling them with incompetent leaders (or beloved equines). And Yingling is certainly right that Trump appointed D-list characters to sensitive positions: the internet troll Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, for instance, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser.

It’s also true that the January 6 clusterfuck seems to have had less to do with malignant decisions by Miller than with a parade of errors by officials under his command. As acting secretary of defense, he failed to ensure that his orders at 3:04 p.m. and again at 4:32 p.m. were carried out with greater speed, though Miller says he didn’t want to micromanage his subordinates. There may have been an element of subconscious bias, too.

“I’m African American,” Walker told the committee. “Child of the ’60s. I think it would have been a vastly different response if those were African Americans trying to breach the Capitol.”

Yet I hesitate to ignite the tinder around Miller. If we drop a match at his feet and walk away with a sense of satisfaction about the justice we think we’ve delivered, we have not changed or even recognized the political culture that gave us the forever wars and everything that flowed from them, including January 6. At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

Look, for instance, at who Joe Biden chose to fill the seat kept warm by Miller: Lloyd Austin, a retired general who earned millions of dollars as a board member of defense contractors Raytheon Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton. Look at Esper, who preceded Miller: He was a lobbyist for Raytheon Technologies, earning more than $1.5 million in salary and bonuses. Look at who came before Esper: Jim Mattis, who was on the board of General Dynamics (as well as Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing firm). And take a moment to read a few pages of Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers,” which uses government documents to reveal a generation of lies from America’s top generals and officials. The professional interests of these people have been closely connected to exorbitant defense spending and “overseas contingency operations” that account for the U.S. devoting more money to its military than the next nine countries combined — all while school teachers drive Ubers at night and people in Mississippi have to drink bottled water because the municipal system has collapsed.

Where are their bonfires?

A year ago, before Biden’s State of the Union address, Miller joined a press conference outside the Capitol that was organized by the GOP’s far-right Freedom Caucus and featured speakers against mask and vaccine mandates. The last to talk, Miller riffed for seven minutes, saying nothing about Covid-19 and focusing on Afghanistan instead. As he recalled being on a mountainside where an errant American bomb killed nearly two dozen U.S. and Afghan soldiers, a woman behind him shifted with visible unease as he angrily described in graphic terms what you don’t often hear from former Cabinet members: “I stood there and it looked as if someone had taken a pail of ground meat, of hamburger meat, and thrown it onto that hill. And those were the remains of so many who gave their lives on that day.”

Let’s agree, then, that Miller is a bit askew. One of his encounters with reporters in his final days as defense secretary was described by a British correspondent as a “gobsmacking incoherent briefing” that included the phrase “blah blah bluh blah,” according to the Pentagon’s official transcript. But if you’re not askew after going through the mindfuck of the forever wars, there’s probably something wrong with you. It’s an inversion of the “Catch-22” scenario in which the novel’s protagonist, Capt. John Yossarian, tries to be declared insane so that he can get out of the bomber missions that he knows are nearly suicidal, but his desire to get out of them proves he’s sane, so he’s not excused. In an opposite way, generals and politicians who emerge from the carnage of the forever wars without coarse passions, who speak in modulated tones about staying the course and shoveling more money to the Pentagon — they are cracked ones who should not operate the machinery of war.

So here we are, just a few days away from the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion on March 19, a cataclysm that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions of dollars, and began with lies. The Pentagon just decided to name a warship the USS Fallujah, after the city that suffered more violence at the hands of American forces than any other place in Iraq. And Harvard University has just decided to give a prominent position to Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bush administration official who helped design the invasion and occupation of Iraq and since 2017 has been a board member of — you may have heard this one before — Raytheon Technologies (for which she was paid $321,387 in 2021). It’s been 20 years and thanks in part to journalists who were complicit in spreading the first lies and were rewarded professionally for doing so, there has been neither accountability nor learning.

Individual pathologies determine how we medicate ourselves after traumatic events, and I think the politics we choose are forms of medication. Miller opted for service in the Trump administration, and while it strikes me as the least-admirable segment of his life since we met in Kandahar, he’s not an outlier among veterans. For as long as our nation is subordinate to its war machine, we’ll be hearing more from them. Forever wars do not end when soldiers come home.

The post Trump’s Last Defense Secretary Has Regrets — but Not About Jan. 6 appeared first on The Intercept.

Mozart’s name was an attention-getting retort to the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian paramilitary company accused of war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere. In contrast, Mozart was described by the American veterans who formed it as a donor-funded initiative to provide humanitarian assistance as well as military training; its members do not engage in combat and say they do not even carry weapons. By August, Mozart deployed three teams of former soldiers — two teams for military training, one for extracting civilians from the front lines — with each one costing up to $100,000 a month in expenses, according to a fundraising email from the group’s public leader, former Marine officer Andy Milburn.

But war is a messy business, and last week a landmine exploded under the Mozart Group.

Andy Bain, a businessman in Kyiv since the 2000s and a former Marine, filed a lawsuit in Wyoming, where Mozart is registered as a limited liability company, accusing Milburn of financial fraud, sexual misconduct, burglary, attempted bribery, avoidance of U.S. weapons-transfer regulations, and even threatening a retired American general. The lawsuit asks the court to remove Milburn from the company and order him to pay damages of more than $50,000. According to the suit from Bain — who says he is the majority shareholder of Mozart — Milburn presided over the group “in a manner which has caused senior Ukrainian military officers to remark ‘can’t he go home and stop saving our country.’”

Milburn, reached for comment by The Intercept, described the suit’s allegations as “completely ridiculous.” He added that he had “placed this matter in the hands of legal experts.”

The last few decades of global warfare have seen a profusion of private military companies operating with little scrutiny and engaging in widespread abuses. The most notorious after 9/11 was Blackwater, led by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, whose highly paid mercenaries — mostly retired U.S. service members — ran amok in Iraq and were implicated in war crimes there, though Prince was not personally charged. Wagner’s troops have been accused of atrocities in pretty much every war zone where they fight.

Mozart casts itself in a different mold, as it claims its members are unarmed and help civilians in addition to soldiers; Milburn reacted with public anger when an American magazine described him as a “foreign fighter.” Nonetheless, Mozart has found a unique way of marching into controversy.

A day after Bain’s lawsuit was filed, Milburn responded with a barrage of counter-accusations in posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He described Bain as Mozart’s disgruntled former chief financial officer and said that Bain had been accused of financial and sexual misconduct. He also said Bain was “heavily invested in Russia,” which in wartime Ukraine is not a trivial accusation. And in a particularly surprising twist, Milburn even alleged that Bain had tried to sell Mozart to the Taliban. Milburn subsequently deleted those posts, though he told The Intercept he still stands by them.

“I apologize for allowing this individual to be affiliated with the Mozart Group,” Milburn wrote on Twitter. “We are reevaluating our vetting process and will not allow this to happen again.”

Bain, asked to respond to Milburn’s accusations, told The Intercept, “I am not going to comment on pending litigation, but recent posts and comments ensure defamation will be a much larger part of the proceedings than originally envisioned.”

The full story of what’s happening inside Mozart is not yet known. While it’s not unusual for a startup’s founding partners to have a falling out, it doesn’t tend to happen in an active war zone. And an intriguing subplot may involve an alleged effort to monetize Mozart’s high-profile work in Ukraine by turning it into a private military company with global aspirations.

While Milburn consistently presents Mozart as surviving off donations and being singularly devoted to saving Ukraine, the lawsuit accuses him of seeking military contracts in Armenia. That accusation does not seem unfounded: a recent article in Intelligence Online reported that Mozart “is now planning to become a conventional for-profit private military contractor (PMC) and expand into other war-torn areas.” The article said Mozart’s chief operating officer, former Marine officer Martin Wetterauer, confirmed it was “looking for new clients in other locations in the world.”

Whatever its outcome, the lawsuit calls into question the stability and credibility of what the New York Times described a few months ago as “one of the biggest private military companies in Ukraine.” It seems certain to lend strength to Russia’s vivid criticisms of not just Mozart but also the overall U.S. effort to aid Ukraine, as Mozart has been one of America’s most visible citizen-led initiatives.

From Iraq to Ukraine

From its birth, Mozart has been intricately connected to Milburn, who describes himself as the group’s founder.

A British-born American, Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after more than three decades of service that included deployments in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, most recently as deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Central, which plans special operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. He has written a memoir about his career, “When the Tempest Gathers,” and has contributed military-themed articles to publications including The Atlantic, USA Today, The Hill, and Task & Purpose.

He traveled to Kyiv as a freelance journalist within weeks of the Russian invasion in February, filing five stories for Task & Purpose, a military website. His last story, published on April 2, was about a former Marine accused of rape in Ukraine, but that story was subsequently withdrawn and now carries an editor’s note that says it is “undergoing editorial review for standards and practices and will be unavailable until the review is complete.” Editors at Task & Purpose did not respond to messages from The Intercept about the editorial review; Milburn told The Intercept he stands by the story.

A day after that article was published, Milburn made what appears to be his first public mention of Mozart Group in an April 3 tweet that said it “comprises former US SOF [special operations forces] personnel who deliver critically required capabilities to front line units in Ukraine. The Group’s activities primarily consist of advising, training and equipping Ukraine SOF and Resistance units.” A day after that, his first fundraising effort on PayPal raised the maximum allowed, $20,000, “within hours,” he tweeted; half of the total, $10,000, came from a military contractor, Obsidian Solutions Group. Two weeks later, Milburn explained in an article for Newsweek that his work for Task & Purpose seemed “frivolous” with a war raging around him, so he decided to organize military training after people “who I knew from previous visits, who are now in the Ukrainian military, asked me for help.”

With U.S. military personnel largely staying out of the country and U.S. diplomats departing in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Milburn attracted a considerable amount of media attention: He was one of the few Americans on the ground with combat experience who was working with the Ukrainian military and willing to talk with journalists. He has been interviewed frequently on cable and broadcast TV, especially CNN and ABC, while major newspapers in the U.S., U.K., and France have published articles about him. A New York Times profile bore the headline, “An American in Ukraine Finds the War He’s Been Searching For.”

None of these stories hinted at the accusations Bain has now lodged against Milburn.

“Crazy American”

Bain announced his 12-page lawsuit in a LinkedIn post last week that challenged Milburn’s self-portrayal as Mozart’s founder. “At the outset of the war,” Bain wrote, “having lived in Kyiv near on 30 years and recognizing Ukraine’s dire need for basic military training, I contacted a retired U.S. Marine general friend asking if he knew anyone who could come develop training. He put me in contact with Andy Milburn, who came to Ukraine a few weeks later.” According to Bain’s post, “I registered, named and arranged financing to launch the Mozart Group with a goal of providing training and support as needed for the war.”

Bain’s LinkedIn post states that he owns 51 percent of the shares in Mozart Group, while Milburn owns 49 percent. In response to a request from The Intercept for documentation, Bain provided three pages from a 35-page “Operating Agreement” for Mozart. One of the pages shows a chart that attributes 51 percent of the company’s “units” to Bain and 49 percent to Milburn.

While Bain has not previously publicized his ownership of Mozart — it is not disclosed on the group’s website and has not been mentioned by Milburn — there is a public record of the two men collaborating. On April 10, they started a YouTube channel called “Two Marines in Kyiv,” which now hosts seven videos, most of which feature discussions between them. The channel’s “About” page describes Milburn as CEO of the Mozart Group and Bain as president of Ukrainian Freedom Fund, which according to its website is a nongovernmental organization that has raised more than $3 million since February for military and humanitarian aid.

Bain’s most serious allegations revolve around Milburn’s handling of donated money — what the suit describes as efforts to “facilitate the diversion of funds away from Mozart Group LLC.” The lawsuit alleges that Milburn was “insisting on personal compensation payments exceeding $35,000 per month from company accounts … and not accounting to the company for donated funds received which were received in personal or other accounts controlled by him.” At least some of Milburn’s personal fundraising was not hidden from donors: His social media solicitations for donations have included clear links to his Venmo and PayPal accounts, which he said was necessary because Mozart’s donation platform was not working at the time, possibly due to Russian interference. But until Bain’s suit, he had not been accused of misusing funds deposited into those or other accounts he controlled.

That wasn’t all, however. According to the suit, Milburn hired as his personal assistant a woman he met on a social media dating site and had a relationship with, paying her an annual salary of $90,000, which according to the suit was “at least four times more” than the going rate. The suit further alleges that Milburn made “unwanted sexual advances and propositions to a female office manager.”

The lawsuit even accuses Milburn of “orchestrating and participating” in the burglary of a warehouse leased by Bain’s Ukrainian Freedom Fund. In addition, it claims Milburn was intoxicated and broke Kyiv’s curfew, leading to his temporary detention by Ukrainian authorities on more than one occasion. And according to the suit, Milburn sent “hostile and caustic messages” to a retired commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe after the general declined to join Mozart (the retired general was not named). Milburn’s conduct, the suit added, exasperated senior Ukrainians.

“Defendant Milburn is now commonly referred to by Ukrainian military leadership as the ‘Crazy American,’” it alleges.

The post U.S. Military Vets in Ukraine Are Fighting Each Other in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

The 9/11 wars have yielded a bumper crop of books and films about U.S. soldiers that often have the effect of glorifying combat. Some of these works are blunt odes to violence and chauvinism, such as “American Sniper,” the memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle that was turned into a blockbuster film by Clint Eastwood. While many memoirs and movies are more honest and complex, there’s a dilemma that even the best war literature has a hard time avoiding. No matter how much a writer might emphasize the dehumanization of boot camp or the dreadfulness of killing, there’s usually enough of a heroic glint in their tales to make young Americans want to get some of the action themselves.

Lyle Jeremy Rubin deals with this conundrum in his thoughtful new memoir, published by Bold Type Books, about being a Marine in the time of the forever wars. “If there is one thing most agree on, it is that to die at war as an American is to be a hero,” he writes. “To almost die at war as an American is to be a hero. To go to war at all as an American is to be a hero. … American war is American heroism.” Anyone who might wish to write an anti-war book about soldiers in combat winds up staring into the smoking barrel of the quandary Rubin faces: How can he leave no pathway for readers to emerge from his book with a desire to get their own taste of that heroism?

Rubin chose as his title a Marine motto that would seem to promise his readers nothing but dumb machismo: “Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body.” But the subtitle – “A Marine’s Unbecoming” – gets at the real business he undertakes, which is to subvert the traditional thrall and scope of war memoirs.

The book opens with a requisite combat scene from Afghanistan, though it’s just a few pages long. The reader must then leaf through nearly 200 pages before Rubin’s narrative settles back into Afghanistan. He charts how his slow epiphany began during a pre-deployment stint at the National Security Agency — the electronic spy agency where he saw how America could “eradicate anyone holding an earmarked SIM card” and used that power with insufficient restraint. He realizes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not innocent mistakes by a well-meaning superpower that happened to overreach. “Now I was prepared to accept the obvious – that U.S. militarism counted as a principal part of this problem,” he writes.

His book includes lengthy passages on how American militarism oppresses not just foreigners, but Americans too, and how he morphed from an eager college Republican before joining the military to a supporter of Occupy Wall Street after his service. It is, in many ways, a bildungsroman of the 9/11 generation, about his Jewish upbringing, his early political and sexual experiences, his initiation into a military culture that breaks down and reconstructs identity, and his unsuccessful efforts to remain connected to a civilian girlfriend. He is struggling, as so many young people do, to understand who he is and what he believes.

By the time he gets to Afghanistan in 2010, Rubin is already skeptical about his line of work. The Afghan war section of his memoir is less than 40 pages and is printed in a different font, creating a book within a book. It’s not so much to accentuate his front-line experiences, I think, but to separate them out, as though to tell us with a bit of distaste, “OK, the war genre requires that I provide some ‘bang bang,’ so here it is.” As combat material goes, it’s pretty mild. Rubin was a signals intelligence officer, so his exposure to bullets and bombs mostly occurred during visits to members of his unit who were on outlying bases.

Typical soldier narratives have once-innocent men and women waking up to the horror of war; picture in your mind Charlie Sheen in “Platoon.” In Rubin’s book, the horror that would gradually reveal itself is the condition and purpose of his homeland. Yet as he set off for Afghanistan, he still didn’t see everything. “I was not ready to fess up to the most wretched ramifications of my slow-going disillusionment,” he writes. “I was not yet equipped, mentally or intellectually, to see the empire, but I was becoming more sensitive to my own status as both its product and its guarantor, a crossroads fraught with conflicting excuses, self-deceptions, and escalations.”

In Afghanistan, he finds that despite his new political consciousness, he is nonetheless susceptible to the brute attractions of inflicting violence on strangers. Just before going out on a patrol to hunt down insurgents, he gathers with other Marines for a chaplain-led prayer that, he writes, “includes phrases like ‘Please, Lord, allow us to track down and kill those cowardly little pricks.’” When the patrol is called off at the last minute, he is deflated: “The fact is, I want to get some like everyone else. And so I’m disappointed as fuck.”

The strength of this book is that its passages on his yearning for violence, and his embarrassment at that yearning, are not the endpoints of his exploration, as they might be in the hands of other veterans. Yes, he is soul-searching, but the soul he examines most intensely is America’s, not his own. I think you could put 100 war memoirs on a shelf and they would not contain as many references to Western intellectuals as Rubin’s 290-page book, which mentions Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Simone Weil, Joan Didion, Dwight Macdonald, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Samuel Freeman, Sigmund Freud, H.L. Mencken, and Guy Debord, as well as the poets Sylvia Plath and Czesław Miłosz, among many others.

This is also a weakness, however. One of the reasons war memoirs tend not to stray from the battlefield or boot camp is that it’s easier to write a compelling narrative when you keep your readers anchored in these crazy and violent places. I’ve written about war before, perhaps too much, and one of the reasons might be that it’s relatively easy; how could I not find a way to entrap readers when there was so much gore and drama to draw upon? Rubin resists this easier path, while acknowledging that whatever approach he takes, “there is no way I can speak about my past or my politics without risking the encouragement and benefits of America’s cheap yet profitable obsession with war … to unveil the treachery of my service, I must first capitalize on it.” Yet by capitalizing as little as he can get away with, and trying to educate his readers, he is doing the literary equivalent of rowing upstream; instead of “bang bang,” he offers his readers Frantz Fanon.

Rubin’s narrative can at times feel choppy and baggy, the hallmarks of a too-indulgent editor, perhaps. But if Rubin does not produce Pulitzer-ready material on every page, he recognizes other writers who are masters of the word. One of the quotations in his book comes from James Baldwin, and though Baldwin wasn’t describing empire and war, his words fit perfectly into the final pages of Rubin’s memoir: “One of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

The post It’s Easy to Write a Memoir About War — but Hard to Write an Anti-War Memoir appeared first on The Intercept.

Fallujah is where, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a crowd of civilian protesters and killed 17 of them; the U.S. military claimed that the first shots came from Iraqis, but there is no convincing evidence for that assertion and significant reporting to the contrary. Fallujah was a stronghold of the ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and for that reason, its residents fiercely opposed an unprovoked invasion that was, according to international law, flagrantly illegal.

Those killings were the prelude to a torrent of violence and destruction in 2004. The bloodshed that year included the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians; the point-blank murder of prisoners; and the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, just 20 miles away. Fallujah’s punishment even extended beyond the brutal era of its U.S. occupation; in years after, there has been a spike in cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages, apparently due to America’s use of munitions with depleted uranium.

“There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”

Instead of apologizing for what was done, the U.S. is choosing to celebrate it: The Pentagon announced this week that a $2.4 billion warship will be named the USS Fallujah. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, made clear that the military has decided to double down on its fairy tale of Fallujah as an American triumph. “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending an urban area,” he said in a press release about the naming. “The battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in the minds of all Marines and serves as a reminder to our nation, and its foes, why our Marines call themselves the world’s finest.”

The announcement noted that more than 100 U.S. and allied soldiers died in Fallujah but said nothing about the far larger toll of Iraqi civilians killed, the flattening of swathes of the city through extensive bombings, the apparent war crimes by U.S. forces, the health impacts on civilians that continue to this day — and the inconvenient fact that U.S. forces were unable to keep their hold on Fallujah for very long. For the Pentagon, it’s as if none of it mattered, or it didn’t happen.

While the whitewashing is generating little pushback in the U.S., it is eliciting protests from Iraq and elsewhere.

“The pain of defeat in Fallujah is haunting the U.S. military,” wrote Ahmed Mansour, an Al Jazeera journalist who reported from Fallujah during the fiercest fighting. “They want to turn the war crimes they committed there into a victory. … I was an eyewitness to the defeat of the Americans in the Battle of Fallujah.”

I reached out to Muntader al-Zaidi, an Iraqi human rights activist who famously threw his shoe at President George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. “It is insulting to consider the killing of innocent people as a victory,” Zaidi said. “Do you want to boast about forces that kill and hunt innocent people? I hope this ship will always remind you of the shame of the invasion and the humiliation of the occupation.”

A statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations got straight to the point: “There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”

If you were an American in Iraq after the invasion, Fallujah was one of the most dangerous places you could visit. Based in Baghdad, I had to drive through Fallujah in an ordinary sedan in late 2003 to reach a nearby U.S. base where I had an embed. What I remember of that journey was the feeble disguise I donned (a red and white kaffiyeh over my brown hair); the way I slunk down in my seat as far as I could as we drove into the city; and the clenching in my gut as my car stopped in traffic and people could notice the Americans inside.

I was fortunate; nobody spotted me or the blond photographer I was working with. But a few months later a two-vehicle convoy of heavily armed contractors from Blackwater, a private security company, was ambushed by rebel fighters on the main street where I was briefly stuck. Four Americans were killed and their mutilated bodies were hung over a bridge on the Euphrates River. The killings — and particularly the ghastly images widely published in the U.S. media — prompted the Pentagon to launch a series of revenge attacks against the city. It was an egregious over-reaction, especially because the slain Americans were not soldiers, they were well-paid mercenaries who, as a general rule, were regarded by Iraqis and U.S. troops alike as reckless, ill-behaved, and unprofessional. One of the worst massacres of the entire American occupation would take place in 2007 in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where a convoy of Blackwater mercenaries opened fire on the cars around them and killed 17 civilians.

There were two battles of Fallujah in 2004. The first was a U.S. invasion in the spring that ended with a partial seizure of the city and its handover to Iraqi authorities who soon ceded control back to the rebels. More than 800 Iraqis were killed in that battle, with more than 600 of them being civilians, half of whom were women and children, according to Iraq Body Count. Later that year, the second battle began when the U.S. military returned with an even greater number of forces and retook the entire city block by block in fighting that stretched from November to December.

During the second battle, freelance journalist Kevin Sites, on assignment for NBC News, followed a squad of Marines into a mosque that contained a handful of injured Iraqi fighters who were disarmed and lying on the ground. Sites was filming and a Marine’s voice can be heard on the video saying, “He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s fucking dead.” One of the Marines then fires his assault weapon into an Iraqi lying on the ground, after which a voice says, “Well, he’s dead now.” A military investigation subsequently determined that “the actions of the Marine in question were consistent with the established rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict, and the Marine’s inherent right of self-defense.”

After the second battle, more than 700 bodies were recovered from the rubble, and 550 of them were women and children, according to the director of Fallujah’s hospital, who at the time said his count was partial because areas of the city remained unreachable for civilian rescuers. This toll made the second battle even more deadly for civilians than the first one. “It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children,” said Dr. Rafa’ah al-Iyssaue, in an article published in January 2005 by IRIN News, a United Nations-funded media outlet that specialized in humanitarian issues. “It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started.”

But it’s a lie if all you do is look at individual acts of bravery rather than the totality of what happened in a battle or war. I honestly can’t fathom how or why the Pentagon officials who decide such matters settled on “Fallujah” as the best name for this yet-to-be-constructed ship. Are they unaware of what happened? Are they aware but hoping to smother the truth? Are they counting on us to not care enough to say, “Excuse me, this is bullshit,” or do they want to remind the rest of the world at every port call that the U.S. is capable of destroying any city it chooses at any time of its choosing — a kind of floating “suck on this”? It could be any of that or all of that, who knows. The fog of war lingers long after the last bullets.

While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin.

This isn’t a done deal. The ship won’t be completed for at least several years, and names have been changed before christening and after entering service. While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin. Maybe there’s a chance of succeeding; President Joe Biden stood up to the generals who wanted to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan forever, so perhaps he’ll tell them to get lost on this one too.

If you step back from the narrow question of whether this ship should be named after Fallujah or Fresno, the larger truth is that it should not be built at all. The United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined. It’s a sickness that weakens the nation by fueling the militarization of domestic policing while depriving Americans of the support they need for essentials like good schools and decent health care.

So if you want to do the right thing for our soldiers and their dependents and their heirs, don’t name this ship the Fallujah, don’t build this ship, and don’t invade a country that has not attacked us. It shouldn’t be this hard.

The post Not a Joke, the Pentagon Wants to Name a Warship the USS Fallujah appeared first on The Intercept.

Curiously, Musk’s recollection of how the Tesla leaker was caught is different from an account provided by Ashlee Vance in his 2015 biography, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” Vance states that Musk retyped the letter into a Word document, printed it, and then looked through printer logs to find who else had printed a document of the same size. Though a retyped document is unlikely to be byte-for-byte identical to the original letter, given the fluctuations in file size based on metadata and the like, the recreated letter would nonetheless be of comparable size, plausibly giving Musk a ballpark size to look for when auditing printer logs.

But there are yet other accounts of how the leaker was caught. The Sunday Times and Gawker, for instance, both reported that the leak investigation involved taking fingerprints from a printout near a copier, though neither publication explained how the fingerprints were used to identify a leaker. Those accounts raise the curious question of how Tesla or its investigators might have had access to employee fingerprint records.

Regardless of the particular methods used to identify the Tesla leaker, and whether Musk is indulging in a spot of parallel construction, the key takeaway for leakers at Musk’s newest and chaotic company, Twitter, is that they should not print out (or even compose) letters using company resources.

To begin with, a wide array of document watermarking measures can identify the source of a leak. That’s why leakers and publishers need to figure out whether a given document is unique and whether it is safe to publish the document itself — or maybe, in the interest of protecting the source, not publish or even write about the document at all.

The notion of uniquely fingerprinting or watermarking each version of a digital text using various spacing modifications is not particularly new. It has been discussed since at least the early 1990s, with research building on general fingerprinting literature from the early 1980s. Ironically, one of the original proposed applications of document watermarking was to protect newspaper and magazine articles from unauthorized distribution.

Every spatial element of a document — including the spacing between characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs — can be modified in every version to form a unique signature that identifies the recipient of that particular document. For instance, a version of a document sent to one person could have slight variations in the distance between certain characters, words, sentences, or paragraphs that uniquely differentiate the document from a version sent to another person with ever-so-slightly different spacings.

As Musk pointed out, a very primitive spatial watermarking scheme could code a single space after a sentence as a ‘0’, and a double space as a ‘1’, resulting in a “binary signature.” If every copy of an email has a unique spacing pattern, an organization can determine the specific recipient of a leaked email.

One of the original proposed applications of document watermarking was to protect newspaper and magazine articles from unauthorized distribution.

Of course, the amount of possible unique watermarks is dependent on the size of the available text, but that size doesn’t need to be large for the watermarking scheme to be sufficient. In the basic watermarking approach described by Musk, the number of possible unique emails doubles for every added sentence. A two-sentence email could have four unique permutations with both sentences having a double space, both having a single space, or one having a single space and the other a double space, and so on. A nine-sentence email could have up to 512 such permutations — and that would be more than enough to uniquely identify every Tesla staff member as of October 2008, when the company reportedly had under 400 employees. It should likewise be kept in mind that in a more complex spacing watermark scheme, seemingly errant spaces could also be introduced between words or even between characters, under the veneer of being typos, which would greatly increase the number of possible unique permutations even for a modest body of text.

The rub is that if an organization has hundreds or thousands of staff, it would need to create a watermarking (and accompanying distribution) system to match. This system could involve having the sender manually modify each email, or it could be an automated system that creates unique permutations of a given text and keeps track which employee is assigned each permutation.

This leads to a basic check that would-be leakers should apply prior to sharing an email or a document. Was the email sent to an individual email address or to a group email address? If the email was sent to a group address, is this an address that’s been used before, or is the address slightly off, perhaps including a stray character or number?

If an email was sent to an individual address, the chances are higher that it could be watermarked. However, an email can be watermarked even if sent to a group address. For instance, a sophisticated (and hypothetical) system could modify the membership of a group email address to only contain a single recipient for each permutation of an email. The group membership is temporarily modified to remove everyone but a single staff member who is sent a uniquely watermarked version of an email. That staff member is then removed from the group membership and another staffer is added who receives a different version, then that staffer is deleted and another is added who receives yet another version — and on and on the ruse goes until all staff receive an email that appears to have been sent to a group, but which in fact is unique to each staffer. Staff may be prone to thinking that the email they received is safe to leak, since it was sent to a group email address, though the emails are in fact individually marked.

Thus, receiving an email sent to what appears to be a group email address is not a guarantee that an email hasn’t been individually watermarked.

Good News, Bad News

Spatial watermarking can be neutralized through manual transcription. Instead of printing or copy-and-pasting a document, a leaker or the publisher of a leaked document can retype a document into plain-text format; this would get rid of spatial watermarks, as well as other techniques such as font-based watermarking, which would entail sending every recipient an email in a slightly different font, or homoglyph watermarking, which replaces certain characters with lookalike characters.

That’s the good news. However, in addition to “open space” watermarks, text can be watermarked via minute syntactic (structural) as well as semantic (word choice) alterations.

For instance, an example of syntactic watermarking arose when the website Genius, which posts and allows users to annotate song lyrics, suspected that Google was taking lyrics from their site and reproducing them in full in its search results (Google was trying to keep users from clicking away to other sites). Genius watermarked their lyrics with variations of straight and curly single-quote characters, which, when translated to Morse code, spelled out the word “red-handed.” When a search for song lyrics on Google turned up the same pattern of punctuation marks, Google was indeed caught red-handed.

It’s also been reported that Musk has used semantic watermarking techniques. As described by Gawker in 2009, “Musk set out to entrap potential leakers by sending each employee a slightly altered version of an email which he expected would get sent to the media.” Each copy of the email used unique word arrangements; for instance some stated “I am,” while others said “I’m.” The watermarking scheme was foiled when Tesla’s general counsel apparently forwarded to everyone in the company his copy of the email, which meant that staff could now compare the version they had received to the lawyer’s version. They could also just leak the lawyer’s version of the email.

Each copy of the email used unique word arrangements; for instance some stated “I am,” while others said “I’m.”

This case highlights how semantic watermarking would survive manual transcription, though it can be foiled by comparing multiple copies of a given text. However, if it’s not possible to review multiple copies, and there’s a possibility a document has been semantically watermarked, then it’s best to not reproduce the original document in a story, as well as, ideally, not quoting from it, lest the quotation contains part of the semantic watermark.

However, the deployment of a so-called canary trap or barium meal test extends beyond spacing or word alterations in documents. Other tactics involve each person at an organization being presented with a unique document or unique piece of information in a document (say, a supposedly new Twitter feature mentioned only to a suspected leaker). In these cases, a story’s reference to a particular document, or a particular item in the document, could identify the leaker. This highlights the crucial importance of obtaining multiple sources to confirm new information in a leaked document – and this may be tricky as revealing the new piece of information to a second source may compromise the original source if the second one mentions it to someone else at the organization.

Ultimately, a variety of strategies can be used to attempt to safeguard a source from watermarking schemes used by Musk or others, ranging from confirming that the same copy of a document was presented to multiple staff, to transcribing the document, to not quoting from the document, to altogether not mentioning a given document. Though organizations may have a variety of tricks up their sleeve, leakers are far from powerless in this dynamic and have a number of techniques at their disposal to foil watermarking measures.

Nonetheless, it’s important to remember that even the best attempts at foiling watermarks are not foolproof guarantees against source identification, as there are other methods of workplace surveillance, including audits of who accessed leaked documents and video footage of employees copying documents. With Musk recently making threats against would-be leakers, it’s now more important than ever to stay vigilant — even if you don’t work at Twitter.

The post How Elon Musk Says He Catches Leakers at His Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most aggressive generals of his generation, and after his military service ended in a bitter fashion, he went home to Tennessee and found a new way to fight. A defeated general in the Confederate army, Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan and was named its inaugural “grand wizard.”

Forrest was in the first wave of American veterans who turned to domestic terror once they returned home. It also happened after World War I and II, after the Korean and Vietnam wars — and it is happening after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sedition trial now taking place in Washington, D.C., features five defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, and four are veterans, including Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers militia. In December, another sedition trial is set for five members of the Proud Boys militia — four of whom served in the military.

A relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence.

The point here is not that all or most veterans are dangerous. Those who engage in far-right extremism are a fraction of the more than 18 million Americans who have served in the armed forces and returned to civilian life without indulging in political violence. Of 897 people indicted after the January 6 insurrection, 118 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. The point is that a relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence, thanks to the respect that flows from their military service. While they are outliers from the mass of law-abiding vets, they are the tentpoles of domestic terror.

“When these guys get involved in extremism, they shoot to the top of the ranks and they are very effective at recruiting more people to the cause,” noted Michael Jensen, a senior researcher at the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

This is a consequence of our society venerating a massive army and going to war at regular intervals: The last 50 years of far-right terror have been dominated by men with military backgrounds. Most infamously, there was Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, who set off the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995 that killed 168 people. There was Eric Rudolph, an Army vet who planted bombs at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as well as two abortion clinics and a gay bar. There was Louis Beam, a Vietnam veteran and Klansman who became a dark visionary of the white power movement in the 1980s and was tried for sedition in 1988 (he was acquitted, along with 13 other defendants). The list is nearly endless: A founder of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division was a vet, while the founder of the Base, another neo-Nazi group, was an intelligence contractor for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the man who attacked an FBI office in Cincinnati after federal agents searched the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump in August was — you guessed it — a veteran.

Adjacent to the violence, key figures in far-right politics come from the military and boast of their wartime service, such as former Gen. Michael Flynn, who has emerged as a high-profile promoter of QAnon-ish conspiracy theories as well as an election denialist. In New Hampshire, former Gen. Donald Bolduc is the GOP candidate for Senate and a spreader of lunatic ideas that include the notion that school children are allowed to identify as cats and use litter boxes (do a web search of “Bolduc litter box”). GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, reportedly the “point person” for Trump’s fake elector scheme in Pennsylvania, blanketed his campaign with so much military imagery that the Pentagon told him to dial it back.

The “why” of this pattern is complex. When wars are drenched in as many high-level lies and pointless deaths as the ones in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no shortage of good reasons for veterans to feel betrayed by their government. Leaving the service can be a fraught process even without that baggage. After years in an institution that brought order and meaning to their lives — and that defined the world in a simplistic binary of good versus evil — veterans can feel adrift at home and yearn for the purpose and camaraderie they had in the military. As the special forces veteran-turned-journalist Jack Murphy wrote of his comrades who fell into QAnon and other conspiratorial mindsets, “You get to be part of a movement of like-minded people, you’re fighting evil in a worldview that you have become comfortable with. Now you know why you don’t recognize America, not because you had a silly preconception of it from the beginning, but rather because it has been undermined by a satanic cabal.”

There is an added twist that historian Kathleen Belew points out: that while the role of veterans in domestic terror is underappreciated, they are not the only ones unhinged by war.

“The biggest factor [in domestic terror] seems not to be what we have often assumed, be it populism, immigration, poverty, major civil rights legislation,” Belew noted in a recent podcast. “It seems to be the aftermath of war. This is significant not only because of the presence of veterans and active-duty troops within these groups. But I think it’s reflective of something bigger, which is that the measure of violence of all kinds in our society spikes in the aftermath of war. That measure goes across men and women, it goes across people who have and have not served, it goes across age group. There’s something about all of us that is more available for violent activity in the aftermath of conflict.”

In 2005 the so-called war on terror was justified by President George W. Bush as “taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.” The irony is that those wars — which cost trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians — instead radicalized a generation of American zealots who for years to come will inflict violence on the country they were supposed to protect. This is yet another stupendous offense for which our political and military leaders should face history’s vengeance.

The post America’s 9/11 Wars Created the Foot Soldiers of Far-Right Violence at Home appeared first on The Intercept.

It was near midnight on June 1, 2015. Ashwaq, her husband, and five children were in the backyard of their half-built house in the northern Iraqi town of Hawija. The night sweltered with an oven-like dry heat during an Iraqi summer in which temperatures could soar to 120 degrees in the daytime. Hawija was under ISIS occupation, which meant the entire town had been cut off from electricity, in addition to the general brutality of political rule by the radical group. There was no escape from the temperature except to go outside where a breeze might cool the air.

Far above Ashwaq and her family, a Dutch F-16 fighter jet released a bomb that whistled down to hit a car-bomb factory in the center of Hawija’s industrial district. The F-16’s mission was coordinated by the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS and was planned by the U.S. military. From 2014 to the present day, between 8,000 and 13,000 civilians have died as a result of bombing by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, according to the monitoring organization Airwars; the coalition only acknowledges the deaths of 1,417 civilians. At the height of the bombing in 2017, as the coalition bombed tightly packed urban areas like Mosul, at least 9,000 civilians died, according to The Associated Press. Yet only one civilian received compensation, although the U.S. military did distribute a limited number of condolence or “ex gratia” payments — which are voluntary payments and not an admission of legal liability — reportedly to the families of around 14 victims.

ISIS had stored an estimated 18,000 kilograms of explosives in the factory, which stood in the midst of a crowded neighborhood. Even though the strike targeted a bomb-making factory, Pentagon planners did not factor in the casualties that could be caused by the secondary detonations. When the bomb hit the factory, night turned into day. Residents of Hawija likened it to a nuclear explosion. The earth rippled and waves of shrapnel flew through the air, tearing into people’s flesh. Buildings collapsed into rubble. The air turned yellow from the fire and chemicals, and the midnight sky lit up as though it were the middle of the afternoon. Fifty kilometers away, in the city of Kirkuk, people said they felt the ground shake, according to a report on the bombing by the Dutch monitoring organization PAX.

Ashwaq’s home shuddered, the windows shattered, and bricks and masonry crashed to the ground. The pressure and the heat caused the gasoline in the family car to catch fire, and the vehicle exploded just as Ashwaq’s children ran past. The flaming gas from the car struck her 4-year-old son Omar across the face and lit his head on fire like the tip of a match. Omar’s father, Ahmed Abdallah al-Jamili, says he has the image of his son running, his head aflame, engraved in his mind. He and Ashwaq both thought that Omar would die. The couple rushed the child to the nearest hospital in a neighbor’s car. They could barely see as they drove streets fogged with acrid chemical smoke from still-raging fires.

The explosion killed at least 85 people, but the actual number is likely much higher, though impossible to verify. ISIS controlled the hospital and often refused to treat people who were not ISIS sympathizers, let alone issue death certificates. Additionally, Hawija was a way station for people who had been displaced by the war took as they fled ISIS territory to Kurdistan. Many internally displaced families had gathered in the industrial area, and uncounted people were killed when the factory was hit. Their deaths were not recorded because there was no one to identify them. PAX — which has done extensive research into the bombing — recently uncovered the existence of two mass graves, but they were unable to visit the sites and verify the number of bodies.

Even as it slowly became clear that the U.S. coalition was responsible for what happened, the needs of the victims and survivors were placed last because, for the countries responsible for the carnage, the most important priority was avoiding accountability. Families were forced to hear vague mentions of aid without ever being consulted about what they actually wanted and needed. Now, seven years later, a visit to Hawija shows how the crumbs of help that were eventually promised have apparently not been delivered to any useful extent for the victims.

A “Voluntary” Contribution

Two weeks after the bombing, then-Dutch Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis Plasschaert received a classified report from U.S. Central Command that assessed early casualty estimates of 70 civilians as “credible.” A few weeks after that, Plasschaert told the Dutch Parliament that “as far as known at the moment, the Netherlands had not been involved in any instances of civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in Iraq.”

For more than four years, the Dutch government obfuscated its involvement in the bombing until finally Dutch journalists brought the issue to light. The resulting scandal almost toppled the government. By that time, Plasschaert was no longer in the cabinet — she resigned in 2017 after Dutch peacekeepers were killed in Mali. In 2018, she was appointed the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. (A spokesperson for UNAMI told The Intercept that Plasschaert was not available to speak on the bombing.)

For more than four years, the Dutch government obfuscated its involvement in the bombing until finally Dutch journalists brought the issue to light. The resulting scandal almost toppled the government and forced Plasschaert to resign, although she quickly recovered; she is currently the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. (A spokesperson for UNAMI told The Intercept that Plasschaert was not available to speak on the bombing.)

Facing pressure from Parliament and growing public anger, the Dutch Ministry of Defense agreed to provide a fund of 4.4 million euros to Hawija as a “voluntary contribution.” The words were chosen carefully. The Dutch government refuses to use the term “compensation.” Sascha Louwhoff, a coordinating spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, explained that if they had issued direct payments to survivors, the Dutch would be opening themselves up to legal responsibility for the bombing. She stated that the Ministry of Defense had no intention of issuing an apology. As she put it, “We are not accountable.”

The Dutch government divided the fund between the United Nations Development Fund and the International Organization for Migration to invest in “‘electricity supplies, economic activities, job opportunities, and water supplies.” UNDP received $1,757,546 and IOM received $3,604,730. Even though the Dutch government had avoided providing compensation to individual people, its fund turned Hawija into one of the few cases where a coalition member offered compensation to a town that had been damaged.

But this money does not seem to have reached the survivors who need it the most — and has riven Hawija as accusations of corruption divide the community.

Following the Money

Not long ago, I drove to Hawija with Tawfan al-Harbi, the head of al-Ghad: a local NGO that partnered with PAX, the Dutch group, to produce a comprehensive report on the aftermath of the strike, based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. Driving from al-Ghad’s Kirkuk office to Hawija, al-Harbi spoke in a steady stream, with regular interruptions from his constantly ringing mobile phone. He is a bouncy middle-aged man who, despite the 110-degree heat, wore a dapper navy and amber pinstriped suit with a matching amber ring and watch. He pointed to different areas that had been under ISIS control, some of which still suffer periodic small-scale attacks from the remnants of the organization. Al-Harbi was deeply unimpressed with the UNDP and IOM projects, which he said had produced minimal results for the budget they were given.

“The international organizations are like a big box. Money goes to guards, hotels, and a very small part goes to the people affected,” he said.

The outskirts of Hawija burst with rich green crops and low tangled brush. The town neighbors a river, and prior to the ISIS occupation, it was a center for agricultural production. Much of its economy also focused on its industrial neighborhood, which was home to factories, car repair shops, and local businesses. The PAX report estimates that the loss of privately owned businesses, possessions, and houses as a result of the bombing comes to around $11 million.

“The international organizations are like a big box. Money goes to guards, hotels, and a very small part goes to the people affected.”

Despite the UNDP and IOM projects, all it takes is driving around the town to understand that after seven years, Hawija is still deeply scarred by the bombing. Entering the town, a stretch of road is unpaved dirt, while another stretch is freshly laid asphalt, a half-finished lopsidedness that repeats throughout much of the town. A freshly built shop stands next to an empty lot filled with rubble remaining from when the neighborhood was obliterated by bombings during the war.

UNDP and IOM told The Intercept in a joint statement in August that the UNDP project had excavated and installed electricity poles and transformers. They added that they anticipated installing an electrical substation in October. IOM’s project consists of clearing rubble, creating jobs through cash-for-work programs, and rehabilitating shops; IOM said in a separate statement to The Intercept that 259 shops had been rehabilitated, six agricultural projects had gone ahead with clearance from local authorities, and 400 individuals had participated in cash-for-work activities. Both organizations stated they had operated in consultation with the community, but none of the survivors who spoke with The Intercept said they had been consulted. This is consistent with PAX’s report, which sampled a much larger group of survivors who said they had never been consulted on how the funds should be distributed.

The remains of the industrial neighborhood are a mix of activity and vast stretches of lots filled with jagged concrete debris. Workers in yellow hard hats hide from the sun in the shade of one building. They are working on the IOM project, although only a few of them are from the areas affected by the bombing; the salaries paid by IOM are not going to the families who were bombed.

The salaries paid by IOM are not going to the families who were bombed.

Another group of men slap mortar onto gray bricks as they build a fresh wall of a shop; they were commissioned by the shop owner but think he got some of his funding from an NGO, though they are not sure which one. This mixture of funding sources seemed to be common in the industrial zone where some shops had been rebuilt on private funds, some appeared to be using IOM’s money, and some appeared to be halfway in between.

An engineer working at what appeared to be UNDP’s electrical project complained that UNDP and the governorate were fighting, and as a result work was slow. He pointed to a building on the site, a low concrete rectangle, and complained that UNDP had vastly overpaid for its construction. These types of claims are hard to verify but are frequently heard in Hawija, where accusations that the NGOs are misappropriating funds flew swiftly from most of the people I interviewed.

Hawija’s mayor is Sabhan Khalaf al-Jubory, a neat man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. In an interview at his office, he said he had only one demand of the Dutch government: that they discontinue working through UNDP or IOM. He accused UNDP of being party to a corruption scandal and IOM of never informing local authorities about their projects. (In an emailed statement, Zena Ali-Ahmad, the UNDP’s resident representative in Iraq, said, “UNDP Iraq is not aware of any instances of corruption associated with this project.”) Airing his grievances, al-Jubory spoke in a resigned tone that evoked the frustration of knowing that this meeting with an international reporter, hardly his first, would most likely not result in any tangible change for the victims of the bombing. He explained that he understands the Dutch government does not want to take legal responsibility for the bombing, but at the same time, he asked that their funding go directly to the survivors.

“Do a project for the families of the people who were killed without taking responsibility,” he said. He agrees with survivors who say cancer cases soared following the bombing, which they suspect is due to the chemicals released by the explosives. “Many people have cancer,” he noted. “Many people need to leave Iraq to get treatments.”

Saba Azeem, a project leader at PAX and lead researcher on the group’s Hawija report, noted that over the course of PAX’s investigation, they had not observed tangible benefits from the UNDP and IOM projects for the survivors of the bombing. But the Dutch, she realizes, are not willing to consider direct support to the survivors. “If they do take on the responsibility or say they are sorry, that could be admitting guilt, and therefore, I think that would lead to a bigger legal issue,” Azeem noted.

U.S. Intelligence

The strike was planned by the United States military and depended on U.S. intelligence. The targeting of the factory was even approved by Lt. Gen. James Terry, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, according to an Army investigation in 2015. A key problem, however, is that prior to the strike, the U.S. military conducted a “collateral damage estimate,” or CDE, that did not account for damage that might be caused by a secondary explosion.

Late last year, the New York Times published a tranche of military records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act that included a detailed military appraisal of the Hawija strike after it had taken place. An article by The Intercept’s Nick Turse revealed that an intelligence official wrote in the appraisal that CDE methodology “does not account for secondary explosions.” That was the case with the CDE for Hawija — even though, according to Airwars, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had estimated, before the coalition’s attack, that the bomb factory contained around 18,060 kilograms of explosives. As The Intercept reported, when the U.S. Navy detonated a similar amount of explosives in a military test, they registered a 3.9 magnitude equivalent to a small earthquake.

“I do not think that anyone could have predicted the magnitude of the explosion and its effects in the surrounding neighborhood,” a coalition official wrote in the military documents. “Secondary effects are impossible to estimate with any level of accuracy, especially without knowing the quantity and type (s) of explosive material present at the site.”

Despite its involvement, the United States has not offered an apology or individual compensation. This is consistent with U.S. policy that has made compensation for civilians extremely rare. The only legal way for civilians to pursue compensation in the U.S. has been through the Foreign Claims Act, but that excludes compensation for death or injury during combat, making victims of the Hawija bombing ineligible. The only other option would be for civilians to receive voluntary ex gratia payments, but the Pentagon has viewed those payments as a strategic tactic to improve relations between U.S. troops and local communities. As the number of ground troops in Iraq have decreased, so have the ex gratia statements. In 2020, the Pentagon did not issue a single ex gratia payment. The ex gratia policy is now changing to allow for broader payments, but the changes do not apply to harm caused in the past.

This leaves civilians who suffered long-term injuries that require expensive treatment they cannot receive in Iraq with no legal route to pursue compensation from the U.S.

Escaping Hawija

When Ashwaq and her husband arrived at the hospital with their son, the halls were crowded with the injured and the dead. In some ways, they were lucky: Omar’s injuries were so severe that even though the hospital was under ISIS control, it agreed to treat him. Many others were turned away at the door because they had not sworn allegiance to the organization; they were forced to sew up wounds at home or to seek treatment from local pharmacists who were far out of their depth.

The doctors at the hospital did not have the ability or resources to treat Omar properly. Ashwaq and Ahmed begged permission from the ISIS occupiers to leave Hawija so they could get Omar’s injuries treated at a better hospital. They were refused. Twice before, Ashwaq had attempted to escape the town with the children, and each time she had been forced back. (Ahmed stayed behind because men were executed if they were discovered leaving). Fear for Omar’s life forced the family to take desperate measures. They paid a smuggler to get them out of the town. They walked through until they managed to cross into government-controlled territory.

But by the time they got to the hospital in Kirkuk, doctors told them it was too late; Omar should have been treated immediately after the burn to avoid permanent damage and scarring. Omar is now 11, and his face is a mask that twists with white swirling scars. Other children bully him. At school, they called him Abu Tashwy, which translates roughly to the “disfigured guy.” He has stopped going to school to avoid the humiliation.

Ashwaq and Ahmed cannot afford the many operations Omar would need to treat his burns. “I see him and I also become sad,” Ashwaq told me. “I see him and say God willing there will come a day where his face is normal.”

I met Ashwaq and Ahmed in their home, where they served us water and sweet black tea. It quickly became clear that they were accustomed to reciting their story to a parade of foreigners; they had spoken to NGO researchers, Dutch journalists, and Dutch officials. We talked in their home’s yellow-tiled entrance hall, only a few minutes away from the industrial zone by car. The family sat on thin cushions placed around the edges of the mostly bare room, and the other children came in and out, playing with each other as their parents spoke. Omar sat next to his mother, not saying a word.

Ashwaq wore a pale blue dress scattered with pink cherry blossoms. She has thick eyebrows, a heavy gaze, and an air of exhausted resignation mixed with a dogged desire to help Omar. She recounted her story readily, but she also made clear that she has no expectations that her telling of it will result in any benefit to her or to Omar.

“In the beginning, I believed,” she said, “They said to go to this place, and I believed them.” The “they” she refers to appears to be an amorphous combination of NGOs that promised they could help. “But I lost hope, I don’t have any hope remaining. They said they would give me support. Lies. It was lies.”

Ahmed said he has not seen a single benefit from the Dutch fund and neither have any of the families he knows who were affected by the bombing. He said he was never consulted about the fund by any representatives of the Dutch government. A thin, bespectacled man in a light white robe who speaks in a quiet, careful voice, Ahmed attended a conference in Erbil hosted by al-Ghad where he said he met representatives from the Dutch government and spoke to them about how he desperately needed treatment for his son. Referring to the fund of 4 million euros, the Dutch representatives told him that they had already compensated Hawija.

Chemical Injuries

I met with other families in Hawija. All had the same complaint. Foreigners had come and recorded their names and stories, but they had not benefited from the money reportedly flowing into their town. No one had consulted them about how the money would be used, and they believed that it must be disappearing into corrupt pockets.

Yusra Khalaf, 20, was only 12 when the bomb struck. She was sleeping in her family’s entrance hall near the window, and when it shattered, it sent a sharp piece of shrapnel straight into her arm. She tried to go to the hospital but was turned away at the door; her mother had to sew her wound at home. As it healed, her arm began to swell and turn a purpled blue; she does not know what caused the aftereffects, but she suspects chemicals from the bombing.

Her father, Yasser Khalaf Hamed, 47, wore a gray dishdasha and smoked steadily. Yusra wore pink robe and spoke in a soft voice. Her injured arm is swollen and mottled with blue veins; she said that it is heavy and she can barely move it. Like Omar, she suffers from bullying at her school. Even while talking about her injury, she tries to hide her arm within her sleeve until she is directly asked about it. Her father worries this is causing a delay in her studies. “If only they would stop talking about her,” he says. “Her younger sister graduated, and she’s still in school.”

They still live in the house where the bomb struck. Yusra speaks to me feet from where she was sleeping when she was injured. She says she did not want to return to this house.

Ashwaq and Ahmed did receive a small benefit from the coverage their case has received, but not from the Dutch government. Citizens crowdfunded Omar’s treatment and gathered around 7,000 euros. It’s not enough for the estimated cost of his operations, but it’s a start. Yet in order to get the treatment, they need a visa to the Netherlands, and although they applied months ago, they have heard nothing. They wait in limbo, holding on to the slimmest hope that even if they cannot get compensation, the Dutch government will at least grant them a visa. Their expectations are low.

In the meantime, the long-term effects of the bombing stay with them. It’s not just the physical injuries. Ashwaq says she still shakes with fear when she hears planes flying overhead. On the way to her house, I passed an old man standing in the road, apparently lost. It was Omar’s grandfather, who has never recovered.

Correction: November 1, 2022
This story has been updated to note that Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis Plasschaert resigned from the Dutch government in 2017 after Dutch peacekeepers were killed in Mali.

The post How a Rare Effort to Compensate Iraqi Airstrike Victims Failed appeared first on The Intercept.

The suit that’s gotten the most attention was filed against Fox last year by Dominion Voting Systems, which was falsely accused by the network’s hosts and guests of rigging the election to deprive then-President Donald Trump of victory. The Dominion suit — a similar one has been filed by another voting company, Smartmatic — seeks $1.6 billion in damages and has advanced into discovery, with Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Jeanine Pirro reportedly being deposed.

Fox’s defense is that its broadcasts are protected under the First Amendment, which has consistently been interpreted by courts as allowing news organizations to publish falsehoods about public figures so long as it’s not done knowingly and there is not a reckless disregard for the truth. Fox contends it wasn’t endorsing conspiracy theories about the election, rather it was just allowing people to voice the lies, including its hosts. However, a Delaware judge, denying the network’s motion to dismiss the suit last year, noted that “the Court can infer that Fox intended to avoid the truth” and ruled that the case should proceed.

The curious thing is that last week Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corp. and son of the network’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, filed a defamation suit in Australia against a small independent news site called Crikey that published an article describing the Murdoch family as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Jan. 6 insurrection and the election lies that preceded it. The legal complaint contends that the Crikey article, as well as social media posts about it, caused Lachlan Murdoch to be “gravely injured in his character, in his personal reputation, and his professional reputation.”

The offending article by Crikey political editor Bernard Keane was about the evidence presented at the Jan. 6 hearings in Washington, D.C., and focused mostly on Trump’s culpability. But its penultimate paragraph noted that Fox had peddled “the lie of the stolen election” and played down Trump’s role in the insurrection. The final line stated that if Trump is indicted, “the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”

That line would not be remarkable if it appeared in America; it’s a statement that is easily defensible under the First Amendment. While Murdoch would have nearly zero grounds for suing in the U.S., Australia does not have anything like the First Amendment. Instead, it has a woeful reputation as the defamation capital of the world.

The upshot is that Fox is trying to have its legal cake and eat it too.

The company argues in the U.S. that it should not be punished for broadcasting lies about Dominion and the 2020 election, while seeking punishment in Australia for what it claims are lies about its role in the election. What’s especially galling is that Fox is trying to avoid any punishment for the significant harm that Dominion has already documented — including threats made against its employees — while Murdoch is seeking damages for “substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment” allegedly caused by an article in a publication whose modest readership has for years heard far worse about Murdoch and his even more loathed father.

“It’s a pretty incredible contrast,” noted Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a nonprofit media watchdog. “It exposes their inconsistency and hypocrisy.”

The reasons for filing the suit against Crikey are obvious as well as a mystery.

Murdoch’s lawyers, taking advantage of Australia’s strict libel laws, contacted Crikey a day after the article was published, and the outlet took it down. But the article was later returned to the site amid an exchange of unfriendly letters between Murdoch’s lawyers and Crikey. This culminated last week with Crikey publishing the correspondence and challenging Murdoch to carry out his threat of suing — which, in short order, he did. “We welcome Lachlan Murdoch’s writ,” Crikey responded.

On the one hand, the suit makes sense because Murdoch could win in Australian courts. The expense of going through the legal process is considerable on an objective scale but a pittance for a billionaire like him. Crikey, on the other hand, is a tiny publication and has had to launch a fundraising campaign to support its legal efforts.

But lawsuits of this sort are unpredictable because of the discovery process — you never know what might be found once opposing counsel has access to emails and other forms of internal communication. That’s one of the reasons Fox settled a suit that had been filed against it by the family of Seth Rich, the late staffer from the Democratic National Committee whom Fox falsely accused of leaking emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election: The company clearly did not want hungry lawyers looking through its confidential correspondence.

“Nobody draws the dots to the Murdochs,” Carusone noted. “The Murdochs run the company. You cannot make the case that they don’t run the company. There is no way those things are taking place without their tacit or explicit consent. Crikey will have the capacity to dig into it.”

The Dominion lawsuit has already opened the potential for disclosures about the Murdochs’ involvement in the publication of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The New York Times reported last week that Rupert and Lachlan, in addition to the hosts they employ, may be deposed. The Murdochs traditionally claim that they don’t make day-to-day decisions on programming and would never tell their hosts what to say or not to say. This claim, for which there is already evidence to the contrary, such as text messages between Lachlan Murdoch and Tucker Carlson, can now come under direct scrutiny in Australia if Crikey can assemble the resources to go the distance against the most powerful media family in the world.

The post The Murdoch Family Exposes Its Hypocrisy in Lawsuits Over Fox News appeared first on The Intercept.

The police department in Tallahassee, Florida, found a surprising answer to that question. Retired Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, accused by his fellow operators of intentionally shooting civilians and murdering a prisoner in Iraq, shared a photo and video on Instagram last week in which he described working with Tallahassee police officers in close-quarters combat and other lethal skills. He posted a picture of himself flanked by the rifle-bearing officers in Florida, with his caption describing an “awesome day of training” with “an extraordinary group of men who were ready to train and take on new concepts of shooting and CQB to add to their tool box. It was truly an honor!”

After Gallagher’s picture was spotted and shared by journalist Wesley Morgan, the Tallahassee Police Department stumbled forward with a believe-it-or-not statement that its officers were merely practicing at a private facility operated by a company called Stronghold SOF Solutions, which Gallagher is affiliated with. Gallagher happened to be at the facility and offered his “input” to the officers, according to the TPD. The department did not provide an explanation of how or why its officers assembled for a group photo with Gallagher, whose current business endeavors include private instruction on weapons and tactics.

Gallagher, imprisoned before his court-martial in 2019, is a free man because a military jury controversially declared him not guilty of premeditated murder, and his conviction on just one minor count — of posing in a picture with a dead prisoner — was essentially overturned when former President Donald Trump granted him clemency. Not long after the trial and grant of clemency, the New York Times released a trove of evidence from Gallagher’s fellow operators that laid out their damning case against him.

The core problem here is not Gallagher or the Tallahassee Police Department. The conduct of each is consistent with a decadeslong meshing of the military and policing — a violent disaster in America. The process, explored in Radley Balko’s “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” began in the 1960s, was stepped up during the so-called war on drugs, and reached terminal velocity after 9/11, when vast amounts of funding and weapons were poured into local law enforcement agencies, which deployed these resources mainly against minority and poor communities. One of the most notorious signatures of this destructive process is the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which since 1990 has distributed more than $7.4 billion in military weapons — including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles — to police departments across the country.

This deluge of military hardware among civilian populations is harmful enough, creating mini-armies inside American communities that are desperate for better schools and social services. But what’s been just as harmful, if not worse, is the military mindset instilled in police ranks after 9/11. As Arthur Rizer, a former police officer and military veteran, wrote recently, “We have for years told American police officers to regard every civilian encounter as potentially deadly, and that they must always be prepared to win that death match. … It was always obvious to me that military tactics, training and weaponry had little place in civilian policing.”

And that’s where “trainers” like Gallagher come into play.

On Killing

One of the most prominent and controversial police trainers these days is Dave Grossman, a retired military officer who catapulted onto the lecture circuit after writing a book titled “On Killing.” Our paths crossed in the early days of the 9/11 era, when I was working on a magazine story and attended a talk he delivered in 2002 to a military audience whom he saluted at the end. It was a boilerplate speech for him, delivered hundreds if not thousands of times since, in which he talked about the ways in which soldiers should be trained to kill so they do not hesitate to pull the trigger and do not feel guilty about it afterward. Even in the military community, his theories were controversial and disputed by academics who believed that Grossman did not fully understand the dynamics or history of killing in wartime.

Grossman was primarily speaking to military audiences in those days — there was a lot of demand for people like him as the Pentagon was beefing up its ranks and starting its catastrophic wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. After a while, as fewer U.S. soldiers were deployed overseas, he transitioned to speaking to a broader range of civilian groups, especially police departments, even though his base of experience is in combat psychology. His policing lectures are grafted from his military talks, emphasizing the danger of the job and the need for split-second aggression — even though policing is hardly the most dangerous profession in America. (Loggers, roofers, farmers, and sanitation engineers, among other workers, have higher on-the-job fatalities.) In a 2020 story on Grossman, the writer Justin Peters noted that “there is a cottage industry of trainers and consultants who encourage police to see their beats as a battlefield” and described Grossman as likening America to “a terrifying place where police are both the primary targets of and defenders against super-predation.”

Grossman, like Gallagher, is just a symptom of the problem.

In an encouraging development, Grossman’s lectures to police audiences are getting criticized more frequently than before. Last year, the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police canceled a talk by him after justice advocates noted that his observations on police killings have included a remark that law enforcement officers can have the best sex of their lives after an on-the-job shooting. (A spokesperson for Grossman, asked for comment, told The Intercept via email, “The human body processes stress and a deadly force encounter many different ways. This is one way of MANY that humans react to and process what they just went through.”) A recent story by the Washington Post noted that the sorts of workshops conducted by Grossman and others were cited in a lawsuit over a police killing in Spokane Valley, Washington.

Yet Grossman, like Gallagher, is just a symptom of the problem. Even as the Tallahassee Police Department was trying to back away from its connection to an accused war criminal who has become a right-wing rock star in the fashion of Kyle Rittenhouse, local journalists unearthed a recruitment video from the department that highlighted an array of military-grade equipment and tactics used by its officers. The video showed off an armored personnel carrier, a camouflage-covered sniper, a squad of riot police marching in a V formation, and an armored bulldozer called the “Rook.” But don’t blame the TPD for being over-the-top: The gear in its video is standard in police departments across the country.

The fundamental problem, which was generations in the making and will perhaps be generations in the solving, is the internalization of a military force and a military ideology that were ostensibly built for external purposes. This is the forever wars coming home. The problem is not just that military spending since 9/11 has helped impoverish America while destroying foreign countries in illegal wars that cost trillions of dollars and left a million or more people dead (mostly foreigners, but plenty of Americans too). History has shown that the aftermath of foreign wars is not what you might expect. “War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state,” noted Kathleen Belew in “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” She added, “It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”

And we have just seen one of those ways: Eddie Gallagher giving shooting tips to cops.

Update: August 12, 2022
This story was updated to include a comment from Dave Grossman that was provided after publication.

The post An Accused War Criminal Trained Florida Cops in “New Concepts of Shooting” appeared first on The Intercept.

It is one of the rituals of school shootings in America — another round of debate, usually among journalists, on whether graphic photos should be published. If people could just see what assault weapons do to young bodies, the argument goes, they would no longer tolerate the policies that enable these killings. No, the other side warns, these photos would only cause further pain to the survivors and have no impact on a divided society that moves from one gruesome entertainment to another with the flick of a switch.

This debate skips along the surface of an American aberration: We passively tolerate high levels of violence while actively suppressing evidence of the slaughter. It is not just school shootings that we forbid ourselves from seeing — and I mean really seeing, not the thoughts-and-prayers equivalent of gazing in sadness at memorial wreaths. It is also the visual evidence of more than 1 million people who died from Covid-19 in the U.S that we don’t see. It is the visual evidence of not just American soldiers killed in our forever wars, but the far greater number of civilians who have perished (at least several hundred thousand in Iraq). And it is the other forms of avoidable death in our homeland that we don’t really see, including traffic violence and drug overdoses.

The scale of American violence is awe-inspiring in all the wrong ways. The rate of shootings — school shootings, mass shootings, police shootings, accidental shootings, suicidal shootings — is top of the charts compared with almost every other country on our planet. The same goes for the other ways Americans kill and die; we excel at the fatal work of extinguishing each other. No single factor can be blamed, but it’s notable that energetic measures are consistently taken to prevent us from seeing what is done. These measures have only intensified as our society has become more visual, with screens tuned to every aspect of the human experience except its final act. As the photographer Nina Berman explained to a New York Times reporter a few days ago, “For a culture so steeped in violence, we spend a lot of time preventing anyone from actually seeing that violence. Something else is going on here, and I’m not sure it’s just that we’re trying to be sensitive.”

There’s a curious thing about this visual void: It requires an aggressive act of construction to come into existence. Let’s look first at school shootings.

There are several barriers that prevent us from seeing graphic photos of school shootings. The first is that the victims tend to be inside their schools, which are crime scenes that the police seal off from reporters. Even after the job of evidence collection is finished and the cleaners are called in, journalists are kept out. Law enforcement entities make their own photos and recordings of these sites, but those are closely held and sometimes protected by law. Even if graphic photos become available — and that’s rare to nonexistent — news outlets are reluctant to publish them, due to concerns about privacy, propriety, and criticism from readers.

One of the few graphic photos that has been circulated is from Columbine in 1999, when a photographer from the Rocky Mountain News flew in a helicopter over the school on the day of the shooting and took a photo of a student’s body on the ground outside, not far from a police officer and several students sheltering behind a car. While the newspaper’s pictures earned a Pulitzer Prize, the reaction was mixed locally. “Hostility against the press got so bad that we had people throwing snowballs with rocks in them at our photographers,” noted John Temple, the paper’s editor at the time. Imagine what would happen today if an equivalent photo were published from Uvalde: The bad-faith brigade would find a hundred ways to distract us from an honest discussion about what it conveys.

But let’s remember that government and public hostility to graphic photos extends far beyond our schools, to battlefields thousands of miles away. Particularly since 9/11, the U.S. military has maintained strict prohibitions on journalists taking pictures of injured or dead soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other combat zones. In recent years, the military has found the most efficient solution of all: It all but forbids journalists from embedding in combat operations. Even photography of military caskets was out of bounds for a long while. The Pentagon has an ever-growing cache of footage of people being killed in U.S. bombing attacks, but it’s only in exceptional circumstances, like the furor over the drone killing of an extended family in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2021, that we see any of it.

The economy of war zone photos is not controlled by the military alone. News organizations have proved reluctant to publish pictures of dead soldiers. In 2008, freelance photographer Zoriah Miller was expelled from his military embed in Iraq after posting on his blog a photo of a dead U.S. soldier. Even after that, no major publication was interested in his rare picture. The New York Times did eventually publish it, but for a story about military censorship. One of the most haunting photos from the Gulf War, showing the corpse of an Iraqi soldier burned alive, was not distributed by any major outlet. “If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it,” said Kenneth Jarecke, the photographer.

The essence of America — its raw capitalism — is at least partly to blame. What would the readers and advertisers think? More than a million people have died of Covid in the U.S., yet there have been precious few images of these people as they perished in hospitals. I spent a good deal of time last year investigating why we were seeing so many pictures of doctors and nurses but almost none of the people whose lives were lost. One of the principal reasons was that hospitals were concerned about legal liability and the damage that images of death and chaos could do to their brands. “There was no benefit to them showing the apocalypse and what it looked like,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “Having patients all over the emergency department on oxygen canisters and people intubated is not going to be a good image for your hospital.”

I think the familiar debate about whether to publish graphic photos of school shootings — or Covid victims or war casualties — has lost its urgency. Like so much else, it has become a ritual that we dutifully enact after another outrage occurs. I think the answer to the debate is clear — yes, publish the photos, it’s the right thing to do, we should be aware of what our plagues of violence beget. I also think it’s now more likely that if news outlets get possession of the right photo from Uvalde or from the next school shooting (we won’t have to wait long, this is America), they will publish it. But it will be from a position of desperation. They have tried everything else to change minds; this is all that’s left.

The truth is, it no longer matters so much. It’s not just, as the critic Susie Linfield wrote the other day, that photos rarely result in the kind of change that their supporters hope for. What’s different now is that on the life-or-death issues that confront us — shootings, wars, Covid, opioids, traffic violence — the awfulness of what has been allowed to accumulate over the decades is so damn vast. How can those responsible begin to backtrack? We’re not talking about a modest correction. America without its violence — without the factions that don’t mind the violence and even draw some benefit from it — would be a new country. There’s a path to getting there, but it’s going to require work and discomfort that’s far more complicated than publishing a shocking photo.

The post America Tolerates High Levels of Violence but Suppresses Photos of the Slaughter appeared first on The Intercept.