Meta — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company — refuses to provide evidence refuting widespread reports that it’s censoring Gaza-related content on its platforms. This week on Deconstructed, technology reporter Sam Biddle joins Ryan Grim to discuss his recent reporting on the efforts of Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to press Meta for specifics.
Grim and Biddle dig into debates blaming the horrifying images coming out of Gaza for turning young people against the war. “When people see images of horrific bloodshed,” Biddle says, “when they see bodies blown apart by bombs, that’s upsetting to most people. There doesn’t have to be any ideology attached.” They also dive into how pressures to sanitize Israel’s war is being used to ban TikTok, and how X, formerly known as Twitter, is profiting off of government surveillance .
Transcript coming soon.
The post How the Gaza War Is Reshaping Social Media appeared first on The Intercept .
Two weeks ago, the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized an email leaked by an anonymous student at the university’s social work school. In the email, a professor, who was also not named in the screenshot, raised the issue of a Palestinian flag emoji that the student had placed next to her name during Zoom meetings.
“On an unrelated matter,” the professor wrote, “it has recently been brought to my attention that geopolitical emojis” — the Palestinian flag — “used at the end of name info has caused trauma reactions, making it difficult for some to remain present and not dissociate during class session.”
The professor asked for the student’s “continued partnership in ensuring our class space remains a safe one for all.” In an excruciatingly polite response, the student asked for permission to discuss the issue collectively, with the class.
It’s the stuff of far-right parody: an absurd example of “woke” culture. An Ivy League professor, invoking the language of “trauma response” and safety, in an email that refers to class members as “folx,” suggesting the removal of an emoji.
Yet the professor’s email speaks to a broader problem of student safety being flattened into a question of whether students feel safe. And these aren’t the reactionary tropes of left-wing “snowflakes”: “Safety” is being invoked by pro-Israel students, many conservative and center-right, who believe that protests targeting the nation state constitute inherent attacks on them as Jews.
The same dynamic played out in the fall at the same university. Last November, Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, as The Intercept reported , because an “unauthorized event” put on by the groups “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” When challenged to name the threat, Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg said only, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the student groups, that “accusations that Israel was ‘a racist state committing genocide’ and ‘is an apartheid state’ could upset some people and ‘seem … like an incitement of violence.’”
New York City’s Upper West Side isn’t the only setting for such thin complaints. A staggeringly imbalanced feature in The Atlantic this week, written by Stanford sophomore Theo Baker, offered up a supposedly neutral narrative that treats the “conflict” on his college campus as a battle between imperiled Jewish students and unreasoned pro-Palestine zealots.
Right-wing GOP culture warriors and conservative Zionist groups are using similar claims about campus incidents nationwide. “Safety” is the latest weapon in the culture war, being deployed now to deal a blow to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and to silence criticism of Israel.
“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe.”
The result has brought us to our intolerable status quo, with students and faculty risking grave consequences for protesting a war in which Israeli forces have slaughtered over 31,000 people. Israel’s U.S.-backed assault has razed to rubble every single university in Gaza , but the concern as relates to intellectual life in this country focuses instead on the inoculation of Israel’s young supporters from bad feeling.
“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe,” said Layla, a Palestinian American graduate student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name for fear of harassment. “As a Palestinian student, I’ve lost family in Gaza. Frankly, I get uncomfortable when Zionist students are chanting ‘no ceasefire’ on campus. That makes me feel uncomfortable. That makes me feel unsafe. But I know that it is not a physical threat to my safety. That is free speech.”
The need to distinguish between feeling safe and being safe is both urgent and undeniably fraught. Antisemitism is rising. There have been instances, including on campuses, of Jewish students harassed and targeted solely for wearing a kippah or being otherwise identified as Jewish. Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian violence is surging . And a American-supported genocide is being carried out halfway around the world in the purported name of Jewish safety. Yet this is no time for cowardice.
Writing as a professor and a Jew, with a profound commitment to my students’ safety and well-being, I see an imperative for them to learn to distinguish between genuine threat and paranoia — that their judgments of the world be grounded and attentive to the workings of power, propaganda, and ideology.
Instead, a perfect political storm, driven in large part by sustained campaigning from pro-Israel groups, has produced structures of feeling — a map of collective emotions at historical junctures — that are resistant to challenge. The elements include the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, pushed evermore fervently by Zionist groups in the last decade ; the equation of feeling unsafe with being unsafe that has been normalized in the oversimplified liberal discourse; and the weight of intergenerational Jewish trauma combined with very real antisemitism in the present.
I have no doubt that the students’ feelings of fear are real, but educational institutions should not be validating a psychic block that precludes seeing support for Palestine as anything other than a threat.
One way universities are validating these feelings as proof of real danger may be out of their hands: through Title VI complaints and, in some cases, official investigations. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. By statute, universities are duty-bound to take these complaints seriously, but that doesn’t mean they’re always serious.
In the post-October 7 campus battles, the complaints in question consistently center on claims of campus antisemitism — referring to Title VI’s protection from discrimination based on national origin.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has 80 open Title VI investigations that have arisen since October 7 that fall under the category of “shared ancestry” discrimination, which also covers incidents of Islamophobia and other religious discrimination. And just one man , Zachary Marschall, the editor of the right-wing site Campus Reform , is responsible for 10 of them, according to a database of the complaints and investigations put together from public data by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
To file a complaint, a person need have no affiliation with the institution in question. Marschall, an outspoken critic of DEI, has no connection with any of the universities against which he is the Title VI complainant, but claims to be filing the complaints on behalf of campus figures who are often not publicly named.
While details of the federal investigations are not public, Campus Reform’s coverage of reported antisemitism on campus offers clues about Marschall’s approach. His posts on the site consist largely of alarmed responses to Palestinian solidarity slogans , calls for ceasefire , and vocal anti-Zionism on the part of left-wing Jewish student groups.
Consider, by way of example, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, against which Marschall filed a Title VI complaint. Campus Reform wrote about the school too. A November post cited as evidence of anti-Jewish animus the fact that a faculty open letter in support of a Gaza ceasefire was commended by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Campus Reform alleged is connected to Hamas — a common attack against CAIR that the group has denied as a “ smear .”
Marschall may well think the discrimination he is alleging is very real, but it hangs on a thin reed. To have the desired impact, though, the Title VI complaints don’t necessarily need to be sustained. The Department of Education might rule that Marschall’s complaints fail to show civil rights violations, but the investigations themselves can still have a chilling effect, forcing universities to act out of fear of losing federal funding.
The investigations can and have drummed up publicity, putting other university funding in the crosshairs. The effects of similar pressure campaigns are already being felt: Elite universities have appeased wealthy pro-Israel donors, who have since October 7 threatened to withhold their money if anti-Israel speech is tolerated on campus.
Getty ImagesUsing antisemitism for political ends is not a new tack. Efforts like Marschall’s play into a pattern of reporting on antisemitism that obfuscates rather than clarifies material antisemitic threats. Frightening statistics, leading to sensationalized headlines, about soaring campus antisemitism are compiled by conservative, agenda-driven watchdogs that conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism as policy.
They assert without compunction that calls for Palestinian liberation are a threat to Jews. The statistics then take on the imprimatur of official narrative, stoke further fear, and resist dispute — any such challenge is open to charges of antisemitism denialism.
Meanwhile, three Palestinian students wearing Keffiyehs were shot last November in Vermont, leaving one paralyzed from the waist down. An Arab Muslim student at Stanford was hospitalized in a hit-and-run in November that authorities are investigating as a hate crime. (The latter incident went notably unmentioned in Baker’s viral Atlantic story detailing threats at Stanford.)
And there have been physical dangers at Columbia, too — for pro-Palestine students. Those attending an on-campus Palestine solidarity rally in January were sprayed with a noxious chemical by two veterans of the Israeli military, also Columbia students. Numerous students — including Layla, the Palestinian social work student — were hit with the foul-smelling spray, believed to be Israeli-developed chemical weapon knowns as “skunk.”
Fifteen students had to seek hospital care for nausea, burning eyes, and irritated skin. While the NYPD is investigating the incident and the assailants are currently banned from campus, the university’s initial response was to chide the injured students for holding the protest in the first place.
Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students at Columbia and elsewhere have seen their faces and names projected on “ doxxing trucks ” circling campus. A vocally pro-Zionist business school professor, Shai Davidai, has faced complaints that he used his X account to target individual Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students by linking them to Hamas. (Davidai has denied going after particular students, though in January he promoted a form letter that singled out a student by name and, in March, accused a student of being “pro-Hamas” while linking to a tweet that identified her.)
In response to dozens of student complaints, the university launched an investigation into Davidai’s behavior; he has decried the probe as “retaliation.” His outrage make sense, I suppose, in a universe that gives credence to a Palestinian flag emoji as a potential trigger for a “trauma response.”
The disparity of the stakes — felt safety and its material counterpart — become ever starker when one’s gaze is turned to where it really belongs: Palestine itself. Students speaking out for Palestine are not doing so to shore up campus safety for Palestinian students — which the Palestinian students, of course, deserve — but because they are desperate to see an end to Israeli assault on Gaza.
“I question why our focus is on the elite college campuses and their use of language over the horrific injustices being committed against the Palestinian people,” wrote Maryam Iqbal, a freshman at Barnard College and among the students hospitalized after the Columbia chemical attack, in the college newspaper. “There is absolutely no reason to be centering the feelings of privileged college students over the victims of an actual genocide.”
Iqbal told me that she hoped that following the chemical attack, the university administration’s attitude towards what constitutes threat and safety, and where risks lie, would change. “Nothing has shifted,” she said.
Instead, attacks on expression continue. Last month, Barnard banned students from displaying any decorations on dorm room doors, to avoid “the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs.”
There are, without question, students who feel hurt and unwelcome when faced with protests and speech condemning Israel as a genocidal apartheid state. Many Jewish people struggle to square such realities with the idealized notion of Israel we were raised with: that it is a noble and necessary state for Jewish safety.
I know, too, that there are Jewish students who fear that antisemitic groups and individuals are simply using opposition to Israel as a guise for anti-Jewish hate — there’s certainly historic precedent. And there are, as I noted, examples of genuine heightened antisemitism on campus. When Jewish people are targeted for being Jewish, we need to act with severity. Fear, however, does not make a protest against Israel, even a protest against its maintenance as a Jewish ethnostate, a protest against Jews.
“Treating feelings of fear and discomfort seriously does not mean reifying them.”
Institutions of higher education should be in the business of demystification, even when it involves challenging certain sensitive received wisdoms. We fail as educators if we permit the false lesson of all too many Zionist upbringings — that Palestinian freedom is a threat to Jewish safety — to persist for our students.
As Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia who has been perturbed by the treatment of pro-Palestine protest on campus, told me, “Treating feelings of fear and discomfort seriously does not mean reifying them.”
Howley, who is also Jewish, noted that, by the same logic, we would not want to validate the fear felt by a white student, conditioned under racist assumptions, who called the police because they felt afraid in the presence of a Black student.
“Capitulation to this sort of language of fear and unsafety in the absence of any real threat,” he said, “is a real betrayal of our actual responsibilities as teachers to the social emotional development of our students.”
NY Daily News via Getty ImagesWe might be tempted to hand it to the anti-woke right, who warned against the proliferation of “safe space” language and “therapy speak” as organizing forces at American universities. Such criticisms, though, rely on bad faith framings of anti-racist and diversity work — only the worst liberal iterations, although too common, exemplify the right-wing caricature of colleges privileging “snowflake” student feelings.
It is a different, more rigorous exercise entirely when students and professors proffer materially grounded, historically informed opposition to oppressive speech and discriminatory treatment on campus.
When the Hillel student group at the New School in New York City, where I teach, invited a lieutenant from the Israeli military to come speak on campus in early March, I was among several colleagues who signed a letter to our administration, requesting the planned event be canceled.
Among the reasons listed was that many students, above all Palestinians, would feel “utterly unsafe” to have an active-duty Israeli soldier on campus. This, I thought, was true, but a weak argument; the students might feel unsafe, but they would not be unsafe.
The letter’s far stronger claim was that, as a university founded on antiwar ideals and a purported commitment to liberatory principles, the school should not offer “a platform for an army that continues to violate international law and is actively engaged in perpetrating human rights abuses and the murder of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.” It is, I believe, valid to oppose a university hosting an active ranking officer of an army that has obliterated every single institution of higher education in Gaza.
Citing the importance of free speech, the university permitted the talk to proceed .
I’ve long argued against an absolutist approach to free speech on campuses and beyond; some oppressive speech, even if constitutionally protected, should not be platformed. Decisions about canceling speakers and banning certain speech, however, should not be a question of privileging certain peoples’ feelings and fears over others, however visceral the feelings might be.
Rather, we must — without presuming answers in advance — interrogate whether structures of oppression and violence are normalized and upheld in our educational institutions through these choices. The decisions will be imperfect and contested, but at least they will be based on more than feelings.
The post Pro-Israel Advocates Are Weaponizing “Safety” on College Campuses appeared first on The Intercept .
When Vice President Kamala Harris toured the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this week, site of the infamous 2018 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, she pushed for more gun control and called for communities to accept more federal help in stopping school shootings. “I will continue to advocate for what we must do in terms of universal background checks and assault weapons ban” Harris said.
But in a land where gun control is politically impossible , the only tangible help the Biden administration offers schools are resources to conduct better behavioral profiling of students, doing so through a Secret Service center founded to study the psychology of presidential assassins. The push, supported by a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the role of the Department of Homeland Security in school violence, would turn America’s schools into another adjunct of the national security apparatus, a veritable school for spies.
School shootings are indeed an epidemic in America, and Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 and injured 17 more in Parkland is a tragic example of yet another juvenile who fell through every social service safety net that American society had to offer. He is a poster child for the ease with which mentally ill Americans can acquire guns. But can the Secret Service really help to deal with the scourge, and is it the right agency to do so?
The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, or NTAC, was created in 1998 to examine threats to the president and security at complex public gatherings. Its focus was expanded a year later to the psychology of school shootings after the Columbine shooting resulted in 15 deaths and horrified the nation. Today, NTAC is “a multidisciplinary team of social science researchers” who assist “law enforcement, schools, government, and other public and private sector organizations to combat the ever-evolving threat of targeted violence,” according to its website .
Over decades, the NTAC has created desks in over a half-dozen Secret Service field offices , staffed by domestic security strategists who conduct school visits and staff training that mostly focus on recognizing “behavioral” traits that its study associates with mass violence. Last year alone, the NTAC touted some 331 training sessions, and it brags that over the last five years, it has trained hundreds of thousands of school administrators and teachers. The demand for its assistance, the Secret Service says, is thanks in part to NTAC publications regarding threats to schools. In its most recent report , “Improving School Safety Through Bystander Reporting,” the NTAC suggests schools encourage programs for students to report suspicious behavior, removing barriers that might impede any such tattletale reporting.
“For reporting programs to be a useful tool for intervention and prevention in K-12 schools, students and other members of a reporting community need to be aware of the importance of reporting, their role in reporting, what to report, and any resources that are available when it comes to reporting threats and other concerns,” the NTAC report says. “Research finds that the fear of being ostracized, or experiencing other forms of retaliation, is a significant barrier to reporting. When students view reporting as ‘snitching,’ they are discouraged from coming forward with their concerns.”
Another NTAC study , “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” studied nearly 70 averted attacks against schools, using demographic information to identify school shooters. Attributes tracked by NTAC include history of school discipline, contact with law enforcement, experience being bullied, mental health issues, alcohol and drug use, and the broadly defined psychological trauma “impacted by adverse childhood experiences.”
NTAC stresses that the goal of school monitoring of students and its suggested “see something, say something” practice is successful intervention. It is the same framework originally created to deal with international terrorism and now expanded to thwart domestic “ extremists ” and government “insider threats.”
But are such government programs created to deal with national security threats appropriate when applied to K-12 schools? Not only is NTAC’s list of behavioral threats just as applicable to skateboarders as they are to potential shooters, but lodging the school safety program in the Secret Service, and its Protective Intelligence Division (where NTAC is assigned), also questionably pushes school systems to adopt a national and homeland security curriculum.
“One thing I learned is that threat assessment doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Bev Baligad, chair of Threat Team Hawaiʻi, said after the Hawaiʻi Threat Assessment Conference last year, where NTAC and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Threat Evaluation and Reporting office made presentations. NTER houses the national “see something, say something” campaign and its own behavioral threat assessment and management program office. “There is a statewide push to build threat assessment capacity on all islands,” Baligad told the conference.
At an NTAC training in Arizona last month, Cochise County School Superintendent Jacqui Clay said , “As the county school superintendent, the reason that we’re doing this is that we have to become a learning community and not be in silos, especially when it comes to school safety.”
“As we come together, the sheriff’s department, the police departments, the (Arizona) Rangers, Border Patrol, superintendents, the community, that’s a deterrent. It’s more of a deterrent because they see we’re working together,” Clay added. “If we all learn the words to the song, then we can sing the song together, better. This is part of the song.” Some of those singing the song are law enforcement agencies without a prior mandate in U.S. schools.
“Messaging should demonstrate to students that there is a big difference between ‘snitching,’ ‘ratting,’ or ‘tattling,’ and seeking help,” a Secret Service guide says .
Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the EAGLES Act to prevent acts of mass violence, a bill that would bolster the NTAC by creating a national program on targeted school violence prevention, while expanding the NTAC’s “research and training on school violence and its dissemination of information on school violence prevention initiatives.”
“Accurate behavioral threat assessments and early interventions are essential to maintaining a safe environment in our schools and communities and preventing another tragedy from taking place,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, in reintroducing the legislation. “The U.S. Secret Service is uniquely equipped to help evaluate these threats, and our bill would enable them to share their tools and expertise with school safety partners across the country.”
Not everyone horrified at the rise of gun violence inside schools has signed on to the mission of reauthorizing and expanding the NTAC as proposed in the EAGLES Act.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote of the bill that “Threat assessment, including as proposed in this legislation, poses major risks for and to students, including increased and early contact with law enforcement, overidentification of students … for ‘threatening’ behavior, distraction from the role of easy access to guns in enabling mass shootings in schools and elsewhere, and undermining of students’ rights under civil rights laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504. School safety belongs in the hands of educators, and those trained in child/adolescent development — not law enforcement, and we should never start from a place of viewing some children as threats.”
The Consortium for Constituents With Disabilities followed suit, adding, “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a border security and counterterrorism agency. This agency has no expertise in student behavior or child development. Nonetheless, they would develop best practices and train school staff on threat assessment, treating children as potential terrorists.”
The post Kamala Harris Touts Homeland Security Program Encouraging High School Spying appeared first on The Intercept .
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is demanding answers from the Pentagon about coups by U.S.-trained African military officers, according to a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin shared exclusively with The Intercept.
Under the bill that authorizes the 2024 defense budget, the Pentagon is mandated to provide a briefing on coups carried out by U.S.-trained African partners to the Senate and House Armed Services committees no later than 90 days after the bill’s December 2023 passage. The briefing is supposed to cover the number of coups, the vetting process employed by the United States for partners, and steps taken to strengthen trainees’ respect for civilian control of the military.
Last week, during a House Armed Services Committee hearing held a day before the deadline, Gaetz asked Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, about the briefing. “You’ll get your answer, Congressman,” replied Langley.
Days later, the House Armed Services Committee is still waiting for its briefing. In his Wednesday letter, Gaetz laid into the Defense Department for its inaction.
“It’s particularly egregious how the Department of Defense dodges a clear legal order to brief Congress about the coups.”
“Given the DoD has failed to meet the congressionally mandated deadline,” wrote Gaetz, “I am formally requesting the briefing or report on security cooperation with African military units who received DoD training and equipping, and subsequently overthrew their governments within the AFRICOM AOR” — or area of responsibility. The letter was copied to Langley.
“It’s particularly egregious how the Department of Defense dodges a clear legal order to brief Congress about the coups led by African militaries after receiving U.S. military assistance within AFRICOM,” Gaetz told The Intercept by email. “This blatant sidestepping of reporting requirements not only undermines legislative oversight but raises significant concerns about transparency and accountability within the DoD’s foreign military assistance program.”
A request to the Pentagon for comment about the failure to provide the briefing and whether it has the requested data was not immediately returned.
At least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror, according to a series of reports by The Intercept.
The list includes military personnel from Burkina Faso ( 2014, 2015, and twice in 2022 ); Chad ( 2021 ); Gambia (2014); Guinea ( 2021 ); Mali ( 2012 , 2020, 2021 ); Mauritania (2008); and Niger ( 2023 ).
At least five leaders of the 2023 Niger coup received American training, according to a U.S. official. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as regional governors, according to the State Department.
Not all U.S.-trained African coup leaders hail from the Sahel. Before Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, he underwent basic training at Fort Benning , now Fort Moore, in Georgia and advanced instruction at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania.
The total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11 may be far higher than is known, but the State Department, which tracks data on U.S. trainees, is either unwilling or unable to provide it. The Intercept identified more than 70 other African military personnel involved in coups since 2001 who might have received U.S. training or assistance, but when provided with names in 2023, State Department spokespeople either failed to respond or replied, “We do not have the ability to provide records for these historical cases at this time.”
The total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11 may be far higher than is known, but the State Department is either unwilling or unable to provide it.
In March 2023, Gaetz grilled Langley about the percentage of U.S.-trained troops who have conducted coups. When asked what datasets with this information were available, Langley responded, “Congressman, we may have that information. I don’t at this time.”
During the exchange, Langley also seemed to say that the U.S. shares “ core values ” with coup leaders.
Last week, Langley still had no answers for Gaetz on the number of U.S.-trained mutineers in Africa but pushed back on any implication that U.S. support to African military personnel was linked to their rebellions.
“There is no syllabus for overthrowing a government; not in our institutions,” said Langley . “It’s safe to say there’s no correlation or causation of U.S. training to a coup happening.”
How Langley came to this conclusion is unclear. AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan previously told The Intercept that the command maintains no database of U.S.-trained African mutineers nor even a count of how many times they have conducted coups.
In 2022, Cahalan said, “AFRICOM does not actively track individuals who’ve received U.S. training after the training has been completed.”
The post Pentagon Ignores Law Calling for Report on How It Trained So Many African Coup Leaders appeared first on The Intercept .
The theory at the core of the lawsuit filed by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and a handful of anti-abortion doctors who are challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone is that they have been harmed — or will be harmed — by the FDA’s actions.
The doctors are not claiming that they’ve been hurt by taking the drug or prescribing it, which none of them do. Instead, their theory goes something like this: Mifepristone is dangerous, and pregnant people who take the drug are bound to have serious complications. When they do, they’ll probably go to an emergency room, which could be in a hospital where one of the anti-abortion doctors works. As a result, the doctor could be pulled from regular patient duties to deal with the mifepristone-related emergency, forcing them to play some role in the provision of abortion and causing emotional trauma.
The claim is so tenuous that during oral arguments in the case on Tuesday, not even the anti-abortion majority of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to buy it as a theory that would give the group standing to sue the FDA. The justices appeared disinclined to rule in a way that would narrow access to medication abortion, at least for now.
“FDA approved mifepristone based on the agency’s scientific judgment that the drug is safe and effective,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court. “It’s maintained that judgment across five presidential administrations, and millions of Americans have used mifepristone to safely end their pregnancies.” The alliance “may not agree with that choice,” she continued, “but that doesn’t give them … a legal basis to upend the regulatory scheme.”
Mifepristone is the first in a two-drug protocol approved for early pregnancy termination. It blocks progesterone, a hormone needed to continue pregnancy, while the second drug, misoprostol, causes the uterus to contract, expelling the pregnancy. Mifepristone is among the most studied drugs in the country; it has been used in more than 600 published clinical trials, and at less than 1 percent, the risk of serious complications is low. Today, the two-drug regimen accounts for more than 60 percent of all abortions in the United States.
The FDA first approved mifepristone in 2000. In 2016 and 2021, the agency loosened restrictions on the drug that had long been challenged as medically unnecessary, extending its use through 10 weeks of pregnancy and lifting a requirement that it be dispensed in person.
The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, an umbrella organization for several groups of anti-abortion doctors, filed federal suit in Amarillo, Texas, in late 2022, challenging the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as reckless and the subsequent changes as hazardous. Filing the suit in Amarillo — where the group had only recently incorporated itself — offered a tactical advantage: It guaranteed that the case would be heard by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a far-right Trump-appointed judge who hears all federal civil cases filed in the Texas Panhandle.
Kacsmaryk did not disappoint. In April 2023, he sided with the alliance, ruling that the FDA never should have approved mifepristone in the first place. To support his position that mifepristone was wildly unsafe, Kacsmaryk disengaged from science and instead cited an analysis of anonymous blog posts , a researcher whose work has been repeatedly called into question , and two studies sponsored by an anti-abortion organization that have since been retracted by the journal that published them.
The government appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which disagreed with Kacsmaryk’s conclusion regarding the 2000 approval of mifepristone but nonetheless said the FDA impermissibly loosened restrictions in 2016 and 2021.
In coming to their conclusions, both courts bought the alliance’s shaky theory of legal standing. On Tuesday, the justices on the Supreme Court seemed less convinced — even if Justice Samuel Alito was inclined to try to help his colleagues along. What if an anti-abortion doctor was the only person on duty in an emergency room when a “woman comes in with complications from having taken mifepristone … and as a result, in order to save her life, the doctor has to abort a viable fetus?” he asked the solicitor general.
The doctors “haven’t identified any incident in more than 20 years … that resembles that kind of hypothetical situation.”
If the doctor was forced into action, that could be a violation of longstanding laws that protect providers’ conscience rights , Prelogar responded, but that “situation has never come to pass.” The alliance and its doctors “haven’t identified any incident in more than 20 years that mifepristone has been available on the market that resembles that kind of hypothetical situation.”
Experts have worried that allowing legal standing on such a thin premise would lower the bar and permit nearly anyone to sue the FDA or any other agency for nearly anything they disagree with. Doctors who don’t think vaccinations are safe could sue to have their approval yanked; cardiologists could challenge a new heart medicine on the grounds that “some patients would no longer require their services,” as the FDA pointed out in a legal brief. Pharmaceutical companies have voiced concern that accepting the alliance’s premise would upend the system, encourage judges to second-guess scientists, chill drug development, and harm patients.
Even if the court were to accept that conscience rights had been violated, the doctors’ suggested remedy — making mifepristone illegal for everyone — was excessive, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson observed. “I’m worried that there is a significant mismatch … between the claimed injury and the remedy that’s being sought.” Exempting the doctors from participating in abortion-related care seemed the logical solution, she said. Instead, “they’re saying because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure, we’re seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all.”
Erin Hawley, a lawyer with the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, tried to push back, ignoring the fact that broad conscience objections can be raised with hospital administrators or other health care employers well before a particular situation arises. She argued that the doctors couldn’t afford to waste “precious moments scrubbing in, scrubbing out” of the ER to lodge an objection.
Justice Neil Gorsuch interrupted: There had been a “rash” of recent cases in which a lower court issued a nationwide ruling when the circumstances called for a more modest result. “This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on … an FDA rule or any other federal government action,” he said.
If the court rejects the alliance’s theory of legal standing, the case is dead without the justices having to address the group’s baseless arguments about the dangers of mifepristone, and the drug will remain available, as it is now, under the FDA’s current regulations. The court is expected to issue a ruling later this year, likely near the end of its session, which concludes in June.
That doesn’t mean that the attacks on medication abortion will stop or that the court will stand in their way. Both Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas seemed open to discussing a revival of the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that outlawed mailing anything considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile” — which included contraception — as well as “every article or thing” that could be used for abortion.
The zombie law has been dormant for decades, but many anti-abortion activists see it as a means of enacting a de facto national medication abortion ban without having to confront mifepristone’s safety record — even if the law’s broad language would trigger the possibility that instruments and drugs used for routine gynecological procedures could also be subject to its provisions.
During oral arguments, Alito asked whether the FDA should have considered the Comstock Act before lifting the in-person dispensing requirement, which led to widespread mail order sales. No, the solicitor general responded. If the restriction wasn’t medically necessary, then the FDA was required to lift it, not consider a statute that was outside its scientific purview.
Thomas asked Hawley, the alliance lawyer, for her take on Comstock. “The Comstock Act says that drugs should not be mailed,” she said. “We think the plain text of that, your honor, is pretty clear.”
The post Anti-Abortion Doctors Struggle to Explain Mifepristone Harms Before Supreme Court appeared first on The Intercept .
The Israeli military assault on Gaza has continued for nearly six months, with word of an impending attack on the densely populated town of Rafah. Against this backdrop, a shadow war has continued to play out between Iran and a network of militant groups on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other. Iran today supports and arms not just Hamas, but also groups like Lebanese Hezbollah , the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militia groups. Aside from the U.S. itself, Iran today is likely the most important outside power in the Gaza war, though its role is often ignored. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain discusses the role of Iran in the region with historian Arash Azizi. The author of “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom,” Azizi also discusses political developments in the country in the aftermath of recent elections.
Transcript coming soon.
The post Iran and U.S. Wage a Shadow War Behind Gaza Conflict appeared first on The Intercept .
Citing the company’s “failure to provide answers to important questions,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are pressing Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to respond to reports of disproportionate censorship around the Israeli war on Gaza.
“Meta insists that there’s been no discrimination against Palestinian-related content on their platforms, but at the same time, is refusing to provide us with any evidence or data to support that claim,” Warren told The Intercept. “If its ad-hoc changes and removal of millions of posts didn’t discriminate against Palestinian-related content, then what’s Meta hiding?”
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent last December, first reported by The Intercept , Warren presented the company with dozens of specific questions about the company’s Gaza-related content moderation efforts. Warren asked about the exact numbers of posts about the war, broken down by Hebrew or Arabic, that have been deleted or otherwise suppressed.
The letter was written following widespread reporting in The Intercept and other outlets that detailed how posts on Meta platforms that are sympathetic to Palestinians , or merely depicting the destruction in Gaza, are routinely removed or hidden without explanation.
A month later, Meta replied to Warren’s office with a six-page letter, obtained by The Intercept, that provided an overview of its moderation response to the war but little in the way of specifics or new information.
Meta’s reply disclosed some censorship: “In the nine days following October 7, we removed or marked as disturbing more than 2,200,000 pieces of content in Hebrew and Arabic for violating our policies.” The company declined, however, to provide a breakdown of deletions by language or market, making it impossible to tell whether that figure reflects discriminatory moderation practices.
Much of Meta’s letter is a rehash of an update it provided through its public relations portal at the war’s onset, some of it verbatim.
Now, a second letter from Warren to Meta, joined this time by Sanders, says this isn’t enough. “Meta’s response, dated January 29, 2024, did not provide any of the requested information necessary to understand Meta’s treatment of Arabic language or Palestine-related content versus other forms of content,” the senators wrote.
Both senators are asking Meta to again answer Warren’s specific questions about the extent to which Arabic and Hebrew posts about the war have been treated differently, how often censored posts are reinstated, Meta’s use of automated machine learning-based censorship tools, and more.
Accusations of systemic moderation bias against Palestinians have been borne out by research from rights groups.
“Since October 7, Human Rights Watch has documented over 1,000 cases of unjustified takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook related to Palestine and Palestinians, including about human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch said in a late December report. “The censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic, global, and a product of the company’s failure to meet its human rights due diligence responsibilities.”
A February report by AccessNow said Meta “suspended or restricted the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists both in and outside of Gaza, and arbitrarily deleted a considerable amount of content, including documentation of atrocities and human rights abuses.”
A third-party audit commissioned by Meta itself previously concluded it had given the short shrift to Palestinian rights during a May 2021 flare-up of violence between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” said the auditor’s report.
In response to this audit, Meta pledged an array of reforms, which free expression and digital rights advocates say have yet to produce a material improvement.
In its December report, Human Rights Watch noted, “More than two years after committing to publishing data around government requests for taking down content that is not necessarily illegal, Meta has failed to increase transparency in this area.”
The post Meta Refuses to Answer Questions on Gaza Censorship, Say Sens. Warren and Sanders appeared first on The Intercept .
With the 2024 elections looming, the Department of Homeland Security has a little-noticed weapon in its war on disinformation: comic books. Few have read them, but the series is attracting criticism from members of Congress. Calling the comics “creepy,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., complained earlier this month that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency-produced series was just another way for the federal government to “trample on the First Amendment” in its zeal to fight so-called disinformation.
“DC Comics won’t be adding these taxpayer-funded comic books … to their repertoire anytime soon,” cracked Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s annual report on government waste released in December.
The comics read like well-meaning (if corny) attempts to grapple with efforts by foreign governments to influence American public opinion, as articulated in intelligence community assessments . But there is a risk that the federal government’s fight against foreign disinformation positions it as an arbiter of the truth, which raises civil liberties concerns. The efficacy of the DHS “Resilience Series” of comic books is also far from obvious.
The members of Congress might be comforted to know that few people ever noticed the comics. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urges users to “share” their “Resilience Series” comics, but a search of the webpage’s address on X shows that it is linked to fewer than a dozen times. CISA also produced glossy-looking YouTube trailers for its two graphic novels that garnered just 4,000 and 6,000 views respectively — a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of views trailers for other graphic novels attract.
For CISA, disinformation is no laughing matter. “Disinformation is an existential threat to the United States,” declares CISA’s webpage detailing its “ Resilience Series ” of comic books.
Third in sales by genre, only behind general fiction and romance novels, graphic novels are particularly popular among the youngest readers. One industry observer notes that in Japan, more paper is used for manga books than for toilet paper. School Library Journal concluded in their graphic novels survey last year that popularity increased over 90 percent year over year in school libraries. The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of school librarians reported opposition to graphic novels from teachers, parents, and others who didn’t consider them “real books.”
Though first released in 2020 in anticipation of the Trump–Biden presidential election, the comics were intended to be an evergreen resource in the war on disinformation. “Learn the dangers & risks associated with dis- & misinformation through fictional stories that are inspired by real-world events in @CISAgov’s Resilience Series,” the U.S. Attorney for Nevada posted on X last April.
CISA produced two graphic novels, “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes.” “Real Fake” tells the story of Rachel O’Sullivan, a “gamer” and a “patriot” who infiltrates a troll farm circulating false narratives about elections to American voters. “Bug Bytes” addresses disinformation around Covid-19, following Ava Williams, a journalism student who realizes that a malicious cyber campaign spreading conspiracy theories about 5G technology is inspiring attacks on 5G towers.
“Fellow comic geeks, assemble!” CISA said when the comic books were initially released. “Let’s band together to take on disinformation and misinformation.” The CISA post quotes another X post by the FBI’s Washington field office recommending the graphic novels and exhorting the importance of “finding trusted information.”
“The resilience series products were released in 2020 and 2021 to raise awareness on tactics of foreign influence and disinformation,” a spokesperson for CISA told The Intercept, noting that despite continued reference by members of Congress and critics, that this series of comic books has now been discontinued.
“The problem is not that panels about African troll farms ( Real Fake ) or homegrown antivaxxers ( Bug Bytes ) might make readers feel insecure—it’s that they don’t make readers feel insecure enough,” writes Russ Castronovo, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and professor of American studies and English, in Public Books magazine. “Or, more precisely, these comics might be judged aesthetic failures because—due to their proximity to propaganda—they leave little space for the vulnerabilities inherent in the act of reading. So, while readers learn that meddling by foreign powers ‘is scary, especially in an election year,’ the graphic fictions commissioned by US cybersecurity assume reading itself to be a process whereby information (as opposed to disinformation) is obtained, questions are answered, and doubts are resolved.”
Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.”
All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says.
Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.
“Over the past three years, Russia has implemented and run the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history,” Watts said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017. While Russia’s propaganda regarding its first invasion of Ukraine and Crimea was no doubt effective, that employed in 2016 against the U.S. presidential election was “neither well organized nor especially well resourced” according to a detailed study by the Pentagon-backed Rand Corporation. The think tank later concluded that “the impact of Russian efforts in the West has been uncertain.”
Co-author Haque, according to an interview in Forbes, became involved in the Resilience Series after a chance meeting at a bookstore with actor Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, who would later join Erly Stage’s advisory board and introduce Haque to his Americans contacts, which included Watts.
“There is now a real need for schools and public authorities to educate young people on how much fake news there is across all forms of media,” Haque told Forbes.
Counter-disinformation has become a cottage industry in the federal government, with offices and programs now dedicated to exposing foreign influence, as The Intercept has previously reported . CISA’s Resilience Series webpage directs questions to an email for the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (not to be confused with the FBI’s own effort, the Foreign Influence Task Force, or the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center). In 2021, the CISA Task Force was replaced by a Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation team according to a government audit , which CISA tells The Intercept has now been rolled into something called “the Election Security and Resilience subdivision.” (Malinformation refers to information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate, according to CISA.)
The proliferation of various counter-disinformation entities has been disjointed, prompting the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general to conclude that “DHS does not have a unified, department-wide strategy to set overarching goals and objectives for addressing and mitigating threats from disinformation campaigns that appear in social media.”
CISA’s mission, originally focused on traditional cyber and critical infrastructure security, evolved in the wake of the 2016 election. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson officially designated the election systems as a part of critical infrastructure. Since then, CISA has expanded its focus to include fighting disinformation, arguing that human thought can be said to constitute infrastructure.
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in 2021.
In pursuit of that cognitive infrastructure, CISA launched the Resilience Series, with an eye to mediums that would appeal to popular audiences.
“We have to find new ways to engage with people through mediums that use soft power and creative messaging, rather than being seen to preach,” Haque said in the Forbes interview.
The post Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation appeared first on The Intercept .
Ten years ago, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.
Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.
In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”
The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.
However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.
While national security letters allow the government to make targeted demands for non-public data on an individual basis, companies like Dataminr continuously monitor public activity on social media and other internet platforms. Dataminr provides its customers with customized real-time “alerts” on desired topics, giving clients like police departments a form of social media omniscience. The alerts allow police to, for instance, automatically track a protest as it moves from its planning stages into the streets, without requiring police officials to do any time-intensive searches.
Although Dataminr defends First Alert, its governmental surveillance platform, as a public safety tool that helps first responders react quickly to sudden crises, the tool has been repeatedly shown to be used by police to monitor First Amendment-protected online political speech and real-world protests.
Dataminr has long touted its special relationship with X as integral to First Alert. (Twitter previously owned a stake in Dataminr, though divested before Musk’s purchase.) Unlike other platforms it surveils by scraping user content, Dataminr pays for privileged access to X through the company’s “firehose”: a direct, unfiltered feed of every single piece of user content ever shared publicly to the platform.
Watching everything that happens on X in real time is key to Dataminr’s pitch to the government. The company essentially leases indirect access to this massive spray of information, with Dataminr acting as an intermediary between X’s servers and a multitude of police, intelligence, and military agencies.
While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business.
“Dataminr has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter, whereby we have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available Tweets,” a representative of the surveillance company wrote to the Secret Service in a July 2023 message about the terms of the law enforcement agency’s surveillance subscription. “In addition all of Dataminr’s public sector customers today have agreed to these terms including dozens who are responsible for law enforcement whether at the local, state or federal level.” (The terms are not mentioned in the emails.)
According to an email from the Secret Service in the same thread, the agency’s interest in Dataminr was unambiguous: “The whole point of this contract is to use the information for law enforcement purposes.”
Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance. (Neither X nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.)
“X’s legal briefs acknowledge that communications surveillance is ripe for government abuse, and that we can’t depend on the police to police themselves,” said Jennifer Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But then X turns around and sells Dataminr fire-hose access to users’ posts, which Dataminr then passes through to the government in the form of unregulated disclosures and speculative predictions that can falsely ensnare the innocent.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users,” Adam Schwartz, the privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of X’s Supreme Court petition. “For example, platforms must not provide special services, like real-time access to the full stream of public-facing posts, to surveillance vendors who share this information with police departments. If X is providing such access to Dataminr, that would be disappointing.”
Following a 2016 investigation into the use of Twitter data for police surveillance by the ACLU, the company went so far as to expressly ban third parties from “conducting or providing surveillance or gathering intelligence” and “monitoring sensitive events (including but not limited to protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings)” using firehose data. The new policy went so far as to ban the use of firehose data for purposes pertaining to “any alleged or actual commission of a crime” — ostensibly a problem for Dataminr’s crime-fighting clientele.
These assurances have done nothing to stop Dataminr from using the data it buys from X to do exactly these things. Prior reporting from The Intercept has shown the company has, in recent years, helped federal and local police surveil entirely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and abortion rights rallies in recent years.
Neither X nor Dataminr have responded to repeated requests to explain how a tool that allows for the real-time monitoring of protests is permitted under a policy that expressly bans the monitoring of protests. In the past, both Dataminr and X have denied that monitoring the real-time communications of people on the internet and relaying that information to the police is a form of surveillance because the posts in question are public.
Twitter later softened this prohibition by noting surveillance applications were banned “Unless explicitly approved by X in writing.” Dataminr, for its part, remains listed as an “official partner” of X.
Though the means differ, national security scholars told The Intercept that the ends of national security letters and fire-hose monitoring are the same: widespread government surveillance with little to no meaningful oversight. Neither the national security letters nor dragnet social media surveillance require a sign-off from a judge and, in both cases, those affected are left unaware they’ve fallen under governmental scrutiny.
“While I appreciate that there may be some symbolic difference between giving the government granular data directly and making them sift through what they buy from data brokers, the end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF.
“The end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process.”
It’s the kind of ideological contradiction typical of X’s owner. Musk has managed to sell himself as a heterodox critic of U.S. foreign policy and big government while simultaneously enriching himself by selling the state expensive military hardware through his rocket company SpaceX.
“While X’s efforts to bring more transparency to the National Security Letter process are commendable, its objection to government surveillance of communications in that context is glaringly at odds with its decision to support similar surveillance measures through its partnership with Dataminr,” said Mary Pat Dwyer, director of Georgetown University’s Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. “Scholars and advocates have long argued the Dataminr partnership is squarely inconsistent with the platform’s policy forbidding use of its data for surveillance, and X’s continued failure to end the relationship prevents the company from credibly portraying itself as an advocate for its users’ privacy.”
The post Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept .
U.S. commandos have shown a special interest in strengthening ties with one of the most corrupt, abusive, and repressive regimes on the planet. The delivery of aid by Special Operations forces to the coastal African nation of Equatorial Guinea last month followed pilgrimages to the country’s pariah president by top U.S. officials.
The move came amid shifting West African geopolitics. A Pentagon report last year mentioned Equatorial Guinea as the potential site of a future Chinese military base. At the same time, U.S. relations with longtime allies in Central and West Africa have frayed, often in the aftermath of coups d’état by American-trained military officers.
The aid to Equatorial Guinea appears to be the latest facet of a U.S. charm offensive to woo the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, a tyrant now in his sixth decade in power, as the U.S. has lost influence in the African Sahel.
“We hope that this donation is the beginning of additional cooperation,” said Commander Michael White, the defense attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, after U.S. Special Operations Command Africa spearheaded a modest donation of humanitarian aid to the tiny, oil-rich central African nation.
U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea David Gilmour expressed hope that the recent donation of medical supplies would be the “first of many opportunities to partner with” the government there. It follows high-level engagement by the administration of President Joe Biden with Obiang’s regime.
“This seems to run counter to every value that the Biden administration publicly espouses when it comes to democracy, human rights, and anticorruption.”
“This seems to run counter to every value that the Biden administration publicly espouses when it comes to democracy, human rights, and anticorruption,” said Cameron Hudson, a former Africa analyst at the CIA, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The administration is doing everything it can to maintain a military foothold on the continent. And if we don’t already have a foothold, to create one. So establishing or deepening relationships with particularly odious regimes like Equatorial Guinea are not off the table.”
Efforts to improve relations with the notorious kleptocracy come as the U.S. has been forced to scale back its military reach on the continent. (Kelly Cahalan, a spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, said the command was unaware of any increased U.S. engagement with Equatorial Guinea.) The Pentagon curtailed military ties with Burkina Faso , Mali , and Niger following coups and reduced its counterterrorism activities in Cameroon due to human rights abuses by the country’s military.
Earlier this month, Niger’s ruling junta, which includes a number of officers trained by the U.S. military, announced it was severing a long-standing security cooperation agreement with the United States “ with immediate effect .”
Crisantos Obama Ondo, Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador to the U.S., did not respond to requests for an interview.
Equatorial Guinea has been plagued by oppression, corruption, and poverty for decades. After seizing power in a military coup in 1979, Obiang and his family have ruled it as their personal fiefdom. Despite significant oil wealth, the country suffers widespread poverty due to rampant embezzlement.
The most recent State Department report on human rights in Equatorial Guinea details credible reports of extrajudicial killings, torture, “inhuman” punishment, arbitrary arrest, and political imprisonment by the state, among many other abuses. It also chronicles corruption at all levels of government, especially the top: “The president and members of his inner circle continued to amass personal fortunes from the revenues associated with monopolies on all domestic commercial ventures, as well as timber and oil exports.”
In 2011, the U.S. Justice Department seized a beachfront mansion in Malibu, California; a private plane; and a fleet of luxury cars — purchased with looted funds laundered in the U.S. — from Teodoro “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang Mangue, the president’s son and now Equatorial Guinea’s vice president. The U.S. settled the case after Teodorin forfeited nearly $30 million in assets .
Swiss prosecutors took possession of 11 of the younger Obiang’s luxury cars in 2016, seizing Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bentleys, a Bugatti, and a Rolls-Royce. In 2021, France seized $170 million of Teodorin’s assets including a 101-room mansion near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
The seizures have not affected Teodorin’s conspicuous consumption, typified by his penchant for enjoying the high life on a luxury superyacht and, last year, staying in a $75,000-a-night New York hotel suite while asking the United Nations for aid.
In recent years, U.S. officials have publicly fretted about China establishing a naval outpost in West Africa. “The thing I think I’m most worried about is this military base on the Atlantic coast, and where they have the most traction for that today is in Equatorial Guinea,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, then-chief of AFRICOM, told the House Armed Services Committee in March 2022.
In an October 2023 analysis for Congress, the Defense Department reported it was “likely” that China has considered locating a “military logistics” facility in Equatorial Guinea. Earlier this month, Gen. Michael Langley, the current AFRICOM commander, warned the Senate Armed Services Committee: “China is actively pursuing a naval base on Africa’s Atlantic coast.”
The pariah state has been invited, since 2019, to participate in AFRICOM’s Obangame Express, the largest multinational maritime exercise in Western and Central Africa. AFRICOM also conducted a maritime capability assessment for the country in 2021.
That same year, when a Navy ship made a port call there, a U.S. news release called Equatorial Guinea “an important partner of the United States.” A visit by another ship in 2022 prompted Navy commander Tim Rustico to highlight the “great opportunity to continue building our partnership with Equatorial Guinea.”
“U.S. forces worked … with the government of Equatorial Guinea to facilitate this engagement signifying sustained relations between the two nations,” reads an Army news release about the February donation of $24,000 worth of supplies, including baby formula and first-aid kits to the country where most of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, but where the president has a reported net worth of $600 million .
Tutu Alicante, the head of EG Justice, a nonprofit organization that promotes human rights in Equatorial Guinea, said that the Biden administration’s high-level engagement with the Obiang government was even more damaging than providing aid.
Since Biden took office, Obiang, his son, or both have met with Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee , Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer , CIA Deputy Director David Cohen , and Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman, the director of strategy, engagement, and programs at AFRICOM.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Hudson said, “Equatorial Guinea seems blatant about the fact that they are very much for sale to the highest bidder. They are very happy to be courted by Washington and Beijing because they occupy a strategic spot in the world and sit on a strategic resource and they have the money to allow them an independence that other countries in the region don’t have.”
“Equatorial Guinea seems blatant about the fact that they are very much for sale to the highest bidder.”
Following rigged presidential elections in 2022 — in which Obiang won 95 percent of the vote — Phee wrote a letter to the newly reelected president. Posted to X by an Equatoguinean government official , the letter shows that Phee welcomed “close collaboration” in which their countries would “act together” and seize “opportunities to strengthen” and “enhance our mutual security.” (The State Department verified the authenticity of the letter to The Intercept, but did not respond to other questions about engagement with Obiang’s government.)
“The United States is committed to a world in which human rights are protected … and those who commit human rights abuses are held accountable,” said Phee’s boss, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in a 2021 statement defining the Biden administration’s core principles. “President Biden is committed to a foreign policy … centered on the defense of democracy and the protection of human rights.”
Experts said engagement with Equatorial Guinea makes a mockery of this pledge and undermines U.S. credibility across Africa.
“The hypocrisy of publicly saying that democracy, human rights, and anticorruption are the cornerstone of your foreign policy and then to go down a path that does not put those values into any kind of real practice is most troubling,” Hudson told The Intercept. “It sends a message to everyone on the continent that everything we say is negotiable.”
The post Squeezed by African Coups, Biden Cozies Up to the World’s Worst Dictator appeared first on The Intercept .
I have organized airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.
None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.
It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Biden administration isn’t just complicit by refusing to condemn Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid — an absurd situation leading the U.S. to incur significant costs and unnecessary risks for symbolic airdrops. He’s actively supporting Israel’s oft-stated but ill-defined war aim of eradicating Hamas, a military effort with little concern for Palestinian lives or the fate of Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell got an honest, if muddled, answer from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week . She asked him to explain the “incompatible policy” of being “the leading supplier of weapons to Israel” while, at the same time, “leading an international rescue effort” being impeded by Israeli government officials. Her question laid bare the ugly reality of Biden’s complicity in Israel’s campaign resulting in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Blinken looked into the camera and attempted to make the incompatible compatible. “These two objectives are not in conflict,” he insisted, defending the ongoing flow of no-strings-attached aid to Israel, Washington’s biggest foreign aid recipient . “The question is whether Israel, on the one hand, is and can effectively deal with its security needs in defending the country, while at the same time maximizing every possible effort to ensure that civilians are not harmed and that assistance gets to those who need it.”
Blinken has since ratcheted up that rhetoric, promising a United Nations resolution urging “an immediate ceasefire” — while at the same time sending endless arms to Israel.
Israel’s war has already cost the lives of over 31,000 Palestinians and brought Biden closer to electoral peril, with 364,000 Michigan and Super Tuesday voters choosing “uncommitted” on their primary ballots, largely a result of grassroots efforts to generate a political cost for the White House’s support for the Israeli war.
Biden and his advisers’ refusal to change policy on aid to Israel or rethink the diplomatic cover it provides for Israel at the United Nations reveals a U.S. presidency with little regard for civilians in Gaza. There’s nothing beyond a steady trickle of statements of concern about Palestinian civilians and anonymous West Wing officials suggesting ongoing frustration with the execution of the war.
Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza wouldn’t be possible without tens of thousands of bombs and guided munitions sent by the U.S. since October 7. The Biden administration organized more than 100 arms transfers but only notified Congress of two , utilizing a variety of mechanisms to mask the scale and frequency of weapons transfers.
While he provided a steady flow of weapons to Israel, Biden withheld funding from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The largest humanitarian aid body in Gaza, UNRWA was targeted by Israel with unfounded claims — that its employees participated in the October 7 attack in Israel.
Biden’s aid efforts implicitly accept Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings.
Israel has yet to provide any evidence to back up its allegations — Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., called the claims “ flat-out lies ” — and Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the European Commission have all resumed their funding. The Biden administration, however, continues to withhold financial support, even as UNRWA faces a $450 million budget shortfall. Instead, Biden chose to engage in humanitarian aid theater, endorsing costly, dangerous, and impractical methods for transporting aid into Gaza that won’t require forcing Israel to end its blockade of food and medicine.
In the short term, Biden’s aid policies won’t deliver any meaningful relief for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The latest effort involves the U.S. military constructing a causeway off the coast of Gaza to deliver as many as 2 million meals per day. The process implicitly accepts Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings. The causeway is expected to take two months to implement, a timeline guaranteeing famine for Gaza’s most vulnerable populations.
Israel, to its credit, has been more honest about its goals in Gaza. Internally, the country has made its goals clear: A leaked October 13 concept paper from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry explored the possibility of mass population transfers from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
In public, the same agenda is stated more crudely . Statements by senior Israeli politicians in the wake of October 7 include calls for mass depopulation of Gaza and exhibited consistent disregard for any distinction between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. One government minister spoke openly of removing up to 90 percent of the Palestinians. Another said Israel was “fighting human animals.” A third said there were no civilians in Gaza and suggested using a nuclear weapon. A top parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party said Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza strip from the face of the earth.”
The statements were used in a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, where a preliminary ruling found enough merit to the allegations to let the case go forward.
By imposing food scarcity on Gaza, and bombing refugee camps, apartment buildings, hospitals, universities , and aid distribution centers, it’s clear that Israel is following through on the words of its political leadership.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s occasional expressions of concern with the civilian death toll in Gaza while enabling the war raises a disturbing question: Is the Biden administration knowingly complicit in maximizing civilian killing in one of the most deadly military campaigns in recent history — or stunningly naive and incompetent?
Either way, hundreds of thousands of Democratic Party voters already came to the same conclusion as Andrea Mitchell: It is incompatible to claim concern for Palestinian lives while actively participating in their extermination.
The post Organizing Aid to Gaza Led Me to a Harsh Truth: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing appeared first on The Intercept .
Warning: This article contains graphic images.
Throughout the past five and a half months, Israel has waged a full-spectrum war against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United States and other Western nations have supplied not only the weapons for this war of annihilation against the Palestinians, but also key political and diplomatic support.
The results of the actions of this coalition of the killing have been devastating. Conservative estimates hold that more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children. More than 8,000 people remain missing, many of them believed to have died in the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks. Famine conditions are now present in large swaths of the Gaza Strip. The fact that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza has not deterred the U.S. and its allies from continuing to facilitate Israel’s war.
The massive scale of human destruction caused by the attacks would pose grave challenges to well-equipped hospitals. In Gaza, however, many health care facilities have been decimated by Israeli attacks or evacuated, while a few remain open but severely limited in the care and services they offer. Israeli forces have repeatedly laid siege to hospital facilities, killing hundreds of medical workers and taking captive scores of others, despite thousands of internally displaced Palestinians sheltering in the health care complexes. This week, Israel again launched raids on Al-Shifa Hospital, reportedly killing more than 140 people.
For months, doctors across Gaza have performed amputations and other high-risk procedures without anesthetics or proper operating rooms. Antibiotics are in short supply and often unavailable. Communicable diseases are spreading , as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in makeshift shelters with little access to toilets or basic sanitary supplies. Many new mothers are unable to breastfeed and infant formula shortages are common. Israel has repeatedly blocked or delayed aid shipments of vital medical supplies to Gaza. Basic preventative medical care is nearly nonexistent, and medical experts predict that malnutrition will condemn a new generation of young Palestinians to a life of developmental struggles.
The result of the onslaught against medical facilities is that there is only one fully functional hospital remaining in the territory, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon, just left Gaza where he spent 10 days at the hospital performing eye surgeries on victims of Israeli attacks. It was his second medical mission to Gaza since the war began last October.
Photo: Provided by Yasser KhanWhat follows is a transcript of a lightly edited interview with Khan.
Jeremy Scahill: Before we talk about your latest medical mission to Khan Younis in Gaza, I wanted to ask you a bit about your background and your medical practice.
Yasser Khan: Well, I’m from the greater Toronto area here in Canada, and I’ve been in practice for about 20 years. I’m an ophthalmologist, but I specialize in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery.
So that’s my sub-specialty and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 20 years. And I’m a professor. I’ve been to over 45 different countries on a humanitarian basis where I’ve taught surgery, I’ve done surgery, I’ve established programs. And so I’ve been to many types of areas and zones in Africa, Asia, and South America.
JS: And Dr. Khan, tell us about how you ended up going to Gaza for the first time. I think you went on your first mission over the winter period, but talk about how you ended up even getting on an airplane to go into a war zone where the Israelis were raining scorched earth down on the Palestinians of Gaza.
YK: Well, you know, all these things, you never plan for them. You never plan to go to an area like Gaza. And I was on the first North American mission. It was about eight of us that went, seven or eight of us that went, surgeons from both the U.S. and Canada, and you can never plan for these and it was just a random conversation with one of my surgical colleagues, who’s a thoracic surgeon, by a scrub sink. And, you know, we’ve been watching this mass killing or slaughter for the last — at that point in time for about three months — livestreamed for the first time ever, I think. And so I think a lot of us were suffering, and he caught me in my down moments. He goes, “Listen, I’m going to Gaza.” And I said, “What? How? I mean, how are you getting in? Nobody’s going there, right?” He [says] they’ve been trying for six weeks, and finally the WHO [World Health Organization] gave them the green light and so everything’s fine. “You may not be approved. I know it’s probably too late, but let me send your information in. I mean, who knows? I need your passport, your medical degree, and your blood type.” And to be honest, I didn’t even know what my blood type was. I just guessed AB, and at the time I just sent it to him right away. And two days later, miraculously, I was approved. To get into Gaza, first of all, nobody but a health care worker or a physician or a team can get in, and to get in you have to be approved by the WHO, by the Israeli authorities, and the Egyptian authorities. So that’s how I got in first.
JS: Describe that journey of how you then go from Canada to Gaza. What is it like? How do you end up getting into Gaza?
YK: Well, I had one day to book my flight. I booked my flight. I got as many supplies as I could together, and I flew into Cairo. And from Cairo, you meet a U.N. convoy that leaves every Monday and Wednesday, nowadays, at about 5 a.m., and it’s about an eight, nine-hour journey through the Sinai Desert. It’s long because you go through multiple checkpoints. It’s a demilitarized zone and so there’s Egyptian army checkpoints all the way through. And then we get to the Rafah border, which is right now controlled by Egypt and has been forever. And then you go through your immigration and then you get to the Gaza side and that’s controlled by the Palestinians.
JS: What was your first impression on that first trip once you crossed over from Egypt into Palestinian territory, into Gaza?
YK: I got there at about 6:30 p.m. at night and nobody travels at night. In fact, the U.N.’s time limit is 5:00 p.m. because anything moving at night, the Israeli forces attack through drones or other missile attacks. But, you know, the two guys that came to pick me up from the hospital said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Trust God.” And so I still went.
So just to describe to you, my first 20 minutes were when I was driving through at night. We were the only car on the road. And it was dark because there’s no fuel, there’s no electricity, so it’s dark, and the road was empty. And I mean, that was quite scary. I basically made my peace with God, and was ready to go at any point in time. But, I’ve never been more happy to see the emergency sign at a hospital, and that’s [when] I knew I’d arrived. The first thing I noticed at the time — this was in Khan Younis — Nasser Hospital and European Gaza Hospital were the only hospitals left in the Gaza Strip, fully functioning hospitals at that point in time.
Khan Younis was still a city, an intact city, but there’s battles going on. So when I exited the car, I could hear the 24-hour buzzing of drones, and it was quite loud, 24 hours, it never went away. I never saw the drones myself because they’re high up, but it’s Israeli drones: There’s either spy drones or there’s a quadcopter, which is the weaponized drone that can fire missiles and gunfire. And so they’re humming around. The other thing that I heard was bombs. And like a “boom” of bombs, basically every hour, every two or three hours; there was like bombs that would shake everything up. So that’s the first images I had.
But the other images I had was like a mass refugee camp. So basically at that point in time, two months ago, about 20,000 people had sought refuge both in the hospital and outside the hospital. And these weren’t tents. They’re still not tents. They’re makeshift shelters with bed sheets or plastic bag sheets. The ones outside sleep on the floor. They’re lucky [if] they get a carpet or a mat. There was one bathroom at the time for about 200 people that they have to share. And inside, the hallways of the hospital were also made into shelters. There was hardly any room to walk, and there’s children running around everywhere. It’s important to remember all these people were not homeless. They all had homes that were destroyed. They’re all displaced people that took shelter in the hospital.
Photo: Yasser Khan“What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine.”
So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come. That was the other thing that at the time shocked me: What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine. I saw scenes that were horrific that I’d never witnessed before and I never want to see again. You have a mother walking in holding her 8, 9-year-old, skinny — because they’re all starving — boy who’s dead, he’s cold and dead and [the mother is] screaming, asking for someone to check his pulse and everybody’s busy in the mass chaos. So that was kind of my initial welcoming scene when I entered Khan Younis the first time.
JS: You’ve just come out now from your second medical mission. You were in Gaza for 10 days. Describe the scenes that you witnessed this time in Gaza, but also specifically in the hospital.
YK: Well, I must admit the first time I went there it was partially getting used to what’s going on, seeing the mass casualties, seeing the hospital, meeting the doctors and the nurses and health care workers, getting familiarized with the surroundings, and also doing the operations. This time, I was over all that introduction.
It was quite demoralizing. You’ve gotta be on the ground to see how bad it is. In two months, things were not only the same in a bad way, but they’re much, much worse because now, two months later, Khan Younis has literally been destroyed as a city. It was an active, hustling, bustling city. The Nasser Hospital, as you know, it’s destroyed now. It’s basically a death zone. And there’s decomposing bodies in the hospital now. It’s been evacuated. And I will add one thing: As a health care worker, I know fully well that to build a major, fully functioning hospital takes years to perfect and build and process, right? So it’s a sheer tragedy that it’s destroyed in mere hours, so it’s really unfortunate.
Photo: Yasser KhanSo now [at European Gaza Hospital] instead of 20,000 people, there’s about 35,000 people seeking shelter in a hospital that’s already beyond capacity. And so now, both outside and inside, there’s a mass of people. There’s no place to move now in the hallways. The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased. The European Gaza Hospital, all you have to do is go online and look at their pictures before. It was a beautiful, gorgeous hospital. Well-built, well-run, good quality control — and now it’s reduced to a place that is a mess. It’s a mess. There’s people cooking inside the hospital hallways, there’s the bathrooms, there’s people mixed in with the people who are sick, with major orthopedic injuries, post op. There’s no beds. So sometimes people go and just sleep in their little makeshift shelters. And so infection is, if you can imagine, infection is rampant. So if you don’t die the first time or if your leg or arm is not amputated the first time, it is for sure with infection. So then they have to amputate it to save your life. So it’s much, much worse.
“They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.”
The other thing I noticed was now, more so than even before, the health care workers and nurses and the doctors, they’re just burnt out. I mean, they’re just spent. They’ve witnessed so much in almost six months now. They’ve seen so much on a regular, hourly, daily basis. When I operate [at a hospital in Canada], typically speaking, I’ve got a few mostly elective lists, elective kind of not urgent problems that you gotta fix. And then there’s some trauma, or something that comes in that’s a bit more urgent once in a while, right? That’s my usual list. But [Palestinian medical workers], they are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen. They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.
The thing I try to emphasize to people is that it’s not only the actual medical trauma, it’s the other trauma associated with it in that these patients come in, if you’ve been involved in an explosive injury, and you come in injured, guaranteed you’ve lost loved ones. Guaranteed. So you’ve either lost a father, a mother, a child, all your children, all your family, your uncle, aunt, grandparents, your house, whatever. You’ve lost something. So every patient that comes in, not only is severely injured, is dealing with this trauma.
I had one girl who basically lost all her siblings, 8-year-old beautiful girl, lost her siblings. She came in for a leg fracture, was under the rubble for 12 hours. And her mother died, all her siblings gone. And all her family [were] gone, her aunts and uncles. As you know, it’s a generational killing, like slaughter. Generations. There’s about 2,000 families that have been erased now completely, are gone. Nonexistent. So it’s generational trauma or death or slaughter, and so her father was out burying his wife and his killed children while she was by herself getting her leg fracture repaired. And while she was under there for 12 hours, this 8-year-old girl, next to her was her grandmother and her aunt, dead, lying next to her for 12 hours.
Photo: Yasser KhanI saw this one guy who had his face split open, and he was under the bubble for eight days. I don’t know how he survived, and they were able to get him out. He lost both his eyes, but they were able to put his face back together again, and he survived. So, they’re dealing with this, all this.
So two months ago it was bad, and two months later, it’s even worse. I could see, actually feel the burnout [among Palestinian medical workers], but they’re superhuman. They keep on going when the rest of us will lose our crap, the rest of us lose it. But they keep on going because it’s their steadfastness and it’s their faith. And they still consider their mere survival as their resistance. You know, they will survive the Israeli bombing no matter what because that’s their form of resistance. No matter what they tried, no matter how much they try to kill them, basically is their attitude.
JS: Dr. Khan, as I’m listening to you, I’m also recalling over these past five-plus months all of the episodes where Israeli forces have attacked or laid siege to hospitals and other medical facilities in Gaza. And I’m specifically thinking of the medical staff at Nasser Hospital, which was raided on February 15 by Israeli forces, and scores of medical personnel were snatched, taken prisoner by the Israelis. And the BBC recently did an exposé documenting what I think can clearly be called the torture of these medical workers, including holding them for prolonged periods in stress positions, dousing them with cold water, using muzzled dogs to menace them, blindfolding them, and leaving them in isolation.
And I’m thinking of the testimony you’re offering about the steadfastness of the doctors and then imagining after months and months of just amputating limbs from children, sometimes without any anesthesia, then having this occupation force come in; snatch doctors, nurses, other medical workers; and then subject them to torture under interrogation aimed at getting them to confess that somehow Hamas is using their hospital as a Pentagon, basically, to plot attacks against the Israeli occupation forces. What kinds of stories did you hear from Palestinian colleagues about these types of raids and actions by the Israelis against medical facilities, doctors, nurses, et cetera?
YK: This has been a systematic, intentional attack on the health care system. The bizarre thing of all of this is that the Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics. There’s been tons of open statements about what they intend to do. So you can’t even make this stuff up. It’s bizarre how they have openly said this, right? But having said that, I think over 450 health care workers have been killed — doctors, nurses, paramedics, over 450 — when they’re not supposed to be a target, right? They’re protected by international law. Doctors have been kidnapped, specific doctors who are of unique specialties have been targeted and killed.
Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon. That’s it, just a medical professional. The assistant director of the hospital was basically declothed and beat up in front of all the other hospital workers just to kind of insult and degrade him because he’s their boss. And they’re beating him up and kicking him and swearing at him, and everybody witnessed this, and they did it purposely in front of his workers. So, it’s a further dehumanization of a human being. These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore. For me, as a surgeon, it’s really heartbreaking for me to see that. As a surgeon, we have people’s lives in our hands and we heal. And then to see them mentally reduced to nothing is hard to take. Yeah. It’s hard to stomach.
JS: I wanted to ask you about an op-ed that a colleague of yours wrote. It was an American doctor, Irfan Galaria, who penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on February 16 after returning from Gaza, and I believe that doctor was at the European Gaza Hospital and described a scene and I’ll just read from their experience at the hospital:
“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”
This should be shocking to the soul of everyone who hears those words from an American doctor describing children between the ages of 5 to 8, arriving in that emergency room with, according to the doctor, single sniper shots to the head. Talk about the kinds of injuries or fatalities that you witnessed during your time there.
YK: Yeah. I know Irfan, and he’s a really good guy and he saw a lot there and I spoke to him when he got back. I myself did not see, when I was there, what he described. But definitely the doctor spoke about it for sure, and it was well known that that indeed was happening on the ground. We hear reports from the West Bank as well, where 12-year-olds or 13-year-olds are shot for nothing really, for no reason at all, just for the sake of being shot. So, it’s not something which is far-fetched, and it is going on.
Photo: Yasser KhanWhat I saw — I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual.
Dr. Khan performed surgeries to remove eyes of multiple children wounded in Israeli strikes, calling the injuries “the Gaza shrapnel face.”
Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out. So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes. And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.
And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. And the thing is that the emergency does not have room, so they’re all over the floor. So you have these massive trauma, and [the patients] are on the floor. And sometimes they get forgotten in the mass chaos.
There was a 2-year-old baby who came in from a fresh bombing. He lost his aunt and his sibling, and his mother was in the OR being amputated. And she was actually a U.N. worker, by the way, a Palestinian U.N. worker. So he was just forgotten on the floor somewhere with major, major head trauma. Fortunately, after about two hours, they found him. And, because he had no — I mean, his mother wasn’t there, his father wasn’t there, there’s no family there — and fortunately, they found him. And they took him up to neurosurgery, but I don’t know what happened to him because that was on my last day that I was leaving. So I remember that very well. So it was just injuries that you have never seen before and the degree to it was amazing.
UNICEF said in December — and this was a low number — that there was over 1,000 children that had either double amputation or single amputation. This is only in December. It’s a very conservative estimate. Some people have said about 5,000 children. This is in January. So if you look at two months later, it must be 7,000, 8,000 now, either double amputees or single amputee, like arm, leg, both legs, both arms, mostly children. The thing is that in any normal amputation, in a normal circumstance, a child who gets amputated goes through about eight or nine operations until they’re adults, to revise the stump and fix the stump. Who is going to do that now? Not only have they lost their supports, their entire family structure, they don’t have the family structure or the infrastructure to do that because it’s all been destroyed.
JS: Were you just in one hospital, or did you go to multiple hospitals?
YK: No, so I stayed in European. The first time I was going to go to Nasser, but it got too dangerous and I think the fear was that the Israelis would just close off the road and then I’d be stuck in Nasser Hospital, so I didn’t go, but I went to European. And now there’s only one hospital, really, left, which is the European Hospital. One fully functional hospital exactly. They have these clinics across the city — I mean, they call them hospitals sometimes, like the Indonesian field hospital, things like that, but they really aren’t fully functioning hospitals. They’re clinics that have one or two services that kind of are more than just a clinic, but they’re mostly just clinics. So there’s really only one fully functioning hospital now, which is the European hospital, and therefore the impending invasion of Rafah is quite worrisome for me.
JS: At the European Hospital, are there sufficient supplies to manage the influx of patients? You’re describing an apocalyptic scene, particularly with these amputations among children. Are there adequate supplies to handle the demand in that hospital where you were?
YK: Definitely two months ago there weren’t. On my last day when I was leaving, they ran out of morphine, and morphine is needed in a lot of orthopedic and major trauma. You need morphine for pain control. So they ran out of morphine, and they ran out of a lot of the antibiotics as well, about two months ago. Now, two months later, supplies have come in. So they do have supplies that are running out pretty fast and they do run out. So, they’re coming in, but their equipment is rusted, new equipment is harder to come in, because anything that’s dual purpose, for example, the Israelis stop from coming.
So a lot of medical equipment is not coming in, unfortunately, and as a result a lot of equipment is rusted and it’s old, and it needs to be replaced, but these Palestinian doctors are very innovative and they’re geniuses, all of them are. What they’re going through, what they’ve done is amazing. I mean, hats off to them for sure. But yeah, it’s a mess. I mean, even the ORs are a mess. They’re a disorganized mess. People are frustrated. There’s a lot of frustrations, and I don’t blame them.
Photo: Provided by Yasser KhanJS: Talk about the conversations you were having with Palestinian colleagues. You described a bit of this, but you are coming from Canada. You had colleagues that also came from the United States, and you’re going for these 10-day periods or so. I know there are some doctors that have stayed longer, but relatively short periods of time. And we all have to remember the Palestinian doctors and nurses and medical workers that are there, they’re simultaneously doing their job and many of them have lost their families, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren. This is their reality. They don’t leave. And I’m wondering as a medical professional from Canada, what that’s like to talk then to your Palestinian colleagues and what impression it has left on your heart?
YK: It’s left a huge impression, Jeremy, especially this time. This time I felt the emotional burden more than I did the last time. But, you know, I’ll tell you one thing. I know we talk about the death and the disease and all that, but one thing that we also need to more talk about — and this relates to how they’re doing is the death of their culture and their civilization, which is a genocide or plausible — that’s part of the definition of a genocide, is it not? Every single playground, hangout place, café, restaurant, 500-year-old ancient mosque, 500-year-old ancient church, destroyed. There’s schools destroyed, there’s stadiums, sports facilities destroyed, their hospitals destroyed, their cinemas destroyed, museums destroyed, archives, where they kept their archives, erased, destroyed, burnt, their homes, 80 percent of homes, are all gone now. And even though the homes are empty, they do not need to be destroyed. They’ve been TikToked on for the whole world to see. The Israeli forces have TikToked this and have shown destruction of these homes, of these beautiful people, and then dedicated destruction to their spouses or their children or whatever.
We’ve seen all this. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all out there that we’ve seen. So they’ve witnessed all this. What the Israeli forces have also done is that once they’ve come in, they’ve depaved the roads. Even in Khan Younis, many of the roads have been depaved. So there’s no roads left. So they’ve seen a complete destruction of their culture and their civilization and their lives, a complete erasure of their culture. And so that by itself is a tremendous tragedy. If we all look at ourselves and see if that happens to us, how would we feel?
So in the backdrop, despite that, they remain hopeful. They really do. There are some that have lost hope and want to get out. There’s a lot of patients that come in, and they may have like a dry eye, and they want a referral to be referred out, like a medical referral, because that’s one way to get out. But first of all, even people with serious medical conditions are not getting out so easily, but they’re all trying to leave just to save their lives, but they all say that they want to leave and come back. They all want to come back, right? Because there’s something magical about the land. Palestinians have been there for thousands and thousands of years, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians. They have a very strong connection to their land, and they don’t want to leave. They’d rather die than leave, but at this point in time, they want to leave, be safe. So that’s their philosophy. In the end, I think what holds them together is their faith. They have faith in God. They have faith in justice. God’s justice. They have no faith in humanity’s justice at all. And I don’t blame them. We have really abandoned them. Not us, as in the average person who’s been protesting and advocating for them. But at an elitist or governmental level. They’re encouraged and touched by everybody in the world who has fought for them and advocated for them. They know this, and they are touched by this. But at the other hand, they don’t know what to do. There’s no certainty. So they don’t know how to plan for the future because they don’t know whether there’ll be a Rafah invasion.
“Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence.”
I was on the ground, I toured the refugee camps, I went around Rafah, I saw, and if there’s an Israeli invasion, I can’t emphasize enough how catastrophic it’s going to be. It’ll be mass killing, mass destruction, because all these figures come in, 50 dead, 100 wounded. But what people don’t realize is, being wounded is a death sentence. Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence. And the wounded often will lose everybody, like all family members, so they have no supports, especially children, have nobody left to take care of them, not even aunts and uncles. It will be catastrophic. I don’t know what to say to the world to stop an impending invasion. You’ve got to rein this prime minister of Israel in. You got to do something to stop this stupid invasion that he still wants to do, because it’ll be catastrophic.
JS: I was just thinking back to your description of having to remove eyes from children or adults who’ve been hit with shrapnel. I think any of us who’ve ever had an operation or surgery, or we’ve helped a loved one that went into surgery, knows that the path to recovery is often a long one where you have to have physical therapy, you have to come to terms with a body part that you’ve lost and are going to have to live your life without. What’s your understanding of what happens to the patients you operated on who now are entering a reality where they no longer can see? They don’t have eyes, or children that no longer have a leg. What happens to those people after the acute situation is dealt with, that the surgery happens, the amputation happens, the eyes are removed?
YK: Well, Jeremy, that’s what keeps me up at night, and that’s what bears on me a lot. The overall simple answer is, I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is because they’re living in tents and structures. Many of them have lost their family and support, especially children have lost their family and support. Even adults.
I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.
There’s tons of children like this as well. So what happens to them? I don’t know. What’s going to happen to the double amputee child who has no home, no parents and no uncles and aunts or grandparents left, no siblings left either? What’s going to happen to them? Then there’s some kids who have an older sibling that’s 11 years old and they’re like 5 years old. I saw one girl who lost an arm and the only living relative she has is an 11- or 12-year old sibling who’s taking care of her. So I don’t know what’s going to happen because in the current infrastructure, there is no infrastructure, there is no care for these stumps. Many of them are getting infected, these stumps are, after they’ve been amputated — and where are they discharged to? Usually when they’re discharged, because the hospital is trying to discharge them to make room for more people to come in, they’re discharged out to the shelters or tents. That’s where they’re discharged. It’s not like they’re discharged home where there’s proper care.
I will emphasize this, Jeremy, that Palestinians were in an open-air concentration camp for decades. This is not new. It was a struggle, but they were still able to make their life. And because they couldn’t go anywhere, because they’re restricted by Israel and by Egypt on the other side, they couldn’t go anywhere, they put everything into their homes. So their homes were their castles, were their life, were their center of their life and their universe, and they really took a lot of care and attention to their homes. And so now all these people who are homeless, their homes are gone. So, it’s a tremendous effect, and they’re living in tents, and I can only imagine what they must go through. Only a year ago, life was normal so to speak, even though you’re in a concentration camp, but life was still normal. It was their normal, right? And they’re living and they make the best of things. They’re very grateful and gracious people, and steadfast people, and they make the best of every scenario, and they did make the best of even being in a concentration camp. They made the best of it. But now it’s heartbreaking.
JS: I’m thinking of this too, and like anyone who’s a parent, imagine that terror when you lose your kid, you’re at a theme park or you’re out somewhere. And all of a sudden, you can’t see your child and all the thoughts that go through your head and then imagine your child alone in the world, completely alone. And, by the way, they’ve lost their sight. Or they’re a double amputee. I haven’t been to Gaza and seen what you’ve seen, but I have these thoughts all the time, and I think everyone who really has internalized this as a human catastrophe that was preventable, that didn’t need to happen, you think about those children and what does it mean to be alone in this world as a child? But then on top of it, to be alone in this world and it’s hell on earth. It’s bombs. It’s everyone trying to survive. It’s starvation. It’s famine. It’s people fighting over the morsels of food that get dropped from the sky along with the bombs. And as I listen to you, it just punctuates how unconscionable this is to the core of humanity, how unconscionable it is. What is your message to the world right now?
Photo: Yasser KhanYK: Well, Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth right now, is what it is, and I think that it’s never too late. If the Israeli invasion of Rafah occurs, it’ll be catastrophic. We have to do all that we can to stop that from happening, put all the pressure we can on our politicians, on the powers that be, to stop this from happening because the health care and the human toll will be unimaginable. The fact is that it’s been 75 years of occupation. In the end, out of all of this death and destruction that’s happened, they need to have their independence, and they need to have their independent state so that they can live their lives with dignity and freedom.
And I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been to 45 different countries, and Palestinians are among the best people that I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’re the most generous, gracious, kind-hearted, intelligent, and wise people that I’ve ever met. And so they’re worth fighting for. I think it’s an issue of humanity. I will side on the side of humanity anytime. And they are worth fighting for. So I want us all to continue the fight and continue advocating for them until this war stops and they are free.
The post “Man-Made Hell On Earth”: A Canadian Doctor on His Medical Mission to Gaza appeared first on The Intercept .
The House of Representatives voted on Friday to defund the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians through next year — even as 1.1 million people in Gaza face threats of famine in coming months — on the basis of flimsy allegations by Israel against a tiny minority of the agency’s staff that have yet to be proven.
The vote came as part of a $1.2 trillion spending package to avert a partial government shutdown. In addition to stripping funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, through March 2025, the bill includes the $3.8 billion the U.S. sends to Israel every year.
The bill also contains a long-standing provision that would limit aid to the Palestinian Authority, which governs the occupied West Bank, if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively supports such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”
The Senate is debating the bill ahead of a Friday midnight deadline, and President Joe Biden has said he will sign it when it comes to his desk.
The U.S. first suspended aid to UNRWA in late January, when the Israeli government leveled allegations that 12 of the agency’s 30,000 employees — or 0.04 percent — were involved in Hamas’s attacks on October 7 (Israel later accused two additional employees of involvement, bringing the total number to 14).
In response, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, immediately terminated the accused staff members and launched an investigation. The U.S. decision to cut aid to the 74-year-old aid agency, which was founded amid the creation of Israel and the ensuing Nakba — the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes — prompted much of the West to follow suit, including other top donors such as Germany, the European Union, and Sweden.
While several of those donors have recently announced their intention to resume funding, the U.S. government, which has historically been a top donor to UNRWA, has instead doubled down. The spending bill passed the House with a 286-135 vote. Twenty-three Democrats voted against the bill, with several issuing statements directly linking their “no” votes to the UNRWA provision.
Even in the lead-up to the Friday vote, several members of Congress slammed the idea of continuing to penalize UNRWA.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told The Independent that members of Congress have intelligence assessments that suggest halting funding is “not grounded in solid facts.”
“We should not be restricting, we should be restoring, I’ve been saying that on public record,” Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., added. “The idea that people are literally starving to death and we are contributing to that is a problem.” Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Dick Durbin of Illinois expressed similar concerns.
“Tragically, many members of Congress seem to be happy to be part of this starvation caucus.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., put it more harshly earlier this week. “Sadly, tragically, many members of Congress seem to be happy to be part of this starvation caucus,” Sanders said , “happy to cut funding to UNRWA and make it harder to get aid to Palestinians in the midst of this crisis.”
UNRWA announced Israel’s allegations against its employees on January 26, the same day the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide . It didn’t take very long for the allegations to start to fall apart.
On January 30, Sky News reported that it had seen Israeli intelligence documents fielding the allegations and that they “make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.”
That same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the allegations were “highly, highly credible,” while also admitting the U.S. hadn’t done its own investigation.
On February 3, the Financial Times wrote that Israel’s intelligence assessment “provides no evidence for the claims.” Shortly thereafter, British outlet Channel 4 reported that a confidential Israeli document detailing the allegations “provides no evidence to support its explosive new claim.” Two days later, CBC reported that Canada — another top UNRWA donor — suspended its funding without seeing any evidence to substantiate the allegation against the UNRWA staff members.
Within a few days, Lazzarini admitted that he followed “reverse due process” by firing staff members implicated in the allegations before conducting an investigation.
“Indeed, I have terminated without due process because I felt at the time that not only the reputation but the ability of the entire agency to continue to operate and deliver critical humanitarian assistance was at stake if I did not take such a decision,” he said, explaining that the agency was already subject to “fierce and ugly attacks.”
“My judgment, based on this going public, true or untrue, was I need to take the swiftest and boldest decision to show that as an agency we take this allegation seriously.”
Just last week, the European Union’s top humanitarian aid official said he has still not seen evidence from Israel to back its accusations — nearly two months after they were made.
Even if the allegations were found to be true, many have argued cutting funding to UNRWA is tantamount to collective punishment. “We should investigate it,” Van Hollen said this week. “But for goodness’ sake, let’s not hold 2 million innocent Palestinian civilians who are dying of starvation … accountable for the bad acts of 14 people.”
Meanwhile, UNRWA’s internal investigation turned out horrific reports that Israel tortured UNRWA staff in order to force false confessions that they were involved in the October 7 attack and are members of Hamas. Staffers were allegedly beaten, waterboarded, and had their family members threatened by Israeli soldiers. UNRWA also alleged that Israeli soldiers used a nail gun on Palestinians’ knees and sexually abused the prisoners, including through “the insertion of what appears to be an electrified metal stick into prisoners’ rectums.” Israel has denied the allegations.
Over the past couple weeks, many Western states have reinstated their funding to UNRWA, including the European Union, Sweden, Canada, and Australia. The State Department, meanwhile, has continued to find ways to justify its ongoing suspension of funding to the agency.
On March 14 , State Department spokesperson Matt Miller was asked about statements by U.N. officials that Israel has still not provided evidence showing that the UNRWA staff were involved with the October 7 attack. Miller responded that the initial U.S. decision to pause funding was prompted not by Israel, but by UNRWA.
“We hadn’t heard from the government of Israel about these allegations,” Miller said. “It was about allegations that UNRWA brought to us. And when they brought us these allegations, they told us that they had investigated them and found them to be credible, and that’s why they had taken action to fire the employees in question.”
He concluded: “With respect to the ongoing investigation, we do have faith in their ability to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Yet Miller’s response evades a crucial detail: It was Israel that brought the allegations to UNRWA in the first place. And though UNRWA’s initial statement may have prompted the pause in U.S. funding, the U.S. has not shifted course even after UNRWA’s own chief said he fired the staff without full-on investigation due to external pressure.
The paradox is telling: The U.S. apparently found UNRWA credible based on the agency’s serious response to the allegations against it. Yet UNRWA’s follow-up statements — that the agency was overzealous in its response and that it has reason to believe Israeli soldiers have tortured its staffers — don’t seem to carry the same credibility.
The post U.S. Doubles Down on Defunding UNRWA — Despite Flimsy Allegations appeared first on The Intercept .
Two unions representing police and state troopers in Minnesota wrote a letter to Gov. Tim Walz last friday. An elected prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, was prosecuting one of their own, and they wanted her removed from the case — immediately.
On Wednesday, four Republican members of U.S. Congress from Minnesota followed up in another letter to Walz expressing “outrage” in the same case. “It is time for us as a nation to stop demonizing law enforcement,” the Republican representatives wrote. They called for an investigation into Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. At least one of the four, Rep. Michelle Fischbach, has called on Moriarty to resign.
Only a few days earlier, Minnesota Republican state lawmakers called on Moriarty to resign and drop charges against the state trooper in the case. Lawmakers accused her of coddling criminals and targeting police in “politically-motivated prosecution.”
The controversy erupted around the prosecution of a state trooper who shot and killed 33-year-old Ricky Cobb II, a Black man, during a traffic stop in July. Moriarty’s office said the trooper’s use of deadly force against Cobb was not justified.
The pressure campaign against the prosecution seems, so far, to be working. Asked about the case during a press conference on Monday, Walz, a Democrat, questioned Moriarty’s handling of the charges and criticized her assessment of the use of force. The governor’s office, however, has not yet said whether Moriarty will be removed from the case. (Moriarty’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but in a previous statement she said the unions wanted Walz to “give special treatment to this case.” Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The attacks like those on Moriarty are not unique to Minnesota. Moriarty was among a clutch of reform-minded prosecutors who started winning elections in greater numbers in recent years. Constituents were increasingly casting their ballots for criminal justice reformers who ran on prosecuting police for misconduct and killing of civilians, ending cash bail, and curtailing the prosecution of nonviolent offenses.
In response, opponents of the reform push have been more and more explicit about why they want to remove elected attorneys like Moriarty: They’re prosecuting the police.
“It’s clear this is not about safety,” said Jessica Brand, who founded the Wren Collective, a progressive consulting firm, and works with several reform prosecutors. “It’s about power — they don’t want prosecutors in office who will hold them accountable when they abuse their power. That’s the theme that is running through the backlash in every state.”
“It’s clear this is not about safety. It’s about power — they don’t want prosecutors in office who will hold them accountable.”
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has unilaterally removed two prosecutors who implemented policies he didn’t like, including one who indicted a deputy sheriff for shooting a civilian in 2020. The attorney DeSantis appointed to replace former State’s Attorney Monique Worrell, Federalist Society member Andrew Bain, dropped the charges against the deputy sheriff last week.
In Texas, where top Republican state officials and police have blamed reform prosecutors for police attrition and crime, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is now demanding case files on the prosecution of police in any county with more than 250,000 residents. The population threshold targets larger cities where reformers have won office or found substantial support.
“When certain crimes went up post-Covid, police unions moved quickly to attack progressive prosecutors and their policies, no matter how modest those policies were,” Brand said. “Now, crime is down, and these attacks have not only continued, but have also intensified.”
The opposition to district attorneys who ran on prosecuting police misconduct, which often lead to formal recall and removal efforts , has come in large part from the police.
In their letter to Walz last week, unions for Minnesota police and state troopers blamed Moriarty for a “state of crisis” among law enforcement officers in the state. They cited, in particular, Minneapolis, where the ranks of police have shrunk since an officer killed George Floyd in May 2020.
The unions wrote, “There is a crisis of confidence in the elected leadership who are supposed to be partners in making our communities safer, but instead seek to score political points through charging every police officer whom circumstances compel to use deadly force, regardless of the evidence.” (In her statement responding to the letter, Moriarty said, “[T]here is a crisis in confidence, but it is not because of attempts at accountability. It is because of well-documented and horrific instances where some officers abused their power and used unauthorized force.”)
Similar sagas have played out from San Francisco to Philadelphia . Police and their unions led attacks against reform prosecutors and poured money into efforts to remove them from office. In Worrell’s case in Florida, DeSantis reportedly worked with law enforcement targeted by Worrell for prosecution to tarnish her reputation before he removed her from office.
In Moriarty’s case, the attacks have also come from one-time allies.
Cobb’s killing is not the first case in which Moriarty was threatened with removal for adhering to the reforms she ran on in 2020. Last year, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison took over another case from Moriarty in which she had declined to charge two teens accused of murder as adults.
Ellison had built his reputation as a reformer and fought off attacks from Republicans claiming he was soft on crime to win election as attorney general in 2022. The juvenile case put Ellison and Moriarty on opposite ends of a fight for reform they had once shared.
The post Prosecute a Cop? You’ll Face Removal From Office appeared first on The Intercept .
As the Biden administration ratchets up its criticism of Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza, it has failed to implement its own civilian casualty avoidance policies for the U.S. armed forces, according to a scathing new government audit.
“The right number of civilian casualties is zero,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of Israel’s war last week.
In December, a year after the Pentagon announced a new program to address civilian casualties, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for an “urgent” effort to get units and headquarters throughout the military to take on the task of mitigating civilian harm.
“Hard-earned tactical and operational successes may ultimately end in strategic failure if care is not taken to protect the civilian environment as much as the situation allows – including the civilian population and the personnel, organizations, resources, infrastructure, essential services, and systems on which civilian life depends,” says the new Joint Chiefs of Staff directive to the armed services. The January 2024 document, obtained by The Intercept, has not been previously reported.
But as the Defense Department pushes forward to revamp its protocols addressing civilian harm, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, released an audit this month that finds that field commands have so far largely rejected the Pentagon’s effort. The scathing GAO report , “Civilian Harm: DOD Should Take Actions to Enhance Its Plan for Mitigation and Response Efforts,” finds that Washington has failed to inculcate a new appreciation of the impact of civilian harm and that its top down directives have been met with ire and confusion from both military commanders and rank-and-file soldiers alike.
In December 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued an instruction formalizing the department’s new civilian harm response, which “Establishes policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for civilian harm mitigation and response.”
“Protecting civilians from harm in connection with military operations is not only a moral imperative, it is also critical to achieving long-term success on the battlefield,” the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan said, as previously reported by The Intercept.
Wide-ranging in its scope, the directive and plan sets in motion 11 core objectives that establish a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Steering Committee, a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the creation of dedicated staff positions at battlefield commands to help mitigate civilian harm, and multiple initiatives to gather more information on incidents and trends with the goal of reducing civilian casualties.
The new regulation, Dan E. Stigall, director for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Policy in the Office of Secretary of Defense, wrote in December 2023, “provides important policy guidance to shape how DoD conceptualizes, considers, assesses, investigates, and responds to civilian harm.”
And yet the GAO report, issued earlier this month, finds that despite the Pentagon mandate, Middle East and Africa regional commanders have failed to change practices for how civilian harm prevention is being factored into military operations. The GAO also found that the Defense Department “has not addressed uncertainty about what constitutes improvement and how the action plan applies to certain operations.” In other words, there is an absence of processes and metrics to record civilian deaths and then interpret incidents and causes for the purpose of learning lessons. The Pentagon itself has also failed to think through civilian casualties and harm caused in the context of all types of operations.
The GAO generally excuses the failure of the fighting commands to take adequate measures to revamp their practices given the military’s focus on small-scale counterterrorism operations over the past two decades. According to the report’s findings, “in our discussions with DOD components about challenges in implementing the action plan, some [commanders] indicated that they are unclear about how to mitigate and respond to civilian harm for large-scale conflicts. This is because they felt that the action plan is geared toward counterterrorism operations.” Creating a culture of civilian harm reduction “will require much more time, resources, and personnel than during the counterterrorism or irregular warfare operations of the past 20 years,” the GAO concludes.
Large-scale conflicts refer to potential wars with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But building up a capacity inside the military to assess civilian harm for conflicts like Ukraine and Israel is also a Pentagon goal in order to properly assess the use of U.S. weapons by American arms recipients , experts say.
U.S. Central Command officials, responsible for the Middle East, told the GAO that they didn’t understand the end goal of the Defense Department plan, given that they felt it fails to provide any way to measure the number of civilian deaths. The command also told the GAO that it was already working to mitigate civilian harm even without the new directives, saying that “the [Pentagon] action plan may be more helpful to other combatant commands that have not had recent experiences with combat and civilian harm mitigation.” It is a strange position for CENTCOM to take given that Austin’s directive itself was precipitated by successful lobbying by human rights groups for the military to address civilian harm in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen , and Syria, where it became clear that CENTCOM was not doing enough .
U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, similarly told the GAO that it should be allowed to continue with its operations as they are being conducted and that nothing more needed to be done to implement Austin’s plan. According to the report, a SOCOM official “told us that there is currently no deficiency in DOD’s civilian harm mitigation and response efforts and the action plan codifies what the command is already doing.”
Officials from Africa Command and Indo-Pacific Command expressed similar skepticism about the Pentagon’s effort, according to the GAO report. A Navy officer said that the new regulations were unpopular within the rank and file: “some staff at lower levels of the Navy are asking questions about what DOD is fixing by implementing the action plan,” the officer said.
On December 13, 2023, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a new staff functional task, contained in its Unified Joint Task List, or UJTL, that directs all military organizations to “manage civilian harm mitigation and response.” The UJTL is the standard “library of tasks, which serves as a foundation for capabilities-based planning across the range of military operations.” It is a comprehensive menu of “tasks, conditions, and measures” used to establish standards and even job descriptions across the entire defense enterprise. A printout of the tasks is over 1,600 pages, but the UJTL is maintained electronically.
According to an electronic copy obtained by The Intercept, the “urgent” priority new task directs the armed forces to “plan, integrate, and/or manage approaches for mitigation and response to civilian harm in plans, operations and/or training.”
“This task may include the Civilian Environment Teams at operational commands, composed of intelligence professionals; experts in human terrain, civilian infrastructure, and urban systems; and civil engineers, to assist commanders in understanding the effects of friendly and adversary actions on the civilian environment. This task may also include the development of command red teaming policies and procedures appropriate to relevant operational environments, with a focus on combating cognitive biases throughout joint targeting processes,” the description of the task says. It calls for reporting on the number of “trained, qualified, and certified personnel ready to support civilian harm mitigation and response requirements.”
With Austin’s civilian harm reduction rollout in 2023 and now with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chiming in, demanding that the services and commands incorporate civilian harm reduction into its staff and operations, a fundamental disagreement inside the military comes into focus, pitting top brass in Washington against combat commanders serving overseas. In the field, according to the GAO report, commanders believe that they are abiding by the laws of war and that their jobs which require putting their lives on the line are difficult and dangerous enough without having to modify them to satisfy Washington. They view the Pentagon as out of touch, catering more to public opinion and negative news coverage than to military reality.
The Pentagon, by focusing on “managing” and “mitigating” civilian harm is also being cautious about directing any mandate to count (or account for) civilian casualties because of the legacy of the dreaded “body count” from the Vietnam era, where commanders were pressured to inflate the number of enemy killed to demonstrate the false success of their operations. In Desert Storm (the first Gulf War in 1991), then CENTCOM commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf fashioned his own experiences into a creed that his command would refuse to count not only Iraqi combatants killed, but Iraqi civilians as well. For many in the military, that bias not to count civilian casualties has continued to this day.
Pressure from human rights and civilian casualty organizations began to change this practice after the Kosovo war in 1999, holding NATO and individual military forces accountable for civilian casualties and harm. Two decades of fighting after 9/11 accentuated the need to account for civilian harm, not just for legal and humanitarian reasons, but also because the effort to kill terrorists without accounting for civilian effects was shown to just increase the number of terrorists in succeeding generations.
In the formulation of its civilian harm “mitigation” strategy, the Pentagon has chosen specifically to ignore the work of the human rights and warfare-monitoring community, as revealed in a 2022 RAND Corporation report on “U.S. Department of Defense Civilian Casualty Policies and Procedures.” The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the report says, rejected the use of “third party” assessments because it did “not want to be held accountable to a range [of number] that is not an accurate estimate.”
The GAO report notes that a Joint Staff official said that the Defense Department still chooses to ignore civilian casualty assessments from third-party sources even though it itself fails to aggregate its own data and make its own efforts. Citing the RAND study, the GAO notes however that “Third-party groups tend to identify a range of estimates and leverage local news, social media sites, and footage of incidents posted to YouTube or other outlets” and that these estimates, though they can vary widely from the DOD’s internal numbers, are still essential to improve the accuracy of the military’s own assessments.
The GAO urges the DOD to establish effective metrics and “to get buy-in from DOD components and officials at all levels implementing the [civilian harm] action plan.” It also says that the Pentagon needs to “better monitor progress in implementing [its own plan] to help ensure that the improvements endure.” It is not an optimistic prognosis for civilians after years of external pressure and more than a year after Austin unveiled his new plan.
The post Biden Decries Civilian Deaths in Gaza as Pentagon Fails With Its Own Safeguards appeared first on The Intercept .
Chanting “power and food,” demonstrators have filled Cuba’s streets in recent days. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim delves into the complexities of Cuba’s current economic crisis with Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. They discuss the various factors deepening the crisis and driving people to the streets, from the half-century-long U.S. embargo on the island, its own economic policies, pandemic-related destabilization, and sanctions the Trump administration imposed and the Biden administration kept in place . Pertierra is in the fifth year of his Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and hosts “Orígenes: A Cuban History Podcast.”
Transcript coming soon.
The post Havana Syndrome: How the Biden Administration Is Driving Cubans Into Misery appeared first on The Intercept .
On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.
Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.
The budget — co-signed by more than 170 House Republicans — calls to eliminate “the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) from the School Lunch Program.” The CEP, the Republicans note, “allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”
“Additionally,” the Republicans continue, “the RSC Budget would limit spending in the program to truly needy households.”
The CEP allows schools and districts in low-income areas to provide breakfast and lunch to all students, free of charge. The program thus relieves both schools and families from administrative paperwork, removing the inefficiencies and barriers of means-testing, all on the pathway to feeding more children and lifting all boats.
This year, the Biden administration further expanded the CEP, allowing another estimated 3,000 school districts to serve students breakfast and lunch at no cost.
Instead of universality, the RSC suggests sending block grants for child nutrition programs to states, to give them “needed flexibility” to “promote the efficient allocation of funds to those who need it most,” while avoiding “widespread fraud.” Such a proposal, which has been pitched before without gaining much traction, could theoretically eliminate the baseline standards for nutrition standards and basic access, said Crystal FitzSimons, the child nutrition programs and policy director at the Food Research & Action Center.
“At this point, we have over 40,000 schools participating in community eligibility, and that allows them to offer breakfast and lunch to all students at no charge,” FitzSimons said about CEP. “There have been year after year increases in participation because the option is so popular to eligible schools across the country.”
Republicans have worked for years to undermine school lunch programs, but the staying focus on the goal, even in rhetoric, is notable given the warm reception some states have received in instituting universal school lunch. In Minnesota, for example, 70 percent of Minnesotans , including 57 percent of conservatives and 54 percent of senior citizens, were found to have approved of the policy change that took effect last summer — even after reports that the program was proving to be more costly than anticipated, due to greater-than-expected demand. Statewide polling in Pennsylvania last year found 82 percent of people supporting expanding their free school breakfast program to include lunch too, while 87 percent of Ohio K-12 parents were found in 2022 to support school meals for all, regardless of ability to pay.
Another seven states — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Vermont — have also passed universal school lunch programs, while at least 26 more states (including Washington, D.C.) are considering ways to achieve the policy too. Nevada, meanwhile, used leftover Covid-19 relief funding to offer one more year of free school meals to all students through this school year. The ambition is endorsed by an increasingly large coalition of groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, the American Heart Association, and the National Education Association.
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.
“If the program is designed to offer free meals to all students,” FitzSimons said, “that question about fraud really disappears if you’re allowed to serve every single child.”
Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/APThe Republican Study Committee is the largest ideological caucus in Congress, and for the past 51 years, it has served as a principle priority-setter for the party. The committee was chaired as recently as three years ago by House Speaker Mike Johnson. He and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise still sit on the Executive Committee, while Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern serves as chair. Its annual budget is not binding, but it does offer a useful window into conservatives’ policy priorities, which can best be summarized as accelerating the planet’s burning, an indifference to mass shootings, and actively threatening consumers and workers.
On the environment — amid the hottest year recorded on Earth — the word “climate” appears 110 times and the word “environment” 53 times in the budget. Not one of those instances has anything to do with a positive Republican vision to address climate change or protect the environment. The RSC instead opposes the creation of a carbon tax and wants to give oil and gas companies deductions on costs like labor and safety, ramp up oil and gas projects on federal lands, and defund the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Republicans also throw their weight behind bills like Virginia Rep. Bob Good’s “No American Climate Corps Act,” to stop federal funds from being used for the American Climate Corps — a revolutionary clean energy jobs program whose applications open next month. While millions of Americans have been surrounded by throat-scratching smog, livelihood-destroying wildfires , and relentless flooding and heat waves , the Republicans call to prohibit the use of emergency disaster or public health emergency declarations “from being used to address purported climate change.”
On guns, Republicans call to undercut or block an array of gun regulations. For instance, the budget supports “defunding the constitutionally dubious red flag provisions in the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.” That law allocates $750 million to support ongoing state implementation of red-flag laws that remove firearms from individuals who are deemed a threat to themselves or others; it doesn’t force any state to do anything.
On reproductive rights, Republicans call for the passage of an array of anti-choice bills, like Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’s “Ending Chemical Abortions Act of 2023,” which would federally outlaw the use of abortion pills , and West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney’s “Life at Conception Act,” which would designate embryos made through in vitro fertilization as “children” — even as many of the same Republicans have scrambled to claim they support IVF in the aftermath of a similar Alabama Supreme Court ruling that led multiple clinics to halt IVF procedures.
Like every good Republican fiscal document, the RSC budget threatens changes to Social Security, including by raising the retirement age. Other Republican budget priorities include eliminating all future funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency , which provides aid to Palestinian refugees; prohibiting federal subsidies for high-speed rail; getting rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ; reducing funding for the famously under-supported Occupational Safety and Health Administration; and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board, which, under President Joe Biden, has done much to protect workers’ right to organize.
Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.
“As in previous years,” the Republicans say about their master plan, “the RSC budget also celebrates the work of House conservatives who have fought for legislation that preserves American values, combats Biden’s woke and weaponized government, and protects the freedoms that should be enjoyed by every American.”
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When 25-year-old U.S. Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell took his life in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. this February, the phone lines at the anti-war organization Veterans for Peace started lighting up. Current and recently retired members of the military were calling to say they were disturbed by Bushnell’s act of self-immolation. Many of them had been privately nursing their own angst and misgivings about U.S. support for the war in Gaza.
“We have been receiving many calls from concerned active duty and recently discharged veterans talking about their personal disgust with our foreign policy in light of recent events, and also talking about how these are effecting them psychologically,” said Mike Ferner, the director of Veterans for Peace.
Members of Veterans for Peace, like other anti-war veterans groups, have mobilized around the Israeli war in Gaza, organizing protests across the country and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Following Bushnell’s death by self-immolation, veterans at a protest in Oregon burned their uniforms in tribute to the deceased airman and to register their opposition to the war. Anger over the civilian carnage from the war, coming on the heels of two decades of disastrous U.S. military involvement in the region , has galvanized some veterans who experienced these conflicts up close.
“It’s fair to say that people’s psychological trauma is being activated again by what they are seeing in the news,” Ferner said, “especially people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been through the meat grinder once already with the U.S. military.”
The U.S. has indeed been intimately involved in Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians since last October, providing its Middle East ally with extensive military aid and diplomatic cover , despite widespread public opposition. For years, Israel has received billions of dollars in military aid from the United States annually. The Biden administration has maintained that support and also asked Congress to approve another $14 billion in the wake of the war, while bypassing Congress to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel.
The U.S. has also provided intelligence support for Israel during the offensive, much of it focused on efforts to deter Iranian-backed militants across the region. As The Intercept previously reported, the U.S. had begun quietly expanding a military base it operates in Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, in the months prior to the war. That base, known as “Site 512,” is believed to help Israel track missile strikes, including from Iranian-backed groups in the region.
Despite the desire of most Americans to stay out of the Middle East, blowback from the Israeli war in Gaza is directly dragging U.S. troops back in — with military casualties as the consequence. Earlier this year, Iraqi militias attacked a base in Jordan that was being used to help deter Iranian-backed groups seeking to build up their forces near Israel’s borders, killing three service members.
Many military veterans who have sacrificed their physical and mental health over two decades of disastrous U.S. wars in the Middle East have been enraged by the continued waste of U.S. lives, resources, and moral credibility in the region. Following Bushnell’s death, Dennis Fritz, who served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years, traveled to D.C. to attend a vigil at the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation. Fritz, who worked for years with wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following his resignation from active duty, said that he felt an obligation to pay tribute to Bushnell’s sacrifice.
“As a former senior enlisted leader in the air force, Aaron would have been my responsibility,” Fritz said. “As an officer I would have been the one who would have checked on him to make sure he was OK. So the news of his death struck me very hard.”
Since leaving the military Fritz has worked in anti-war activism as part of the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military officers critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.” Fritz said that he and other former U.S. military officers who had already been critical of U.S. policy in the region are angered by what they are seeing unfold in Gaza. They now believe that the U.S. government is assisting in the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza.
“They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”
“When we are in the military we are taught the Geneva Convention and the law of armed conflict. This teaches us not just that we must do everything we can to protect civilian life, but even the property of innocent people,” Fritz said. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “is definitely not doing that. They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”
Bushnell himself has become well-known for his sacrifice, both in the U.S. and abroad where his image has often appeared at protests denouncing U.S. complicity in the Gaza war. After attending Bushnell’s vigil, Fritz himself said that he holds the U.S. government responsible for Bushnell’s sacrifice, given its lockstep support for Israel in its assault on Gaza.
Fritz said, “Aaron died for the sins of our Congress and the Biden administration.”
The Intercept’s coverage of veterans’ health is made possible in part by a grant from the A-Mark Foundation .
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Among the many hawks on Capitol Hill, few have as effectively frightened lawmakers over Chinese control of TikTok as Jacob Helberg, a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission. Helberg’s day job at the military contractor Palantir, however, means he stands to benefit from ever-frostier relations between the two countries.
Helberg has been instrumental in the renewed legislative fight against TikTok, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Spearheading the effort to create the bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks is Jacob Helberg,” the Journal reported in March 2023 . The paper noted collaboration between Helberg, previously a policy adviser at Google, and investor and fellow outspoken China hawk Peter Thiel, as well as others in Thiel’s circle. The anti-China coalition, the Journal reported this past week , has been hammering away at a TikTok ban, and Helberg said he has spoken to over 100 members of Congress about the video-sharing social media app.
From his position on the U.S.–China commission — founded by Congress to advise it on national security threats represented by China — Helberg’s rhetoric around TikTok has been as jingoistic as any politician. “TikTok is a scourge attacking our children and our social fabric, a threat to our national security, and likely the most extensive intelligence operation a foreign power has ever conducted against the United States,” he said in a February hearing held by the commission.
Unlike those in government he’s supposed to be advising, however, Helberg has another gig: He is a policy adviser to Alex Karp, CEO of the defense and intelligence contractor Palantir. And Palantir, like its industry peers, could stand to profit from increased hostility between China and the United States. The issue has been noted by publications like Fortune, which noted in September 2023 that Palantir relies heavily on government contracts for AI work — a business that would grow in a tech arms race with China. (Neither the U.S.–China commission nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.)
“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations.”
Experts told The Intercept that there didn’t appear to be a legal conflict that would exclude Helberg from the commission, but the participation of tech company officials could nonetheless create competing interests between sound policymaking and corporate profits.
“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations about economic and security relations between the U.S. and China,” said Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and scholar of the U.S. defense industry. “From their perspective, China is a mortal adversary and the only way to ‘beat’ them is to further subsidize the tech sector so we can rapidly build next generation systems that can overwhelm China in a potential conflict — to the financial benefit of Palantir and its Silicon Valley allies.”
Helberg’s activities are part of a much broader constellation of anti-China advocacy orbiting around Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir in 2003 and is still invested in the company. (Helberg’s husband, the venture capitalist Keith Rabois, spent five years as a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund). Thiel, also an early investor in Pentagon aerospace contractor SpaceX and weaponsmaker Anduril, has for years blasted the Chinese tech sector as inherently malignant — claims, like Helberg’s, made with more than trace amounts of paranoia and xenophobia .
Thiel’s remarks on China are characteristically outlandish. Speaking at the MAGA-leaning National Conservatism Conference in 2019, Thiel suggested , without evidence, that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” — and urged a joint CIA–FBI investigation. In 2021, at a virtual event held by the Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel said , “I do wonder whether at this point, bitcoin should also be thought [of] in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”
For Thiel’s camp, conflict with China is both inevitable and necessary. U.S.–China research cooperation on artificial intelligence, he says, is treacherous, and Chinese technology, generally, is anathema to national security. As he inveighs against Chinese tech, Thiel’s portfolio companies stand by with handy solutions. Palantir, for instance, began ramping up its own Made-in-the-USA militarized AI offerings last year. Anduril executives engage in routine fearmongering over China, all the while pitching their company’s weapons as just the thing to thwart an invasion of Taiwan. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey told Bloomberg TV last year.
Palantir is making a similar pitch. In a 2023 quarterly earnings call, Palantir Chief Operations Officer Shyam Sankar told investors that the company had China in mind as it continues to grow its reach into the Western Pacific. On another Palantir earnings call, Karp, the company’s CEO and Helberg’s boss, told investors the more dangerous and real the Chinese threat gets, “the more battle-tested and real your software has to be. I believe it’s about to get very real. Why? Because our GDP growth is significantly better than China’s.” Even marketing images distributed by Palantir show the company’s software being used to track Chinese naval maneuvers in the South China Sea.
Thiel is not alone among Silicon Valley brass. At a February 2023 panel event, a representative of America’s Frontier Fund, a national security-oriented technology investment fund that pools private capital and federal dollars, said that a war between China and Taiwan would boost the firm’s profits by an order of magnitude. Private sector contributors to America’s Frontier Fund include both Thiel and former Google chair Eric Schmidt, whose China alarmism and defense-spending boosterism rivals Thiel’s — and who similarly stands to personally profit from escalations with China.
Repeated often enough, anti-TikTok rhetoric from tech luminaries serves to reinforce the notion that China is the enemy of the U.S. and that countering this enemy is worth the industry’s price tags — even if the app’s national security threat remains entirely hypothetical .
“Just like tech had to convince people that crypto and NFTs had intrinsic value, they also have to convince the Pentagon that the forms of warfare that their technologies make possible are intrinsically superior or fill a gap,” Shana Marshall, an arms industry scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, told The Intercept.
Marshall said bodies like the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission can contribute to such conflicts because advisory boards that encourage revolving-door moves between private firms and government help embed corporate interests in policymaking. “In other words,” she said, “it’s not a flaw in the program, it’s an intentional design element.”
“The tensions with China/Taiwan are tailor made for this argumentation,” Marshall added. “You couldn’t get better cases — or better timing — so grifters and warmongers like Helberg and Schmidt are going to be increasingly integrated into Pentagon planning and all aspects of regulation.”
Forcing divestiture or banning TikTok outright would not trigger armed conflict between the U.S. and China on its own, but the pending legislation to effectively ban the app is already dialing up hostility between the two countries. After the House’s overwhelming support last week of the bill to force the sale of the app from Chinese hands, the Financial Times reported that Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the U.S. of displaying a “robber’s logic” through legislative expropriation. An editorial in the Chinese government mouthpiece Global Times decried the bill as little more than illegal “commercial plunder” and urged TikTok parent company ByteDance to not back down.
“There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”
Of course, self-interest is hardly a deviation from the norm in the military-industrial complex. “This is the way Washington works,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. “There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”
Although it’s common for governmental advisory boards like Helberg’s U.S.–China commission to enthusiastically court the private sector, Amey said it would be important for Helberg to make clear when making policy recommendations whether he’s speaking as an adviser to Palantir’s CEO or to Congress, though the disclosure wouldn’t negate Helberg’s personal interest in a second Cold War. Such disclosures have been uneven: While Helberg’s U.S.–China commission bio leads with his Palantir job, the company went unmentioned in the February hearing. Given the ongoing campaign to pass the TikTok bill, Helberg’s lobbying “certainly raises some red flags,” Amey said.
He said, “The industry is hawkish on China but has a financial interest in the decisions that the executive branch or Congress make.”
The post Tech Official Pushing TikTok Ban Could Reap Windfall From U.S.–China Cold War appeared first on The Intercept .
A political action committee funded by a Republican megadonor is running the first ads of the Pennsylvania primary season by an outside group attacking Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa.
The group, Moderate PAC, launched in January 2023 to target progressives in Democratic primaries. It’s doing so with Republican money .
The ads back the candidate recruited by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to run against Lee, Bhavini Patel, in hopes of making it to a general election against Republican candidate Laurie MacDonald.
Although Moderate PAC has employed Democratic consultants, including former Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, its primary funder is Jeffrey Yass, one of the richest man in Pennsylvania and a major donor to the GOP. Yass, though formally registered as a libertarian, is one of former President Donald Trump’s picks for Treasury secretary should he win election in 2024.
Yass, a co-founder of a large hedge fund, has become increasingly involved in spending against progressives, aimed at keeping a regressive tax code in place and cutting funding for public schools in Pennsylvania.
“Take a cue from Laurie McDonald and just run as a Republican.”
“If you have to rely on a Super PAC bankrolled by Pennsylvania’s richest Republican — who has made it his mission to defund public education and ban abortion in PA — you’re not just unfit to run in a Democratic primary, you’re actively anti-democracy too,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Lee. “Take a cue from Laurie McDonald and just run as a Republican.”
Moderate PAC president and founder Ty Strong told The Intercept that other Pittsburgh area donors, including labor unions, had given to the PAC to fund ads against Lee in the race for the Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District.
“All the money raised for the ads in PA-12 were received from members of that community and Pittsburgh labor unions,” Strong said.
Though he didn’t identify the labor unions, Strong named six individual donors — including one registered Republican and five Democrats. Among them were private equity and venture capital executives Todd Reidbord and Gregg Perelman, who run the Pittsburgh private equity firm Walnut Capital; Richard and Arlene Weisman, who are active philanthropists in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community; and Evan Segal and Andy Rabin of the 412 Venture fund. Rabin is registered as a Republican.
Strong said the names of other donors would be revealed in the PAC’s next filings with the Federal Election Commission, which is due on April 15.
One of those donors, Segal, a Democrat who worked in the administration of former President Barack Obama, told The Intercept he hardly agreed with Yass on anything, including his reasons for funding the PAC in the first place.
“Mr. Yass’s reasons for funding this are in support of a very, very ultra-right-wing group of crazies who despise Summer Lee,” he said. Though he is supporting Yass’s PAC, Segal said, “I don’t support people on the extremes.”
Segal said he gave to Yass’s PAC not because he believes the enemy of his enemy is his friend, but that observers are anticipating further outside spending to back Lee. “We firmly believe that there will be money that will come in from the outside — from people who also hate marginalized communities — to support Summer Lee, as well as people from the right like Mr. Yass who want to run these Machiavellian games with their billions of dollars,” Segal said. (The other five identified donors did not respond to a request for comment.)
Segal said he’s backing Patel because she’ll support Democratic leaders including President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to fight for issues like reproductive freedom and women’s equality.
For her part, in a press statement last week, Lee said, “Republican-funded Super PACs and their chosen candidate couldn’t stop us last cycle, and they won’t stop us this time.”
Lee faced an onslaught of spending from pro-Israel lobbying groups in 2022. AIPAC and its ally, Democratic Majority for Israel, spent millions against her.
It’s also not the first time Lee’s opponents have claimed she’s not really a Democrat — while themselves taking money from Republicans. Patel and her campaign have strategized about how to encourage Republicans to get involved in the primary, how Patel’s campaign appeals to Republican voters, and how the campaign can encourage Republicans to switch parties to vote in the April 23 primary.
Moderate PAC’s Strong compared the donors who funded the new ads, including Republicans, to one of Lee’s donors. “This is in contrast to Rep. Summer Lee, who receives money from people condemned by the White House,” Strong added.
Strong said he was referring to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whom the White House denounced in December after he said he was happy to see the people of Gaza breaking the long-running siege against the territory on October 7. Awad has explicitly condemned the Hamas attack and clarified that his comments were in support of Palestinians’ fight against Israel’s illegal occupation, not in support of Hamas.
Yass is also a major donor to a far-right Israeli think tank that has tried to reconfigure the country’s judicial system and suppress criticism of human rights abuses by the Israeli government.
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