Americans adore a moral panic.

During the Red Scare, we believed that Soviet agents were everywhere, having secretly infiltrated all levels of society. In the 1950s, the U.S. government banned switchblades over unfounded fears that we were in the throes of “West Side Story”-style knife violence. The Satanic Panic convinced Americans of the 1980s that absurd claims of ritual abuse and sacrifice were somehow credible. Around the same time, there was “ stranger danger ” — which was debunked like other moral panics, but never went away entirely.

At any given time, America is moving in and out of some moral panic or another. Harm to children is a persistent theme. In recent years, however, our national obsession with these moral panics has consumed our politics. We’ve come to believe that sex trafficking rings are all around us. The driving force may come as a surprise: a moral panic about consensual sex workers who advertised legally on the internet.

The far-right’s current obsession with “child sex trafficking” — the animating force behind such conspiracy theories as QAnon and Pizzagate, as well as coded political insults like “groomer” — has roots in this moral panic hyped by powerful Republicans and Democrats alike. The panic reached its crescendo with the 2018 federal indictments related to a sex ad hub called Backpage.com.

The Backpage story may stand as a cautionary tale not only of overzealous prosecutions, but also of the second- and third-order effects of moral panics.

A classifieds site that became known predominantly for “adult” advertising, Backpage was born of a more dispersed industry that used to operate in the back pages of local alternative weekly newspapers like the Village Voice, Chicago Reader, and LA Weekly — known as alt-weeklies. For a time, the sex ad industry had its central platform on Craigslist, the free classifieds website, which spurred large-scale campaigns against the ads. As the campaigns took hold, Craigslist buckled and effectively handed the mantle to Backpage — until eventually it, too, came under a sustained morality attack.

I spent four years reporting on this saga — the rise and fall of alt-weeklies, adult advertising, and Backpage — with fellow journalists Sam Eifling and Michael J. Mooney. The result, a documentary podcast series, now on Audible, titled “ Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website ,” reveals how cynical politicians can take hold of a moral panic and exploit it for political gain.

One thing that struck me during my reporting was that the Backpage story may stand as a cautionary tale not only of overzealous prosecutions, but also of the second- and third-order effects of moral panics — in this case, conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon. If you look closely enough, you can trace a line from adult ads in alt-weeklies to escort ads on websites like Craigslist and Backpage, to conspiracy claims that Donald Trump is fighting to break up a global child sex-trafficking cabal run by Hillary Clinton and her malevolent minions.

Conspiracy theories don’t grow in isolation. They wrap themselves around kernels of truth . The truth here is that sex trafficking and sexual exploitation are horrific crimes, and no one should underestimate the harms experienced by survivors. For the last two decades, though, powerful politicians, breathless news media, and a host of ill-informed celebrities have conflated “sex trafficking” with “prostitution” — fanning a national hysteria that underpins the conspiracy theories now wracking American society.

Sex Ad Industry

A quick history: Starting with the Village Voice in the 1950s, alt-weeklies popped up in cities nationwide. These papers prized investigative reporting and magazine-style narrative writing; pioneered attitudinal pop-culture criticism; and published classified ads in their back pages that would make half the country blush.

The “adult” ads on the last pages of the tabloid-style papers promoted sex work. At first, they were written in coded language, which created enough ambiguity that federal judges had upheld the ads’ First Amendment protections. The legal doctrine was simple: The government couldn’t deprive a massage therapist or a dancer of their First Amendment right to advertise on mere suspicion that they might also provide an illegal sexual service behind closed doors.

For decades, wink-and-a-nod adult ads could be found in alt-weeklies nationwide. Publishers knew what was being advertised. Most readers knew. So did police and prosecutors. No one, however, seemed to holler about sex ads in newspapers that could be found at busy bus stops, crowded restaurants, or smoky bars. Society didn’t collapse. The kids were all right.

Then came Craigslist, a simple website that slashed a gaping hole in the newspaper industry’s hulking money bags. Who would pay for an ink-smeared classified ad in a newspaper when you could get a more effective one for free, in minutes, on Craigslist? People selling cars, boats, guitars, whatever — they moved to Craigslist. And those sex workers advertising in the back pages of alt-weeklies? They did too.

In response to the migration of classifieds to the internet, the largest publisher of alt-weeklies launched a Craigslist competitor, Backpage. Essentially a knockoff, Backpage used a design and category scheme almost identical to Craigslist’s. Throughout its early existence, the alt-weekly-run Backpage never matched the popular site from which it was cribbing.

Then the government and the press turned on the burgeoning online classifieds industry. Public officials latched on to a study from the University of Pennsylvania that claimed 326,000 children in America were “at risk for commercial sexual exploitation.” The report analyzed data from the 1990s using methodologies so deeply flawed that the Washington Post described it as “ bogus .”

The jaw-dropping stat — More than 300,000 children in the United States could be victims of sex trafficking! — nonetheless lodged itself in our national consciousness. Politicians trumpeted the claim . Actor Ashton Kutcher, fashioning himself an advocate against sex trafficking, announced unchallenged on CNN that there are “between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today.” It sounded even then like an improbable total. But with kids’ lives reportedly at stake, few Americans pushed back.

Pressure Campaigns

The FBI, conditioned to view any national clamor as a federal funding bonanza, launched Operation Cross Country to investigate the supposed scourge of sex trafficking. The FBI’s ongoing efforts now include partnerships with 400 law enforcement agencies nationwide, but the feds still haven’t uncovered any sort of large-scale, highly organized trafficking ring as part of Operation Cross Country.

That’s because — while cases of sexual exploitation and trafficking do occur, many of them horrific in their details — the perception of a large-scale threat in the United States is perched on a mountain of distortions and exaggerations.

“If you believe that hundreds of thousands of kids are being trafficked, you have to believe your husband, your dad, your brother, your sons are the ones buying them,” Juliana Piccillo, a sex worker advocate, explained to me. “It’s not just a handful of guys buying 300,000 kids.”

For context, the union-covered employees of UPS , those brown-clad delivery drivers we see daily, number 300,000.

As America bought into myths of large-scale sex trafficking, individual accounts of sexual exploitation made headlines. Yet the more nuanced story of online adult ads went unreported. Put simply, the internet made sex work, on the whole, safer by giving consensual sex workers a marketplace away from the streets and the ability to screen potentially dangerous clients.

Sex workers and their supporters protest a police raid on Oct. 25, 2016, in Minneapolis saying shutting down sites like Backpage.com exposes them to more risk. Photo: “ Protest march against the raid on Backpage ” by Fibonacci Blue. Used under CC BY 2.0

These gains in worker safety benefited a large portion of Americans, and the reason is simple: The nation’s sex work industry is enormous. The National Institutes of Health estimate that sex work in the U.S. generates $14 billion per year in economic activity. That makes sex work a significant American industry, on par in revenue with the streaming music industry.

As police and politicians conflated sex trafficking with sex work, journalists dutifully followed along. A study from the University of Minnesota of 1,500 news articles from 1995 to 2014 found a dramatic increase in the media’s use of “sex trafficking” in place of “prostitution.” That trend hasn’t reversed. A local news report from Florida last year described a standard prostitution bust as being part of “a sweeping sex trafficking investigation.” Or consider a local news report from South Dakota, where an undercover cop posed as an underage sex worker in a prostitution sting. The TV anchor described it as “an undercover sex trafficking investigation,” even though no one involved was being trafficked. A right-wing sheriff in Florida fashioned a national profile by running prostitution stings and hosting chest-beating press conferences that promote how he’s bravely fighting “human trafficking.”

Backpage became the world’s internet brothel. It was the same legal business alt-weeklies had been in for decades, now operating at an industrial scale.

In August 2010, 17 attorneys general banded together in a letter pressuring Craigslist to take down its adult ads. It wasn’t a legal threat; federal judges had upheld the legality of such ads since their days on the back pages of alt-weeklies. Instead, the attorneys general were mounting a coordinated pressure campaign. And it worked. Bowing to the coercion, Craigslist shuttered its adult section, slapping the word “CENSORED” across it on the website.

Suddenly, adult ads flooded into the also-ran, Backpage, and the company’s annual revenue skyrocketed from $11.7 million to $78 million in just a few years. Backpage became the world’s internet brothel. It was the same legal business alt-weeklies had been in for decades, now operating at an industrial scale.

Backpage’s owners, Arizona newspaper moguls Michael Lacey and James Larkin, believed they could withstand what the nerds at Craigslist couldn’t. After all, they were career alt-weekly publishers, owning 17 papers nationwide, including the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and Miami New Times. They’d printed adult ads in the back pages of their papers for decades. How could the internet be any different?

Political Opportunism

As the world’s largest platform for adult ads, Backpage became the target of withering scrutiny and sensational claims that it was encouraging child sexual exploitation. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof led the charge with stories headlined “When Backpage.com Peddles Schoolgirls for Sex” and “Google and Sex Traffickers Like Backpage.com.”

Protestors gathered outside the Village Voice’s office in New York. They held up signs reading “End Sex Trafficking” and “Women and Girls Will Not Be Silenced.” An anonymously run website, VillageVoicePimps.com , aggregated reports of violence and sexual exploitation.

The drumbeat drowned out a more complicated reality. Backpage, whose owners and employees knew large amounts of its ads were using ambiguous language to promote illegal sex work, was minting money by cynically pushing First Amendment protections and internet laws to their legal limits. Backpage, though, didn’t turn a blind eye to possible harm. One of the company’s executives had received an award from the FBI for working proactively with law enforcement. Prosecutors at the Justice Department had even advised against filing criminal charges involving Backpage after concluding, in an internal memo , that “Backpage genuinely wanted to get child prostitution off of its site.”

Politicians, on the other hand, saw blood in the water.

Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris addresses the Domestic Human Trafficking symposium in Los Angeles on April 25, 2014. Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP

Vice President Kamala Harris, then the ambitious attorney general of California, boasted of being tough on human trafficking . In 2016, while running for U.S. Senate, she filed criminal charges against Backpage’s owners. The case garnered Harris national headlines — What politician doesn’t want to be seen as tough on child sex trafficking? — but a judge threw out most of the charges shortly after the newly elected Harris was sworn into the Senate. Her case hadn’t helped end exploitation at Backpage, but it had launched her into national politics.

Around this time, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s think tank, the McCain Institute, focused its efforts on human trafficking. His wife, Cindy, became a self-appointed expert in the subject. McCain Institute reports circulated in Washington, pointing the finger at Backpage for sex trafficking cases in the United States.

The McCains had a wounded history with the owners of Backpage, who started their publishing company in Arizona with the muckraking alt-weekly Phoenix New Times. The paper had written unflatteringly about the McCains for decades and in the mid-1990s revealed how Cindy McCain was stealing painkillers from her medical charity — a story headlined with the very alt-weekly pun “ Opiate for the Mrs. ” Cindy spun the scandal as a story of addiction and redemption, but it dogged her husband through his failed presidential bids.

Political chicanery and sensational news reports about sex trafficking fueled each other, creating a media environment by 2016 in which Americans had been inundated with reports about sex trafficking and online classifieds. Just as Americans had come to believe that strangers were abducting thousands of children in the 1980s, we came to believe that child sex trafficking was endemic, with hundreds of thousands of our kids at risk.

In April 2018, bowing to pressure from Harris, McCain, and other elected officials, the Justice Department seized Backpage and filed criminal charges against its owners. None of the charges alleged sex trafficking — of either children or adults. The government accused Backpage’s owners and executives of money laundering and facilitating prostitution . Because prostitution is not a federal crime, the Justice Department filed charges under the Travel Act, which outlaws interstate activities intended to violate state laws.

In the first Backpage trial, federal prosecutors repeatedly referred to “child sex trafficking” — even though none of the charges alleged such activity — forcing the judge to declare a mistrial. In November 2023, a federal jury in Arizona convicted Backpage’s principals following a second trial. Lacey was convicted on one count of money laundering, acquitted on another, and no verdict was reached on the other charges, many of which were thrown out by a judge this week ahead of an possible retrial. He faces sentencing in June. Larkin took his own life in 2023, on the eve of the second trial.

Any of the nation’s alt-weeklies — which published the same types of adult ads that Backpage did — could have faced the same charges decades earlier, but prosecutors had deferred to First Amendment protections.

Until the political pressure ramped up on Backpage.

Conspiracy Theories

Pizzagate, the far-right conspiracy theory that suggests Democrats operated a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, sprung from this Backpage-obsessed media environment. The conspiracy claim jumped from the online world to the real one when, in December 2016, a man fired an AR-15 rifle inside the pizzeria , Comet Ping Pong, as he attempted to investigate the supposed sex trafficking ring.

The intrigue around Comet pizza then fed the sprawling pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy. The far-fetched myth hyped secret sex trafficking rings operated by prominent figures, notably Democrats, with Trump cast as a hero fighting valiantly to expose this criminal network and bring its pedophiles to justice. QAnon inspired other conspiracy theories, including one that claimed online retailer Wayfair was selling sex-trafficked children .

“You’re onto something with the idea of far-right obsession over trafficking and grooming having its seeds planted with Backpage,” Mike Rothschild, the author of “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories,” told me after I explained how I suspected the years of sensationalistic Backpage coverage explains our current conspiracy theories. “There’s a sense among QAnon promoters and right-wing influencers in general that organized rings of child trafficking have been a problem for decades and that only Trump had the courage and lack of connections to ‘the swamp’ to take it on.”

“And sure enough,” Rothschild added, “I dug around a bit on Telegram and found some Q promoters talking about the cabal taking its child trafficking ops somewhere else once Trump took Backpage down in 2018.”

The beliefs behind QAnon are shaped by so-called Q drops , cryptic online messages written by a supposed government insider describing child sex trafficking and Trump’s efforts to stop it. One “Q drop” in particular folded the seizure of Backpage into its tinfoil-hatted QAnon universe as if it were evidence that Trump was battling the sex traffickers:

That didn’t take long.

Preparation.

Strength test.

For God & Country!

We Fight for FREEDOM.

Q

After the Justice Department seized Backpage, Trump signed a bill known as FOSTA-SESTA into law. It was designed to scorch the earth behind Backpage — a response to the years of media reports about sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation. The law stripped away liability protections for online platforms perceived to be promoting prostitution.

By one measure, the law worked. The breathless news reports about child sex trafficking through online classified ads came to a trickling stop.

A screenshot of Backpage.com on April 6, 2018, the day that federal authorities seized the classified site as part of a criminal case. Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP

The End of Sex Trafficking?

So, the far-right conspiracy theories were correct, then? As prophesied by “Q,” Trump vanquished the child sex trafficking rings?

Of course not.

In 2021, the Government Accountability Office issued a report concluding that shuttering Backpage had made it more difficult for law enforcement officials to identify and track cases of sexual exploitation.

And online ads promoting sex work haven’t gone away either. There’s now a constellation of smaller Backpage-like sites, many based outside the United States and beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Some sex workers have simply slid over to Instagram, Facebook, and X, using a decades-old trick refined in the naughty back pages of alt-weeklies: ambiguous language.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate were never the true aim. They are byproducts of something more sinister in our body politic.

The madness of our nation’s obsession with child sex trafficking appears to be reaching new and frightening peaks. Last year, the melodramatic movie “Sound of Freedom,” about a vigilante who rescues children from international trafficking rings, was a box-office smash, grossing more than $250 million. The film’s writer-director, Alejandro Monteverde, was inspired to make it after seeing TV news coverage of sex trafficking during the Backpage media pile-on. The influence has gone full circle: A prospective juror in the second Backpage trial admitted that he thought “Sound of Freedom” was a documentary film.

That prospective juror wasn’t the only one mixing sex-trafficking fiction with reality. Last month, during the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt passed off a case of child sex trafficking in Mexico from two decades ago as a recent crime that had occurred in the United States under the Biden administration.

The avalanche of stories portraying extensive violence, human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation linked to online classified ads helped rid the world of Craigslist’s adult section and Backpage altogether. Those stories, however, seeded the ground for another dark reality, with secondary and tertiary effects that promise to be much more consequential. We are now a nation consumed by fantastical conspiracy claims about child sex trafficking.

Potential harm to children is an unmatched motivator in American civic life. By fooling us into fears about massive sex trafficking rings, elected officials can lace panic into the border crisis or crack down on internet speech .

Conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate were never the true aim. They are byproducts of something more sinister in our body politic: power-hungry elected officials promoting fear for political advantage, all the while unconcerned about what happens when that fear becomes hysteria.

The post QAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.com appeared first on The Intercept .

“There were kids in the ICU that had bullet wounds to the chest or bullet wounds to the head,” Dr. Mohammed “Adeel” Khaleel recounts the harrowing scenes from his recent medical mission in Gaza to Ryan Grim on Deconstructed this week. An orthopedic spine surgeon hailing from Dallas, Texas, Khaleel witnessed firsthand the crushing toll on human life amid the rubble of decimated hospital infrastructure. Despite the overwhelming challenges, Khaleel highlights the unwavering dedication of medical personnel committed to providing whatever aid they can through the devastation. He returned back to the U.S. with a message from patients and doctors in Gaza: “Don’t forget us.”

Transcript coming soon.

The post “Tell the World What’s Happening Here,” Say Patients in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept .

The Intercept has uncovered new details about the small family business in Connecticut identified as having sold a lethal drug to the Federal Bureau of Prisons for use in the Trump administration’s unprecedented execution spree. Beginning in July 2020, the administration killed 13 people in the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, over the course of six months.

Absolute Standards Inc., located on the outskirts of New Haven, produces and sells materials used to calibrate laboratory and research instruments. The company is registered with Connecticut as a “manufacturer of drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices” and employed just 21 people in the lead-up to the executions, records show.

John Criscio, the company’s owner, has denied that Absolute Standards played a role in supplying pentobarbital, a barbiturate used for lethal injection.

But according to a source The Intercept interviewed last year, Criscio and the company’s director, Stephen Arpie, acknowledged in a meeting that Absolute Standards produced the active ingredient for pentobarbital for use in the federal executions. The person, who met with Criscio and Arpie about the possibility of obtaining lethal injection drugs, asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the interaction. A separate unnamed pharmacy then used the active ingredient, or API, to make an injectable drug that would stop prisoners’ hearts.

“They went about explaining to us how they produce the chemical,” the person said of Criscio and Arpie. “They’d been reading about it in the papers. And they saw that people couldn’t get it. They were like, ‘Well, we make the standard, so we know how to make it. So we can just make it.’ They basically bragged about how they built this little home market.”

A second person interviewed by The Intercept said they were also told by Arpie and Criscio that Absolute Standards made drugs for executions.

Like many of the 27 states capable of carrying out death sentences, the federal government has fought to keep the identity of its supplier hidden from the public. Earlier this month, the comedy news program “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” named Absolute Standards as the Bureau of Prisons’ drug supplier, citing an anonymous source. The segment echoed reporting by Reuters , which noted in 2020 that the House Oversight Committee had sent a letter to Absolute Standards suspecting the business was the source of the drugs. At the time, Arpie told Reuters that he did not always keep track of the final use of his products and couldn’t rule out involvement.

Interviews conducted by The Intercept and documents obtained under public records laws bolster evidence that Absolute Standards, located in a state that abolished the death penalty in 2012, helped the Trump administration resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. A Connecticut congressional staffer raised concerns about the company’s role in the executions as early as April 2021, suggesting that states might be looking to follow the federal government’s lead. “As Absolute Standards has been identified as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for executions,” the staffer warned, “the risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”

When asked about pentobarbital, Criscio told The Intercept, “We don’t make that material.” Arpie did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the BOP declined to comment.

The federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., on Aug. 28, 2020. Photo: Michael Conroy/AP

In August 2018, Absolute Standards applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital, according to a notice in the Federal Register . The designation allows for the production of chemicals “by means of chemical synthesis or by extraction from other substances.” A few months later, in October, the BOP received its first batch of the API for pentobarbital, according to a declaration by Raul Campos, then-associate warden of the BOP’s Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The declaration was submitted as part of litigation over the Trump administration’s lethal injection protocol.

(The Intercept requested Absolute Standards’ applications to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital in August 2023. On Monday, the DEA declined to hand over those records, stating that they were exempt from disclosure, in part because they included “information that is classified to protect national security.”)

For years, pharmaceutical companies refused to sell pentobarbital for use in capital punishment, creating shortages that halted executions in some states that relied on the drug. Acquiring the API marked the end of a yearslong search for the BOP.

“We were looking for the drugs domestically and internationally,” a former BOP official with knowledge of the situation told The Intercept last year. The official asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the procurement of execution drugs. “There were a number of leads that looked promising and then ended up being dry.”

Eager to restart executions, the Trump administration had prioritized locating lethal drugs. But U.S. manufacturers did not want their products to be associated with killing people because they feared it would hurt their bottom line. “There’s such a lobby against the death penalty that any company who becomes identified as providing the drugs gets boycotted,” the BOP official said. “Those companies make more money from legitimate uses of the drug than they do from executions.” It was equally difficult to find drugs internationally, the official added, because of “shady characters” and issues confirming the legitimacy of suppliers.

A team within the BOP general counsel’s office, led by then-general counsel Kenneth Hyle, was in charge of vetting potential suppliers. “More often than not, the companies they identified turned out to be nonviable,” the official said. Hyle did not respond to requests for comment.

The former official did not remember how the BOP identified Absolute Standards but said there was a team of people calling suppliers off a list. “I know that we had people that were just calling every company that they could to find out if they were able and willing to produce it.”

Only a small group of people knew the name of the API supplier, according to the official, who was only aware that it was a small company based in Connecticut. “I had no reason to ask for the name,” the official said.

The API failed its first quality assurance test in October 2018, according to the declaration submitted by Campos. Another batch of the pentobarbital ingredient passed testing in February 2019 and was sent to a compounding pharmacy to be made into an injectable solution. The BOP has not revealed the identity of the compounding pharmacy. The former BOP official told The Intercept that they did not remember the name of the pharmacy, only that it was located somewhere in the South.

“The fear was that publicity would result in this company no longer wanting … to do business.”

Typically, the government logs payments to vendors in an online database, but there is no public record of any BOP payments to Absolute Standards. “I don’t recall how it was done. It was probably not done through their normal payments process,” the former BOP official said. “Everything was done discreetly, because again, the fear was that publicity would result in this company no longer wanting to be willing to do business.”

After learning that the BOP had secured execution drugs, officials from other states started inquiring about whether they could buy from the same company. An official from Nebraska, which was prevented in 2015 from importing drugs from India, asked the BOP about its source. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services did not respond to questions about the communication.

In April 2019, an attorney adviser from the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs emailed colleagues to notify them that a staffer from South Carolina Rep. William Timmons’s office had asked about the federal government’s execution drugs. “Specifically, they ask 1. Does the Federal Government have the ‘cocktail’? 2. Could they transfer it to states under existing law?” the email read.

Timmons’s deputy chief of staff, Heather Smith, told The Intercept that the employee who inquired with the BOP no longer worked for the representative. Smith did not know whether the employee ever talked to Absolute Standards.

South Carolina has not conducted an execution since May 2011 due to drug shortages. But last September, officials announced that the state had secured pentobarbital. After The Intercept requested records detailing communications between the South Carolina Department of Corrections and Absolute Standards, the corrections team replied that such information was exempt from disclosure, citing in part a state secrecy law that shields records disclosing the identity of people and companies involved in executions. The corrections department did not comment when asked whether its response meant that Absolute Standards was providing the state with execution drugs.

In the summer of 2020, as the federal executions got underway, Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., started to raise questions about Absolute Standards’ involvement. They sent a letter to the company on July 14, the same day the government killed Daniel Lewis Lee , the first person to die in the execution spree, stating that they’d seen redacted testing reports “indicating that your company has assisted DOJ in securing and/or testing pentobarbital for death penalty executions.” The lawmakers posed a list of 11 questions to Absolute Standards about its work in the executions. The company did not reply, emails obtained by The Intercept show.

There is no public record of further investigation by the lawmakers into Absolute Standards.

Pressley’s office did not return multiple requests for comment, and Raskin’s press secretary told The Intercept to contact the House Oversight Committee. Nelly Decker, the communications director for Oversight Committee Democrats, wrote in an email that she had “nothing more to add” on the inquiry.

“The risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”

In April 2021, Jennifer Lamb, the district director for Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., brought Absolute Standards to the attention of state Attorney General William Tong. “It appears the company may have supplied the US Department of Justice with ingredients used to make pentobarbital for use in federal executions,” Lamb wrote.

“There are several states that are now actively looking to follow the federal government’s lead in acquiring this drug and resuming executions,” she continued. Describing Absolute Standards as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for capital punishment, Lamb warned that Connecticut could be complicit in clearing the way for executions across the country.

The following month, Tong sent a letter to Absolute Standards informing its owners that “Connecticut has a strong public policy against executions.” Providing drugs to carry them out, he wrote, “is contrary to the values and policies of this state.” Tong requested details about the company’s activities, expressing concern that the business might “also be providing pentobarbital, or contemplating providing the drug, for use by individual states in their attempts to execute human beings.” Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Joshua Perry, named in the letter as the point of contact for future correspondence, declined to comment.

After John Oliver named Absolute Standards as the BOP’s source, a spokesperson for Tong told CT Insider that the attorney general was reviewing the company but had not launched an investigation. The outlet also reported that state lawmakers are now exploring legislation to ban Connecticut companies from selling lethal injection drugs.

Abe Bonowitz of Death Penalty Action protests near the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., on July 15, 2020. Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Absolute Standards is known for its flexibility in the scientific industry. “They can pivot pretty easily as far as what the needs are of whatever industries,” said Meredith Millay, director of product management at Emerald Scientific, a company focused on cannabis science that has worked with Absolute Standards for a decade and sells products made by the Connecticut business. “If you need something and you can’t find what you need … they are small enough to where you can put in a special request and get custom standards made.”

Absolute Standards has boasted about the “world class manufacturing” and “internationally recognized quality” of its analytical reference materials and performance evaluation samples, compounds used to calibrate lab equipment and increase the precision of scientific analysis conducted by a wide range of entities. Criscio started the business in 1990, later employing his son and daughter. The company is registered with the DEA to manufacture Schedule II through V drugs, according to documents filed with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection. When asked about Absolute Standards and the API for pentobarbital, the DEA said it “does not comment on specific registrants.”

In recent years, the company netted contracts with the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, contracts and invoices obtained through records requests show. In 2017, for example, the company sold the Interior Department $88,500 worth of analytes in substances such as ethanol and soil. State agencies such as the California State Water Resources Control Board and the New York Office of Cannabis Management list Absolute Standards as one of a handful of vendors approved to conduct testing to ensure the quality of lab results.

Criscio has vehemently denied his company’s role in executions. Last October, The Intercept visited the Absolute Standards office, a small one-story building covered in weathered aluminum siding. When The Intercept inquired about Criscio at the reception desk, a woman said that he was out for the rest of the week. But later in the afternoon, Criscio arrived at the office, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the NASA logo.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing to talk about,” Criscio told The Intercept in the parking lot after being asked whether his company supplied execution drugs. “You’re on private property. If I have to, I’ll call the police. Is that what you want me to do?” He then went inside.

After The Intercept approached another man outside to ask about pentobarbital, Criscio reemerged and called the police, telling the operator, “I have two people on my property refusing to leave, harassing my employees.”

“I’m ready to have a fucking heart attack right now. Get off my fucking property,” he said, growing increasingly agitated. “I do not know what you’re talking about. That’s all I have to say. I’m not gonna say no more.”

The Intercept left a note at an address listed for Arpie, the company’s director. He did not reply and has not answered subsequent phone calls, text messages, or emails.

In early April, after the John Oliver segment, Criscio maintained that his company did not supply drugs for the federal executions.

“Yeah, no, we don’t make that material,” he told The Intercept. “I’m the owner of the company. I’m telling you there’s no comment. Thank you, goodbye.”

This story was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

The post “Little Home Market”: The Connecticut Company Accused of Fueling an Execution Spree appeared first on The Intercept .

Civil liberties groups are raising alarms about a bill making its way through Congress that applies pressure for a ban on travel to Iran for Americans using U.S. passports. The rights groups see the bill as part of a growing attempt to control the travel of American citizens and bar Iranian Americans in particular from maintaining connections with friends and loved ones inside Iran.

“If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

“This bill is very concerning because it’s the beginning of a process of criminalizing something that is very normal for many people, which is traveling to Iran,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

Along with a flurry of other sanctions bills targeting Iran, the bill calling for the travel restrictions passed the U.S. House last week. The bill is now slated to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Introduced last fall, the No Paydays for Hostage-Takers Act languished until tensions between Iran and Israel escalated into a series of reciprocal attacks earlier this month.

Among other provisions, the bill seeks to bar U.S. passport holders from traveling to Iran by rendering their passports invalid for such travel. Though the prohibition would need to be enacted by the State Department, the legislative proposal effectively encourages the move and, as with other sanctions against Iran, waiving the authority to enact the ban could incur political costs.

If Donald Trump wins a second White House term, a distinct possibility according to polls, the invocation of the travel ban would be likely. In his first term, Trump imposed the so-called Muslim ban on travel to the U.S. for Iranians, among other nationalities, and has promised to reimpose it if elected again .

The idea of banning travel to Iran on American passports was raised last September by former Trump State Department official Elliott Abrams, a right-wing hawk with a controversial history that includes covering up a Central American massacre and involvement in the Iran–Contra scandal.

In practice, many Iranian Americans tend to travel to Iran on Iranian passports, but Americans of Iranian extraction who do not hold Islamic Republic travel documents would be unable to travel there under the ban. The measure is viewed as a potential signal of deeper isolation for the Iranian people and severing of people-to-people ties between Iran and the U.S.

Iran and North Korea?

The bill, originally proposed last October by Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., was promoted as a measure to restrict the Iranian government’s ability to take U.S. citizens hostage as bargaining chips for bilateral negotiations. Some dual-nationals have been arrested in Iran in the past amid tensions between the two countries.

Yet hundreds of thousands of dual-nationals are believed to travel regularly to Iran from across the West. Measures barring their ability to do so would represent an unprecedented step, making it difficult or impossible for people with ties in both countries to visit family or maintain personal and professional connections.

Invalidating U.S. passports for travel to Iran would put it on par with North Korea, which had a similar ban put in place in 2017 — during Trump’s first term — when an American citizen died after 17 months of detention there.

Despite being heavily sanctioned over foreign policy and human rights issues, Iran still has relations with much of the international community and large number of Iranians live throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.

“North Korea and Iran are very different countries.”

“North Korea is really the model for this policy, as it is the only country where there is such a strict prohibition for travel on the books,” said Costello. “But North Korea and Iran are very different countries. The level of isolation of North Korea is far greater, and it doesn’t have the same diaspora that Iran does.”

This week, a delegation from North Korea traveled to Iran, with reported hopes of breaking North Korea’s total diplomatic isolation as conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine forge new geopolitics.

Costello said that NIAC is still hoping that the Senate will not approve the bill when it comes to its consideration. Still, the implications of it coming under consideration, alongside Trump’s promises to revive his “Muslim ban” policy, bode poorly for the future of U.S.–Iran relations.

“You are talking,” he said, “about a policy that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.”

The post House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away from Americans appeared first on The Intercept .

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst in response to a complaint that alleges that the school took months to address the harassment of Palestinian and Arab students.

In the previously unreported civil rights complaint , 18 students said that they have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted.” The result, the students said, was a hostile environment for all Arab and Palestinian students, those perceived to be Palestinian, and their allies on campus. Among the most chilling allegations involves a student yelling “kill all Arabs” at fellow students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.

The complaint, which was filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, charges that despite repeated communication to over a dozen administrators and Title IX officials, the school “was extremely slow to take action” and that its stonewalling exacerbated the hostile environment.

The Education Department’s civil rights division, known as OCR, opened its inquiry on April 16, less than two weeks after the legal advocacy group Palestine Legal filed the complaint on behalf of the students. The office will ultimately determine whether or not the school’s handling of the harassment complaints and disciplining of students involved in on-campus protests violated federal civil rights law.

“When you have a complaint that so clearly, and in such detail, lays out the severity of the hostile environment … I think that led OCR to really swiftly open it,” said Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. “It’s an ongoing environment too.”

The Department of Education declined to comment on the pending investigation, and the university did not respond to a request for comment on the probe or the allegations.

Over the past six months, students across the country have conducted protests, sit-ins, and other demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and for their institutions to divest from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. While universities have largely responded with an iron fist, the Department of Education has been increasingly brought in to investigate civil rights claims. Since October 7, Palestine Legal has filed five complaints with the OCR, including against Northwestern Law and the University of North Carolina . Conversely, pro-Israel groups have used the civil rights law to target students speaking out in support of Palestinian rights.

Tariq Habash, a former political appointee in the Department of Education who resigned in January in protest of President Joe Biden’s policies on the Gaza war, said that universities’ widespread crackdowns against anti-war protests is connected to the discrimination students have complained of.

“This is not how you prevent discrimination. This is how you enable it and how you make it normalized.”

“The condemnation has been so swift against largely peaceful, non-violent anti-war protests that are calling for an end to an ongoing genocide of Palestinians,” Habash said. “They’re arresting faculty who are trying to protect students who are in the middle of prayers. They are suspending students. They are kicking them out of their dorms and throwing their belongings into alleyways — this is not how you create safe, inclusive environments. This is not how you prevent discrimination. This is how you enable it and how you make it normalized.”

Targeted Harassment

The 49-page complaint lays out allegations of harassment going as far back as the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. The complaint alleges that a student began appearing at Students for Justice in Palestine and other related off-campus protests, “shouting threats such as ‘Kill all Arabs,’ playing a speaker with a recording of the sounds of bombs and other explosions and attempting to ram student protestors with an electric scooter.”

The student, whose name is redacted in the copy of the complaint reviewed by The Intercept, also allegedly attempted to intimidate an elderly woman among other people, “while also being extremely racist towards Arabs and Palestinians, stating ‘level Gaza’ and ‘Kill all Arabs.’”

The complainants also report receiving vicious messages and threats online, also allegedly by a student and student-run accounts with names like “@amherstzionwarroom, @UMass_amherst_sjp_watch, @UMass_amherst_zionists and @UMass_zionists.”

Some of the posts called the students “classic Islamic barbarism supporters [who] love raping and killing,” and “genocidal barbarian baby decapitator supporters.” One account, named “palisranimals,” reportedly targeted two students, making comments like “where is the best beach in Gaza to build a house next to?! I’ve heard Pali bones make great foundation!” and “every ‘Palestinian’ child in Gaza is actually a terrorist.”

“These accounts would target SJP students and comment on their meeting times, eventually bragged about the doxing on Canary Mission,” reads the complaint, referring to a website that targets and doxxes students and professors who criticize the Israeli government.

The school’s Equal Opportunity and Access Office determined in February that a student was running the accounts, according to the complaint.

Over a matter of weeks, into months, the targeted students and their parents would email administrators asking for support, at the very least a public expression from the university that it cared for its Arab and Palestinian students and would not accept hate toward them. Sometimes they would not hear back for days, sometimes not at all.

As administrators began to engage with individual complaints, the complaint states, they did not enact broader measures to “effectively put an end to the hostile environment as a whole,” nor issue any statement explicitly condemning anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab behavior.

“We spent our senior year just compiling evidence against our own school.”

“We spent our senior year just compiling evidence against our own school,” said Emmanuelle Sussman, one of the student complainants. “OCR was like a second full-time job. … It’s insane the degree to which this has been our time spent, plus everything else that’s going on.”

Meanwhile, university leadership took strides to express solidarity with Israel. In October, UMass President Marty Meehan co-founded a broad coalition of more than 100 institutions of higher education standing “with Israel and against Hamas.” And in November, according to the complaint, university administrators “appear to have participated in at least two events” with the Anti-Defamation League — an organization that has been criticized for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and that has given the school an “F” rating in its “Campus Antisemitism Report Card.” The complaint cites an email sent to members of the administration, including Meehan, that states that one of those events would be focused on “making it clear that Anti-Zionism is in fact antisemitism.”

A member of the University of Massachusetts Police Department asks a protester to stand up and walk with him out of the building as students who staged a sit-in outside of the chancellor’s office are arrested on Oct. 25, 2023. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Mass Arrests

In October, the university arrested 57 demonstrators conducting a sit-in protest on campus, calling on the school to cut ties with weapons manufacturers involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The complaint notes that the day after the October protest, Chancellor Javier Reyes and his assistant Mike Malone met with four student protesters to discuss the arrests and their demands. At the meeting, according to the complaint, the chancellor assured the students that the school would not press disciplinary charges against them and that they would not suffer any consequences other than those stemming from the criminal trespassing charges brought by the UMass Police Department.

Two weeks later, however, all 57 arrested students received notice that the university was in fact pursuing disciplinary charges against them for trespassing. The students went through code of conduct hearings amid final exams, right before the winter holiday, and none of them succeeded in appealing their sanctions, regardless of their records or references from professors and employers. The rush with which the school arrested and disciplined the students was a departure from its handling of previous protests, according to the complaint.

Meanwhile, three students were barred from studying abroad the following semester because of the disciplinary sanctions. The complaint notes that when parents and students attempted to appeal that decision, they were informed that it came from Kalpen Trivedi, vice provost for global affairs and International Programs Office director. The complaint includes a purported screenshot of Trivedi’s Facebook page, in which he suggests doctors at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the media were complicit with Hamas. (At the time, the Israeli military had laid siege to the hospital while claiming, without credible evidence , that it was a command and control center for Hamas.)

“They are all Hamas. All grotesquely evil,” reads the screenshot. Trivedi could not be reached for comment.

The complaint also charges that the UMass Police Department published the home addresses of the arrested students, many of whom were already facing harassment. In response to repeated requests by parents to remove the addresses from its website, according to the complaint, the police department claimed it was required to publish the addresses by state law. In fact, state law requires the agency only to make addresses available as a public record, not to post them online.

The police department eventually removed the students’ home addresses from its website several weeks later, on December 5. The department did not respond to a request for comment.

“We were fighting like tooth and nail to get them to remove our private addresses off the internet.”

“While we were experiencing this crazy level of harassment and deeply, deeply concerning threats of violence, we also were fighting our own police department that we were reporting these incidents to,” Maysoun Batley, one of the students who filed the complaint, told The Intercept. “We were fighting like tooth and nail to get them to remove our private addresses off the internet.”

“Hundreds of Emails”

The complaint also lays out various interactions the students or their parents had with university administrators that left the complainants frustrated by what they felt was an inept response.

In late November, when three Palestinian college students were shot in nearby Vermont, one frustrated parent wrote to Reyes, Meehan, and Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief of Police Tyrone Parham.

“Three Palestinian undergraduate students were shot in Vermont last night!! Three young men were shot! Instead of protecting our children in this current political climate, you are exposing them to risk. This is dangerous and irresponsible. You need to take ACTIVE STEPS to protect our children. I expect a call. I expect an email to the ‘UMass community.’ I expect action beyond the empty words that you have offered so far!”

The university brass did not respond, according to the complaint.

In December, the students said, they were invited to two Zoom meetings with administrators and faculty who apparently were seeking to understand how to make the students feel safer. Instead, the students told The Intercept that they walked away feeling less than fully embraced, citing one professor who apparently criticized their protests.

“This reminds me less of what my dad told me about sit-ins in 1962 in Kentucky, and sounds more like Nazi students shouting down Jewish professors in 1932 in Berlin,” a professor said, according to the students. The professor reportedly suggested that the students “turn down the volume.”

In face of lackluster institutional support, the students took it upon themselves to seek out protections like anti-harassment or no-contact orders.

While the school’s Title IX coordinator granted a mutual no-contact directive to one student against another student accused of harassment on November 29, according to the complaint, it was not until January 30 that other students received similar protections. And it was not until March 28 that the complainants received court-sanctioned harassment prevention orders against other students harassing them, which went into effect the next day.

“Hundreds of emails toward them proving all the harassment since mid-October, and it took them until March 29,” said Ruya Hazeyen, another one of the students who filed the complaint. “And all of them are still allowed on campus, even though we have proof of some of them assaulting our members, threatening our members, doxxing our members. They’re still all right now on campus.”

The post “Kill All Arabs”: The Feds Are Investigating UMass Amherst for Anti-Palestinian Bias appeared first on The Intercept .

In the face of growing international pressure, the Biden administration has continued to double down on a policy of blanket support for Israel, even as it presses ahead with a possible military offensive against the town of Rafah that many observers have warned could trigger the largest humanitarian crisis of the war so far. This week on Intercepted, co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict with Thanassis Cambanis, director of the foreign policy think tank Century International. Cambanis explains how Biden’s policy toward Israel is pushing the entire Middle East to the brink of a regional war that could inflict far greater suffering than we have seen to date, in an area which U.S. policymakers claim to be trying to exit.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Biden’s Indifference to Palestinian Lives Is Sending the Middle East Into the Abyss appeared first on The Intercept .

Burkina Faso’s military summarily executed more than 220 civilians, including at least 56 children, in two villages in late February, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

“We saw the bloody corpses riddled with bullets. We were able to save a 2-year-old child whose mother was killed shielding him with her body,” a 19-year-old witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept. “The attackers were soldiers from our own army. They arrived on motorbikes and in vehicles, and they were armed with Kalashnikovs and heavy weapons.”

“The attackers were soldiers from our own army. They arrived on motorbikes and in vehicles, and they were armed.”

The mass killings came as the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the West African Sahel crumbled, with U.S.-trained military officers launching a long string of coups , including in Burkina Faso itself. Despite the coups and massacres, the U.S. has not cut ties with Burkina Faso, and a contingent of U.S. personnel remain in-country to “engage” with the armed forces serving the ruling junta.

Burkinabè soldiers killed 44 people, including 20 children, in Nondin village, and 179 people, including 36 children and four pregnant women, in nearby Soro village in the north of the country on February 25, according to HRW. The mass killings are part of a long-running counterterrorism campaign aimed at civilians accused of collaborating with Islamist militants.

“The massacres in Nondin and Soro villages are just the latest mass killings of civilians by the Burkina Faso military in their counterinsurgency operations,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “The repeated failure of the Burkinabè authorities to prevent and investigate such atrocities underlines why international assistance is critical to support a credible investigation into abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The West African Sahel was once touted as an American foreign-policy success story, but persistent violence over the last decade intensified as the U.S. implemented its counterterror strategy.

Putsches by U.S.-linked military officers, prompted by spiking militant attacks, have brought with them seismic geopolitical changes. Niger, for example, the site of the most recent coup by U.S.-trained officers in the Sahel, severed its lon-gstanding ties with the American military and welcomed in Russian trainers .

“They Showed No Mercy”

The February massacres followed several attacks by Islamist militants which killed scores of soldiers and civilians, including an assault on a military base almost 15 miles from Nondin.

Witnesses in Nondin told HRW that a military convoy with over 100 Burkinabè soldiers arrived on motorbikes, pickup trucks, and armored cars about 30 minutes after a group of Islamist fighters on motorcycles passed near the village yelling “Allah Akbar!” The eyewitnesses said the soldiers went door to door, rounding up locals before gunning them down. Villagers said a similar sequence played out in Soro.

“Before the soldiers started shooting at us, they accused us of being complicit with the jihadists,” a 32-year-old survivor from Soro, who was shot in the leg, told HRW. “They showed no mercy. They shot at everything that moved, they killed men, women, and children alike,” said a 60-year-old farmer who witnessed the murders.

The Burkinabè Embassy in Washington did not respond to repeated requests from The Intercept to speak with the defense attaché or other officials.

The United States has assisted Burkina Faso with counterterrorism aid since the 2000s, providing funds, weapons, equipment, and American advisers, as well as deploying commandos on low-profile combat missions .

In 2018 and 2019, alone, the U.S. pumped a total of $100 million in “security cooperation” funding into Burkina Faso, making it one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in West Africa. U.S.-trained Burkinabè military officers have also repeatedly overthrown their government, in 2014, 2015, and 2022 .

At the same time, militant Islamist violence skyrocketed. Across all of Africa, the State Department counted just 23 casualties from terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, combined. Burkina Faso alone suffered 7,762 fatalities from militant Islamist attacks last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. That represents an almost 34,000 percent spike.

In 2020, Simon Compaoré, who previously served as Burkina Faso’s interior minister and was then president of the ruling political party, admitted to me that the Burkinabè government was conducting targeted executions of terrorist suspects. “We’re doing this, but we’re not shouting it from the rooftops,” he said.

The democratically elected government of that time was overthrown in 2022 by the U.S.-trained Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba , who himself was ousted months later by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré. The extrajudicial killings continued.

“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by security forces,” reads the most recent U.S. State Department report on human rights in Burkina Faso, adding that “impunity for human rights abuses and corruption remained widespread.”

Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on three 2023 drone strikes by Burkina Faso’s government — targeting Islamist militants in crowded marketplaces and at a funeral — that killed at least 60 civilians and left dozens more injured.

U.S. Risking Complicity

The “Leahy laws” prohibit U.S. funding for foreign security forces implicated in gross violations of human rights. U.S. law also generally restricts countries from receiving military aid following military coups. The United States, however, has continued to provide training to Burkinabè forces, Gen. Michael Langley , the chief of Africa Command, or AFRICOM, told the House Armed Services Committee last year.

The U.S. provided millions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance to Burkina Faso in 2023, according to State Department data. Last month, a State Department press release touted the fact that the U.S. has given Burkina Faso “hundreds of millions of dollars in development and humanitarian assistance, as well as counterterrorism support to civilian security and law enforcement actors.”

Burkinabè soldiers also took part in Flintlock 2023, an annual exercise sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa. (Past Flintlock attendees, including Damiba, have overthrown the government .)

“The United States should stop all military cooperation with Burkina Faso, otherwise they risk becoming complicit in the abuses,” a civil society activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation, told The Intercept.

Last October, senior White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials told Traoré, now Burkinabè president, that working with Russia-linked Wagner Group mercenaries would irreparably damage his relationship with the U.S. In January, Russia’s Africa Corps — described by Russian officials as the successor to the Wagner Group following the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin — deployed troops to Burkina Faso to, according to their post on Telegram , protect Traoré and battle terrorists.

Even with the raft of atrocities, coups, and transgressions against the Russian red line, a small contingent of U.S. military personnel are nonetheless deployed to Burkina Faso to, according to AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, “engage and interact” with the Burkinabè military and “keep lines of communication and dialogue open.”

On March 1, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller called on the junta to conduct “complete investigations” of the massacres “with integrity and transparency and hold those responsible to account.” (The State Department failed to provide on-the-record responses to questions by The Intercept.)

The Burkinabè activist scoffed at the suggestion that the Burkinabè military could investigate itself and said that the junta would “erase” evidence of the massacres.

“The United States and the international community must demand concrete actions,” the activist told The Intercept. “Real repercussions are needed, such as sanctions against the perpetrators of the crimes, in order to deter them.”

The post U.S.-Trained Burkina Faso Military Executed 220 Civilians appeared first on The Intercept .

As Congress and the national security state continue their quest to ban the TikTok social media platform in the United States, President Joe Biden has been courting TikTok influencers to help him shore up youth support for his reelection. While the administration has been publicly casting TikTok as a grave threat to American security, the White House has quietly hosted a number of influencers to pitch them on pro-Biden content.

“Don’t jump, I need you!” Biden joked to a group of TikTok influencers as he walked by the group standing on the White House balcony on his way to deliver his State of the Union speech earlier this year.

In recent months, some of the biggest TikTok users with accounts boasting millions of followers have visited the White House, visitor logs reveal. Since September alone, some of the most prominent examples include:

• Jason Linton, a dad who posts wholesome content about his family and whose TikTok account @dadlifejason has 13.8 million followers.
• Michael Junchaya, (who goes by “Mikey Angelo” on the handle @mrgrandeofficial , 3.5 million followers), a young entertainer who specializes in rap recap videos.
• Mona Swain ( @monaswain , 1.9 million followers), theater enthusiast.
• Alexandra Doten, space communicator, who previously worked for NASA (going by “Astro Alexandra” @astro_alexandra , 2.3 million followers).
• Andrew Townsend (going by “Papi Dre” @andrewtowns , 3.1 million followers).
• Alex Pearlman ( @pearlmania , 2.6 million followers), comedian.
• Josh Helfgott ( @joshhelfgott , 5.5 million followers), LGBTQ+ advocate.

Perhaps the biggest TikToker hobnobbing at the White House was Oneya Johnson, a viral sensation famous for his angry reaction videos (@angryreactions) boasting 27 million followers. He visited the White House on September 27. (Johnson has since deleted his account after being arrested for domestic violence.)

Each of these TikTokkers’ meetings was coordinated by White House deputy director of partnerships, Morgan MacNaughton, who herself has a background with the company. She was hired away last year from Palette, a social media talent management company that specializes in TikTok personalities. While there, MacNaughton helped found the political group “TikTok for Biden” (since renamed “Gen-Z for Change”). Many of the TikTok users who visited the White House are themselves represented by Palette.

In 2022, Palette received a $200,000 payment from the Democratic National Committee for paid media, Federal Election Commission data shows. According to the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, Palette was paid a retainer from the DNC to cover expenses for eight TikTok creators to travel to Washington in hopes of wooing them in the run-up to the midterm elections, resulting in an Oval Office meeting with Biden.

Anita Dunn , senior adviser to the president, told The Intercept that MacNaughton “helped to get POTUS’s message out to more audiences.”

“The reason Morgan’s position exists is because we knew the work she was capable of: discovering, ideating and leading creator talent,” Christian Tom, director of the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, told The Intercept. “In just under a year at the White House, she has driven on many digital creator projects that have been vital to our digital strategy.”

With Biden’s reelection campaign in full swing, it would hardly be surprising that they’re meeting with influencers whose videos reach millions of Americans — were it not for the administration’s national security rhetoric about the app’s purported threat. Earlier this month, Biden raised his concerns about TikTok during a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, their first contact since November. Biden administration officials have raised hypothetical concerns about the Chinese ownership of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

Public opinion on banning TikTok is sharply divided, with support tending to come from older Americans but marked opposition coming from youth. Biden’s support for the legislation has irked even some of his most ardent supporters.

“There are clearly some First Amendment concerns here and to do this in an election year seems wrong to me,” Harry Sisson told The Intercept. Sisson describes himself as a “pro-Biden content creator” and frequently uses his TikTok account ( @harryjsisson , 800k followers) to advocate for the president and blast his opponents. (Sisson has himself visited the White House and is represented by Palette.)

“There are over 170 million Americans on TikTok, many of which get their news from the app, and to take that away and give Trump a talking point only hurts the Democratic Party,” Sisson said.

While White House visitor logs are only available through this past September, it is clear that TikTok influencers have continued to frequent the White House. When Biden gave his State of the Union speech in March, Sisson was one of dozens of social media influencers, including TikTok stars, invited to the White House where he spoke to his 800,000 followers during Biden’s address. The influencers sat on the White House balcony and watched as Biden headed over to the Capitol to deliver his speech.

Though the Biden administration has directly consulted on the creation of the legislation that could ban TikTok, the Biden campaign has embraced the app, creating an official account in February. The decision has drawn criticism from even some of Biden’s most stalwart allies.

“I’m a little worried about a mixed message,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the decision.

The White House, for its part, has brushed off accusations of hypocrisy, pointing to the fact that the federal ban on the use of TikTok on government devices is still in place and applies to White House officials, referring questions to the Biden campaign.

The campaign has said that it will “continue meeting voters where they are.”

Unless, of course, the app is banned.

The post As Biden Cheers TikTok Ban, White House Embraces TikTok Influencers appeared first on The Intercept .

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned in a conversation with Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington that the safety of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan was a high priority of the United States, multiple sources familiar with the exchange told The Intercept.

The warning issued late last month by Schumer, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, to Pakistan came after intense activism by members of the Pakistani diaspora amid concerns that the Pakistani military may harm Khan, the former prime minister who was ousted from office in 2022.

“The Pakistani American diaspora has felt let down by Washington’s failure to engage power brokers in Pakistan and hold them accountable for blatant violations of human rights.”

“Chuck Schumer speaking to the ambassador regarding the safety of Imran Khan is very constructive,” Mohammad Munir Khan, a Pakistani American political activist in the U.S., told The Intercept. “The Pakistani American diaspora has felt let down by Washington’s failure to engage power brokers in Pakistan and hold them accountable for blatant violations of human rights, and destruction of basic fundamentals of democracy.”

Imran Khan is currently incarcerated on corruption charges that are widely seen as politically motivated. Khan, who is regarded as the most popular politician in Pakistan, was removed from power in an April 2022 no-confidence vote orchestrated by the country’s powerful military establishment and encouraged by the U.S. Since then, Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, has faced a brutal repression that has raised international alarms and been denounced by human rights groups .

The concerns about Khan’s life that prompted Schumer’s call to the Pakistani Ambassador Masood Khan reflect a growing fear that the military may deal with Khan’s stubborn popularity by simply putting an end to his life behind bars. (Schumer’s office declined to comment for this story. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The outreach from Schumer, who represents a large, vocal Pakistani American community in New York, came as a new governing coalition in the South Asian country seeks to consolidate power despite public disaffection over a February election rife with fraud.

In addition to banning PTI, Pakistan engaged in heavy repression ahead of the February vote. A record turnout suggested PTI-aligned candidates had the upper hand. Ignoring widespread fraud, however, a coalition of parties supported by the Pakistani military successfully formed a government led by Shehbaz Sharif in the vote’s aftermath.

The international community, including the U.S., noted voting irregularities, and credible allegations arose of vote rigging and flagrant fraud in the election.

“There is undeniable evidence, which the State Department agrees with, that there were problems with this election,” Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, told The Intercept in March. At the time, Casar and other members of Congress had just called on President Joe Biden to withhold recognition of the government, but Washington’s ambassador to Pakistan congratulated Sharif in early March.

“There is undeniable evidence, which the State Department agrees with, that there were problems with this election.”

Foreign policy experts in Washington said the Biden administration’s approach risked transgressing democratic principles in the name of security. Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said, “This appears to be an example where the administration is allowing its security relationship with a foreign government to crowd out other critical concerns like democratic backsliding and human rights.”

Imran Khan himself has reportedly been held in dire conditions at a prison in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. Last month, his visitor privileges were abruptly suspended for two weeks, prompting fears from his supporters about his physical conditions in custody. Earlier this month, one of his lawyers claimed that his personal physician was not being allowed to see him in jail. Khan’s wife, who is imprisoned on politically motivated charges of an un-Islamic marriage and graft, has also reportedly suffered health problems due to conditions of her confinement, according to remarks from her lawyer this week.

In a statement given to reporters from prison and later shared on social media, Khan, who was wounded in an attempted assassination in November 2022 at a political rally, alleged that there had been a plot to kill him while behind bars. Khan suggested his fate was in the hands of Gen. Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful army chief.

“Let it be known that if anything happens to me or my wife, it’ll be him who will be responsible,” Khan said.

Schumer’s call to the Pakistani ambassador, however, may play into the military’s calculations about killing Khan. “A senior Democrat influential in the Biden administration is sending a warning, which is somewhat significant,” said Adam Weinstein, the deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, adding that he did not believe the military would will Khan in prison.

As extreme as a step it would be, the military harming or even killing a leader it ousted, even one as popular as Khan, would fit a pattern in Pakistani history. Several Pakistani leaders have died violently in the past few decades after falling out with the military, some under murky circumstances, while others, like former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, were executed by military rulers after being deposed from power.

Although nominally led by a civilian government today, Pakistan’s military is widely known to call the shots in the country politically and is currently led by Munir, whose clashes with Khan and his party have been the main political storyline in the country for over a year.

For Pakistani activists in the U.S., the American relationship with Pakistan creates leverage that can be used to ensure that Khan is not murdered behind bars. Mohammad Munir Khan, the Pakistani American activist, said, “The least Washington can do is to ensure Imran Khan is not harmed physically.”

Supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party hold a March 10, 2024, protest in Peshawar against election fraud. Photo: Abdul Majeed/AFP via Getty Images

Capitol Hill Hearing

The U.S. has played an outsized role in Pakistan’s internal politics, especially over the past several years, including a pivotal role in Khan’s ouster from power.

In August 2023, The Intercept reported on and published a classified Pakistani diplomatic cable — a contentious document that had become a centerpiece of political drama, though its contents had remained unknown — showing that Khan’s removal from power had taken place following intense pressure placed on the Pakistani government by U.S. State Department officials.

In the cable, Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu, whose office covers South Asia at the State Department, is quoted as telling the Pakistani ambassador to Washington that the countries’ relations would be seriously damaged if Khan were to remain in power.

“I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington,” Lu said, according to the Pakistani cable.

Since Khan’s removal from power, the U.S. has worked closely with the new military-backed Pakistani regime. Pakistan provided weapons to Ukraine in exchange for the U.S. brokering a favorable International Monetary Fund loan package, according to previous reporting from The Intercept .

Before being imprisoned, Khan made frequent reference to the classified cypher and even claimed to be brandishing a physical copy during a political rally. He is now facing a lengthy prison sentence on charges related to his handling of classified information, in addition to the raft of corruption charges that initially landed him in custody.

Coming in the context of a broader crackdown on his party — which has including killings, extrajudicial disappearances, and torture targeting supporters of PTI and members of the press — most observers believe Khan’s continued imprisonment is a politically motivated gambit to keep him and his movement out of power.

Following this year’s election, with Casar and others in Congress raising questions about Khan’s removal and the vote, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing featuring Lu, the assistant secretary of state.

The sole person testifying, Lu denied that he had been involved in a “regime change” in Pakistan — a reference to Khan’s comments about his role and the content of the cable reported by The Intercept.

On the election, Lu paid lip service to concerns about how the ballot was carried off, while failing to outline what consequences there would be for the vote rigging.

“You have seen actions by our ambassador and our embassy,” Lu said, alluding the congratulations extended by the U.S. to Pakistan’s new prime minister. He then quickly added: “We are in every interaction with this government stressing the importance of accountability for election irregularities.”

“In the long term it has never worked out in the United States’ benefit to be seen as propping up illegitimate, military-led governments.”

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., raised the issue of Khan’s safety in detention at the hearing. Sherman urged Lu to meet directly with Khan in prison, earning applause from the mostly Pakistani audience in hand.

“Ensuring the safety of leaders, regardless of political differences, is paramount,” said Atif Khan, another Pakistan American diaspora activist. “Congressman Brad Sherman rightly advocated for accountability and protection, urging the US Ambassador to visit former Prime Minister Imran Khan and prioritize his well-being.”

While Khan’s fate hangs in the balance, members of Congress have warned that continued U.S. support for a government seen as illegitimate by most Pakistanis risks harming not just Pakistan, but also the U.S. position in a critical region.

“Promoting democracy is important in itself, but it’s in our interests as well,” Casar, the Texas Democrat, told The Intercept. “Regardless of the short-term military benefits, in the long term it has never worked out in the United States’ benefit to be seen as propping up illegitimate, military-led governments.”

The post Chuck Schumer Privately Warns Pakistan: Don’t Kill Imran Khan in Prison appeared first on The Intercept .