Ny Sarim had lived through it all. Violence. Loss. Privation. Genocide.

Her first husband was killed after Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge plunged Cambodia into a nightmare campaign of overwork, hunger, and murder that killed around 2 million people from 1975 to 1979. Four other family members died too — some of starvation, others by execution.

“No one ever even had time to laugh. Life was so sad and hopeless,” she told The Intercept. It was enough suffering for a lifetime, but it couldn’t erase the memory of the night in August 1973 when her town became a charnel house.

Ny was sleeping at home when the bombs started dropping on Neak Luong, 30 tons all at once. She had felt the ground tremble from nearby bombings in the past, but this strike by a massive B-52 Stratofortress aircraft hit the town squarely. “Not only did my house shake, but the earth shook,” she told The Intercept. “Those bombs were from the B-52s.” Many in the downtown market area where she worked during the day were killed or wounded. “Three of my relatives — an uncle and two nephews — were killed by the B-52 bombing,” she said.

The strike on Neak Luong may have killed more Cambodians than any bombing of the American war, but it was only a small part of a devastating yearslong air campaign in that country. As Elizabeth Becker, who covered the conflict as a correspondent for the Washington Post, notes in her book “When the War Was Over,” the United States dropped more than 257,000 tons of explosives on the Cambodian countryside in 1973, about half the total dropped on Japan during all of World War II.

“They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence.”

“The biggest mistakes were in 1973,” she told The Intercept. “They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence. During those months ‘precision bombing’ was an oxymoron.” Neak Luong, she concurred, was the worst American “mistake.”

State Department documents, declassified in 2005 but largely ignored, show that the death toll at Neak Luong may have been far worse than was publicly reported at the time, and that the real toll was purposefully withheld by the U.S. government.

In his 2003 book “Ending the Vietnam War,” Henry Kissinger wrote that “more than a hundred civilians were killed” in the town. But U.S. records of “solatium” payments — money given to survivors as an expression of regret — indicate that more than 270 Cambodians were killed and hundreds more were wounded in Neak Luong. State Department documents also show that the U.S. paid only about half the sum promised to survivors.

The Price of a Life

The death warrant for Neak Luong was signed when U.S. officials decided that American lives mattered more than Cambodian ones. Until 1967, U.S. forces in South Vietnam used ground beacons that emitted high frequency radio waves to direct airstrikes. But the U.S. stopped using the beacons after a radar navigator on a B-52 bomber failed to flip an offset switch, causing a bomb load to drop directly on a helicopter carrying a beacon instead of a nearby site designated for attack. The chopper was blown out of the sky, and the U.S. military switched to a more reliable radar system until the January 1973 ceasefire formally ended the U.S. war in Vietnam.

At that point, the more sophisticated radar equipment went home, and the less reliable ground beacons came into use in Cambodia, where the U.S. air war raged with growing intensity.

In April 1973, according to a formerly classified U.S. military history, American officials expressed concern that “radar beacons were located on the American Embassy in Phnom Penh” and raised “the possibility that weapons could be released in the direct mode,” striking the U.S. mission by accident. Within days, that beacon was removed. But while Americans at the embassy were safe, Cambodians in places like Neak Luong, where a beacon had been placed on a pole in the center of town, remained at risk. “It should have been put a mile or so away in the boondocks,” a senior U.S. Air Force officer told the New York Times in 1973 .

On August 7, 1973, a secret cable shot from the beacon-less U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh to the secretaries of State and Defense and other top American officials in Washington. At approximately 4:35 a.m. in Cambodia, according to Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Enders’s message, Neak Luong was “accidentally bombed by a yet undetermined [U.S. Air Force] aircraft.”

Ny said that her cousin, who served with the U.S.-allied Cambodian army and spoke English, got on the radio shortly after the bombing and asked an American what had happened. He was told that the bombs were dropped in error, she said.

It later became clear that a navigator had again failed to flip the offset bombing switch.

“No Great Disaster”

Col. David Opfer, the U.S. Embassy’s air attaché, quickly flew to the town to survey the situation, he told The Intercept. “I remember that some of the injured people were very happy to see somebody arrive, and I sent some of the most seriously wounded people back to the hospital in Phnom Penh in my helicopter,” he said. (Opfer died in 2018 .)

Opfer told the foreign press corps in Phnom Penh that the bombing was “no great disaster.”

“The destruction was minimal,” he announced at a press briefing, even though Enders, in the secret cable, had already informed U.S. officials that damage was “considerable.”

In a November 2010 interview, Opfer reiterated that he didn’t consider the damage to Neak Luong significant, and that it was limited to a small area. “It was a mistake,” he explained. “It happens in war.”

Sydney Schanberg, who reported for the New York Times in Cambodia, recalled Opfer’s briefing. “He said the casualties weren’t severe,” Schanberg, who died in 2016, told The Intercept. “He said there were 50 dead and some injured.” Opfer admitted that he didn’t actually know the number. “Even then I wasn’t sure how many,” he told The Intercept.

Schanberg, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia , was skeptical of the pronouncement and set out to see for himself. He was thrown off a Cambodian military flight to Neak Luong, but Schanberg’s fixer Dith Pran got them to the town by boat, and they interviewed survivors until local officials detained the journalists for taking photographs of “military secrets.” The U.S. Embassy, meanwhile, tried to wrest control of the story by arranging for a group of five Western reporters to take a quick look around with little opportunity to speak to townspeople.

Schanberg and Pran, who spent a day and night under house arrest, watched their press colleagues through the window of the building where they were confined. “They didn’t see enough to write a detailed story and they hadn’t talked to anybody,” said Schanberg, noting that the pool reporters were only on the ground for about 20 minutes.

Ny Sarim told The Intercept that soldiers from the U.S.-allied Cambodian military also kept residents from making their way downtown, but that even from a distance, the damage was unmistakable. When she finally got through the cordon, she saw massive craters and twisted metal. “It was a total wreck,” Schanberg told me. “Everything had been hit.”

Schanberg’s August 9, 1973, front-page Times story on Neak Luong emphasized Opfer’s minimization of the damage; a second article and an editorial soon after detailed U.S. efforts to thwart Schanberg from covering the story.

In a confidential cable back to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Emory Swank mentioned “the New York Times correspondent’s accusation that the air attaché office attempted to block journalists’ access to Neak Luong” and defended the officer. “Colonel Opfer has done well in trying circumstances,” he stated, while casting the foreign press corps as “demanding and hostile.” Opfer told The Intercept that the Cambodian military had detained Schanberg and Pran. “They always get things mixed up and don’t tell it as it really is,” he said of the press.

Schanberg took a different view. Opfer, he said, “was absolutely unskilled with the press. I felt bad for the man, in a way, because he was telling us what he had been told to tell us. A lot of the senior officers felt that we didn’t give anybody a fair break — but the Cambodians weren’t getting much of a break, were they?”

A Grand Bargain

Officially, 137 Cambodians were killed in the Neak Luong bombing and 268 were wounded, according to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. Months later, Enders, in a confidential, December 1973 cable that went to Kissinger and then-Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, confided that the U.S. had actually paid out solatium for 273 dead, 385 seriously wounded, 48 who suffered “mutilation,” and 46 victims of slight injuries. All told, that figure — 752 people hurt or killed — was 86 percent higher than the official number.

Enders stated that the U.S. had not sought to verify the numbers, but that the tally had been certified by the Cambodian regime. The final number of wounded and dead, he noted, “is higher than the official count given by [the Cambodian government] to the press and therefore should not be released.”

In the December 1973 cable, Enders admitted that the U.S. had never established a policy for “the payment of medical expenses for persons injured by U.S. errors,” and that the bombing of Neak Luong was “the only such incident which has occurred in Cambodia.” But just a day after the Neak Luong bombing, a State Department cable referenced a “second accidental bombing” at Chum Roeung village that killed four to eight people and injured up to 33. The Pentagon blamed the “error” on a F-111 bomber’s “faulty bomb-release racks.” By then, the U.S. had dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs throughout the countryside and killed, according to experts, as many as 150,000 Cambodians.

Two weeks after the bombing of Neak Luong, Swank, the U.S. ambassador, publicly signed an agreement on compensation with the Cambodian government. “We desire to compensate, insofar as possible, the survivors of the tragedy,” he said in a brief speech, adding that the U.S. would pay $26,000 to rebuild the damaged hospital in Neak Luong and provide $71,000 in equipment.

The next of kin of those killed, according to press reports following his speech, would receive about $400 each. Considering that in many cases, the primary breadwinner had been lost for life, the sum was low: the equivalent of about four years of earnings for a rural Cambodian at the time. The financial penalty meted out to the B-52 navigator whose failure to flip the offset switch killed and wounded hundreds in Neak Luong was low too. He was fined $700 for the error. By comparison, a one-plane sortie, like that which bombed Neak Luong, cost about $48,000 at the time. A B-52 bomber cost about $8 million.

In another confidential cable sent in December 1973, Thomas Enders made a final accounting of solatium payments to those who had lost a relative in Neak Luong. They had actually not received the $400 per dead civilian that they had been promised. In the end, the U.S. valued the dead of Neak Luong at just $218 apiece.

The post Notorious 1973 Attack Killed Many More Than Previously Known appeared first on The Intercept .

O n the night of December 23, 1975, Ron Estes, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Athens, was lounging on the couch in his girlfriend’s apartment when the man who worked as a driver for his boss, Richard Welch, burst through the front door.

“A shooting, and Mr. Welch is down,” the driver yelled.

Estes grabbed his coat and ran outside, ignoring his girlfriend’s pleas to stay.

At Welch’s house in the Greek capital, Estes saw the station chief lying on his back on the sidewalk, his wife, Kika, kneeling beside him. Blood covered Welch’s face, and Estes could see immediately that he was dead. “I didn’t need to feel for a pulse,” he said in an interview. A police car arrived, and Estes asked the officer to call an ambulance. When no ambulance arrived, they hauled the body into Welch’s car and Estes and Welch’s driver followed the police officer, siren blaring and lights flashing, through the streets of Athens to the nearest hospital. A medical team was waiting; they quickly placed Welch on a gurney and took him to an examining room. There, a doctor placed a stethoscope on Welch’s chest and confirmed to Estes that he was dead.

Welch was 46 years old. A career CIA officer, he had been the CIA’s Athens station chief for six months.

At the hospital, Welch’s driver finally caught his breath and told Estes what had happened. He had driven Welch and his wife home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, then stopped in front of the walled compound that enclosed Welch’s house to open the front gates. As Welch and his wife got out, three armed men in a black car pulled up behind them, burst out of the car, and confronted Welch.

“Put your hands up!” one of the men told Welch in Greek.

“What?” Welch asked in English.

One of the gunmen leveled his .45 caliber handgun and fired three times. An autopsy later showed that the first shot hit Welch in the chest, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The three men got back in their car and sped away. That’s when Welch’s driver rushed to get Estes.

The hospital lobby soon filled with journalists, who had most likely heard about the shooting by monitoring the city’s police radio. Estes realized that many of them already seemed to know that Welch had been the CIA’s station chief. Steven Roberts, a New York Times reporter in Athens who covered Welch’s murder, wrote the next day that he had been talking with Welch at the ambassador’s Christmas party an hour before the shooting.

A spokesperson from the U.S. Embassy arrived, and Estes slipped away from the crowd of reporters. The police found the gunmen’s car, which had been stolen, abandoned several blocks from Welch’s home.

Back at the CIA station, Estes sent cables to CIA headquarters and talked on a secure phone with a top agency official. “When I finished briefing him, he said, ‘I could only hear about half of what you said.’” Estes recalled. “‘Send me a cable repeating what you said immediately. We’ve got to go to the president.’”

Welch’s assassination was huge news and struck a painful political nerve in Washington, coming at the end of a year of stunning disclosures about the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community by the Senate’s Church Committee, which, throughout 1975, had been conducting the first major congressional investigation of the CIA. The Church Committee uncovered so many secrets and generated so many headlines that pundits were already calling 1975 “the Year of Intelligence.”

Before the Church Committee was created in January 1975, there had been no real congressional oversight of the CIA. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees did not yet exist, and the Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.

Sen. Frank Church, the liberal Democrat from Idaho who chaired the committee, had come to believe that the future of American democracy was threatened by the rise of a permanent and largely unaccountable national security state, and he sensed that at the heart of that secret government was a lawless intelligence community. Church was convinced it had to be reined in to save the nation.

The Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.

To a great degree, he succeeded. By disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power and spearheading wide-ranging reforms, Church and his Committee created rules of the road for the intelligence community that largely remain in place today. More than anyone else in American history, Church is responsible for bringing the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the government’s intelligence apparatus under the rule of law.

But first, Church and his committee had to withstand a brutal counterattack launched by a Republican White House and the CIA, both of which wanted to blunt Church’s reform efforts. The White House and CIA quickly realized that the Welch killing, which occurred just as the Church Committee was finishing its investigations and preparing its final report and recommendations for reform, could be used as a political weapon. President Gerald Ford’s White House and the agency falsely sought to blame the Church Committee for Welch’s murder, claiming, without any evidence, that its investigations had somehow exposed Welch’s identity and left him vulnerable to assassination.

There was absolutely no truth to the claims, but the disinformation campaign was effective. The Ford administration’s use of the Welch murder to discredit the Church Committee was a model of propaganda and disinformation; an internal CIA history later praised the “skillful steps” that the agency and the White House “took to exploit the Welch murder to U.S. intelligence benefit.”

The Welch case has long since served as a classic example of how to exploit and weaponize intelligence for political purposes. The George W. Bush administration’s efforts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11; the Republican obsession with the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and their use of it to discredit then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Donald Trump’s efforts to portray himself as the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy can all be traced back to the way U.S. leaders exploited Welch’s 1975 killing.

The White House and CIA were aided in their propaganda campaign by the fact that Estes did not go public at the time with his account of what really happened in Athens. Now, nearly 50 years later, Estes has finally broken his silence. In interviews for my new book, “ The Last Honest Man ,” he talked in detail about the murder and its causes with a journalist for the first time, supplying new evidence that Welch’s assassination stemmed from the toxic politics of Athens — not Washington.

W elch’s killing was a direct result of the feverish political climate that gripped Greece in the mid-1970s. In July 1974, the right-wing military junta that ruled Greece backed a coup in Cyprus to oust the island’s president and create a union between Greece and Cyprus. Making Cyprus fully Greek was a longtime objective of Greek right-wing ultranationalists, but the move immediately prompted a Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Greek junta leader Dimitris Ioannidis bitterly blamed the United States for not stopping the Turkish invasion.

Greek hostility toward the United States spread. On August 19, 1974, a pro-Greek mob attacked the U.S. embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, and both U.S. Ambassador Rodger Davies and a local embassy employee were killed. After a ceasefire, Cyprus was divided into Greek and Turkish zones; the disastrous outcome of the coup in Cyprus later led to the collapse of the military junta in Athens. But anger in Greece toward the United States continued unabated.

The relationship between the CIA and Greece’s Central Intelligence Service, known as the KYP, was also poisoned. Soon, someone had leaked the names of Welch and a few other officers in the CIA’s Athens station to the Greek press.

In November 1975, Welch’s name and home address were published in English language and Greek language newspapers in Athens. The information “was obviously leaked by hostile KYP officers,” Estes said in the interview, “because the only names leaked were those in liaison contact with KYP.” (CIA overseas stations often included officers who were in liaison contact with the intelligence service of the local country — their identities as CIA officers thus declared to the service so they could meet with them and trade intelligence — and others who were not identified so they could spy without the knowledge of the local government.)

Welch was not hard to find; he lived in a luxurious villa that had been the official residence of the CIA station chief for decades. After his name and home address were published in the press, Estes talked to him about whether he should move. But Welch and Estes concluded that the threat was minimal. “We both agreed that political assassination was not part of the fabric of Greek history or culture,” Estes recalled.

It was a fatal miscalculation. Welch’s murder was carried out by a new, extremely violent Greek leftist guerrilla organization called 17 November. While right-wing Greek nationalists hated the United States for betraying Greece over Cyprus, left-wing Greeks blamed the United States for helping to install the military junta in Athens in 1967. The 17 November group was named for an anti-junta protest by students that was brutally broken up on November 17, 1973. Welch was 17 November’s first target. (The group continued to conduct terrorist attacks in Greece, including the murders of other American officials, until it was finally crushed in 2002.)

Estes reported the truth back to CIA headquarters: that Welch had been murdered by Greek terrorists after being publicly exposed by the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. His story was buried in the service of a more helpful political narrative.

After Welch’s murder, emotions were running high in the CIA station in Athens. On the night of the assassination, Estes had to restrain another CIA officer after he grabbed a pistol and threatened to seek revenge by killing the KGB’s Athens Rezident, Welch’s Soviet counterpart.

Welch’s murder hit Estes hard as well. He and Welch had come up through the ranks of the agency together, and by 1975, they were close friends who met to play chess every Sunday. Welch and Estes had previously served together in Cyprus, and they understood the island’s status as a battlefield in the long-running conflict between Turkey and Greece. While serving in Cyprus, Estes said, Welch had recruited the personal secretary of Cypriot President Makarios III to spy for the CIA.

Estes was eager to solve his friend’s murder, without waiting for the Greek police. At the time, he didn’t know about the new leftist 17 November organization since Welch’s killing was its first operation. Instead, Estes focused his investigation on a right-wing terrorist group.

He and other CIA officers in Athens grilled their local sources and found that a gunman associated with a Greek-Cypriot right-wing paramilitary group known as EOKA had left Athens on a flight to Nicosia, Cyprus, the day after Welch’s killing. The gunman was known to have killed people in Cyprus with a .45 handgun — the same kind of weapon used to kill Welch.

When he worked in Cyprus years earlier, Estes had recruited an EOKA hitman to work for the CIA. “When I left Cyprus, he told me that whenever the CIA wanted something done that it didn’t want to do itself, call me,” recalled Estes. “So, after Welch was killed, I sent a case officer to Nicosia to meet him and tell him that Ron Estes sent him.”

The CIA officer asked the Cypriot agent if he knew the EOKA killer who had flown from Athens to Cyprus the day after Welch’s murder. The hitman said he did. The CIA officer told the hitman to go meet the man and ask him if he’d killed Welch.

The hitman reported that, when he confronted the EOKA killer, the other man was so scared that he offered to plead his innocence to the CIA himself. An American case officer then met with the man in Laranca, Cyprus, where he passed a CIA-administered polygraph.

Estes’s conviction that Welch had been exposed by the KYP and murdered by Greek terrorists, and the fact that CIA officers were conducting their own murder investigation on the ground in Cyprus, were not made public in Washington at the time. That information would only have gotten in the way of the campaign to exploit Welch’s murder to discredit the Church Committee.

By late 1975, Ford and the CIA were both worried about their public standing. The Church Committee’s disclosures of intelligence abuses had weakened the CIA, and the White House was concerned about the political impact of the committee’s disclosures on Ford, the first commander-in-chief who had never been elected either president or vice president. Ford had been the obscure House minority leader in 1973 when he was chosen as vice president under the 25th Amendment by then-President Richard Nixon and Congress. Ford replaced Spiro Agnew, who had been forced to resign amid a corruption scandal; he became president when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in August 1974. Ford was headed into a tough presidential election campaign in 1976, and he wasn’t even assured of winning the Republican nomination. He faced a formidable challenge on the right from former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, and so Ford was eager to prove his conservative bona fides.

Now, with Welch’s assassination, the White House and CIA quickly realized they had been handed a political gift — a martyred hero whose death they could lay at the feet of liberal Democrat Church.

Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.

It didn’t matter that Welch’s murder had nothing to do with the Church Committee. It didn’t matter that Estes had told CIA headquarters that the Greek intelligence service had leaked Welch’s name and address to the Greek press as revenge for U.S. policy in Cyprus. Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.

The day after Welch’s murder, Welch’s father, who had been living in Athens with his son, asked Estes to see if Welch could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Welch had never served in the military, so burial at Arlington would require a special exemption.

Estes says he cabled CIA headquarters about the request, and Ford quickly gave his approval. That led to a grand political moment, stage-managed by the White House.

A U.S. Air Force plane flew Welch’s body from Athens to Washington. Welch’s son, a Marine lieutenant wearing his dress blues, accompanied his father’s body on the flight. The plane delayed its landing, circling Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington for 45 minutes so its arrival could be broadcast live during the morning network television news programs.

Daniel Schorr, a CBS News correspondent who covered the event, wrote in his personal journal, which was published in Rolling Stone in 1976, that “the public relations people explain that the big cargo plane, already overhead, will stay in a holding pattern and land at 7 a.m. so that it will be available for live televising on network morning news programs. We do in fact carry it live on the CBS Morning News.”

Welch’s January 6, 1976, funeral service at Arlington was attended by Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and CIA director William Colby. No president had ever before attended the funeral of a slain CIA officer.

After the funeral service, Ford stood beside Welch’s widow while Welch’s coffin was placed on a horse-drawn caisson. “We watch, and film … the same caisson that carried the body of President Kennedy, the folded flag given to the widow by Colby,” wrote Schorr in his journal.

“It is the CIA’s first public national hero,” Schorr wrote. “I have a sense that Welch, dead, has one more service to render the CIA. He will be turned into a symbol in the gathering counter-offensive against disclosure.”

While Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended Welch’s funeral, the FBI was investigating a death threat against Church in retaliation for Welch’s murder, sent by a group calling itself Veterans Against Communist Sympathizers.

Another prominent Washington official also attended Welch’s funeral: George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just been nominated to succeed Colby as CIA director. Ford had chosen Bush after firing Colby, who Ford believed had cooperated too readily with the Church Committee’s inquiries. The opening battle between the White House, the CIA, and Church would be fought over Bush’s confirmation in the Senate.

Church saw Bush’s nomination as an effort by Ford to put a partisan hack at the CIA, someone who would do the bidding of the White House just as Congress was seeking to curb the agency’s abuses. Church viewed Bush’s nomination as a direct attack on the Church Committee.

The chance to be CIA director came at a critical moment in Bush’s career. Until then, he had a poor record in elected politics. He won a House seat from Texas and served two terms but then lost a campaign for the Senate in 1970. After that, Bush started to rise in the Republican ranks through a series of appointed positions. He served as chair of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, a job that forced him to make repeated public excuses for Nixon but earned him credit for party loyalty. He also served as United Nations ambassador under Nixon and as head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China under Ford.

Ford was considering Bush to be his running mate in 1976; the job as CIA director seemed like a stepping stone. But first, Bush had to get past Frank Church.

Even as he was still working on his committee’s investigations and reports, Church went all out to block Bush’s confirmation. On December 16, 1975, Church testified as a witness against Bush during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bush’s confirmation was “ill-advised,” Church told the committee, because of his partisan political background and because he had refused to rule out running as vice president in 1976. Church complained that the White House was using the CIA as a “grooming room” for Bush “before he is brought on stage next year as a vice presidential running mate.”

But Welch’s murder quickly changed the political calculus of the confirmation fight in favor of Bush — and against Church.

The White House and CIA followed a subtle but effective strategy to use the Welch murder to help get Bush confirmed, while also poisoning the political climate for Church and his Committee. Immediately after Welch’s murder, the CIA sought to blame the Fifth Estate, a left-wing group based in Washington that published Counter Spy, a small left-wing magazine that had previously printed long lists of CIA officials’ names, including Welch’s when he served in Peru. Agency officials also blamed Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who had just published “Inside the Company,” a controversial book that had listed the names of hundreds of CIA officers and agents.

Many observers saw the CIA’s efforts to blame Counter Spy and Agee as a way to shift the blame for Welch’s murder from Greek terrorists to the CIA’s American critics. And if the public inferred that those American critics also included Church and his committee, so be it.

Conservative pundits quickly made the link explicit. In early January 1976, right-wing columnist Smith Hempstone wrote that the blame for Welch’s murder should be shared by “the congressional committees that for nearly a year have been holding the CIA up to ridicule and verbal abuse.” Around the same time, an anonymous, pro-CIA newsletter, the Pink Sheet, called Welch’s murder “a tragic reminder of a very basic truth: There are individuals and organizations in this country whose activities are aiding the enemies of the U.S. Are we to be impotent against such fifth columnists in our midst? Please write to your congressman and senators and ask what they propose to do about this increasingly dangerous problem. Instead of harming our internal security agencies, Senator Frank Church and his colleagues should be investigating outfits like the Fifth Estate.” The Pink Sheet’s diatribe was included in CIA files and publicly released by the CIA among other documents declassified in 2004. It is not clear whether the newsletter was published by someone affiliated with the CIA.

Meanwhile, former CIA officers began to make themselves available to the press to attack Church. One of them, Mike Ackerman, told reporters that the Church Committee shared the blame for Welch’s death, adding that the committee should have conducted its investigations without publicly disclosing agency operations.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis saw through the unfolding White House-CIA strategy.

“Understandably, the Welch case has brought to a boil the resentment felt by CIA veterans at critics of the agency,” Lewis wrote . “But it is another matter entirely to use the murder of Richard Welch as a political device, as President Ford and his national security assistants are evidently trying to do now.”

Colby’s “denunciation [of Fifth Estate] plainly had a larger purpose: to make the case that the CIA needs more secrecy in general than it has been getting lately,” Lewis wrote. “President Ford and his colleagues, judging by their recent comments, hope to prevent any thoroughgoing reform of the CIA. They will use the Welch case to that end, in particular to resist limits on covert action and to reduce congressional scrutiny.”

The Washington Star’s Norman Kempster agreed, noting that “only a few hours after the CIA’s Athens station chief was gunned down in front of his home, the agency began a subtle campaign intended to persuade Americans that his death was the indirect result of congressional investigations and the direct result of an article in an obscure magazine. The nation’s press, by and large, swallowed the bait.”

The campaign by the White House and the CIA to exploit Welch’s murder ensured Bush’s confirmation as CIA director. On January 27, 1976, Bush sailed through the Senate on a vote of 64-27. Ford made only one concession to the Senate before the vote: He announced that Bush would not be his running mate in 1976.

Four years later, Bush was elected vice president on the ticket with Reagan.

The false narrative that Welch had been murdered because of reckless disclosures in Washington remained powerful for years afterward, ultimately leading to legislation that made it illegal to publish the names of covert CIA officers, a law that has since often been abused by the government to crack down on whistleblowers and dissent.

After Welch’s murder, public support for the Church Committee waned. Church was stunned by the sudden reversal of the political climate and angered that Bush continued to push the false story around Welch’s killing even after he became CIA director.

During one closed hearing of the Church Committee soon after Bush had been confirmed, “Bush blurted out, ‘You were responsible for Welch’s assassination,’” recalled Fritz Schwarz, the Church Committee’s chief counsel. “It pissed off everybody. We forced Bush to apologize during the hearing.” Still, the Bush family continued to push false narratives about the Welch murder for years. In the 1990s, Agee, the former CIA officer, sued Barbara Bush for libel after she wrote in her memoir that Welch had been killed after Agee’s book blew his cover. The suit was dropped in 1997 after Bush acknowledged that Agee’s book was not responsible for Welch’s assassination.

Meanwhile, Church also had to convince other senators, whose support for his committee was wavering in the face of the White House and CIA disinformation campaign, that his investigation was not responsible for Welch’s murder.

“One of the things we did was tell other senators that we didn’t reveal Welch’s name,” recalls former Church Committee staffer Loch Johnson. “We had to make it clear to other senators that we had nothing to do with it.”

The controversy over Welch’s murder hit just as Church was about to launch his own bid to run for president in 1976. After the Church Committee had completed its investigations, Church announced his candidacy in March 1976. But by waiting until the committee’s work was done, Church started off far behind the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. Still, Church surprisingly won several primaries before dropping out and became a leading contender to be Carter’s running mate. When Carter instead chose Walter Mondale, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Church began to suspect that CIA officials had worked behind the scenes to torpedo his selection. Church confided to his son that, just before the Democratic convention in New York, he’d gotten a call from the CIA saying the agency had been told that The Economist magazine was going to publish a story revealing that the Church Committee had been infiltrated by the KGB.

“Can you imagine any rumor more certain to spook a presidential candidate than that his prospective vice president has overseen an operation which was infiltrated by the KGB?” Church told his son, Forrest, who recounted the conversation in his 1985 memoir.

It turned out that the reporter the CIA had told Church was writing the story did not exist, and no story was ever published. “Church’s feeling that he had been sandbagged by the CIA might have been an illusion,” Forrest Church wrote. “One thing is certain, however. There is no member of the Senate whom the leaders of our intelligence services would have less preferred sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Former Church staffer Peter Fenn corroborated that account: “We talked a good deal about the CIA torpedoing him.”

T he CIA’s hatred of Church didn’t end in 1976.

In 1980, Church was facing a tough reelection campaign in Idaho. As the election loomed, Rep. Steve Symms, a hard-right Republican who represented Idaho’s first congressional district, appeared the most likely candidate to run against him. Symms, whose family owned a large fruit ranch near Caldwell, Idaho, had been plotting to take on Church for years. He had even urged Bob Smith, his friend and chief of staff, to run against Church in 1974 as a stalking horse.

But just in case Symms had any last-minute doubts, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s former chief of counterintelligence, stepped in to give him a push.

Angleton felt he had been humiliated by being forced to testify in public before the Church Committee, and Church was at the top of his personal enemies list. In the late 1970s, Angleton, who was originally from Idaho, began meeting with Symms to convince him to run against Church.

“He was from Boise, and he really despised Frank Church,” Symms said in an interview. “He used to come over to see me in the House,” he added. Angleton would recount to Symms all the damage he claimed Church had wrought on the CIA, Symms said, and then Angleton would say, “You should run against Church.”

“I got exposed to that [intelligence] stuff through Angleton,” Symms added. “I still remember him coming over to my office and sitting on my couch, and he would smoke one cigarette after another. He would kind of put his leg up and talk to me on intelligence. He wanted Church defeated.”

Symms beat Church in 1980, which was cause for celebration in CIA circles.

“After I won the Senate race, I was invited to a party at someone’s house and I was just about the only person there who was not former intelligence,” Symms recalled. “It was quite impressive to meet all these people and see how deeply they all despised Church.”

This article was adapted from “ The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys — and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy ” by James Risen with Thomas Risen, which will be published on May 9, 2023, by Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2023 by James Risen. All rights reserved.

The post How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic appeared first on The Intercept .

O n Halloween day last year, a 17-year-old-student walked straight through an artificial intelligence weapons detection system at Proctor High School in Utica, New York. No alert went off.

The 17-year-old then approached a fellow student, pulled a hunting-style knife out of his backpack, and repeatedly stabbed the other student in the hands and back.

The Utica City School District had installed the $4 million weapons detection system across 13 of its schools earlier that summer, mostly with public funds. The scanners, from Massachusetts-based Evolv Technology, look like metal detectors but scan for “signatures” for “all the guns, all the bombs, and all the large tactical knives” in the world, Evolv’s CEO Peter George has repeatedly claimed .

In Utica, the 17-year-old’s weapon wasn’t the first knife, or gun, to bypass the system. Earlier that month, at a parents’ night, a law enforcement officer had walked through the system twice with his service revolver and was puzzled to find it was never detected. School authorities reached out to Evolv and were subsequently told to increase the sensitivity settings to the highest level.

The detector did finally go off: It identified a 7-year-old student’s lunch box as a bomb. On Halloween, however, it remained silent.

“They’ve tried to backtrack by saying, ‘Oh no, it doesn’t pick up all knives,’” said Brian Nolan, who had been appointed acting superintendent of the Utica City School District 10 days before the stabbing. “They don’t tell you — will it pick up a machete or a Swiss army knife? We’ve got like really nothing back from Evolv.”

Ultimately, Utica City School District removed and replaced the scanners from their high schools, costing the district another $250,000. In the elementary and middle schools, which retained Evolv scanners, three knives have been recovered from students — but not because the scanners picked them up, according to Nolan.

Stories about Evolv systems missing weapons have popped up nationwide. Last month, a knife fight erupted between students at Mifflin High School in Ohio. It’s not clear how the knives entered the building, but it was less than three months after the school district spent $3 million installing Evolv scanners.

As school shootings proliferate across the country — there were 46 school shootings in 2022, more than in any year since at least 1999 — educators are increasingly turning to dodgy vendors who market misleading and ineffective technology. Utica City is one of dozens of school districts nationwide that have spent millions on gun detection technology with little to no track record of preventing or stopping violence.

Evolv’s scanners keep popping up in schools across the country. In a video produced by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district about its new $16.5 million system, students spoke about how the technology reassured them. “I know that I’m not going to be threatened with any firearms, any knives, any sort of metallic weapon at all,” one said.

“Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.”

Over 65 school districts have bought or tested artificial intelligence gun detection from a variety of companies since 2018, spending a total of over $45 million, much of it coming from public coffers, according to an investigation by The Intercept.

“Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, or NYCLU, “and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.”

In December, it came out that Evolv, a publicly traded company since 2021, had doctored the results of their software testing. In 2022, the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, a government body, completed a confidential report showing that previous field tests on the scanners failed to detect knives and a handgun. When Evolv released a public version of the report, according to IPVM and underlying documents reviewed by The Intercept, the failures had been excised from the results. Though Evolv touted the report as “fully independent, there was no disclosure that the company itself had paid for the research. (Evolv has said the public version of the report had information removed for security reasons.)

Five law firms recently announced investigations of Evolv Technology — a partner of Motorola Solutions whose investors include Bill Gates — looking into possible violations of securities law, including claims that Evolv misrepresented its technology and its capabilities to it.

“When you start peeling back the onion on what the technology actually does and doesn’t do, it’s much different than the reality these companies present,” said Donald Maye at IPVM, a surveillance industry research publication. “And that is absolutely the case with Evolv.”

Evolv told The Intercept it would not comment on any specific situations involving their customers and declined to comment further. (Motorola Solutions did not respond to a request for comment.)

The overpromising of artificial intelligence products is an industry-wide problem. The Federal Trade Commission recently released a blog post warning companies, “Keep your AI claims in check.” Among the questions was, “Are you exaggerating what your AI product can do?”

A rtificial intelligence gun detection vendors advertise themselves as the solution to the mass school shootings that plague the U.S. While various companies employ differing methods, the Evolv machines use cameras and sensors to capture people as they walk by, after which AI software compares them with object signatures that the system has created. When a weapon is present, the system is supposed to pick up the weapon’s signature and sound an alarm.

At an investor conference in June 2022, Evolv CEO George was asked if the company would have stopped the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. “The answer is when somebody goes through our system and they have a concealed weapon or an open carry weapon, we’re gonna find it, period,” he responded. “We won’t miss it.”

In January, the scanners caught a student trying to enter a high school with a handgun in Guilford, North Carolina. Subsequently, an Evolv spokesperson told WFMY News that their systems had uncovered 100,000 weapons in 2022. In a presentation for investors in the fourth quarter of 2022, George said the detection scanners, on average, stopped 400 guns per day.

There is little peer-reviewed research, however, showing that AI gun detection is effective at preventing shootings. And in the case of Uvalde, the shooter began firing his gun before even entering the school building — and therefore before having passed through a detector.

“The odds of that happening — someone walks in with a displayed gun — are really, really small. It just doesn’t make sense that that’s what you’re investing in.”

“The odds of that happening — someone walks in with a displayed gun — are really, really small,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at American University’s law school and an expert on surveillance. “It just doesn’t make sense that that’s what you’re investing in.”

Even in airports with maximum security protocols, Evolv’s technology has proved to have gaping holes. When an official at Denver International Airport expressed interest in Evolv scanners, he asked a colleague at Oakland International Airport, which uses the machines.

“It is not an explosives detection machine per se,” wrote Douglas Mansel, the aviation security manager in Oakland, in an internal email obtained through a public records request and shared with The Intercept, “So if an employee (or law enforcement during a test) walks through with a brick of C4” — an explosive — “in their hands, the Evolv will not alarm.” (The Oakland Airport told The Intercept it does not comment on its security program.)

In a BBC interview in 2020, Evolv said the density of metal is one key indicator of a weapon’s presence. But the company firmly denies that their scanners are akin to metal detectors. “We’re a weapons detector, not a metal detector,” George said on a conference call in June 2021. (A large competitor of Evolv is CEIA, which manufactures metal detectors without AI, used in airports and schools.)

Yet in many cases, Evolv hasn’t picked up weapons. And researchers have also highlighted how metallic objects, such as laptops, repeatedly set the system off. “They go through great lengths to claim they are not a metal detector,” said Maye of IPVM. “To the extent to which AI is being used, it’s open to interpretation to the consumer.”

Despite claims by George that the system can scan up to 1,000 students in 15 minutes, in the Hemet Unified School District in California, false alarms slowed ingress to school buildings. The solution, according to Evolv, was to simply encourage educators to let students proceed.

“They only need to clear the threat(s) and not figure out what alarmed the system,” wrote Amy Ferguson, customer manager at Evolv, in an internal email to the school system obtained through a public records request and shared with The Intercept. “I recommended not doing a loop back unless necessary. … Many students were looping back 2 or 3 times.” (The Hemet Unified School District did not respond to a request for comment.)

Across the country in Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, the system had 250 false alarms for every real hit in the period from September 2021 to June 2022, according to internal records obtained by IPVM. The school district spent $1.4 million on the Evolv software, which it bought from Motorola.

“It plays an important role in our efforts to keep our School District safe,” the district told The Intercept. “And we plan to expand its use within the District.”

Evolv isn’t the only company making bold claims about its sophisticated weapons detection system. ZeroEyes, a Philadelphia-based AI company, states in contracts that “our proactive solution saves lives.” Founded by Navy SEALs in 2018, the firm uses video analytics and object detection to pick up guns.

ZeroEyes’s website lists the timeline for the Sandy Hook shooting, arguing its technology could have materially reduced the response time. When a gun is visible on camera, an alert gets sent to a “24/7/365 ZeroEyes Operations Center Team,” with people monitoring the feed, who in turn confirm the gun and alert the school and police. It claims to do all of this in three to five seconds.

The human team is key to the group’s system, something critics say belies the weakness of the underlying AI claims. “This is one of the fundamental challenges these companies have. Like if they could fully automate it reliably, they wouldn’t need to have a human-in-the-loop,” said Maye. “The human-in-the-loop is because AI isn’t good enough to do it itself.”

“We have never suggested that AI alone is enough,” Olga Shmukyler, spokesperson for ZeroEyes, told The Intercept. “We would never trust AI alone to determine whether a gun threat is real or fake, nor should anybody else.”

In addition to Philadelphia, the company also has an operations center in Honolulu, Hawaii, “to cater to different time zones.”

ZeroEyes seems determined to overcome its critics and is so far faring well. The company raised $20 million in 2021. According to co-founder Rob Huberty , in a LinkedIn post, the team’s mantra is “F*** you, watch me.”

“We are problem solvers, and this is a difficult problem,” said Shmukyler, the spokesperson. “Without the mentality proposed in that post, we wouldn’t have a solution to offer to school districts around the country.”

D uring the pandemic, school shootings rose in tandem with a spike in gun violence in general. The sort of panic that ensued can lead to impulsive and ineffective action, according to safety experts.

“We are seeing some school boards and administrators making knee-jerk reactions by purchasing AI weapons detection systems,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. “Unfortunately, the purchase of the systems appears to be done with little-to-no professional assessment of overall security threats and needs.”

Schools in Colorado and Texas brought weapons detection software from a now-convicted fraudster. Barry Oberholzer developed SWORD in 2018 under the startup X.Labs, registered as Royal Holdings Technologies, which he claimed to be the first mobile phone case providing gun detection software.

“I can identify you and identify if you are carrying a gun in 1.5 seconds,” Oberholzer told WSFA 12 News in Alabama in February 2019. “You don’t even have to click. You just need to point the device at the person.”

Later that year, it was reported that Oberholzer was on the run from over two dozen fraud and forgery charges in South Africa. ( Todd Dunphy, a board member of and investor in X.Labs, denied the charges on Oberholzer’s behalf and produced an unverified letter from South African authorities clearing him .)

His SWORD product was endorsed by former high-level U.S. officials.

Former FBI agent James Gagliano, who was listed as an adviser to X.Labs, praised the product as “next generation public safety threat-detection.” Charles Marino, a retired secret service special agent, was listed as the company’s national security adviser.

Marino said he invested in the company but has not been involved for years and did not work on the SWORD project. “He swindled everybody,” Marino told The Intercept, referring to the conspiracy conviction. “Look, you kiss a lot of frogs in this world.”

Gagliano said in an email that he severed ties with Oberholzer after hearing of the fraud charges. “I was as stunned as anyone,” he said. “Have had no contact with him since I learned of his indictment in the Summer of 2021. I was excited about the technology he was seeking to introduce to law enforcement.”

In June 2020, X.Labs announced the rebranding of SWORD to X1, a standing device and “full-featured weapons detection system” in partnership with another firm.

Last month, Oberholzer and his business partner Jaromy Pittario pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to defraud investors and creditors. The Department of Justice accused Oberholzer of posing as Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director, while pitching the product to venture capital firms.

“Instead of attracting investors honestly, Oberholzer lied continuously to make his company more appealing to investors,” Manhattan U.S. attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

None of it deterred the company. Its scanners, despite problems, remain in schools — and X.Labs continues to cultivate new business. “All of the devices that are purchased by clients are in their possession and can be used as they see fit,” Dunphy said. “The company, like last year, is run by the board and is working with parties to complete the last phase of development for the purpose of slowing down mass shootings globally.”

Oberholzer is no longer involved with X.Labs, said Dunphy, the board member, who responded to emails addressed to Oberholzer.

“Mr Oberholzer is a professional helicopter pilot and his comings and goings has nothing to do with X.labs,” Dunphy said, “as he resigned from the company in February 2021.”

T here is a reason districts in New York, such as Utica, have been a target of gun detection vendors. Most of this technology is being funded by taxpayer money and, in the Empire State, there is a lot to spend.

Under the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services aid, school purchases get reimbursed based on a school district’s poverty level. Utica City School District, which has a high poverty level , was reimbursed 93 cents on the dollar on the Evolv sale, according to acting superintendent Nolan.

The Boards of Cooperative Educational Services told The Intercept, “ As a coalition of the state’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, BOCES of NYS has neither authority nor oversight regarding the budgets, purchases, or reimbursement rates of any school district.” The regional Oneida-Herkimer-Madison Counties BOCES office — which covers the Utica school district — did not respond for comment.

While the district gets most of its money back after the disastrous purchase of the Evolv scanners, “New York state taxpayers are still on the hook for the system,” Nolan said.

The Smart Schools Bond Act, passed in 2014, also set aside $2 billion funding to “finance improved educational technology and infrastructure,” drawing the attention of vendors nationwide.

“Folks in the school security industry got wind that New York State was sitting on this big pot of money that school districts had access to,” said Coyle of the NYCLU. “And that kind of opened the floodgates for companies to try to convince school districts to use that state funding to buy products they don’t need, they don’t know how to use, and are potentially harmful.”

New York isn’t the only state ready to spend a fortune. A 2019 Texas bill allocated $100 million in grants for schools seeking to purchase new equipment.

Federal Covid-19 relief dollars can also be directed to things like school security systems, through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Companies, including ZeroEyes and a similar firms, advertise how schools can receive a grant for the “development and implementation of procedures and systems to improve the preparedness and response efforts of a school district.”

“We are targeting sales to all states,” Shmuklyer, of Zero Eyes, said. “A lack of funds should not be the reason why a school cannot be proactive in addressing the mass shooting problem.”

Experts argue schools are just a cheap training ground for technology vendors to test and improve their object detection software so that they can eventually sell it elsewhere.

“Part of the reason why these companies are offering schools the technologies at a relatively cheap price point is that they’re using the schools as their grounds for training,” said Ferguson, the American University professor. “And so those schools or students become data points in a large data set that’s actually improving the technology so they can sell it to other people in other places.”

“They keep saying how the artificial intelligence system they use gets refined after more usage, because they collect more data, more information. But what’s it going to take, 20 years?”

Acting superintendent Nolan himself was told by Evolv the system would get smarter over time with more use. “They keep saying how the artificial intelligence system they use gets refined after more usage, because they collect more data, more information,” he said. “But what’s it going to take, 20 years?”

The lack of regulation leads to a lack of transparency on the use of the data itself. “There’s no protections in place,” said Daniel Schwarz, privacy and technology strategist at NYCLU, “And it raises all these issues around what happens with the data. … Oftentimes, what we’ve caught out is that they actually worsen racial disparities and biases.”

Additionally, ShotSpotter — now renamed SoundThinking — a system of microphones which claims to use “sensors, algorithms and artificial intelligence” to detect the sound of gunfire, has received intense criticism for being overwhelmingly deployed in communities of color. The frequent false alarms of the systems has led to more aggressive policing, as well as the distortion of gunfire statistics.

An analysis by the MacArthur Justice Center found that 89 percent of ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago from 2019-2021 turned up no gun-related crime. “Every unfounded ShotSpotter deployment creates an extremely dangerous situation for residents in the area,” according to the report.

There has been extensive reporting on police departments and other agencies’ use of ShotSpotter nationwide — but not schools. Public records show Brockton Public Schools, in Massachusetts, for instance, bought access to the technology for three years in a row. However, the school said the Shotspotter system was bought by the police department, who donated the technology to them, but it was never activated.

“Contrary to claims that the ShotSpotter product leads to over-policing, ShotSpotter alerts allow police to investigate a gunfire incident in a more precise area,” Sara Lattman, a SoundThinking spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Additionally, ShotSpotter has maintained a low false positive rate, just 0.5%, across all customers in the last three years.”

F or many advocates against gun violence, particularly in schools, gun control measures like an assault weapons ban would go a long way in curtailing the deadly effects of attacks. With Congress failing to enact such policies, experts argue that schools should refrain from turning to shoddy technology to support their students.

“We advise schools to focus on human factors: people, policies, procedures, planning, training, and communications,” said Trump, the National School Safety and Security Services head. “Avoid security theater.”

Vendors, though, continue to emphasize the risk of gun violence and rely on the steady drumbeat of attacks to generate fear in potential clients — and to make sales.

“While recent high visibility attacks at publicly and privately-owned venues and schools have increased market awareness of mass shootings,” said Evolv’s recent annual disclosure report , “if such attacks were to decline or enterprises of governments perceived the general level of attacks has declined, our ability to attract new customers and expand our sales to existing customers could be materially and adversely affected.”

The company even helps schools market the technology to their own communities. In an email from Evolv to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, a bullet-point list of talking points makes suggestions for how the school system might respond to public queries about the scanners. One of the talking points said, “Security approaches included multiple layers,” adding that “this approach recognizes the reality that no single layer or single technology is 100% effective.”

When reached for comment by The Intercept, Eddie Perez, a spokesperson for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, quoted the talking point verbatim in an emailed response.

That hedged view is out of step with how people in the district itself speak about the system: as an absolute assurance of a gun-free safety. Students in the video produced by the school district said, “You get a certain reassurance that there are no dangerous weapons on campus.”

The post Schools Are Pouring Millions Into AI-Powered Weapons Detection Systems. Do They Work? appeared first on The Intercept .

NIAMEY, Niger — The look on Miriam’s face was abject fear. Her pink, white, and green veil had mostly slipped from her head, and her dark eyes grew wide as she stared down at her lavender smartphone. In a flash, she pulled it to her ear. “Allo!” she said, her pitch rising as her other hand nervously cradled her chin.

In the courtyard of her family’s tree-lined compound in a well-to-do neighborhood in Niger’s capital, members of Miriam’s ethnic group had been describing jihadist attacks on their historic community in a rural region to the north. Now, the six or seven men wearing tagelmusts — a combination of turban and scarf worn by Tuareg men to provide protection from sun and dust — were also glued to their phones as chimes announced incoming texts and calls. Voices on the phones sounded panicked. There were gunshots, and a familiar roar rumbled through the desert scrubland 100 miles away. At any moment, relatives warned, they expected an attack by the “motorcycle guys.”

Over the last decade, Niger and its neighbors in the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have taken the notion of the outlaw motorcycle gang to its most lethal apogee. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on “motos” — two to a bike, their faces obscured by sunglasses and turbans, armed with Kalashnikovs — have terrorized villages across the borderlands where Burkina Faso , Mali, and Niger meet. These militants, some affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State group, impose zakat , an Islamic tax; steal animals; and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians.

Jihadist motorcyclists, Miriam reminded me, had thundered into the village of Bakorat on March 21, 2021. As described afterward by one of the survivors, the motos “swept into the village like a sandstorm, killing every man they saw. They shot one of my uncles in front of me. His 20-year-old son ran to save him, but he perished as well. We found them, slumped over each other.” Attacking in overwhelming numbers and with military precision, the jihadists executed men and boys while looting and burning homes. “They attacked the well like it was a military objective, opening fire on the dozens of men there. As they killed, I heard the attackers saying, ‘This is your time … for working with the state,’” another survivor told Human Rights Watch. “I collapsed, seeing the carnage … my father, my brothers, my cousins, my friends lying there, dead and dying.” Human Rights Watch said more than 170 people were massacred near Bakorat and Intazayene villages and nearby nomad camps that day. Miriam and her relatives put the number at 245.

As we sat in the courtyard, it all seemed to be happening again.

U.S. Military Aid

In 2002, long before motorcycle attacks became commonplace in the tri-border region of the Sahel, the United States began providing Niger with counterterrorism assistance . The U.S. flooded this country with military equipment, from armored vehicles to surveillance aircraft. Since 2012, the tab to U.S. taxpayers is more than $500 million and climbing , one of the largest security assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, Niger hosts one of the largest and most expensive drone bases run by the U.S. military. Built in the northern city of Agadez at a price tag of more than $110 million and maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million each year, Air Base 201 is a surveillance hub and the lynchpin of an archipelago of U.S. outposts in West Africa. Home to Space Force personnel, a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment, and a fleet of drones — including armed MQ-9 Reapers — the base is an exemplar of failed U.S. military efforts in this country and the wider region. With terrorism skyrocketing in the Sahel while the U.S. pours hundreds of millions of dollars into security assistance, base construction, and troop deployments, this drone outpost — built to enhance security in the region — can’t even protect its own contractors and the U.S. tax dollars that keep it running. Less than a mile from the base’s entrance, as The Intercept recently reported, bandits conducted a daylight armed robbery of base contractors and drove off with roughly 24 million West African CFA francs late last year.

U.S. troops in the country also train, advise, and assist local counterparts and have fought and even died — in an ambush by ISIS near the village of Tongo Tongo in 2017. Over the last decade, the number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Niger has jumped more than 900 percent from 100 to 1,001 . Niger has seen a proliferation of U.S. outposts that includes not just the huge drone base in Agadez, but also another one in the capital, at the main commercial airport. You can sit in a departure lounge and watch drones land and take off.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum and decried the growing regional influence of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group. “Where Wagner has been present, bad things have inevitably followed,” said Blinken , noting that the group’s presence is associated with “overall worsening security.” The U.S. was a better option, he said, and needed to prove “that we can actually deliver results.” But the U.S already has a two-decade record of counterterrorism engagement in the region — and “bad things” and “overall worsening security” have been the hallmarks of those years.

Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism assistance to Niger. Last year, the number of violent events in Burkina Faso, Mali, and western Niger alone, reached 2,737, according to a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. This represents a jump of more than 30,000 percent since the U.S. began its counterterrorism efforts. (Wagner has only been active in the region since late 2021.) During 2002 and 2003, terrorists caused 23 casualties in Africa. In 2022, terrorist attacks in just those three Sahelian nations killed almost 7,900 people. “The Sahel now accounts for 40 percent of all violent activity by militant Islamist groups in Africa, more than any other region in Africa,” according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

The impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on Nigeriens has been enormous.

Last year, an estimated 4.4 million people experienced dire food insecurity — a record number and a 90 percent increase compared to 2021. Between last January and September, almost 580,000 children under 5 suffered from wasting. This year, the United Nations estimates that about 3.7 million Nigeriens, including 2 million children , will need humanitarian assistance. Many of those in need are also the most difficult to reach due to insecurity.

It’s worth noting that in 2002, when the U.S. began pumping counterterrorism funds into the country, the overall food situation was described as “satisfactory” and undergoing “progressive improvement,” according to a food security monitoring agency set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Banning Motorbikes

As quickly as it began, the telephonic flurry of rings and chimes that took over Miriam’s courtyard in Niamey ceased. I heard later that one motorbike was spotted — and that the gunfire may have been shots from the local self-defense group at the rider of that moto.

To Miriam and her relatives, shooting at someone for riding a motorcycle sounds completely prudent. This mindset meshes with a parade of government policies instituted in the tri-border region and the far east of the country, near Lake Chad, where the terror group Boko Haram has been a persistent menace.

Niger and its neighbors have intermittently imposed emergency measures, including the banning of motorbikes. Local markets have also been closed because authorities say that terrorists use them to purchase supplies. There have been other restrictions on people’s movement, the purchase of fertilizer, and fishing — all in the name of counterterrorism. Violating these strictures may brand you as a terrorist or sympathizer. Your ethnicity may too. People in this compound, just like those in the Nigerien government, will tell you that while many jihadists are ethnic Peul, all Peul are not jihadists. They also say there is no ethnic component to this conflict. Peul leaders disagree. They say they’re the victims.

A week later, I’m in a different compound in another part of town to meet two men who want their stories told. As we sit in a darkened room, I ask if it’s OK to use their names; they shoot each other worried looks. “The military will come find us. They’ll say, ‘You talked to the journalist,’” said a man in a white tagelmust as his colleague in a blue turban nodded. It’s a common fear here. People are afraid of their U.S.-backed government, so while they gave me their names and those of their villages, I can only call these men “Puel community leaders.”

“The emergency measures just impoverished people. The jihadists kept their motos. They were able to purchase supplies. They eat and drink. They do whatever they want. But average people lost everything.”

“The emergency measures just impoverished people. The jihadists kept their motos. They were able to purchase supplies. They eat and drink. They do whatever they want. But average people lost everything,” the man in white explained. “There’s a 6 p.m. curfew, but it takes two days by moto to travel to the health clinic. People are dying because they can’t get treatment.” The man in blue explained that the closure of markets meant finding a car — another major expense — to drive to Mali. “So instead of paying 10,000 CFA for a sack of millet, you pay 50,000 CFA,” he said, referring to the local currency, West African CFA francs. “There’s a lot of hunger.”

Predominantly seminomadic Muslim cattle herders, ethnic Peuls across the Sahel express discontent with government neglect of their communities. Many say they have been tagged as terrorists, and the stigma has further marginalized them and encouraged abuse by government troops. “They arrest people without cause,” said the leader in white. “Peul youth laid down their arms and wanted to join the state security forces or form a militia, but the government rejected the offer.”

Hassane Boubacar, a colonel major — a rank between colonel and general — and an expert on radicalization detailed to the Nigerien prime minister’s office, agreed that socioeconomic issues are key drivers of terrorism. “The jihadists do what the state fails to do and provides services that the government fails to provide,” he said. “The people in these areas are very poor, and the jihadists have a lot of money to pay them from illegal activity, like drug trafficking.”

A recent U.N. Development Program report on terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa found much the same. Drawing on interviews with 2,200 people in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and five other African nations, UNDP discovered that roughly 25 percent of voluntary recruits cited job opportunities as their primary reason for joining terror groups. Only 17 percent mentioned religion. The report found that most who joined extremist groups grew up “suffering from inter-generational socio-economic marginalization and underdevelopment.”

As a disaffected minority, the Peul have been the prime focus for recruitment by Islamist militants, even as Peuls are often victims of jihadist attacks. “They say, ‘The Peul are terrorists,’ but the terrorists terrorize us,” said the Peul community leader in the white tagelmust. “They steal our animals. They kill our family members.” At the same time, Peul are also a prime target of arrests, abuse, and attacks by Nigerien security forces.

Nearly half of those interviewed for the UNDP report said a specific event pushed them to join militant groups, with 71 percent citing human rights violations , often at the hands of state security forces. According to the report, “in most cases, state action, accompanied by a sharp escalation of human rights abuses, appears to be the prominent factor finally pushing individuals into [violent extremist] groups in Africa.”

Col. Maj. Boubacar was dismissive of reported Nigerien atrocities. “Sometimes, we’re accused of human rights violations,” he said. “But we pay a lot of attention to allegations.”

The U.S. government doesn’t agree. A State Department analysis of human rights in Niger released last month cited significant abuses, including credible reports of arbitrary and unlawful killings by the government. “For example, the armed forces were accused of summarily executing persons suspected of fighting with terrorist groups,” reads the report, which also details arbitrary detention, unjustified arrests of journalists, life-threatening prison conditions , and rampant impunity among the security forces.

In 2020, for example, Niger’s National Commission on Human Rights investigated allegations that 102 civilians had disappeared during a weeklong military operation . “There have indeed been executions of unarmed civilians and the mission discovered at least 71 bodies in six mass graves,” said Abdoulaye Seydou, the president of the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy, and Development, which took part in the investigation. “It is elements of the defense and security forces which are responsible for these summary and extrajudicial executions.” Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that an additional six mass graves containing 34 bodies were also uncovered nearby.

Last fall, the Nigerien military also bombed a gold mine during a counterterrorism operation. While the government claimed that only seven people died, locals said many more civilians were killed. After Seydou spoke out about it, he was charged with “ publishing information likely to disturb public order ” and arrested. The case was dropped, but as he attempted to leave the courthouse, Seydou was again arrested, cited for “creating false evidence to overwhelm” the Nigerien military and sent to a high-security prison .

Direct Operations

As with allies the world over, from Cameroon to Saudi Arabia , human rights violations haven’t deterred the U.S. from supporting Niger’s government. Hang around the airport in Niamey and you’ll see a parade of white faces, tattooed arms, and goatees. Waiting for flights in and out of the country, you hear talk of the trials and tribulations of Veterans Affairs medical care. When discussing their seats on the plane, it isn’t 23D but 23-Delta. “What are you teaching?” a paunchy contractor with a Southern accent and a goatee asked a younger man with an artfully groomed beard traveling with a group of Americans who, it turned out, were providing instruction on battlefield medicine.

When asked what U.S. troops were doing in Niger, U.S. Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan offered a boilerplate response: “The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger and we remain committed to helping our African partners to conduct missions or operations that support and further our mutual security goals and objectives in Africa.” What are those “missions or operations”? The most famous came to light in October 2017 when ISIS fighters ambushed American troops near Tongo Tongo, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others.

AFRICOM told the world that a small group of U.S. troops were providing “ advice and assistance ” to local counterparts. In truth, the ambushed team was working out of the town of Ouallam with a larger Nigerien force under Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging regional counterterrorism effort . Until bad weather prevented it, that group was slated to support another team of American and Nigerien commandos based in Arlit — a town 700 miles northeast of the capital — attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, a so-called 127e program that allows U.S. forces to use local troops as proxies.

A 2018 investigation by then-Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier found that AFRICOM’s advise-and-assist story was a fiction. “Missions described in this report and executed by Team OUALLAM and Team ARLIT were driven by U.S. intelligence, planned entirely by U.S. forces, and directed and led by [U.S. forces]. Nigerien forces had no input in the planning process or the decision to execute the missions,” he explained. “Advise, assist, and accompany operations that Team OUALLAM and Team ARLIT were conducting … more closely resembled U.S. direct action than foreign partner-led operations aided by U.S. advice and assistance.” Direct action , to be clear, is a special ops euphemism for strikes, raids, and other offensive missions.

Cloutier wrote that U.S. commandos in Niger “are planning, directing, and executing direct action operations rather than advising Nigerien-led operations.” Is this still the case? The official answer is no. But the official answer used to be that these were “advise-and-assist” missions. It took a tragedy that couldn’t be suppressed for the truth to slip out.

Commandos, however, don’t only conduct clandestine raids. When I happened to encounter three men who said their names were Cam, Chuck, and Brock at Agadez’s Ministry of Justice headquarters, they were on a different kind of mission. Cam sported a shiny lavender dashiki-style top — they call it bazin here — with an embroidered placket and matching lavender pants, dark wraparound sunglasses, a backward black baseball cap, and a beard that would satisfy the Taliban. He said he hailed from Colorado and had been in-country almost eight months. Chuck had more conventional facial hair, wore a green Fjallraven cap, a blue Osprey Daylite shoulder sling strapped tight to his chest with one radio or satphone carabineered to it and another walkie-talkie clipped to his pocket. Brock wore a black and gray ballcap, a polo shirt and khakis, a hand-held radio clipped to the right front pocket, and had a haversack strapped to his back.

While the U.S. spends significant time and money training, advising, and assisting Nigerien troops, Americans also devote substantial resources to courting government officials and building influence with local elites.

Cam said he was on a farewell tour and had a gift for the top local prosecutor. It highlighted another facet of American efforts in Niger — one that plays out across the globe whenever Americans sit down for an awkward cup of tea with , or provide Viagra to, some local chieftain they hope to win over. While the U.S. spends significant time and money training, advising, and assisting Nigerien troops, Americans also devote substantial resources to courting government officials and building influence with local elites.

Anastafidan el Souleymane Mohamed, a leading figure among the Association of Traditional Chiefs of Niger who represents more than 400 Tuareg villages, is an influential man in Agadez and across the region. Not so long ago, he was also an outspoken critic of the U.S. presence. “What we have seen in all the Arab countries is that after there’s an American base, there comes trouble,” he told the Washington Post in 2017 . He even called Air Base 201 “a magnet for the terrorists.” A year later, he said much the same to The Atlantic , even raising the specter of Americans accidentally killing civilians in the course of their missions.

When I spoke with him recently, Mohamed’s tune had dramatically changed. He had gone from a vocal critic to an ardent believer. “In the beginning, they didn’t have anything to do with me,” he said of the U.S. military in Agadez. “Now, the Americans come here every two weeks, every month. They were here just yesterday. We exchange information about security issues,” he gushed. “I’m very pleased with the relationship.”

AFRICOM ignored questions about their relationship with Mohamed, but it seems clear that the U.S. military decided to court this formerly critical local leader. Mohamed showed me a certificate, commemorating a 2021 drone mission and bearing the logo of Special Operations Command Africa, presented to him by his American friends. But it didn’t stop with press-the-flesh attention and meaningless keepsakes. After Mohamed told the Americans about a nagging medical condition, he said that they brought him to the drone base in Agadez where he was treated by a U.S. doctor.

Drones and Hope

While the base may come up short as a surveillance and security bastion, it has had an undeniable impact. If you’re a local elite like Mohamed, the Americans apparently invite you in and provide you with free medical care. But if you’re living on the outskirts of the facility in the hard-scrabble Tadress neighborhood, it’s a different story.

To most in Tadress, Air Base 201 is a mystery. “We don’t know what they do there,” said several women in a rough-hewn compound a short distance from the outpost. The only tangible impact of the U.S. military on their lives, they told me, were the cracks that formed in their mud walls due to huge transport planes that shook their homes as they passed overhead.

Maria Laminou Garba, 27, runs a recycling collective in Tadress that pays unemployed youths to gather recyclables and subsidizes schooling for neighborhood orphans. When there were only Nigeriens at the base, Garba could make a little money selling them food. When the Americans arrived, she said she was no longer welcome. With permission from the mayor of Agadez to collect plastic in that section of Tadress, she approached the base with her young employees, hoping to gather discarded water bottles. But Garba quickly grew scared of the guards’ guns when a booming voice from a loudspeaker told them to leave.

The U.S. military touts good works in Tadress, like rebuilding a primary school . “I’ve heard about them helping, but I’ve never seen it,” said Garba. The U.S. also publicizes opportunities for locals to sell trinkets at craft bazaars at Air Base 201. “People from town get to sell stuff,” Garba told me, referring to Agadez proper. “They’re not from here.”

Garba and a local leader — the chef de quartier of Tadress, Abdullah Bil Rhite Chareyet — led me to a reservoir near the outskirts of the base where locals use the water to make mud bricks. But the site is also, they explained, a danger to children. “A 6-year-old child drowned here a few years ago,” said Garba. “Every year, someone dies here.” Last year, a 17-year-old girl became the latest victim, she and Chareyet told me.

Chareyet meets with American military personnel from time to time. They asked him to look out for suspicious activity — most notably sightings of Toyota Land Cruisers. (A Land Cruiser pickup truck apparently carried out the 2021 armed robbery on the outskirts of the base.) The Americans gave him a phone number to call in reports.

In 2021, after years of requests from the village chief for American assistance, Chareyet, Garba, and other local leaders met with a U.S. officer and his interpreter at this same spot. The American, they said, pledged to install a fence around the reservoir and post a guard, to protect local children. Chareyet showed me photos of him with the American. AFRICOM refused to comment on the man’s identity, but a U.S. contractor working at the base, who was not authorized to speak with the press, examined the images and verified that the man pictured was a civil affairs officer who had since left Niger.

Chareyet had hoped that the Americans would honor their word. But six months later, when I visited the site, there was no fence. Chareyet said the Americans had not been back. “I thought they would build the fence like they said,” he told me. Garba shook her head, adding, “The Americans gave us false hope.”

The post After Two Decades of U.S. Military Support, Terror Attacks Are Worse Than Ever in Niger appeared first on The Intercept .

O n very clear days, you can follow the rolling hills surrounding the Palestinian city of Yatta all the way to the Dead Sea on one side, the Negev desert on the other. The windswept landscape offers idyllic views, with clusters of olive trees alternating with narrow rows of cultivated land, patches of shrubs, and the occasional grazing sheep. This is also a unique observation point to watch the reality of Israeli apartheid take hold of the land.

Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the pastoral hills surrounding Yatta, is one of several areas across the occupied West Bank where the Israeli state has for decades forced out Palestinians and replaced them with Israeli settlers. The goal, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated plainly after returning to power last year, is to give the state absolute and ultimate control over what he called “ all areas of the Land of Israel ” — including land widely expected to one day form the territory of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli government has deployed an array of legal and policy pretexts to extend its domination of the West Bank, most notably by supporting the more than half million Israeli settlers who illegally moved there. Since a new, far-right coalition took power , Israel has been roiled by mass protests that reached an apex this week, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to oppose plans by Netanyahu — who is currently fighting corruption charges — to severely curtail the independence of the country’s judiciary. But the political crisis means little to Palestinians, including the 1.6 million with Israeli citizenship, who have long viewed Israel’s courts as complicit in their oppression, and the legal system many Israelis are now rushing to defend as an enabler to the regime of racial domination forced upon them.

“Palestinians know that Israel has only ever been a democracy for its Jewish citizens, and never for us,” George Bisharat and Jamil Dakwar wrote in an op-ed for Haaretz this week. “What we are witnessing today is an internal Israeli Jewish struggle over who will administer an apartheid regime over the Palestinians, not a genuine fight for democracy for all.”

Few Israelis took to the streets last May, for instance, when Israel’s highest court put an end to a decadeslong legal battle Palestinian residents of a dozen communities in Masafer Yatta had been fighting to stay on their lands — inside what Israel had unilaterally declared a “firing zone.” The proceedings followed Israel’s declaration in the 1980s of a large section of Masafer Yatta as a restricted, military area for the army to train in. Since then, Palestinians living there faced forcible expulsions, frequent home demolitions, rising settler violence, and a host of other coercive measures seeking to drive them off the land — all while illegal Israeli settlements expanded around them with no consequence. Last May, their legal battle ended when the same court whose legitimacy hundreds of thousands of Israelis are now fighting to preserve ruled definitively that there are no “legal barriers” to the planned expulsion of Palestinians from the firing zone. The court — which is Israel’s Supreme Court but rules as the High Court of Justice when deciding matters of state authority, as in the Masafer Yatta case, — is made up of 15 judges appointed by the president of Israel. The court is being targeted by Netanyahu, who wants to change the way judges are selected as well as the laws the court can rule on, in addition to giving Parliament the power to overturn its decisions.

Last May’s ruling, the final one on the Masafer Yatta case, essentially sanctioned the forcible transfer of Palestinians from the firing zone — even as the forcible transfer of an occupied population is a form of ethnic cleansing and, under international law standards , a war crime.

Performative Law

The Masafer Yatta ruling has brought renewed international attention to this pocket of the southern West Bank and prompted widespread condemnation of Israeli actions. But it has also intensified the Israeli military’s and settlers’ joint efforts to force the nearly 1,200 Palestinians who remain in the firing zone to leave. Harassment of local residents has become a daily affair, and violent attacks by settlers are on the rise. For the Palestinians who have already lived in limbo for three decades, the court’s decision means that they may now face forcible transfer any day — even as human rights observers note that efforts to drive them out are likely going to be more insidious so as not to draw further global condemnation.

“We don’t believe we’re going to see people put on trucks and being transferred — although it could happen — because of the optics of it,” said Dror Sadot, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, during a recent visit to the firing zone, noting that Israeli authorities did force people onto trucks in an earlier effort to evacuate the area in 1999. “Instead, what we’re seeing already, and what we think we’re going to see even more, is efforts to make their lives impossible to live. Demolitions, checkpoints, confiscating cars. They really isolate these communities and basically try to do everything they can to make them leave.”

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces wrote in an email to The Intercept that “in the ruling of the Supreme Court on May 4th, 2022, the Court approved the State’s position which determined that at the time of the declaration of the area as a closed zone, the area was uninhabited” — even though hundreds of people lived in the area at the time.

“In recent months dialogue has been held with the Palestinians in the area, in order to enable them to leave the closed zone in an agreed upon and independent manner,” the spokesperson added. “The training zone has great importance for training security personnel including in the use of live fire, which cannot be carried out effectively with civilians present in the area.”

In recent years, a growing number of global human rights organizations has begun to describe the Israeli state’s control of Palestinians as a form of apartheid — a parallel to South Africa that Palestinians themselves had been drawing for decades. The political backlash has been fierce, even as those reports — by Human Rights Watch , Amnesty International , but also the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the Israel-based B’Tselem — have offered careful legal analysis to explain their conclusions, and referred to an established, legal definition of the crime of apartheid as defined under multiple international statutes. Left with no other recourse, Palestinians have increasingly taken their plight to the international community and international mechanisms of justice like the International Criminal Court, which includes apartheid under the crimes against humanity over which it has jurisdiction, and which in 2021 opened an investigation on the situation in Palestine .

Until now, those seeking to defend Israel’s conduct have largely done so by referring to its democratic character, including the integrity and independence of its judiciary, even as Palestinians have long argued Israel is no democracy when it comes to them.

Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School who has researched legal policies pertaining to land in Israel and the West Bank, noted that the Israeli state has perfected the use of the law as an instrument to control Palestinians, shrouding its actions in a façade of legitimacy. Dispossession is often disguised as a bureaucratic matter of enforcing the law, with Israeli officials declaring homes illegal and subjecting them to demotion orders, designating land as restricted, and issuing eviction orders.

“The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

“There is definitely this culture of hyper legalization and performative law,” Eghbariah told me, pointing for instance to a legal distinction Israel draws between settlements and outposts — even as it mostly treats both equally, and even as both are illegal under international law. “The whole distinction between outposts and supposedly legal settlements is absurd. But it’s part of the legitimizing force of the law to try to use this façade of rule of law, of supposedly a democratic state, that practices so-called measured violence, and that has checks and balances in place. The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

The protests in Tel Aviv , many Palestinians have pointed out , are an effort to preserve rather than challenge the system that has enabled Israel’s regime of racial domination. “Now all these liberals are roaming the streets outraged because of the idea that the independence of the judiciary is going to be supposedly compromised,” Eghbariah said. “It makes perfect sense: because Israel tries to maintain and use the law in its service.”

That was well on display this week in Tel Aviv, when amid a sea of protesters waving Israeli flags, a lone man waving a Palestinian one — which Israel has banned — was quickly tackled by police and protesters.

The Firing Zone

For the Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta’s firing zone, the court’s decision sanctioning their forcible transfer has exacerbated the uncertainty and fear that has dominated their lives for generations. Nasser Nawajah, a community organizer and field researcher for B’Tselem, has been living with his family in Khirbet Susya, a cluster of homes and verdant vegetable gardens near the firing zone, since the 1980s, when the village’s families were forcibly expelled from their original homes in Susya, a few hundred meters away, which Israel had declared an archaeological site. Since then, Khirbet Susya’s residents have been living with no connection to water and electricity. When they formally applied for access to infrastructure, they were told “No, you’re illegal,” Nawajah told me, even as nearby Israeli outposts were quickly connected to infrastructure. “At the end of the day it’s just a policy to make Palestinians’ lives miserable in all kinds of ways, firing zones, declaring buildings illegal, calling land ‘state land.’ All the roads lead to making Palestinians’ lives miserable.”

“All the roads lead to making Palestinians’ lives miserable.”

For years, residents of the area have relied on ingeniousness and the solidarity of nongovernmental organizations and activists who have provided them with a microgrid of solar panels and water tanks that the army regularly confiscates and that settlers vandalize. Settlers also regularly damage olive trees, set fields on fire, uproot vegetables from gardens, and destroy Palestinian property. In Khirbet Susya, Nawajah pointed to a stone monument that settlers had ripped out, a tribute to a Palestinian baby who was burnt to death along with his family in a 2015 settler attack. Not far from the village, a patch of olive trees was shriveled dry by poison. Signs in Hebrew called on people to report international peace activists to Israeli police.

Nawajah described a combination of daily harassment, increasingly violent attacks, and a seemingly endless stream of new techniques devised by settlers, under the watch of the army, to seize ever-larger swaths of Palestinian land. Sometimes, he said, settlers fly drones over herds of sheep to scare them off course; often, they send their own sheep and livestock to graze on Palestinian crops. And a new practice was taking hold in the area, by which a lone, armed settler would set up a “pastoral outpost” on a hilltop, bringing animals to graze on the lands below — a faster and more efficient way to stake a claim on a piece of land than to set up an entire residential community. Where residential outposts are often made up of a few caravans and makeshift homes, a pastoral outpost only requires some tools, animals, and one person who, using this tactic, can significantly alter control of the land. “It’s enough to set up something like this to clear out a lot of land that belongs to Palestinians,” Nawajah said, noting that most Palestinian farmers would give up trying to reach that land for fear of being attacked.

During my visit to the South Hebron Hills, one such settler, a young man standing alone on a hilltop overseeing Palestinian crop lands, used binoculars to watch me, Nawajah, and a couple Israeli human rights observers. Then he approached us to ask about the purpose of our visit. Moments later, a “civil administration” vehicle pulled up: a quiet reminder that we were in the firing zone, where the army could choose to confiscate our car at any point. “Don’t be fooled by the word ‘civil administration,’” said Roy Yellin, B’Tselem’s director of public outreach, who was with the group that day. “It’s a part of the army that’s in charge of running the civil aspects of the life of Palestinians — but it’s the army.”

Palestinians and human rights observers stress that while the army is ubiquitous in the firing zone, it is not there to protect Palestinian land or lives: It is there to protect settlers or stand by when they attack Palestinians. In Khirbet Susya two years ago, Palestinian residents filmed a group of adult settlers playing with the children’s toys in the village playground while soldiers watched without intervening. (The IDF spokesperson wrote in reference to the playground incident that “the video that was published on social media represents only the beginning of the encounter and does not depict the rest of the incident in which the settlers were removed from the playground premises within minutes.”)

The army generally stands by and does little while settlers engage in violence, but sometimes the violence goes too far even for them. In Tuba, a Palestinian village inside the firing zone near the outpost of Ma’on, settler attacks on Palestinian children have become so frequent and violent that the army now escorts the children on their way to school and back home.

“They’re not doing anything to the settlers, they just escort the children,” noted Sadot, of B’Tselem.

“This is why when we talk about settler violence, we talk about state violence, because you can’t separate it.”

“This is why when we talk about settler violence, we talk about state violence, because you can’t separate it,” she added. “A lot of people will say, those settlers are a few bad apples, or something like that. But first of all, they are being allowed to live there even though it’s been declared an illegal outpost, and they get electricity and water, and the army protects them, and nobody’s getting charged when they are being violent. They have the backing of the state and they are all going for the same goal: to take over land from the Palestinians.”

Often the harassment and threats turn into open violence . Nawajah, who has been documenting dozens of such incidents for years, tells his neighbors to continue to report settler attacks to the army so as to create documentation of what happens — even as most Palestinians have given up reporting them because they fear retaliation and because they have come to view settlers and the army as one.

The IDF spokesperson wrote to The Intercept that soldiers are required to stop violations of the law by Israeli citizens, including by detaining them. “A Palestinian who was harmed as a result of an incident of violence or damage to his property can also file a complaint with the Israel Police,” the spokesperson added.

A day before I arrived, a Palestinian farmer was attacked by settlers with brass knuckles and hospitalized. The settlers were residents of a one-family outpost, Talia Farm, named after a South African convert to Judaism who moved to the West Bank from South Africa in the 1990s, after the end of apartheid there.

“I loved apartheid,” Yaakov Talia, the outpost’s founder, once told an Israeli journalist. “I still think that apartheid is the best thing in the world.”

Apartheid’s Playbook

In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords, with the aim of creating a Palestinian state, divided the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip into different areas. The carved-up territory would allow limited Palestinian self-governance in anticipation of an eventual state while, in a nod to Israeli security concerns, letting Israel maintain full control of much of the land. “Area A” contains the largest Palestinian cities, where 2.8 million people live under the civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority, the home-rule body and the closest thing to a sovereign government Palestinians were ever granted. “Area B” includes the areas immediately surrounding the cities, under Palestinian civil management and, in theory, joint Palestinian and Israeli security control. Then there is “Area C”: the largest swath of the West Bank. In addition to encompassing all the Israeli settlements, whether urban or rural, Area C included the pastoral and agricultural land from which Palestinians have drawn their sustenance for generations, and the economic lifeline of any future state. Covering 60 percent of what after Oslo was widely understood to be the land of a future Palestine, Area C remained under full Israeli military control, with the army frequently and increasingly making incursions into other areas as well.

Over the years, the Israeli government seized on Oslo’s unresolved parameters to deploy an intricate framework of land policies and legal justifications for taking territory that belonged to Palestinians. Perhaps the most effective tool has been the development of settlements.

The Israeli government seized on Oslo’s unresolved parameters to deploy an intricate framework of land policies and legal justifications for taking territory that belonged to Palestinians.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law. As part of the Oslo process, in order to preserve the possibility of Palestinian statehood, Israel committed not to change so-called facts on the ground. That should have meant no new settlements, but Israeli officials cited what it described as natural population growth as justification to expand existing settlements, building more neighborhoods and towns in the hills surrounding existing ones, often naming each new development with a numeral next to the name of the original settlement. In addition to those settlements, which in some cases have grown into cities fully supported by the state, more than 140 outposts have sprung up over the years. Those were built by settlers without official authorization, but while authorities occasionally issue — and rarely carry out — demolition orders against outposts, they more often provide them with electricity, water, public transportation, and army protection.

In Masafer Yatta, for instance, the rural areas surrounding Yatta have been cut off from the city by a circle of ever-expanding Israeli settlements and outposts, the latter of which are illegal not only under international law but also even under Israeli law. Yet in several cases, outposts that were built illegally were later recognized and legitimated by Israeli authorities — as is the case of Avigail, an outpost near Masafer Yatta that the Israeli government “ legalized ” along with several others in February, ostensibly in response to two attacks carried out by Palestinians in east Jerusalem that month.

Over the years, the settlement enterprise has turned the prospect of a viable Palestinian state into a near-impossibility by precluding both territorial integrity and access to enough land to sustain a future state’s population. Settlements, usually built on hilltops, often with unnaturally narrow and long footprints so as to create a longer barrier, have not only encroached on Palestinian land: They have also effectively cut off one Palestinian community from the other. Each settlement is also surrounded by a — usually unofficial — “security zone,” in theory a buffer between Palestinians and settlers where nobody is supposed to stand. But settlers have regularly expanded into those areas too, therefore pushing the security zone further and taking over more land.

Overall, in the West Bank, Israeli officials have confiscated more than 2 million dunmas, or nearly 800 square miles of Palestinian land, more than one-third of the West Bank — much of it the private property of Palestinians. They have done so under an array of justifications, including the designation of much of it as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now, which tracks the expropriation of Palestinian land, estimated that the Israeli government declared up to a quarter of the West Bank state land. B’Tselem, which also tracks Israeli land grabs, found that settlements and the roads and infrastructure that serve them have effectively encircled Palestinians in the West Bank into “165 non-contiguous ‘territorial islands’” — a fragmentation that observers have long compared to apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans .

The reference to Bantustans evokes the pockets of territory that South Africa’s apartheid government designated for Black residents, forcing their resettlement there with the goal of ultimately creating independent “homelands.” This is one of many ways in which Israel’s regime of racial domination over Palestinians has been compared to apartheid South Africa.

The references to apartheid, however, offer not only a historical comparison, but also a legal one. While the South African experience coined the term itself and popularized the concept of apartheid, the crime of apartheid has since been defined and codified in a number of international treaties, including the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute, the International Criminal Court’s founding document.

“Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy,” Human Rights Watch concluded in its 2021 report on Israeli apartheid. “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity.”

Maximum Land, Minimum Palestinians

While apartheid policies encompass a range of institutionalized discrimination practices — from restrictions on residency for non-Jews to the recent introduction of legislation that would seek the death penalty for Palestinians only — the element of racial domination that is intrinsic to the concept is particularly evident in Israeli land policies.

“They want maximum land with minimum Palestinians,” said Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans opposed to the occupation. “They don’t want to annex tens of thousands of Palestinians because eventually they’ll have to give them citizenship.”

Givati, who served in the military in the West Bank, described a close collaboration between the state — through the military — and the ideological settlers driving the land grab in the West Bank. The two regularly worked together, he said, with representatives of the settlement movement often participating in military drills and speaking to soldiers sent to serve in the territory.

“Basically we’re seeing a system which deprives Palestinians of their lands and aims to push them away from living in Area A, into Areas C and B,” he added, during a visit to the South Hebron Hills. “And that element of using settlements in order to divide the land is very visible here.”

In many ways Masafer Yatta is a microcosm where the dynamics playing out across the entire West Bank are magnified by the designation of the firing zone. Daily harassment of Palestinians, illegal settlement expansion, and settler violence have been growing steadily throughout the occupied territory for years. So has the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces — which last year reached the highest toll since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. So far, 2023 has been even worse, with Israeli raids in cities like Nablus and Jenin killing dozens, and settlers setting fire to homes and cars in a series of attacks that have been compared to “ pogroms ” and that were encouraged by top officials of Israel’s new fundamentalist government.

The extremism of the current Israeli government has in many ways laid bare the reality of Israel’s project of domination. As settler violence in the West Bank has reached historic records in recent months, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently called for a Palestinian village attacked by settlers to be “wiped out,” before being forced to apologize. And as protests in Israel reached a peak this week, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a settler once convicted of supporting an Israeli terrorist organization, worked out a deal with Netanyahu to delay the controversial judicial reforms in exchange for the establishment of a new security force that will operate under Ben-Gvir’s direct orders — a prospect that some have likened to handing the extremist minister a “ private militia .”

But before the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reached the highest level of the Israeli government, the groundwork for the supremacist project they have championed had been in motion for years, advanced under more liberal Israeli governments as well — much of it unfolding with at best tepid criticism from Israel’s closest allies, including the U.S.

Across the Green Line

While Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land is most visible in Area C of the West Bank, it is a reality also in Jerusalem, as well as inside Israel, defined as the territory of Israel before the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, even though Israel’s borders remain an unsettled matter. There, like in the occupied territories, an array of laws and legal justifications have resulted in the seizure of much of the land belonging to Palestinians who became citizens of Israel after an estimated 750,000 others were made refugees during the 1948 establishment of the state. Today, there are approximately 1.6 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, comprising more than 20 percent of Israel’s population.

Eghbariah, the human rights attorney and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, argued a particularly effective tool deployed by Israel has been the legal fragmentation of Palestinians themselves into different categories, with different IDs, rights, and legal frameworks applying to each. “It’s a regime of legal fragmentation that classifies some Palestinians as citizens, and some as residents of the West Bank, or Gaza, and some as residents of Jerusalem, and each of them have different legal statuses,” he told me. “It designs different tools to experiment. It’s labs of oppression and domination.”

Land grabs inside Israel are often overlooked, Eghbariah added. But there too “is dispossession, there is segregation in the ways that accessibility to resources and land is distributed,” he said.

Since 1948, for instance, officials have authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” inside Israel, but have only granted a handful of permits for government-planned townships for Palestinians. Most of those are communities the Israeli state has created for Bedouins that it continues to displace across the Negev desert — even as those Bedouins have for years resisted forced relocation to these poverty-stricken townships.

In the Negev, the historical land of the Bedouins dating back centuries, Israel has announced plans to forcibly displace 36,000 people living in roughly 40 “unrecognized” communities, in order to expand military training areas and implement what it called “economic development” projects. Adalah, an Israel-based human rights group, has been representing many of the Bedouin communities facing eviction as they fight in court for the right to stay on their land.

“The plan provides clear confirmation that Israel’s Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouins in the Negev overtly discriminates against the Bedouin population,” the group wrote, referring to the government agency set up to handle Bedouin affairs — which Bedouins view as the agency tasked with their oppression. The agency, according to Adalah, views Bedouins “as an obstacle that must be removed from the landscape in order to clear a path for Jewish settlement and ‘development’.”

That dynamic is not unlike that unfolding in Masafer Yatta, even as the Bedouins targeted for displacement are Israeli citizens. For those Bedouins, who over the decades have watched the desert become urbanized and threaten their way of life, the eviction orders are a bitter irony.

“They call us invaders, they say we are trespassers in this land,” Freij Al-Hawashleh, an 86-year-old Bedouin man, told me when I visited his community, Ras Jrabah, on the outskirts of the industrial city of Dimona.

Al-Hawashleh remembers when the area was under the control of the British Mandate, before the establishment of the state of Israel. One day, after 1948, some officials came to hand the members of his community blue ID cards: their Israeli citizenship. The Bedouins stayed on their land and continued growing their crops. Then, in the early 1950s, came the first settlers; Al-Hawashleh said that the Bedouins shared water and milk with them when they arrived. “Dimona was established on our land,” he added.

Today, Dimona is a rapidly expanding city, with construction projects underway on multiple sides. A campaign launched under the previous Israeli government offers an array of benefits to convince Jewish Israelis to move here. On the city’s main thoroughfare, a monument nods to the roots of the city: a mural with the figure of a man in Bedouin dress walking camels across a desert landscape. But that’s as far as Dimona’s recognition of its Bedouin residents will go. Al-Hawashleh’s community is one of the unrecognized Bedouin villages under eviction orders. The government wants its residents to move to Ras Jrabah, one of the townships it has designated for Bedouins, five miles away. When that proposal was announced, the Bedouins petitioned to stay in Dimona and to establish their own recognized neighborhood there — but they were denied and told they could only move to towns specifically created for them.

For now, as construction has continued in the city, the Bedouins have stayed put. Feet away from to their homes, the municipality has built a large new playground for Dimona’s children, but the dozens of children living in the Bedouin village only play there late in the evenings, if nobody else is there, adhering to an unwritten rule that they are not wanted there. Still, members of the community have no plans to leave.

“If they want me to move, they can take a gun and shoot me,” said Al-Hawashleh. “I will sit here and never move.”

The Israeli government has shrouded its policy of displacement in the language of modernization and the promise of better services. But the towns Bedouins are moved to are among Israel’s most impoverished and with poorest access to resources, with some of the country’s worst unemployment and crime rates. “The government always tries to tell the Bedouins, ‘If you want services, you need to move. If you want water, you need to move,’” Marwan Abu Frieh, a coordinator with Adalah, told me. “When that doesn’t work, they try to move them by force, by demolition orders.”

Home demolitions, he noted, are becoming increasingly common inside Israel. And as in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Israel often forces those facing demolition orders to destroy their own homes themselves — or face hefty fines to cover the cost of the bulldozers.

“The same things that are happening in the West Bank are happening here,” Abu Frieh added, noting that the practice has deeply traumatized the Bedouin population. “The same apartheid that’s there, is here.”

Al-Bqea’ah , another of the unrecognized communities facing eviction, stands against the backdrop of Masada, one of Israel’s most iconic tourist attractions, but the state is seeking to forcibly relocate its residents to the township of Mar’it, some 20 miles away. Next to Al-Bqea’ah , an Israeli-run tourist village offers visitors rides and photos with camels. But while camels have been a part of Bedouins’ lives for centuries, it has become increasingly difficult for them to keep them, as officials have refused to recognize camels as farm animals and have denied their owners grazing rights on lands where they traditionally kept them. Officials regularly confiscate camels “trespassing” into areas declared off-limits — sometimes lifting them with cranes to transport them away. They then charge exorbitant fees to return them to their owners.

The government’s resettlement plan — in addition to having been established without consulting the Bedouins — is fundamentally at odds with their traditional lifestyle.

“You can’t take a Bedouin from the desert and move him to a town; the Bedouins need freedom,” Moussa Al-Hawamsha, an elderly resident of Al-Bqea’ah, told me. His family has been living there since 1953, when they were moved there by Israeli authorities who evicted them from their original lands near Dimona, to make room for an industrial zone. When a Jewish man came in the 1980s to set up the tourist village next door, Al-Hawamsha said, they gave him camels and helped him get established; many residents of the village still work at the tourist site. At times, they helped authorities search for hikers lost in the desert, which they know intimately.

“Now, he has a permit to stay, and we are in court,” Al-Hawamsha added, stressing that Al-Bqea’ah’s residents do not want to leave. “If they want to move us again, they should move us back to the land we came from.”

Holding Onto the Land

Sami Huraini grew up in Al-Tuwani, a village in Masafer Yatta just outside the firing zone, near a large settlement and its surrounding outposts. He was 3 years old when Israeli authorities began evicting people from the area. “When I was young, I was terrified of the army; I was kind of traumatized; when I saw the army was coming to the village, I would run,” he said. “They would come search our house, they would wake everybody up and encircle them in one place in the middle of the village and then they’d go and search all the houses.”

“They want to delete us from this land, delete our identity from this land.”

Huraini grew up in an activist family, although merely choosing not to heed to pressure to abandon one’s home is an act of resistance in this area. “As I grew up, I understood the situation, and I understood that I don’t have to run; I need to stand on the land and defend this land,” he said. “They want to delete us from this land, delete our identity from this land.”

Al-Tuwani, a smattering of homes constantly under construction — even as authorities frequently demolish them — has in recent years become a hub for global solidarity with the residents of Masafer Yatta. The village is home to international and Israeli activists whose presence offers a measure of protection against violence by settlers and the army, even as the activists have increasingly been targeted for attacks as well. “The international presence is very important for documentation purposes, the army is a little more quiet when there are internationals than when it’s Palestinians alone,” noted Huraini.

Last fall, his father was attacked and severely injured by settlers, but when the army came, they stopped his relatives from taking his father to an ambulance and arrested him instead. The older Huraini spent 10 days in jail and was only released because a 20-minute video filmed by an international activist left no doubt about the dynamics of the incident. International pressure, Huraini added, has helped stave off the demolition and eviction of other communities, such as Khan al-Ahmar . That community, a group of Bedouin villages in the central West Bank, was slated for forcible eviction a few years ago, but it remains in place largely thanks to widespread international condemnation of the Israeli plans.

Still, Huraini noted, the reliance on international support is not sustainable. During the pandemic, when Israel imposed severe travel restrictions, the residents of Masafer Yatta were left to fend for themselves. “Settler violence was crazy during the pandemic,” he said.

In 2021, the army arrested Huraini, who had begun organizing regular Friday protests, and accused him of assaulting a soldier. The IDF spokesperson said that a verdict in the case is pending. Meanwhile, every Friday morning, Huraini has to turn himself in to the military, who hold him until the afternoon. “The main goal was to stop the protests and the organizing,” he said. “They thought that by putting me in prison and giving me these charges they could stop my work and my activism.”

But Huraini and others here live by the principle of sumud , an Arabic word that translates as “steadfastness” and that has long been a cultural pillar of Palestinian resistance.

“Police and army and settlers are all working hand by hand to evict us from our land,” he said. “But despite this, we need to continue to live our life here. Despite this court decision, we have no other place to go, and we’ll remain and struggle here. Even if the eviction happens, we’ll go back, because this is our land. We’ll continue to live in our land. At some point, this is going to end.”

Many Palestinians in Masafer Yatta refer to the notion of sumud . In Khalet a-Daba’, a small village inside the firing zone that is home to more than 90 people, half of them children, Jaber Dababsi described the daily harassment residents are subjected to. In the last couple years, the village, which is powered by solar panels provided by NGOs and reliant on a network of water cisterns, saw much of its infrastructure demolished. When residents planted 12,000 trees, the army destroyed their water system, killing the plants. Soldiers also cut 500 olive trees that they claimed were planted on “state land.” Once, the military held a drill so close to the village that a large bullet pierced the roof of Dababsi’s home. The drill, with helicopters flying by the village, causing a large dust storm, “didn’t feel like real training,” he said. “It felt a little bit staged, like they were doing it for the purpose of harassment, intimidation.”

Older children in the village go to school in Al-Tuwani and often face settler intimidation on their way there. When residents built a school in Khalet a-Daba’ for the younger kids, the civil administration shut it down. The younger children began to take classes in the home of Dababsi’s brother, so the army came and demolished it. In total, he said, the army demolished his and his brother’s homes five times. Many people from the area, he added, started moving into caves: traditional dwellings in this part of the West Bank that locals are now returning to in order to avoid the constant demolitions.

“It’s not life,” said Dababsi, noting that the recent court decision only adds to the instability so many families have already faced for years. “The civil administration has a plan for us, we don’t know what it is. They can come here and shoot us and force us to leave, but this will be the only way that we will go: if they kill us.”

Clowns and Cactuses

On a cold, sunny afternoon, earlier this year, a handful of Palestinian farmers — surrounded by twice as many children and a group of British, German, and Israeli activists — unloaded dozens of cactus plants wrapped in black plastic and distributed them across a patch of shrubby land where they would plant them for their animals to graze on. The Palestinians were residents of Jawia, in Masafer Yatta. This was their land, but it had become increasingly dangerous for them to go there alone.

Just before I arrived, a group of soldiers had come to the field and loaded half the cactuses into their jeep. The activists on the scene said the army left without taking the remaining cactuses after there seemed to be a disagreement between soldiers about what justification to cite for taking them.

As the group returned to work with the remaining plants, a few men watched with binoculars from a jeep parked on a hill. The Palestinians and international activists drank coffee and an Israeli woman dressed as a clown in army uniform helped the children take the cactuses to their planting spots. The men on the hill were in plainclothes and appeared to be settlers, but on the road atop the hill, a line of soldiers in uniform also monitored the scene. Standoffs like these, the Palestinians in the field told me, would sometimes last hours and other times erupt into violence. The presence of international activists reduced the risk of being attacked while farming their lands.

The farmers knew that if the remaining cactuses were not planted, they would be stolen by the settlers. If they were planted, there was still a chance the settlers would come and rip them out of the ground. But today, the Palestinians would plant the cactuses and hold onto their land.

The post As Israelis Protest Mounting Authoritarianism, Apartheid Regime Over Palestinians Goes Unchallenged appeared first on The Intercept .

T he young woman with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.

“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable ,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.

The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.

“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”

But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

The work of Rogers, or “Chelsie,” is a direct offshoot of the FBI’s summer of 2020 investigation in Denver , where Mickey Windecker, a paid FBI informant, drove a silver hearse, rose to a leadership role in the racial justice movement, and encouraged activists to become violent. Windecker provided information to the FBI about an activist who attended demonstrations in both Denver and Colorado Springs, prompting federal agents to launch a new investigation in the smaller Colorado city. I tell the story of Windecker and his FBI work, as well as the investigation in Colorado Springs, in “ Alphabet Boys ,” a 10-episode documentary podcast from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts.

As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.

Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes , including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.

To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation , a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.

The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.

For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.

This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”

The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.

“Nowhere Is Safe”

The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey , who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.

On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.

“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”

“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”

They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.

Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted : “Nowhere is safe.”

Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.

A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.

“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”

The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.

“Boot to the Face”

Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.

“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”

Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”

As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.

“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”

And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.

Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”

As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.

“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”

The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.

“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.

Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.

“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”

A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.

Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”

Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.

Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.

“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.

Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.

“I Never Saw Any Grenades”

Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.

One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.

Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.

Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”

Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.

Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.

Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”

But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.

Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.

Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.

“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.

The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”

That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.

“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”

In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.

“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”

Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.

“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.

Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.

The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.

“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”

Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.

Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously , you know?”

Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.

“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”

In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.

During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.

The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.

“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.

“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.

“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.

“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.

“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”

“I respectfully decline to answer.”

“People have become more cautious, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.

“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.

Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.

The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.

Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.

Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

“Something Went Boom”

A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.

Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.

As with the killer in the Pulse attack , the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich . They closed that inquiry less than a month later.

As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.

“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”

Eleanor Knight contributed research.

The post The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes appeared first on The Intercept .

Na manhã de terça-feira, 14, a Meta fez um anúncio. Em seu blog, a empresa confirmou : dez mil funcionários serão demitidos ao longo dos próximos meses. A empresa ainda vai congelar a contratação em cinco mil vagas que estão abertas. O texto foi enviado aos funcionários da companhia por Mark Zuckerberg e diz que as medidas serão tomadas para que a Meta, dona do Facebook, Instagram e WhatsApp, se torne “uma empresa de tecnologia melhor” e melhore seu “desempenho financeiro em um ambiente difícil”.

A demissão em massa anunciada não é a primeira da companhia, e o aviso chega aos funcionários pouco mais de quatro meses após a Meta mandar embora 11 mil pessoas – 13% da força de trabalho total, à época –, em um movimento que começou no fim de 2022 e ainda não mostra sinais de estar terminando.

A era das demissões em massa em empresas de tecnologia – responsáveis por contratar pessoas consideradas as melhores cabeças do mundo em escritórios modernos e cheios de benefícios – começou no ano passado, e é um choque de realidade em um setor que se aproveitou como ninguém de vender promessas e especulação.

A era das demissões começou pelos Estados Unidos no ano passado. Em todo o ano de 2022, o mercado de tecnologia do país demitiu 161 mil pessoas. Agora, só em janeiro e fevereiro de 2023, já foram 119 mil, segundo levantamento do Layoffs.fyi, um site colaborativo que mapeia informações de demissões em massa, checa a veracidade e compila os números em uma planilha aberta ao público.

Estão lá demissões como a da Meta e da Amazon, que demitiu dez mil pessoas de uma vez, mas também de startups menores e até alguns dados sobre o Brasil. Roger Lee, criador da plataforma, não esperava que suas informações, utilizadas por veículos como a Bloomberg e o Wall Street Journal, servissem à comunidade. “Eu criei o Layoffs.fyi para alertar sobre as demissões nas empresas de tecnologia e ajudar os funcionários demitidos a encontrar uma nova empresa”, falou ao Intercept . “Acontece que o site também se tornou um recurso útil para a comunidade de tecnologia em geral”.

Lee não foi o único a ter essa ideia. O Layoffs Brasil usa o mesmo sistema de planilhas e contabilizou milhares de demissões nos últimos meses no país. Até o começo de março, cerca de três mil pessoas enviaram suas próprias informações, como gênero e nível de senioridade, aos criadores da plataforma. Com os dados, a equipe analisou que, na maioria dos setores demitidos pelas empresas, as mulheres são as mais afetadas. Dos 17 setores compilados pela equipe, mulheres são mais de 50% das demissões .

O Intercept conversou com 107 brasileiros afetados por demissões em massa entre o segundo semestre de 2022 e fevereiro de 2023. No Brasil, conversamos com funcionários e ex-funcionários do Enjoei, OLX, Buser, XP, C6, WillBank, Kavak, AmBev, Pier, Alice, Quinto Andar, Arco Educação, Wildlife Studios, Afterverse, CESAR, Sensedia, Digital House, IdWall, iCarros, Domestika, ClickSign, Toptal e Yahoo Brasil, além de colaboradores da Meta, Google e Twitter.

Foram ouvidos estagiários, funcionários plenos e funcionários seniores, de cargos altos ou gerência, principalmente no Brasil. Para manter a segurança das pessoas que contaram suas histórias, que têm medo de ficar mal vistas no mercado de trabalho, além de sofrerem represálias legais, os nomes e os cargos, assim como informações específicas sobre o trabalho, serão mantidos em sigilo caso permitam a identificação da fonte.

Mova-se rápido e quebre coisas

No último aviso, a Meta deu a notícia do corte primeiro aos funcionários, depois ao público. Mas, quatro meses antes, não foi por Zuckerberg que os funcionários em todo o mundo souberam que seus empregos estavam em risco. Naquela quarta-feira, 9 de novembro de 2022, eles estavam em alerta. Depois de dois dias de silêncio total pelos diretores e RH, funcionários da empresa no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos começaram a receber e-mails informando seu desligamento. Por aqui, os cortes começaram às 8h da manhã. O passo-a-passo seguiu exatamente o que o jornal americano Wall Street Journal disse, três dias antes, que aconteceria.

No domingo, 6 de novembro de 2022, o veículo havia publicado uma reportagem rica em detalhes afirmando que haveria uma demissão em massa no Facebook. A precisão da publicação levou funcionários brasileiros a se perguntarem se a fonte para as informações não seria apenas interna, mas também oficial – ou seja, o próprio Facebook. “Não é normal você dar pitacos com esse nível de detalhe”, disse ao Intercept Pedro , um dos ex-funcionários demitidos no Brasil. E a postura da Meta ajudou a colocar uma pulga atrás da orelha. “Nesses dois dias, a gente ficou esperando algum comunicado, algo como ‘gente, estão rolando algumas fofocas, não acreditem em nada de fora da Meta’, mas eles ficaram caladinhos”, completou o funcionário.

O Facebook não costuma ser uma empresa que demite seus funcionários. Aos trabalhadores, inclusive, Mark Zuckerberg havia dito em um on-hands – reunião em que os diretores da empresa passam comunicados e respondem perguntas dos colaboradores – que a empresa se tornaria mais enxuta com o congelamento de contratações e diminuindo seu quadro de funcionários organicamente, com demissões pontuais por desempenho.

‘Oi, hoje é meu primeiro dia de licença-paternidade e chegou um e-mail dizendo que estou demitido’

Pedro havia sido recrutado de outra empresa para o Facebook e trabalhava lá há pouco tempo. Segundo ele, seu time desempenhava bem e constantemente batia metas – por isso, pensou, estavam todos salvos. Não estavam. Às 8h05, ele largou seu treino às pressas e correu para o computador. Uma mensagem recebida por um colega, dizendo ter sido demitido, o colocou em alerta. Ele passou alguns minutos atualizando seu e-mail até uma nova mensagem aparecer.

“Uma atualização importante para a organização” era o assunto do e-mail enviado por Zuckerberg para todos os funcionários. A empresa confirmou as informações do Wall Street Journal e descreveu os benefícios que ofereceria aos demitidos, o “severance package” . Comum nos Estados Unidos, em que leis trabalhistas são escassas, o severance é um pacote de benefícios que podem incluir salários extras e planos de saúde estendidos. Este e-mail, padrão para todos, foi um aviso – os funcionários efetivamente demitidos receberiam uma segunda mensagem. Ela não demorou a chegar.

Neste segundo e-mail, houve quem fosse demitido imediatamente, mas também quem recebesse um ambíguo texto dizendo que nada aconteceria enquanto não voltassem a trabalhar – este, enviado especificamente para quem estava em algum tipo de licença, incluindo as de maternidade e paternidade. No Brasil, não é comum empresas demitirem funcionários afastados. No caso de demissão de uma mulher grávida, por exemplo, a empresa deve pagar salários referentes aos meses restantes de gestação e mais cinco salários referentes à estabilidade no emprego garantida pela licença-maternidade. O mais comum, então, é esperar o retorno do funcionário, que não estará mais resguardado pela estabilidade garantida pela CLT, e realizar a demissão. Foi exatamente isso que a Meta fez, segundo os funcionários que ouvimos.

Nos Estados Unidos foi ainda pior. “Horas antes das demissões, entrei em um grupo de WhatsApp dos funcionários dos Estados Unidos e passei o dia acompanhando as mensagens”, contou Pedro. “É de chorar. ‘Oi, hoje é meu primeiro dia de licença-paternidade [na Meta, o período de licença-maternidade e licença-paternidade é igual] e chegou um e-mail dizendo que estou demitido’. ‘Oi, estou grávida de três meses’. ‘Oi, estou grávida de seis meses’. ‘Oi, eu estou em licença-maternidade’. Lá não tem CLT, mas a Meta não era uma empresa melhor?”.

Nenhum funcionário recebeu uma justificativa definitiva para a sua demissão, e o cenário depois dos e-mails foi definido como uma “cena de massacre”, segundo Juliana , outra funcionária da Meta no Brasil. “A gente tem um sistema que é como um Facebook interno, e íamos atualizando para ver o organograma. Parecia aquela série Round 6, em que as pessoas desaparecem”, ela disse. Logo após os e-mails, todos os acessos eram cortados. Segundo o comunicado de Zuckerberg, essa decisão foi tomada para evitar o acesso dos ex-funcionários a informações sensíveis.

Funcionários ouvidos relataram pressão – o termo usado por um deles é “leve ameaça” – pela assinatura dos papéis.

Depois do e-mail de demissão, os funcionários receberam os documentos de encerramento de contrato de trabalho para assinatura. No meio deles, estava o severance package. Zuckerberg prometeu 16 semanas de salário aos funcionários, além de duas semanas adicionais por cada ano trabalhado. Também incluía o plano oferecido a extensão do plano de saúde por seis meses. No Brasil, as promessas não foram inteiramente cumpridas, segundo os funcionários.

As informações eram referentes ao aplicado nos Estados Unidos. Apesar de Zuckerberg dizer em seu comunicado que localmente as condições seriam equivalentes, o que foi oferecido aos funcionários brasileiros passou longe. Com FGTS, multa de 40% e rescisão a pagar, valores que a Meta não arcaria nos Estados Unidos, a empresa possivelmente apenas complementou o valor restante entre o prometido e o que era direito dos funcionários. Apesar desta ser a conclusão a que chegaram os dois funcionários ouvidos, não existem informações oficiais sobre a discrepância no cálculo. A extensão do plano de saúde também foi adaptada ao contexto brasileiro. Em vez dos seis meses prometidos, os funcionários daqui receberam apenas três, segundo me contaram.

O bônus estava atrelado à assinatura de um documento, ao qual o Intercept teve acesso. Ao assinar, o ex-funcionário concordava com os valores oferecidos pela Meta como complemento aos benefícios legais, mas também concordava em não processar a empresa e que manteria sigilo sobre os termos de sua demissão. Ao não assinar, o ex-funcionário receberia apenas o valor determinado por lei. A empresa definiu um prazo para a devolução do documento assinado, e ambos os funcionários ouvidos relataram pressão – o termo usado por um deles é “leve ameaça” – pela assinatura dos papéis.

Insatisfeitos com o não-cumprimento do que Zuckerberg alardeou, ex-funcionários reclamaram com o RH, mas tudo o que conseguiram foi igualar o tempo de duração do plano de saúde com o odontológico.“É como se os países que não são os Estados Unidos fossem uma segunda classe”, desabafou um deles.

Pressão de investidores

Inspirado na demissão da Meta, o TCI, um fundo de investimentos da Alphabet, controladora do Google, pediu a Sundar Pichai , CEO da gigante, a redução no número de funcionários da empresa. Com a desculpa de alteração de prioridades, o Google atendeu o pedido e demitiu cerca de 12 mil funcionários. O anúncio ocorreu no fim de janeiro, mas as demissões no Brasil só aconteceram em 10 de fevereiro. Nesse meio tempo, os funcionários foram largados à própria sorte.

“Estamos vivendo momentos de extrema tensão até que as decisões sejam tomadas”, me disse Antônio , funcionário do Google, dois dias antes das demissões acontecerem. “Para uma empresa que sempre se pautou no bem-estar e na saúde mental de seus funcionários, sabemos de muitos que estão passando por momentos de ansiedade generalizada e pânico”. Não ficou claro aos funcionários, nem mesmo nas justificativas das demissões, como a empresa chegou ao número de pessoas que seriam demitidas em cada equipe e em cada país.

Os desligamentos aconteceram na manhã de uma sexta-feira. Mais de 60 pessoas foram mandadas embora de uma vez, cerca de 4% dos funcionários no Brasil. Segundo Antônio, não era possível saber quem foi demitido ou não. Para tentar descobrir, os funcionários se organizaram em uma força-tarefa para enviar mensagens uns aos outros em chats internos, coordenando a ação pelo WhatsApp. Os que não recebessem as mensagens estariam sem acesso ao sistema, logo demitidos.

‘A competição por funcionários talentosos na indústria da tecnologia diminuiu significativamente, o que permite que a Alphabet reduza a remuneração por funcionário.’

Os funcionários desligados apenas receberam um e-mail em seu endereço de e-mail pessoal, pois haviam perdido acesso às ferramentas de trabalho. O funcionário que falou conosco não foi demitido, mas se compadeceu pelos seus companheiros de trabalho, inclusive de seu próprio time, que foram dispensados. “Foi frio e impessoal”, ele resumiu.

No mesmo dia em que anunciou as demissões, Pichai recebeu outra correspondência do TCI. Nela, o fundo diz estar animado em ver que o Google “agora está tomando algumas medidas para dimensionar corretamente a base de custos”, mas que “a administração precisará ir além”. Apesar de elogiar o movimento, o TCI acredita que mais 20% do número total de funcionários deveria ser cortado: “a decisão de cortar 12 mil postos de trabalho é um passo na direção certa, mas não reverte nem o fortíssimo crescimento no quadro de funcionários de 2022”. O fundo sugere que o Google retorne ao contingente de funcionários que possuía no fim de 2021.

A carta do TCI aproveita a oportunidade para reforçar que demitir não é o suficiente – é necessário também que o Google reduza a média salarial. “A competição por funcionários talentosos na indústria da tecnologia diminuiu significativamente”, a carta diz, “o que permite que a Alphabet reduza a remuneração por funcionário”.

“Eles mesmos criaram esse mercado, onde sempre contrataram os melhores dos melhores, via processos seletivos de infinitas entrevistas onde avaliam tudo”, afirma Antônio. “A cobrança também é alta, com processos rigorosos de performance duas vezes ao ano e muita, muita pressão para você atingir a meta. Logo, os salários oferecidos eram uma retribuição não só por isso, mas para manter talentos fora da concorrência”. “Por que cortar pessoas e não benefícios?”, ele questionou.

Procurado, o Google não respondeu nossas perguntas e se limitou a enviar o link do comunicado feito pelo CEO da empresa em 20 de janeiro, quando as demissões foram anunciadas, intitulado “uma difícil decisão para nos preparar para o futuro”.

Primeiro dos gigantes a inaugurar a onda de demissões em massa, o Twitter impactou severamente seus funcionários logo após a venda da empresa, em outubro de 2022. Elon Musk prometeu aos investidores que demitiria 75% dos funcionários da rede social, segundo informações reveladas pelo jornal americano The Washington Post . Uma semana depois ele voltou atrás, e decidiu que demitiria apenas metade dos funcionários.

Os impactos da compra são sentidos pelos usuários da plataforma, que virou um ambiente de experimentação das vontades do bilionário. O Twitter passou por instabilidades técnicas, perdeu funções básicas e de segurança, como autenticação por duas etapas por SMS, e tenta empurrar goela abaixo dos usuários uma versão paga que garante um selinho azul de verificação ao lado do nome – um prato cheio para golpistas e disseminadores de notícias falsas.

Após efetivada a compra, não levou uma semana para que os funcionários perdessem seus trabalhos. Ouvimos Bruna , ex-funcionária do escritório brasileiro, sobre o ocorrido.

Pequena em relação aos demais escritórios, a sede em São Paulo estava ciente que demissões aconteceriam, mas não tinha certeza se seria afetada. Nas palavras da funcionária, ela achou que o momento seria “mais de se compadecer pelos outros”. Até que às 17h de quinta-feira, 3 de novembro, um aviso chegou por e-mail. A mensagem dizia que no dia seguinte todos os funcionários receberiam um comunicado às 10h. Se o e-mail chegasse no endereço de trabalho, nada havia acontecido. Se o recebimento fosse no e-mail pessoal do funcionário, ele estava sendo demitido. Ela não precisou esperar até a manhã de sexta-feira para saber que estava fora.

Demorou uma semana até o RH entrar em contato e confirmar sua demissão.

Ainda na quinta-feira, trabalhando até mais tarde, o e-mail dela se desconectou automaticamente enquanto escrevia uma mensagem. Pelo celular também não era possível acessar. Ao tentar entrar na ferramenta de mensagens de trabalho, o acesso também falhou. Ela avisou sua equipe, e todos os funcionários começaram a checar seus acessos. Antes mesmo do anúncio oficial, quem havia sido demitido já sabia. Às 10h o e-mail de demissão chegou em seu e-mail pessoal, mas não haviam informações além do que ela já sabia. Demorou uma semana até o RH entrar em contato e confirmar sua demissão.

No mesmo dia em que as demissões aconteceram, Elon Musk anunciou, em um tuíte, que os funcionários impactados pela demissão no Twitter receberiam um “severance package” de três meses de salário. O pacote de benefícios também incluiria as ações da empresa que os funcionários tinham direito e a extensão do plano de saúde ou um valor em dinheiro correspondente. A funcionária que ouvimos afirma não ter recebido nada além do que é garantido pela lei trabalhista brasileira. Reportagem publicada em janeiro de 2023 na revista americana Wired aponta que , nos Estados Unidos, os funcionários também ficaram com as mãos abanando.

Tirando o coletinho da empresa

“Aqui sempre teve a cultura de que se vira sócio. Aquela coisa mente de dono, sabe? A XP é provavelmente uma das empresas com essa cultura mais forte”. Foi assim que Fernando , funcionário da XP, corretora de investimentos brasileira, descreveu a cultura organizacional da empresa para o Intercept. Ele segue empregado, mas acompanhou as demissões em massa que a empresa vem promovendo desde novembro de 2022.

A XP elevou o conceito de “vestir a camisa da empresa” ao sentido literal, e é famosa por seus coletinhos pretos com o logo branco e com a bandeira do Brasil. Na hora da demissão, porém, não bastou vestir o colete da empresa.

Entre os demitidos, conta Fernando, havia pessoas com alta performance e até funcionários-sócios, que possuem participações na empresa pelo seu desempenho. “Demitiram pessoas que estavam apostando e dando o sangue para chegar a ser sócios para manter o lucro dos lá de cima”, ele analisa. Outro funcionário que ouvimos concorda com a análise. Demitido em janeiro, ele afirma ter recebido uma avaliação positiva do seu chefe, inclusive com prospecção de uma promoção, apenas horas antes de ser mandado embora com a justificativa de “corte de custos e desalinhamento cultural”.

Outro funcionário ouvido pelo Intercept cogita que as demissões podem ter começado por quem ganhava muito acima da faixa de salário de seus cargos, mesmo que isso vá contra o discurso da empresa de que “só depende de você”. Independente de qual seja o real motivo, como é comum em empresas que refletem a Faria Lima, o discurso meritocrático da XP só existe enquanto não afeta os lucros.

‘A gente ficava tenso se na outra semana seríamos um dos desligados.’

Depois de iniciadas as demissões, ainda segundo o funcionário, o CEO da companhia, Thiago Maffra, teria dito em uma reunião geral com os funcionários que “cada um deveria trabalhar por dois” e que quem não estivesse disposto a isso não teria lugar na empresa. “Era normal começar a trabalhar às 9h e parar 19h30, 20h todos os dias. E o bônus não era nada transparente, então ninguém sabia se o bônus de alta performance era realmente maior do que se você só fizesse sua carga de trabalho normal”, disse um dos funcionários demitidos. Segundo ele, os empregados costumavam trabalhar até durante as férias, com a anuência do RH da empresa.

Além do discurso de Maffra, os times também teriam passado a ser pressionados a buscar mais redução de custo nas operações. “Não tem nenhuma fala explícita dizendo que se não reduzirmos custos será reduzido em pessoas, mas esse é o entendimento que todos estamos tendo”, um dos funcionários relata.

Segundo ele, em vez de fazer uma grande demissão, a empresa fez levas de demissões menores, que chamaram menos atenção. Isso fez com que o clima no escritório ficasse tenso, relatou o funcionário entrevistado. “Como aconteceram várias ondas, a gente ficava tenso se na outra semana seríamos um dos desligados. O sentimento parece ser de que pausaram as demissões, já foi o que tinha que ir, mas que podem ocorrer mais se as metas de redução de custos não forem batidas ao longo do ano”, disse.

Do encantamento ao corte

De acordo com o levantamento do Layoffs Brasil, 647 empresas foram responsáveis pelas demissões no Brasil, e as áreas com mais demissões foram em fintechs , edtechs , foodtechs , healthtechs e e-commerce . Os nomes, popularizados em inglês, na verdade se referem a setores amplamente conhecidos pela população: bancos, escolas, empresas de delivery, planos de saúde e lojas, respectivamente.

Os trabalhadores de tecnologia demitidos, portanto, não são necessariamente programadores ou funcionários de TI. Há atendentes, analistas, redatores, designers, vendedores, publicitários. A tecnologia usada para designar os trabalhadores não diz respeito aos funcionários, mas às empresas.

Para Túlio Custódio, doutor em sociologia que analisa o trabalho freelancer na indústria criativa, essa fusão entre os funcionários e o mercado acontece pela necessidade das empresas, hoje, de se autoidentificarem como tecnológicas por usarem tecnologia, não por a fornecerem. Ele chama isso de “solucionismo tecnológico”, “a ideia de que você consegue resolver todos os problemas da sociedade a partir de uma evolução ou uma inovação tecnológica, baseada em um caráter de investimento privado”, em suas palavras.

‘As big techs, pelo seu caráter, são empresas voltadas para o crescimento do capital, e não do trabalho.’

Para Custódio, o discurso de solucionismo tecnológico cria uma expectativa ao redor dessas empresas. “A forma como elas trabalham sua imagem é muito consoante com a ideia de liberdade, de autonomia, que é de fato algo que as pessoas têm cada vez mais demandado”, ele diz. “Essas big techs, pelo seu caráter, são empresas voltadas para o crescimento do capital, e não do trabalho. Isso significa que todas as decisões de negócio, inclusive a forma como elas empregam trabalho, sempre tem esse caráter móvel. É preciso impulsionar determinada ferramenta, determinada coisa? Contrata um monte de gente. É preciso reduzir? A primeira coisa que se enxerga é exatamente os profissionais, porque o trabalho nesse espaço não é um investimento, ele é um custo”, analisou.

A situação é ainda mais agravada no Brasil, inserido na estrutura do capitalismo periférico. Isso, o sociólogo observa, aprofunda as lacunas entre o que os trabalhadores esperam viver e o que de fato viverão. Grandes empresas de tecnologia, como Meta, Google e Twitter, não concentram suas tomadas de decisão no Brasil, mesmo que as decisões sejam sobre a atuação da empresa no país. Foi assim com as demissões: nas três empresas, não apenas as ordens de demissão, como também os nomes de quem seria demitido, vieram das matrizes, nos Estados Unidos.

Os funcionários, contratados aos montes para garantir a expansão que as empresas de tecnologia conquistaram durante a pandemia, são agora dispensados para as empresas reorganizarem o fluxo de dinheiro. Mas os caixas não estão exatamente no vermelho. “No início do ano passado, as demissões estavam concentradas em startups menores que precisavam cortar custos emergencialmente. Hoje, após o aumento na taxa de juros dos Estados Unidos – que subiu de 0,25% em março de 2020, no início da pandemia, para 4,75% em fevereiro de 2023 –, até mesmo empresas bem consolidadas recorreram às demissões por verem declínio na demanda, em seus ganhos e no preço de suas ações”, diz Roger Lee, do Layoffs.fyi.

Em 15 de novembro de 2022, o memorando do fundo de investimentos TCI para a Alphabet afirmava, por exemplo, que no terceiro trimestre de 2022, o último com dados consolidados na data em que a mensagem foi enviada, o lucro da companhia havia crescido 6%. Mas, para os investidores era pouco, já que o grupo estava crescendo em um ritmo anual de 23%. “Big techs são empresas que nascem de um capital de investimento e atendem, portanto, a interesses muito específicos de acionistas”, afirma Custódio.

Enviamos perguntas sobre as demissões para Meta e XP, que não retornaram até o fechamento da reportagem. Também contatamos a sede do Twitter, que não possui mais uma equipe de comunicação no Brasil, e não fomos respondidos.

The post Demissões na Meta, Twitter, Google, XP e empresas de tecnologia têm ‘leve ameaça’, cortes durante licença e bônus menor para brasileiros appeared first on The Intercept .

A construção de um megaempreendimento de energia eólica ameaça soterrar sítios arqueológicos pré-históricos, secar nascentes de rios e devastar áreas de vegetação preservada entre o sertão da Paraíba e do Rio Grande do Norte – além de expulsar populações quilombolas e de agricultores familiares descendentes de indígenas ali estabelecidos.

Batizado de Complexo Eólico Pedra Lavrada, o projeto prevê a instalação de 372 aerogeradores, em aproximadamente 1,6 mil hectares, numa região conhecida como Seridó. Atualmente, o empreendimento aguarda a emissão da licença pela Superintendência de Administração do Meio Ambiente da Paraíba, onde tramita o processo, para iniciar as obras. O prazo estimado para conclusão da implantação do projeto é de 26 meses, a partir da obtenção da licença.

A empresa responsável é a Ventos de São Cleófas Energias Renováveis, um braço da Casa dos Ventos – gigante brasileira do setor, com 35% de capital da multinacional de combustíveis francesa TotalEnergies.

Oito cidades do Seridó fazem parte do projeto. No Rio Grande do Norte: Currais Novos, Acari, Carnaúba dos Dantas e Parelhas; e, na Paraíba, Pedra Lavrada, Nova Palmeira, Picuí e Frei Martinho.

As torres e acessos, quando instalados, vão ficar bem próximos de um conjunto de 40 sítios arqueológicos, visto como um dos principais patrimônios histórico-culturais do país, segundo o historiador e arqueólogo Joadson Vagner Silva, que já prestou consultoria para outros projetos eólicos. São lugares de vestígios únicos no mundo, com a presença de pinturas e gravuras rupestres em grutas, fragmentos de rochas lascadas utilizadas como ferramentas, restos de fogueiras e sepultamentos de populações ancestrais que ali viviam. Um dos restos ósseos mais antigos é de uma criança e remonta a aproximadamente 9,4 mil anos, de acordo com pesquisadores que fizeram as escavações no local.

Uma análise dos bens arqueológicos indica que, naquele território, houve densas populações indígenas nômades, divididas em pequenos grupos que viviam com base na caça e na coleta de frutos e plantas silvestres.

“O modo de vida deles era baseado em acampamentos e um dos principais vestígios deixados por eles são fogueiras, muito presentes aqui. A mais antiga identificada tem 3.600 anos. Isso tudo está em risco agora. O que causa estranheza é que a empresa não identificou nenhum desses vestígios”, afirmou Silva.

Ele faz parte de um grupo de 49 membros da sociedade civil que se uniram para tentar barrar o projeto como foi apresentado. Eles redigiram uma nota técnica, enviada ao Ministério Público Federal, às promotorias estaduais, a órgãos do governo dos dois estados envolvidos e a institutos como o Iphan e o Incra na qual apontam uma série de falhas e inconsistências no estudo e no relatório de impacto ambiental apresentados pela Ventos de São Cleófas.

‘O que nos preocupa é a proximidade do empreendimento com essas áreas. O patrimônio arqueológico é um testemunho, uma página de um livro da história de toda a população brasileira’.

Uma das inconsistências diz respeito justamente à falta de identificação dos sítios, especialmente das fogueiras, todas ignoradas pela empresa no primeiro estudo apresentado. No relatório de avaliação de impacto entregue ao Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, o Iphan, a companhia cita apenas a Cachoeira do Pedro, um dos 40 sítios arqueológicos do local. E, nessa única indicação, a distância entre o sítio e a área diretamente afetada pelo empreendimento está errada. A empresa indica que a localidade fica a 1,2 quilômetro do parque, quando fica bem mais próximo, a 290 metros, de acordo com os pesquisadores do Seridó Vivo.

“O que nos preocupa é a proximidade do empreendimento com essas áreas. O patrimônio arqueológico é um testemunho, uma página de um livro da história de toda a população brasileira”, defendeu Silva.

Outros sítios ignorados pela empresa ficam ainda mais próximos da área afetada, como o Casa de Pedra e o Sítio Pote, respectivamente a 40 metros e 60 metros da área onde serão instalados os aerogeradores. Há ainda um conjunto de 20 sítios pré-coloniais, que circundam os riachos do Bojo e Olho d’Água, por onde se pretende abrir uma estrada exclusiva para a operação do parque eólico. O sítio Casa Santa, por exemplo, um dos mais importantes da região, está situado a 530 metros de uma área reservada para três torres de produção de energia, segundo o arqueólogo Silva.

Próximos a essas localidades está o cemitério das Cruzes, um lugar de peregrinação no qual foram sepultadas vítimas de uma epidemia de cólera, no fim do século 19. E vizinho a ele, a 650 metros do complexo eólico, está o sítio Pedra do Alexandre, um cemitério indígena pré-histórico com registros de enterramentos feitos ao longo de 8 mil anos. Os possíveis danos a esses locais também estão ausentes no estudo de impacto elaborado pela Ventos de São Cleófas.

Os sepultamentos indígenas, comuns em todo o Seridó, rememoram um grande massacre cometido entre os séculos 17 e 18, que ficou conhecido como Guerra dos Bárbaros. Os pesquisadores julgam ser um dos episódios de resistência nativa contra a invasão portuguesa, com um fim comum à história de colonização no país: a escravização e a consequente dizimação das populações indígenas.

“Esse patrimônio arqueológico é o testemunho da grandeza de todos esses povos originários que existiam na área e deve ser visto com respeito e consideração a essas populações”, explicou Silva.

O arqueólogo se diz bem preocupado com as as grandes explosões necessárias para a abertura das estradas e das covas onde serão construídas as bases dos aerogeradores, equipamentos com 105 metros de altura por 150 metros de diâmetro, cada um.

“Nos estudos de impacto ambiental e na audiência pública não foi mencionada a autorização para os explosivos. Mas as explosões, em áreas montanhosas com rocha, são imprescindíveis em um empreendimento dessa envergadura”, alertou o arqueólogo.

Procurada, a Casa dos Ventos disse que não há risco de soterramento de bens arqueológicos , “visto que o projeto está sendo concebido a uma distância segura dos sítios identificados, o que será ratificado tempestivamente dentro do trâmite do licenciamento arqueológico junto ao Iphan”.

Afirmou ainda que as atividades de detonação e movimentação de terra serão assistidas por programas ambientais seguindo “as melhores práticas da engenharia”. Questionada sobre a ausência dos sítios no relatório, a Casa dos Ventos informou que trata-se de um “arranjo preliminar” seguindo “a legislação vigente para esta etapa de análise”. A empresa reforçou que não identificou nenhum sítio na área diretamente afetada pelo projeto e que novos estudos serão feitos posteriormente com assistência do Iphan.

Patrimônio natural

A s serras buscadas pelo empreendimento contradizem o senso comum sobre a Caatinga, de que por lá só existem terra seca e pequenos arbustos retorcidos. O trecho de interesse da Ventos de São Cleófas é predominantemente úmido, esverdeado e possui um ecossistema rico em plantas e animais em risco de extinção.

Nesse local, a empresa planeja desmatar 1.477 hectares de vegetação nativa. A supressão vegetal nessa área para instalação do parque eólico pode decretar a morte da biodiversidade, transformando essa faixa preservada em deserto.
“A grande preocupação é que a Caatinga acabe desaparecendo”, explicou o biólogo Damião de Oliveira, mestre em Ecologia pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, e também integrante do projeto Seridó Vivo.

Embora a preservação vegetal conserve a umidade nas serras, o Seridó está no semiárido brasileiro e, naturalmente, sofre com a falta de chuvas. A média pluviométrica da região é de no máximo 600 milímetros ao ano – para fins de comparação, é a mesma quantidade de água registrada em três dias durante a trágica tempestade no litoral norte de São Paulo, no fim de fevereiro, de acordo com o Centro de Pesquisas Meteorológicas e Climáticas Aplicadas à Agricultura da Unicamp.

Grandes empreendimentos, como o Complexo Pedra Lavrada, demandam muita água local para a construção das estruturas dos aerogeradores e das estradas. Para suprir a falta de chuva, a Ventos de São Cleófas sugeriu a perfuração generalizada de poços artesianos. O problema é que a água subterrânea é um bem raro na região, já que, além da estiagem, a estrutura rochosa do Seridó naturalmente dificulta a infiltração da água no solo.

’A história dessas pessoas está inscrita nos territórios. Se você tira o território, não tem mais história, não tem mais memória, não tem mais marcas’.

Além do risco de secar os rios, existe a possibilidade de contaminar a água com o óleo que cai dos aerogeradores e do maquinário, conforme a própria empresa prevê no estudo ambiental. O documento indica que o projeto terá interferência direta em 16 cursos d’água que abastecem a bacia do rio Piranhas-Açu, a principal fonte hídrica das comunidades ali instaladas.

O parque também ameaça o movimento de aves que migram para a região nos períodos chuvosos em busca de refúgio para fazer seus ninhos. Além disso, aves de rapina são comumente vítimas das pás dos aerogeradores em parques eólicos já em funcionamento.

Populações de morcegos também podem ser drasticamente afetadas com a chegada do complexo – tanto pelo risco de colisão quanto pela destruição do habitat. Sem eles, a engrenagem da Caatinga não gira.

“Os morcegos realizam uma parte significativa da polinização de muitas plantas do bioma. Quanto mais empreendimentos, mais impacto a essas populações. Isso pode levar a um colapso desse ecossistema”, afirmou o biólogo.

A Casa dos Ventos diz que realizou estudos suficientes para avaliação “de todos os impactos ambientais para o empreendimento”. A empresa afirmou que o estudo foi conduzido por mais de 30 profissionais, ao longo de três anos de trabalho, e que, por meio dele, foram propostos 31 programas ambientais e ações de para garantir a viabilidade do projeto.

Síndrome de turbina e ameaça aos quilombolas

À s margens da área prevista para o complexo eólico, estão comunidades quilombolas e de agricultores familiares com ascendência indígena, em ao menos seis dos oito municípios envolvidos no projeto. Muitas comunidades não são tituladas pelo Incra, embora sejam reconhecidas por si próprias e pela tradição oral que se manteve dos antepassados. De acordo com os pesquisadores do Seridó Vivo, muitas não foram consultadas adequadamente sobre o projeto, conforme prevê a Convenção 169 da Organização Internacional do Trabalho, a OIT.

“O relatório de impacto ambiental só conta as comunidades cadastradas no Incra. Como poucas comunidades são tituladas, eles não levam em conta quase nenhuma comunidade quilombola, nem os descendentes de indígenas. Eles tentam apagar que existem comunidades tradicionais que vão ser afetadas”, criticou a antropóloga Julie Antoinette Cavignac, professora da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande Norte.

Alguns aerogeradores estão projetados para ficar distantes 400 ou 500 metros das casas dos quilombolas, o que pode comprometer as estruturas dos imóveis e gerar distúrbios mentais relacionados ao constante barulho das hélices. O principal deles é conhecido pela comunidade científica como “síndrome da turbina”, que gera dores de cabeça, náuseas, raiva, ansiedade, insônia e falta de concentração.

Os efeitos, de acordo com Cavignac, tendem a expulsar gradualmente as populações tradicionais do território .“A história dessas pessoas está inscrita nos territórios. Se você tira o território, não tem mais história, não tem mais memória, não tem mais marcas”, analisou a antropóloga.

Uma das comunidades diretamente afetadas, não reconhecida pelo Incra, é a Comunidade Negra Serra do Abreu, onde a Ventos de São Cleófas planejou abrir uma estrada. Lá, atualmente, vivem 34 famílias.

Diana Barbosa dos Santos, presidente da Associação Comunidade Negra Serra do Abreu, contou que, há alguns anos, representantes da Casa dos Ventos começaram a visitar a comunidade e a apresentar o projeto eólico como se fossem mil maravilhas.

“Procuraram meu sogro diversas vezes para ele assinar documentos. Ele assinou vários papéis sem ler, porque o estudo dele é pouco. Diziam que iam pagar alguma coisa, mas nunca recebeu um centavo”, detalhou.

Para Maria das Neves Valentim, articuladora do Fórum Mudanças Climáticas do núcleo do Rio Grande do Norte, a possível repulsão das comunidades tradicionais é a continuidade de uma história de exploração e descaso no semiárido nordestino.
“A natureza desse projeto é a atualização, com a falácia da sustentabilidade, do velho colonialismo extrativista, como foi com a cana-de-açúcar. Ou seja, somos um quintalzão. Agora, nós somos uma fazenda para produzir energia”, comparou.

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