From his prison cell, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has expressed escalating criticism of Pakistan army chief Asim Munir’s drive to seize political power, according to multiple sources who remain in close touch with Khan.

The communications include new allegations about Khan’s history with Munir. According to those in touch with the imprisoned prime minister, Khan is making new allegations that Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

Imran Khan is making new allegations that Asim Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

The deposed prime minister also alleges that Munir conspired with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to cooperate against him in exchange for dropping corruption charges that had forced Sharif into exile.

The escalating personal conflict between Khan and Munir also looms large in the communications. Khan alleges that Munir ordered agents of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service to kill him and that the general covered up assassination attempts by squashing a police probe and burying CCTV footage.

The allegations from Khan about Munir come as the general has continued amassing political power and leading a brutal crackdown on rival political parties, activists, and the press in Pakistan.

The crackdown included the removal and imprisonment of Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician; violence and arrests targeting his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party; and a rigged election this February.

Khan’s fate remains the biggest unanswered question in the country’s politics, which the prison communiques suggest are driven by acrimony between him and Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists.”

With transnational repression reaching the U.S. — the military reportedly detained Pakistan-based family members of rivals living in the U.S. and Canada — the crackdown is drawing increasingly stronger condemnations from American officials.

Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., issued a video statement condemning the targeting of family members of Americans and called for sanctions to be placed on Pakistani military leaders including Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists,” Khanna said. “We all know the elections in Pakistan were rigged, and Imran Khan is still in jail. The United States needs to sanction Asim Munir and any military leader in Pakistan who is targeting Americans.”

Assassination Attempts

Khan’s allegations about Munir were shared with The Intercept by a number of sources close to him who requested anonymity to protect their security.

In the communications, Khan alleges the existence of CCTV footage and other evidence showing that Munir concocted a scheme to have Khan killed at a tumultuous court appearance on March 18, 2023.

Khan’s car was mobbed by spectators on the way to court, some of whom, Khan alleges, were Inter-Services Intelligence agents dressed in civilian clothes. The attempt on his life, Khan says, was only thwarted by a crowd of PTI supporters who surrounded his car.

Khan also offered his own narrative on a November 2022 incident when he was wounded in a shooting attack at a political rally that killed one of his supporters. The Pakistani government detained a single person for the attack, whom officials claimed had been motivated by religious extremism.

According to sources close to the former prime minister, Khan accused Munir of being behind a cover-up of the incident. The general, he claims, blocked an independent probe into the attack and that eyewitness accounts pointed to the involvement of multiple assailants.

Munir’s Political Plays

Pakistan has been held hostage to the political clash between Khan and Munir, with the former prime minister now imprisoned on charges widely seen as politicized.

Khan claims that Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including Sharif, the former prime minister, to spare them from corruption charges. In exchange, the politicians like Sharif supported jailing Khan and cracking down on his party.

Khan claims Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to spare them from corruption charges.

The crackdown — extrajudicial killings, torture, mass detentions, and other sweeping measures aimed at dismantling the PTI — has so far failed to dim Khan’s popularity. In elections this February, candidates affiliated with PTI won sweeping support, according to exit polls, before electoral rigging engineered by the military allowed a coalition government of Khan’s opposition to form.

Khan characterizes the events as a betrayal by Munir. In Khan’s telling, according to the sources close to him, the prime minister’s downfall was precipitated after Munir reneged on an agreement. Khan says that, as the then-prime minister, he had the power to block Munir’s ascension to the top military post in the country but allowed it to go forward after the general’s emissaries said he planned to stay out of politics.

Munir, like Pakistani military leaders before him, plays a prime role in the country’s political affairs.

Khan’s legal status remains in flux after serious corruption and espionage charges against him were thrown out in court. The former prime minister now remains imprisoned solely on charges that he improperly married his third wife in contravention of religious guidelines.

PTI meanwhile remains at odds with the military establishment, with halting attempts to mediate a resolution to Pakistan’s ongoing political standoff so far unsuccessful.

Deepening Crackdown — and Crises

Khan’s removal by his military and civilian rivals came in a 2022 no-confidence vote organized amid pressure from the U.S. over the prime minister’s foreign policy stances.

Since the removal, Pakistan has been wracked by overlapping economic and political crises that have paralyzed the nation of 200 million.

Even with Khan and PTI sidelined, the military continues its attempts to suppress speech. This year, the military blocked X and issued a statement denouncing “digital terrorism.” Government officials have also made reference to imposing a national firewall on the country’s internet.

Khan’s personal safety is widely believed to be in jeopardy by his supporters, including Pakistani Americans who recently lobbied for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to contact the Pakistani government about his safety.

In addition to blaming Munir for betraying his trust and attempting to engineer his murder, from prison Khan has repeatedly raised the specter that the general is leading the country toward a repeat of its traumatic 1971 partition — a stinging embarrassment for Pakistani nationalists.

The partition occurred following a military-led crackdown and massacre after an army rival won elections. The civil war spurred the secession of the eastern half of the country into the nation of Bangladesh.

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After an arduous legal fight, a Pakistani court on Monday acquitted former Prime Minister Imran Khan on charges related to his handling of a confidential intelligence cable, known within the Pakistani government as a cypher.

Khan’s acquittal by the Islamabad High Court is a major victory for the former prime minister and his supporters, coming on the heels of a suspended sentence in a separate corruption case.

The ruling leaves Khan behind bars on precisely one charge: namely, that he and his third wife Bushra Bibi entered into an “un-Islamic marriage,” a crime for which Khan and Bibi are serving seven-year sentences. 

The court, both during the hearing and in its ruling, dove into the details of Bibi’s menstrual cycle, ultimately rejecting her claim that three cycles had passed between her divorce and her marriage to Khan. Instead, the court relied on the word of her ex-husband.

Asked by The Intercept at a briefing, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said the case and its merits were none of the United States’ business.

“We’ve addressed the question of Imran Khan many times,” Miller said. “The legal proceedings against him are something for the Pakistani courts to decide.”

Pressed on whether it was truly the case that Bibi’s menstrual cycles were a matter for the courts, Miller said that perhaps a Pakistani court will toss out this conviction just as they did the cypher case.

Former Pakistan PM Imran Khan is currently in prison on charges of an "un-Islamic marriage," because the court ruled his wife hadn't had enough menstrual cycles between her official divorce and her marriage to Khan.

I asked the State Department why it can sanction Georgia over… pic.twitter.com/UZTrph0WUG

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 3, 2024

The overturning of the so-called cypher case was a blow to the Pakistani government’s contention that Khan was a traitor to his country, and bolsters his supporters’ position that the charges against the imprisoned former prime minister are politically motivated.

Khan and his ex-Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly mishandling the secret document, including Khan’s alleged brandishing a paper copy of it at a political rally.

The cypher has long since been a central piece of drama in Pakistan’s political wrangling. Khan had claimed in several instances, even when still prime minister, that the cypher revealed U.S. involvement in his removal from power in a no-confidence vote in 2022. 

In 2023, the cypher was provided to The Intercept by a source in the Pakistani military. The document showed that during Khan’s time in office, U.S. State Department officials had threatened the then-Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. about damaged ties between the two countries if Khan remained in power. Shortly after the meeting, a vote of no-confidence in Parliament advanced, a move orchestrated by the powerful Pakistani military that succeeded in removing Khan from office.

Since then, Khan and his supporters have been in an escalating conflict with the military, which has led to widespread crackdowns, killings, and torture, as well as a ban on Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI. Khan himself was imprisoned on an array of charges. 

The State Department has remained muted on the crackdown on democracy in Pakistan, including after February elections marred by extensive and brazen fraud.

Despite Khan’s imprisonment and a general ban on his party, candidates associated with PTI did resoundingly well in the vote. Following exit polls that seemed to show PTI-affiliated politicians sailing to victory, official announcements began to pour in that the candidates were losing. Amid allegations of election rigging by the military at the regional level, a coalition of opposition parties took power and was quickly recognized by the U.S.

The charges against Khan have now almost all fallen apart, save for an allegation of legal impropriety in Khan’s marriage to Bibi. 

The court, in its ruling, writes that her ex-husband tried to prevent his then-wife from visiting Khan, saying he “tried to stop her by force and during which hard words and even abuses were also exchanged but of no avail.”

The court, in its ruling, also approvingly reproduced her ex-husband’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, noting that “complainant believes that sister of respondent No.02” — Khan’s wife — “who resides in UAE has strong connection with Jewish Lobby.”

Bibi’s ex-husband, according to the ruling, also complained he was denied his right of “rujuh” — which refers to a husband getting their wife back in the initial period after a divorce. “He pointed out that under the law and ‘Shariah,’ the complainant has a right to have ‘Rujuh’ to his wife,” the ruling says, “but he was deprived of such right by the respondents.”

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Some 20 American and British medical workers who had been unable to leave Gaza were evacuated from the European Hospital in Khan Younis on Friday, though three American members of medical missions refused to evacuate until Israel allows additional humanitarian workers to replace them. They remain at work, along with doctors and staff from separate medical missions, serving a population trapped in Gaza with no escape.

The missions, as is often the case, had been scheduled to last two weeks before a fresh group of aid workers would rotate in with new supplies. But after Israel seized and closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, nothing could get in or out, neither supplies nor people. 

“If all and only the Americans left at once, what would that say about us as a nation?”

Among the three Americans who refused to leave is Adam Hamawy, a New Jersey doctor and Army veteran who insisted on remaining behind to protect and serve his patients.

“There is a palpable gloom and foreboding that had set in at the hospital. The children and staff are asking for everyone by name. All the Americans and Brits left. That can’t be a good sign,” said Hamawy.

“A decision for some of us to stay was consistent with our American values. We came in as a team and we do not leave anyone behind. If all and only the Americans left at once, what would that say about us as a nation?”

While serving in the Iraq War, Hamawy was the doctor who treated now-Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., when her helicopter was shot down. Duckworth credits Hamawy for saving her life and put pressure on Israel and the State Department to find a way to free the medical workers.

Hamawy said that the mission staff had been put in an impossible position.

“Although we feel we are abandoning our patients we all understood that this was going to happen from day one,” he said, given the short-term nature of the mission. “We would have to turn over our patients to a fresh team. Unfortunately we have to leave this burden on our overworked, burnt out Palestinian colleagues. The three Americans that stayed behind opened the opportunity for three Brits to leave.”

Sixteen medical workers remain at the hospital, Hamawy said. That includes nationals of Egypt, Ireland, Australia, and Jordan — countries with less political sway than the United States. Other missions, some staffed with Americans, remain active elsewhere in Gaza.

The staff and patients fear that without Americans in the hospital to serve as political shields against the Israel Defense Forces, the hospital will be destroyed, as the IDF has done to every other hospital in Gaza.

“It was a grueling trip and very bitter departure,” said Monica Johnston, a nurse who initially held out against leaving without new aid worker replacements but eventually agreed to go. “The politics and injustice in it enrages me.” Johnston said the bombing around the hospital had ramped up in recent days.

Rotating in a new mission has taken on additional importance given the blockade of medical supplies, as each new mission arrives with their own supplies. “The refusal to allow in basic humanitarian aid,” said Hamawy, “is a failure of the international community.” 

Dr. Mosab Nasser, who led the FAJR Scientific mission to the hospital, took a more upbeat approach in a statement issued after he arrived safely in Jerusalem. “I am thrilled to announce that the FAJR team (comprising 12 Americans and 3 British nationals) has been successfully picked up by both the US and UK embassies from the KS crossing near Gaza,” Nasser wrote, going on to reference Hamawy and another volunteer. “The team will spend a day in Jerusalem before flying back to the US and UK on Sunday. Two of our FAJR volunteers have remained in Gaza, continuing their life-saving work. They will soon exit Gaza as part of the UN rotation of EMTs, in collaboration with the WHO.” (The third American to stay behind was part of a separate mission, as was Johnston, at the same hospital.)

“This achievement highlights the remarkable coordination FAJR Scientific has accomplished with international entities, including the Department of State, the US embassy in Jerusalem and Cairo, the UK embassy in Tel Aviv, the US embassy in Muscat, Oman, the WHO, OCHA, CLA, and others,” he went on. “Yes, we left Gaza, but Gaza has left an indelible mark on us, and it will remain with us forever. We promise we will be back again and very soon.”

The statement rankled some staff who stayed behind there and at other medical facilities. 

Dorotea Gucciardo, an aid worker in Rafah with the medical solidarity organization Glia Equal Care, said that the international focus on Western doctors risked obscuring the reason they are there: Israel’s ongoing occupation and assault on Gaza. “We have international organizations, we have national governments all working together to open the borders for this already privileged group of people,” she said. “Our main objective is not that we are stuck here and we need to get out. Our main objective is to ensure that the patients are being taken care of. I think that the focus should be put back onto once again the reason why these humanitarian workers are here to begin with, and that’s the occupation. And this ongoing siege and war against Gaza.”

“I’m hearing some international aid workers saying, ‘Oh, it can’t get worse than this,’” she said. “And yet, if we actually take a look at context and if we take a look at history, we see that it can get worse. It has gotten worse and it’s continuing to get worse. And so we can do the best that we can while we are here to support our Gazan hosts and our colleagues. But what we need is for this war to end. We need this siege to end, this blockade to end, the occupation to end, so that we can finally have aid too.”

Dr. Haleh Sheikholesami, an American physician from California also volunteering with Glia, said the situation put the perilous prospects of the Palestinians in stark relief: “You know that hopefully this will end and we can go home. But, unfortunately, the Gazans don’t have such predictions.”

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Upward of 20 American doctors are trapped in Gaza as a result of Israel’s post-invasion closure of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, according to sources with knowledge of the plight of two ill-fated medical missions.

Israel has blocked fuel, food, and water from entering Rafah for over a week, leading to severe dehydration among the general population, as well as among the doctors on mission.

Relatives of the doctors were told by the State Department that rescue efforts were underway, including through coordination with the United Nations and the Israel Defense Forces. Yet on Monday, the Israeli military fired on a United Nations vehicle that was traveling to the European Hospital in Khan Younis, near Rafah, killing a U.N. employee and injuring another.

A family member of one of the doctors stranded at the European Hospital said that he suspected the vehicle was part of the rescue mission, but was uncertain. “We are aware that a car that is similarly supposed to be their rescue passage was shot at and UN employees were killed and injured and we fear for their ability to have a safe passage and exit,” said the relative. “We are aware that there is active shelling around the hospital and that staff has been told to stay away from windows.”

The doctors are rationing water and at least one physician is in poor health and is on an IV drip to combat dehydration. The dire state of the medical mission underscores how difficult the conditions are for average Palestinians, who have spent seven months enduring the Israeli siege, whereas the medical mission arrived only recently. More than 1 million Palestinians are trapped in Rafah, which is at the southernmost end of the Gaza Strip. As Israel threatens a full-scale invasion of Rafah, Israeli troops entered the area last week and took over the crossing into Egypt.

The doctors are part of two medical missions, one of which was organized by FAJR Scientific, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear which organization set up the second mission.

“The people on the ground always said once y’all are gone and not allowed in, we’re gonna be destroyed like Al-Shifa,” said Dr. Mohammed Khaleel on Monday, referring to Gaza’s largest hospital, which Israel has repeatedly raided. Khaleel recently returned from the most recent mission organized by FAJR. “I guess we were all hoping that wouldn’t be allowed to happen.” Khaleel, who spoke about his experience in a recent Intercept podcast interview, has also been in touch with doctors on the current mission, and he said they remain optimistic they will get out this week.

The FAJR mission was told to leave its safe house, Khaleel said, because it was no longer considered safe.

The Intercept asked about the stranded doctors during the State Department’s daily briefing on Monday. “We’re aware of these reports of U.S. citizen doctors and medical professionals currently unable to leave Gaza,” said spokesperson Vedant Patel. “We don’t control this border crossing and this is an incredibly complex situation that has very serious implications for the safety and security of U.S. citizens. But we’re continuing to work around the clock with the government of Israel and with the government of Egypt to work on this issue.”

Patel added, “Rafah is a conduit for the safe departure of foreign nationals, which is why we continue to want to see it get opened as swiftly as possible.”

A trial evacuation will begin on Wednesday, a source with knowledge of it said, and if that goes well, further evacuations will be attempted.

Monica Johnston, a nurse at European Hospital, sends in this message pic.twitter.com/befyzRUe1n

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) May 13, 2024

Update: May 13, 2024, 3:37 p.m. ET
This article was updated to mention a plan to attempt evacuations from Rafah.

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A group of prominent international economists is applauding the recent move by Honduran President Xiomara Castro to push back against American crypto investors attempting to seize billions in public money from the Central American nation.

The crypto crew is exploiting a dispute mechanism nested inside the World Bank, created by an obscure provision of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Castro has deemed the forum, called the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, to be an illegitimate usurpation of Honduran sovereignty and has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID. The crypto crowd is crying foul.

The spectacular battle playing out in Honduras and inside global financial institutions blends the 19th-century American legacy of gunboat diplomacy and banana republicanism with a contemporary twist: The lead group of investors battling Honduras by exploiting international financial institutions is made up of a band of crypto-libertarians.

The fight presents an almost-impossible-to-believe scenario: A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

Since Castro took office in 2021, the World Bank’s ICSID has seen investors bring no fewer than 10 cases targeting her government. The largest case, brought by U.S. corporation Próspera Inc., seeks more than $10 billion in compensation, which would equal roughly a third of the country’s GDP. Próspera, rooted in the world of crypto finance, describes itself as a “platform [that] powers the development of new cities in special economic zones that maximize generalized prosperity and wealth creation.” A city the company set up in Honduras accepts bitcoin as official tender.

In an open letter published on Tuesday, the economists argued that Castro’s decision was a smart move. “We view the withdrawal as a critical defence of Honduran democracy and an important step toward its sustainable development,” reads the letter, which was organized by Progressive International, a left-leaning coalition.

“For decades, international arbitration courts like ICSID have allowed corporations to sue states and restrict their freedom to regulate in favour of consumers, workers and the environment. Since 1996, governments in Latin America alone have been forced to compensate foreign corporations over $30 billion, intimidating regulators away from raising minimum wages, protecting vulnerable ecosystems, and introducing climate protections, among other domestic policy priorities. We find scant economic evidence that mechanisms like ICSID stimulate meaningful foreign direct investment, in return.”

At issue are so-called ZEDEs created by previous governments of Honduras. The law that established ZEDEs — short for Zone for Employment and Economic Development — effectively carved out portions of Honduras and turned them over to American investors, who operate as effective sovereign governments. The ZEDEs could one day control 35 percent of Honduras’s territory, according to the United Nations, which has said that the zones raise human rights concerns.

It took enormous political muscle more than a decade ago to force the ZEDEs into law. They only became possible when Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a U.S.-backed coup in 2009.

After Zelaya was ousted, a new election brought in President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who quickly moved to undo Zelaya’s social reforms, attacking workers rights and reneging on land reform efforts. The Supreme Court struck down the first version of the ZEDEs law as unconstitutional, but after the constitution was amended and four new justices were added to the Supreme Court, the law stuck in 2013.

Lobo Sosa’s rise was fueled not just by U.S. support but also by narco-trafficker cash, according to U.S. prosecutors who convicted Tony Hernández, the brother of former President Juan Orlando Hernández, for trafficking “monumental” amounts of cocaine. Juan Orlando Hernández was Lobo Sosa’s successor and was himself convicted of drug trafficking earlier this month in a U.S. federal court. He was president of the National Congress, Honduras’s legislative body, from 2010 to 2013, and was a primary mover of the ZEDEs legislation. He also led the overnight takeover of the Supreme Court that enabled their implementation.

Prosecutors in the Tony Hernández case linked the brothers with Lobo Sosa in their sentencing memorandum. “Between 2004 and 2019, the defendant secured and distributed millions of dollars in drug-derived bribes to Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and other politicians associated with Honduras’s National Party,” prosecutors wrote.

So to put the ZEDEs in context: The radical “free market” intervention was only jammed into law as the result of a military coup and the stacking of the Supreme Court. The ZEDEs were then enacted and implemented for the benefit of U.S. investors by two narco-governors. On March 8, in celebrating the conviction of the former Honduran president who shepherded the law into being, and then oversaw its implementation, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Hernández — a man propped up throughout his tenure by his allies in the State Department — oversaw “a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity.”

Zelaya was overthrown ostensibly over his attempt to extend his presidency to what was deemed an unconstitutional second term. Yet Hernández breezily ran for reelection in 2017 and claimed victory amid an absurd amount of irregularities, all of them brushed aside by a supportive Trump administration. The years of chaos and violence led to a surge of migration toward the U.S. border.

The U.S. had no evident problem with that freewheeling narco-state while Hernandez was in office and remained useful, yet once Castro took power in a backlash to the U.S.-fueled corruption, the United States suddenly rediscovered its respect for the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts with U.S. investors.

Castro quickly and successfully moved to repeal the ZEDEs law in the face of intense bipartisan U.S. pressure to maintain them. The American response has been to repudiate the very idea of Honduran democracy and sovereignty, with investors using the World Bank’s ICSID to force the new Honduran government to respect the policies carried out by the former president now sitting behind federal bars.

Among the dozens of signatories to the Progressive International praising Castro’s decision to exit the arbitration court are prominent South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang; Chilean Gabriel Palma, of the “Palma Ratio of inequality”; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; British economist Ann Pettifor; and Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh.

Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, has been fighting the crypto crew for years and welcomed Castro’s move. “The Honduran people overwhelmingly opposed the ZEDE law, and when the Honduran legislature unanimously repealed this law, that should have been the end of the story,” she said. “This is just the latest example of corporations abusing this ISDS mechanism to challenge environmental, health, land use, and other public interest policies around the hemisphere. Honduras was wise to withdraw from the World Bank venue where many of these cases are brought as an important first step.”

In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up.

Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, came out against the effort by Próspera to exploit the dispute resolution system to undermine Honduran sovereignty. “In the case of Próspera,” they write, “a ZEDE located largely on the Honduran island of Roatán, investors have created a governing council where 44 percent of members are appointed by the private company and 22 percent are elected by landowners in a system where their number of votes is proportional to the size of their property.”

A conference Próspera held on Roatán last year signaled the company’s ethic. “Próspera aims to be the best jurisdiction for the crypto/web3 industry in the world, and we welcome the best ideas on how to achieve that with a sound legal framework,” said Chris Wilson of Próspera in publicity materials that described the confab as “specifically designed for legal hackers, crypto lawyers, jurisdictional polymaths, and businesses that want to create better laws to do business under.”

The company’s response to a request for comment on the letter from the economists was representative of the unusual corporate structure it has been able to implement. The company’s communications director told The Intercept that a response to our questions would be submitted by Jorge Colindres, representing the “Office of the Technical Secretary.”

Colindres’s email signature alludes to the public-private nature of the corporation, reading:

Jorge Constantino Colindres

Technical Secretary – Próspera ZEDE

Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico

República de Honduras

Manager – General Service Provider

Colindres responded as a government official. “Attached you will find my office’s statement on the unconstitutional withdrawal from ICSID by the Honduran government,” he said. His statement insisted:

Próspera ZEDE is [a] local government and special economic zone of the Republic of Honduras. It is governed by the Technical Secretary, a Honduran citizen by birth, appointed by the Government of Honduras and empowered by article 329 of the Honduran Constitution and the ZEDE Organic Law to oversee the implementation of new policies and rules designed to foster economic development, facilitate job creation, attract national and foreign direct investment, and safeguard the fundamental rights of the workers and residents of this special jurisdiction. National and foreign companies alike are bound to comply with Próspera ZEDE Rules, which are Honduran rules, as they have been adopted by a local government of Honduras with the legal blessing of the country’s Executive Power, National Congress, and Supreme Court of Justice.

Colindres claimed that the ZEDEs had resulted in more than $100 million in foreign investment so far, and that Castro had not gotten approval from the National Congress to withdraw from the World Bank’s dispute body. “We stand proud of our achievements in job creation and investment attraction, which run in stark contrast to the job killing policies of the national government, and we continue undeterred in our mission to transform the Honduran economy and catalyze prosperity through the oasis of economic freedom and rule of law that Próspera ZEDE offers to the Honduran people,” Colindres said.

Fernando Garcia, a presidential commissioner appointed by Castro to oppose the ZEDEs, said that while the Honduran Constitution requires the National Congress to ratify new international treaties, it does not require the executive branch to notify the legislature ahead of a withdrawal.

“The ICSID convention establishes the possibility of a sovereign state’s withdrawal from its convention,” Garcia told The Intercept. He added that the arbitration court has already legally accepted Honduras’s withdrawal, effective August. This does not, he said, “prevent those who have requested arbitration from proceeding in accordance.”

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Last year in Pakistan, a bystander happened to catch, on camera, police raiding the Sialkot home of Usman Dar. At the time, Dar was an opposition candidate representing former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party — which the military and its civilian allies were busy suppressing with abductions, raids, blackmail, and threats. Khan, a populist prime minister, was forced from office in 2022 under military pressure with the encouragement of the U.S. 

Through a window, video shows Pakistani police officials assaulting Dar’s elderly mother, Rehana Dar, in her bedroom. Dar’s brother, Umar Dar, was also picked up, though police only acknowledged he’d been arrested much later at a court hearing. When Usman Dar emerged from custody, he announced he was stepping down from the race and leaving the party — as many other PTI candidates have done under similar pressure. 

But then came a new wrinkle, a symbol of the refusal of Khan’s supporters to bow to the military-backed government. While the news was announced that Dar was withdrawing from the race, and with another son still missing, his mother went on television to say that she would be running instead. “Khawaja Asif,” Rehana Dar said in a video posted on social media directed to the army-backed political rival of her son, “You have achieved what you wanted by making my son step down at gunpoint, but my son has quit politics, not me. Now you will face me in politics.”

She was a political novice, an angry mother who represented the country’s frustration with its ruling elite. “Send me to jail or handcuff me. I will contest the general elections for sure,” she said while filing her nomination papers. Those papers were initially rejected — like they were for so many PTI candidates, and only PTI candidates — and she had to refile.

Nevertheless, she persisted. On Thursday night, election night, with her son Umar still in custody, she shocked the country. With 99 percent of precincts counted, she had beaten that lifetime politician, Khawaja Asif, with 131,615 to 82,615 votes. The loss by Asif, who was allied with Nawaz Sharif — the military-backed candidate whose victory Vox had called “almost a fait accompli” — was a blow to the army. 

Then came one more wrinkle — one that many in Pakistan expected, but which was still shocking. When the full results were announced, Dar’s total had been reduced by 31,434 votes, while Asif gained votes, and he was declared the winner. 

Across the country, similar reversals are flowing out from Pakistan’s election commission. As polling ended Thursday evening, early results shocked the establishment and even some dispirited supporters of Khan who had worried that Pakistani authorities had successfully done everything they could to manipulate the outcome. Those results suggested a landslide victory for ousted former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party even as Khan himself sits in prison, ineligible to run. 

But in several key races, results have suddenly swung toward the military-backed party, after hours of unexplained delays. In the NA-128 constituency, where the PTI-backed candidate is senior lawyer Salman Akram Raja, Raja was leading with 100,000 votes in 1,310 out of 1,320 polling stations. On Friday, he was trailing by 13,522 votes. But the publicly available totals from the polling stations did not add up with the results announced by the election commission. He took the case to high court, which granted him a stay and stopped the election commission from announcing the winner pending further investigation. Following his lead, multiple PTI candidates have announced that they will take their cases to court. Rehana Dar is one of them.

The problem now for the Pakistani army is that it seems to have been unprepared for the explosion of support for Khan’s candidates. Pakistani election laws explicitly state that the “returning officer shall compile provisional results on or before 2 a.m. the day immediately following the polling day.” But for thousands of polling stations across Pakistan, results were stopped and had not come in even 24 hours after polling ended. Across the country, candidates and their supporters have refused to leave polling locations without official documentation of the vote, leading to tense and violent confrontations.

At the same time, because every polling station is required to fill out and distribute something called a “Form 45,” which has the vote tally from that precinct, political parties and news networks had been able to tabulate official results. That’s how we know that Dar was so far ahead. Those Form 45s are officially aggregated at election headquarters, and a Form 47 is produced totaling all the numbers. Prior to the election, the military succeeded in replacing the election workers with state bureaucrats — a move that was blessed by the country’s Supreme Court only after two dissident justices were forced off the bench. Those workers and their fantastical Form 47s are now the focus of the country’s attention. 

The changes in the official counts also finally caught the attention of the State Department, which had secretly supported the nation’s military in its ouster of Khan in 2022. “We join credible international and local election observers in their assessment that these elections included undue restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly,” spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “We condemn electoral violence, restrictions on the exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including attacks on media workers, and restrictions on access to the Internet and telecommunication services, and are concerned about allegations of interference in the electoral process. Claims of interference or fraud should be fully investigated.” 

But it was the next line of Miller’s statement that gives Khan’s supporters hope that the theft of the election may not be inevitable. “The United States is prepared to work with the next Pakistani government, regardless of political party, to advance our shared interests,” Miller said. “We now look forward to timely, complete results that reflect the will of the Pakistani people.” Members of Congress have begun demanding the U.S. not recognize a new government without a thorough investigation of the fraud. Whether that clear mandate is listened to remains an open question. 

THREAD – Growing calls in US Congress for @StateDeptSpox to not recognize the results from Pakistan's election until the evidence of vote rigging is fully investigated and the clear will of the Pakistani people is respected:@HouseForeign Affairs Committee member @RepSusanWild: https://t.co/KKCAOWVO7L

— Just Foreign Policy (@justfp) February 9, 2024

Prior to the election, many observers had raised the alarm about potential fraud in the Pakistani elections. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International voiced concerns over the possibility of internet shutdown on election day. Those concerns turned out to be warranted; the Pakistani military did indeed shut down internet and mobile data for most of the day. When internet returned early on Friday in Pakistan, independent candidates across Pakistan seemed to have a clear majority in Parliament with 127 seats. Trailing far behind were the Pakistan Muslim League, or PMLN, headed by the former prime minister and military backed-candidate, Sharif; and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party, with 65 and 48 seats respectively.

The independent candidates are mostly members of PTI who were forced to run as independent in a court decision that was called “a huge blow to fundamental rights” in Pakistan. The move also deprived PTI of its electoral symbol — the cricket bat — and had the candidates run on randomly assigned symbols.

“PTI backed independents at this moment in the lead in NA, KPK & Punjab assemblies. This is unprecedented,” tweeted Mohammad Zubair, a former minister and member of the PMLN. “The unusual delay in the result announcement has made the process completely dubious leaving no moral authority for PMLN to rule.” 

On Friday, Sharif absurdly declared victory. From prison, so did Khan, with artificial intelligence being used to simulate his voice reading a statement. “By voting yesterday, you have set up the foundation for true freedom,” the “authorized AI voice” of Khan said, making reference to the “movement for true freedom” he has led since his ouster. “I had complete faith that you would go out to vote. Your massive turnout shocked everyone.”

Chairman Imran Khan's victory speech (AI version) after an unprecedented fightback from the nation that resulted in PTI’s landslide victory in General Elections 2024. pic.twitter.com/Z6GiLwCVCR

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) February 9, 2024

The post Historic Turnout in Pakistan Is Swamping the Military’s Effort to Rig the Election appeared first on The Intercept.

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As Pakistan prepares to determine its next government in a general election on Thursday, concerns are intensifying about electoral irregularities. A growing body of evidence points to election manipulation and political interference by the Pakistani military.

Pakistan was supposed to go to polls last year. The country’s constitution has five-year terms for both the national and provincial assemblies as well as for the post of the prime minister. When the former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government was toppled in a parliamentary coup backed by the Pakistani military and the U.S. State Department in 2022, it was only in its fourth year. 

Since then, the Pakistani military has ruled from the shadows, trying to delay the inevitable elections while at the same time trying to ensure that the massively popular Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, do not come back to power. 

Inside Pakistan, the media is completely muzzled. Outside Pakistan, the upcoming elections are being called the “least credible in the country’s history,” and “more like a coronation,” where the military is understood merely to be choosing a new civilian face for its rule. While the U.S. State Department has consistently said that it has not made a determination about the fairness of Pakistani elections, the events leading up to the elections have not gone unnoticed in Congress.

“Threats to free and fair elections anywhere is concerning. In light of recent events in Pakistan and the upcoming election, let’s be clear: promoting stability, democracy, and human rights around the globe is paramount to maintaining our values worldwide,” posted Republican Rep. Nathaniel Moran on Twitter. 

“There can’t be free and fair elections when one of the opposition parties has been criminalized,” posted Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, echoing Moran’s sentiments from across the political aisle.

There is no democracy or free and fair elections when you ban your opponents from participating.

We cannot continue to finance or condone the actions of the Pakistani government while it's actively undermining its democracy and criminalizing political opposition. https://t.co/OaOsknhbfF

— . (@RepSummerLee) February 6, 2024

The publicly visible instances of election rigging — visible, that is, to all but the Biden administration — are too numerous to articulate in a single article. What follows are the most egregious. 

Banning the Leading Party’s Symbol

On a Pakistani ballot paper, each political party has an electoral symbol. Candidates in each of Pakistan’s hundreds of constituencies have their party symbols next to their names, a critical guide for the substantial portion of the electorate that can’t read. PTI candidates were stopped from using their unified electoral symbol — a cricket bat — by the court, based on a technicality no other party was subjected to. This means each PTI candidate is assigned a random symbol and has to run an individual campaign. 

With the loss of its bat, PTI was converted from a formidable political party to a loose group of individuals with no legal affiliation overnight, effectively disenfranchising millions of citizens who placed their trust in PTI as a political entity. The move has been severely criticized as a “huge blow to fundamental rights” by the Pakistani legal fraternity and civil society.

The implications of this go even further. If, by some miracle, PTI candidates overcome all the obstacles and win a majority in the Parliament, the technically unaffiliated candidates would be missing key legal protections and could be vulnerable to bribes and coercion by the military. 

Shutting Down the Internet

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority is now chaired by a retired general. The chair of the PTA has the ability to shut down the whole country’s internet or specific websites on a moment’s notice. He has shut down social media and the internet every time Khan’s PTI held an election-related event online in the past few months, affecting more than 100 million users.

The Pakistani media has already expressed concerns that the internet might be shut down on election day to discourage people from voting. Lending credibility to those concerns, a top minister on Tuesday hinted at the possibility of an internet shutdown on election day, alarming human rights organizations including Amnesty International and prompting them to write an open letter and put out a statement. 

“Amnesty International, along with several other human rights organizations, call on Pakistani authorities to guarantee uninterrupted access to the internet and digital communication platforms for everyone across the country,” the statement read.

Banning and Jailing the Leading Candidate

The charges against ousted prime minister Khan range from incoherent to absurd. He was charged with “exposing state secrets” for publicly discussing the contents of the secret cable that The Intercept reported on last year. He was slapped with a seven-year sentence for what the Supreme Court said was an invalid marriage. And he got 14 years for supposedly keeping state gifts without filing the proper paperwork or compensating the state, though all evidence suggests that he did so.

Three major court decisions in quick succession just before the elections has been seen inside Pakistan as a message from the Pakistani military establishment. The message is intended not only for the voters, but also for the candidates, signaling the influence and control wielded by the military.

Hacking the Election Management System

Just two days ago, a local electoral official complained in a letter circulated to the Election Commission of Pakistan that key software used in managing elections was behaving oddly. In the letter, the official cites specific issues with the software and claims that data related to its staff was erased. “This weakness of system has created many issues and also raises question mark on the reliability and validity of the tool/software. This shows that either the [election management system] is [an] utter failure or there is a someone else [sic] that controls and manages the system behind the veil,” he wrote in the document leaked online. 

The election management system was built by the National Database and Registration Authority, a government department that is usually headed by a civilian but since last year has been run by a general in the military. NADRA is the primary custodian of all of Pakistan’s data — from population and demographic data to voter rolls — and is supposed to play a key role in conducting elections along with the Election Commission of Pakistan. As long as the Pakistani military has direct control of NADRA, it controls all the systems used to administer elections and transmit their results. 

Terrorist Violence

Last week, 10 PTI activists were killed in a bomb blast at an election rally in the Balochistan province. The same week, a PTI candidate and a senior leader were shot dead in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in separate incidents. In Karachi, a PTI candidate’s car was shot at. According to a statement from the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, there have been “no less than 24 reported instances” this year in which armed groups have attacked political parties in Pakistan ahead of the elections.

At least one of these deadly attacks was claimed by ISKP, the Afghan chapter of the Islamic State, which has never specifically targeted the PTI in the past.

Police Raids

When the elections were announced, there were several reports that unknown people and masked government officials were snatching the nomination papers of PTI candidates as soon as they would go to file them, thereby preventing them from filing to run before the deadline. Of the candidates who did manage to file, those who were not arrested faced frequent police raids on their homes. 

During one raid at a political candidate’s home, an American police officer who happened to be vacationing in Pakistan was also arrested. He was subsequently released following intervention by the U.S. Embassy. In another police raid on a political activist’s house, the activist’s father suffered a heart attack and died.

Virtually every notable PTI member’s house has been raided and ransacked. In addition, PTI rallies and meetings have also been violently shut down by the police and scores of workers have been arrested. In one constituency in northern Pakistan, there were reports of police shooting at a PTI rally. On Tuesday, the last day of campaigning, almost every PTI rally was attacked by police. In a video that went viral on social media, a PTI candidate, Zartaj Gul Wazir, is seen sitting on the road, crying, after a police attack on her rally. In other areas that have not been so violent, comical social media videos of police chasing PTI activists through the streets have emerged.

In PTI strongholds, there are even reports of police ticketing people in unusually high numbers and confiscating their identification cards, which won’t be returned until after the election, meaning that they will be unable to vote.

Abducting Candidates and Their Families

There are reports of PTI candidates being abducted by unknown men and returning home only after announcing their withdrawal from the race. Most notably, a female PTI candidate, Iffat Tahira Soomro, was abducted and forced to step down under duress. She was the second candidate in the constituency to step down. PTI has now pitched a third candidate for the same seat.

In another incident, a PTI candidate’s elderly father was picked up from his house to pressure him into leaving the party. After four days, the father died in police custody.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights deplored these incidents in their statement on Tuesday. “We are disturbed by the pattern of harassment, arrests and prolonged detentions of leaders of the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party and their supporters which has continued during the election period,” the statement read.

Voter Suppression

PTI has been counting on high voter turnout to counter the efforts to manipulate the elections. But by reducing the number of polling stations in key constituencies, the government is effectively suppressing votes in those areas. 

There are polling stations that used to have a few thousand voters assigned to them but will now have tens of thousands of voters. One polling station in Lahore that used to have only 8,000 constituents has ballooned to 29,000, including thousands of young and first-time voters from all over Lahore. In some constituencies in Karachi, so many people have been assigned to each polling station that with a 50 percent turnout (roughly the total turnout for the last election), each voter will get only one minute and 13 seconds to vote. 

Can PTI Still Win?

Despite the gloomy verdict, a sense of hope persists among many in Pakistan. Nothing illustrates this contradiction more than two women, Yasmin Rashid and Aliya Hamza Malik, who are contesting elections from jail. These two political prisoners, running their campaigns from incarceration and against all odds, have become symbolic figures representing resistance against military interference in Pakistani democracy.

“The brazen electoral rigging, persecution of political leaders, and sham court trials have substantially increased the stakes.”

“The election in Pakistan is going to be a referendum against the establishment – a local euphemism for Pakistan Army – and its associated partners,” says Hussain Nadim, an analyst and former policy specialist working with the Pakistani government. “This is why despite all efforts by the establishment otherwise, we can forecast a historic turnout in the elections. The brazen electoral rigging, persecution of political leaders, and sham court trials have substantially increased the stakes,” he added.

In the week leading up to the elections, Khan has been sentenced to a cumulative 31 years in prison. His political party confronts the imminent risk of outright prohibition, with his motley crew of candidates on the run, evading authorities, attempting to canvass for votes clandestinely (and even using artificial intelligence). 

Yet, PTI has resisted calls to boycott the election. The goal, they say, is to win in such dramatic and runaway fashion that even all of the above can’t steal it. 

The post 8 Flagrant Ways the U.S-Backed Government in Pakistan Is Subverting the Election appeared first on The Intercept.

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The Ukrainian military is experimenting with ibogaine, a psychedelic drug banned in the U.S. but often used to treat opioid use disorder elsewhere, to treat traumatic brain injury and promote battle readiness. 

To do so, it is partnering with a founder of the Yippie movement, Irvin Dana Beal, a longtime ibogaine advocate. Beal recently traveled to Ukraine to help launch the project. Oleksii Skyrtach, a Ukrainian military psychologist attached to the 57th Motor Infantry Brigade, provided Beal with a letter for immigration authorities to help him move through customs with the drug. 

Ibogaine’s most famous American patient may well be Hunter Biden, who has battled his own drug addiction with help from ibogaine treatment at a Mexican clinic. At low doses, Beal and researchers behind the project believe ibogaine can have salutary effects on TBI as well as help with battle readiness. “These guys need something for traumatic brain injury,” Beal said. “But nobody else is willing to fucking go into a war zone with ibogaine but me, apparently.”

Skyrtach agreed. “We really need as much Ibogaine as possible,” he said. “Even if the war ends now we’ll have too many ‘rambos’ to come back home from the frontline. It’ll be much more serious problem [than the] USA faced when thousands of veterans came home from the Vietnam war.”

Militaries since World War II have plied soldiers with amphetamines, with Nazi Germany relying heavily on the practice. Russian soldiers in the current war are known to rely on Captagon, a dirt-grade speed produced primarily in Syria. The benefits of amphetamines — the ability to remain alert while on watch duty or obtain some of the chemical courage helpful for combat — come with significant risks to the mental and physical health of soldiers, including addiction, paranoia, premature aging, and other complications.

A recent study on ibogaine and TBI published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine found positive results. Ibogaine, like marijuana, is a Schedule 1 drug in the United States, meaning the federal government bans it outright and considers it to have no therapeutic value. “This is possibly the first study to report evidence for a single treatment with a drug that can improve chronic disability related to repeated TBI from combat/blast exposures,” the authors of the Nature Medicine study wrote. “After [treatment], participants showed a remarkable reduction in these symptoms with large effect sizes … and the benefits were sustained at the 1-month follow-up.”

“Areas of improvement after treatment” included “processing speed and executive function, without any detrimental changes observed.” Cardiovascular risks, including heart attack, are a known potential side effect of high doses of ibogaine.

Beal, known as something of a godfather of the pro-pot movement, was a founder of the Youth International Party, known as the Yippies. He’s been interested in ibogaine as a treatment for opioid addiction since the 1970s, when he challenged Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern on live television on the role of the CIA in assisting heroin traffickers in Southeast Asia.

Rick Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the leading organization aimed at the advancement of the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, said MAPS helped raise funds to back the project bringing medical-grade ibogaine from Africa for Ukrainian military research. Doblin said that the use of MDMA, sometimes known as ecstasy, is banned in Ukraine even for research purposes, which left ibogaine as an intriguing alternative. High doses of ibogaine, the kind used for opioid treatment, put users into a dreamlike state of intense hallucinations — not ideal for combat, which explains why Beal’s project relies on microdoses. 

Beal said that veteran Jon Lubecky, who has made repeated humanitarian relief visits to Ukraine, also helped finance the project and made connections, including to the Ukrainian Psychedelic Research Association. Lubecky, legislative director for Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, confirmed his involvement. “As a combat Veteran of Iraq who suffered through 8 years of crippling PTSD, returning to a war zone, and having no effects, while seeing everyone around suffering as I once did, I knew something had to be done, and I could,” said Lubecky. 

MAPS is also pushing forward with an educational program around MDMA and post-traumatic stress disorder for Ukrainian therapists now in Poland as refugees, as well as with interested Polish therapists. The aim is to treat Ukrainians in Poland suffering from PTSD, with the goal of expanding the work to Ukraine if and when changes in the law allow it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering approving MDMA for therapeutic use and may rule as early as this summer.

Asked to describe the feeling of a microdose of ibogaine, Beal said it has a softer lift than speed. “Say you’re in the morning, and you’ve just done your first thing of the day successfully, you sit back, maybe with a cup of coffee,” Beal said. “On ibogaine, the extra feeling of satisfaction is ineffable. People have better ups, and that kind of reward is extremely important for keeping people’s morale up in a battlefield situation. Also, ibogaine is good for pattern recognition and coincidence detection. The NMDA receptor, which is the one for ketamine, which is also activated by ibogaine, is the coincidence detector and it up-regulates right-brain functioning, so that you have better pattern recognition, faster pattern recognition, get-out-of-the-way-of-the-incoming-shell kind of pattern recognition.” 

Skyrtach, in the letter he provided Beal, said that both battlefield burnout and TBI were areas the military hoped could be addressed by ibogaine. “On the initiative of Rick Doblin of the Multi-Disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, we have contracted with I. Dana Beal and Howard Lotsof’s Ibogaine Company IboGrow to supply Ukrainian veterans hospitals and the Ukrainian Army with pharmaceutical grade ibogaine both for traumatic brain injury and experimental micro-dose use for battlefield burnout and enhanced performance and survival,” he wrote in the letter to Ukrainian immigration authorities. Skyrtach confirmed the letter as authentic. “It is urgent that we find a battlefield energy supplement other than amphetamine (which promotes premature aging) that will instead act as neurotrophigen and rejuvenant.”

Ibogaine is derived from an African root, but, the letter adds, a synthetic version is being pursued: “The sample amounts Mr. Beal is bringing us are derived from Voacanga Africana, produced in Accra, Ghana; however Beal is also in talks with the Ukrainian company FarKoS to give Ukraine the process to make completely synthetic cGMP ibogaine in a production-sharing arrangement with his Israeli affiliate Ibogacine.”

Beal turned toward Ukraine after he ran into immigration problems in Mexico in December, when, he said, he was barred entry at the behest of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, citing his past criminal record related to cannabis. (DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Beal, who had flown to Mexico from Spain, was put back on a plane to Europe and made his way to Ukraine. After setting up the experimental project, he has been able to return to the United States. 

Beal noted the Russian use of Captagon and argued Ukrainians would be at an advantage. “We think what we’ll do is we’ll get our side to live longer,” he said. “It’ll be the Ukrainians on ibogaine versus the Russians on meth.”

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A crucial document from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, undermines a major plank in the high-profile prosecution of the country’s former prime minister, Imran Khan.

Khan remains behind bars while he faces trial for allegedly mishandling a secret document, known as a cypher, which the prosecution claims compromised the integrity of the encrypted communication system used by the state’s security apparatus. But according to an ISI analysis leaked to The Intercept, that claim is entirely false. Internally, the agency concluded that the leak of the text of a cypher could in no way compromise the integrity of the system, an assessment contrary to public claims made repeatedly by prosecutors.

The main charge against Khan relates to his handling of a diplomatic cable describing a key meeting in March 2022 between U.S. and Pakistani officials in Washington. Khan, while prime minister, had repeatedly alluded to the existence of a cypher that outlined U.S. pressure on Pakistan to remove him from power in a vote of no confidence. Though he never disclosed its full contents, at times, in public speeches, he quoted statements recorded in it from U.S. officials promising to reward Pakistan for his ouster. At one rally, Khan even waved what he said was the printed text of the document, without revealing its exact contents.

Prosecutors assert that Khan damaged Pakistani national security by exposing the text of this encrypted document, contents they say could potentially be used by rival intelligence agencies to crack the code of a wide range of other secret Pakistani communications. A criminal complaint against Khan alleges that he “compromised the entire cypher security system of the state and secret communication method of Pakistani missions abroad,” through his alleged mishandling of the cypher. The former prime minister faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act and could face the death penalty if charged with treason in the case.

On August 9, 2023, The Intercept published the text of the cypher outlining U.S. pressure against Pakistan to remove Khan. Shortly afterward, Pakistan’s own intelligence agency issued an assessment addressing the very question of how damaging publishing such a text would be.

The internal conclusion of the ISI was crystal clear: No threat to Pakistan’s encryption existed.

Pakistan did not respond to a request for comment.

On August 11, two days after The Intercept story was published, an internal request for information was sent to the ISI by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The question at hand: Does the revelation of the plain text of such a cypher compromise the integrity of the system’s encryption? The response, filed by the Inter-Services Intelligence Secretariat under the heading ISI-Policy Matters, and titled “Breach of Crypto Security,” determined that contrary to the present charges against Khan, revealing the text of a cypher poses no risk to the government’s encrypted communications network. “If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) … is leaked it has no effect on security of encryptor,” the analysis, which was filed on August 23, concludes. “Leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”

Concern about the security of an encryption system is not entirely unfounded. Some encryption systems can theoretically be compromised by what is known as a “plaintext attack,” in which an attacker has access to a copy of both the plain and encrypted versions of a document’s text and can use the two versions to determine the encryption system.

But the spy agency’s conclusion in the days following The Intercept’s publication of the secret cypher was that the disclosure of the short piece of text alone — without the encryption key — did not pose a risk.

“If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) using DTE is leaked, it has no effect on security of the encryptor due to following,” the analysis reads, referring to “an offline encryption device.”

“The encryption algorithm,” it goes on to explain, “is designed with an assumption that the plain/cipher text pairs and algorithms are known to the adversary, the security lies in the secrecy of the key. Therefore leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”

According to the agency’s own analysis, to launch a plaintext attack an adversary would need a minimum of 2²⁵⁶ bits of “plain/cipher text data encrypted with the same key” to figure it out. That would be an amount of text that exceeds not just the length of Khan’s diplomatic cable, but also the total amount of digital storage space available worldwide. In other words, there was never any risk whatsoever that publishing the contents of the cypher could allow an adversary to crack the state’s encryption system.

“Not Compromised”

The cypher published by The Intercept deals with a March 7, 2022, meeting between a senior State Department official, Donald Lu, and Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the U.S. The document describes a tense meeting in which State Department officials expressed their concerns about Khan’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and threatened that Pakistan could face isolation from the U.S. and European allies. According to the cable, Lu tells the Pakistani ambassador that “all will be forgiven” if Khan were removed from power by a vote of no confidence.

The day after the meeting described in the cypher, on March 8, 2022, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward a no-confidence vote against him — a vote largely seen as having been orchestrated by Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. A month later, Khan was ousted from power, time during which he tried to blow the whistle on U.S. involvement in his removal.

Khan had said that the meeting detailed in the cypher showed proof of a U.S.-led conspiracy against his government. The text of the document published in August 2023 by The Intercept broadly validated his account of that meeting, with portions of it matching word for word what little Khan had quoted from it. (The cypher was leaked to The Intercept by a source within Pakistan’s military, not by Khan.)

Khan, according to prosecutors, did not declassify the cypher document while in office, even as it had become a major part of his battle for political survival. At several points while he was in power, representatives of other branches of the government expressed opposition to declassifying the document, including at a critical March 30 cabinet meeting, arguing that revealing the text of the document would compromise Pakistan’s national security.

Khan’s former foreign secretary echoed these claims, saying that Khan’s government discussed revealing the full text to quiet critics who said he was fabricating the U.S. pressure, but had been informed that doing so might endanger Pakistan’s encrypted communication systems. A probe by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency this November into Khan’s handling of the document also cited a former aide to the prime minister, Azam Khan, who reportedly told investigators that he warned that the “cipher was a decoded secret document and its contents could neither be disclosed nor be discussed in public.”

The allegation that Khan undermined the cryptographic security now forms a major part of state security charges against the former prime minister, who remains Pakistan’s most popular politician. A conviction on the charges would likely prevent Khan from being able to contest future elections, including those expected early next year.

“Regime Change” Cypher

The scandal over the cypher and Khan’s claim that it described a “regime change” conspiracy has gripped Pakistan since his removal from power in 2022. In public statements, Khan had claimed that attempts had been made by foreign powers “to influence our foreign policy from abroad.” After his removal the U.S. subsequently assisted Pakistan in obtaining a generous IMF loan, while Pakistan began producing ammunition for the war in Ukraine. Khan had sought to keep Pakistan neutral in the conflict, a stance the State Department had angrily objected to in the meeting described in the cypher.

Following Khan’s removal, Pakistan has been gripped by a series of political, economic, and security crises. The country has experienced record-breaking inflation, social unrest, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan’s current army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, visited the U.S. last week to build ties with U.S. policymakers, even as the country continues to be nominally led by a civilian caretaker government.

Khan was arrested on August 5, 2023, after being sentenced to three years in prison over a politically dubious corruption case. That conviction was suspended by the High Court later that month, yet he has remained behind bars ever since thanks to subsequent charges made against him over his handling of the cypher.

Khan’s lawyers have criticized his jailing as illegal and unconstitutional. Legal proceedings against him have been mired in secrecy, legal irregularities, and accusations of abuse, including violations of his privacy while imprisoned. Khan’s trial has been under strict controls that have impeded media coverage. During his imprisonment, supporters of his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, continue to hold large rallies in the country despite attempts at government suppression.

After a long delay, Pakistan is expected to hold elections early next year, though Khan, who polls show would likely win a free vote, is unlikely to participate thanks to his compounding legal challenges. Prominent among these is the charge that Khan’s alleged mishandling of the cypher document risked compromising Pakistan’s encryption systems — notwithstanding the ISI’s own internal conclusion that no such risk existed.

While his state secrets trial continues, there is no public indication that the ISI has turned this exculpatory evidence over to Khan’s defense team.

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