A Nigerian airstrike this month on a village in the country’s northwest killed 33 people, according to four residents and a local traditional leader. It is the latest in a long-running series of attacks on civilians by the government of Nigeria, one of the United States’ closest allies in Africa and the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. weapons and military assistance.
The April 10 attack, the latest errant strike in a Nigerian counterterrorism campaign against militants and “bandits,” came as villagers prepared for Eid prayers marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
“The pattern of Nigeria’s military operations resulting in civilian casualties is deeply troubling.”
“Arriving at the scene, I saw children, men and women … were killed and trapped inside the collapsed buildings that were hit by a bomb,” Lawali Ango, the traditional leader of Dogon Daji village, told Reuters. (A Nigerian military spokesperson, Maj. Gen. Edward Buba, denied that civilians were killed in the April 10 strike.)
“The pattern of Nigeria’s military operations resulting in civilian casualties is deeply troubling,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “One of the biggest factors contributing to violent extremism is security sector violence against you or someone you know — so we’ll likely see the reverberations of this civilian harm for years to come unless there’s justice and accountability.”
Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid, including weapons and equipment sales, to Nigeria, according to report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. Over that time, the U.S. also carried out more than 41,000 training courses for Nigerian military personnel.
The U.S. has repeatedly raised the subject of civilian casualties with Nigeria’s government. Earlier this year, in the wake of an attack that killed more than 120 civilians, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly discussed the issue with Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu.
When pressed by The Intercept following Blinken’s visit on what actions the State Department would take if Nigeria’s military continued to kill civilians, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee said, at the time, “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.”
Since the April 10 attack that killed more than 30 civilians, requests for comment from or to speak with Phee, while acknowledged, have gone unanswered, and the State Department failed to respond to questions on the record.
“Of course, as we always do when we meet with our Nigerian partners, we talk about how to minimize harm to civilians,” Phee told The Intercept in January, asserting that the U.S. seeks “to support Nigeria’s wish to make sure that the country is safe and secure for all of its citizens.”
Since it ramped up its U.S.-backed counterterror campaign in 2017, however, Nigeria has regularly attacked its own people.
U.S. Weapons and Civilian Deaths
A January 17, 2017, airstrike on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria — revealed by The Intercept to involve the U.S. — killed more than 160 civilians and seriously wounded more than 120 people.
And a December 2023 strike killed more than 120 villagers celebrating Maulud, the birthday of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, according to Amnesty International.
A 2023 Reuters analysis of data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a U.S.-based armed violence monitoring group, found more than 2,600 people were killed in 248 airstrikes outside the most active war zones in Nigeria during the previous five years. Most victims were identified as “communal militia,” a catchall category that includes local self-defense forces, criminal gangs, and so-called bandits.
Nigeria’s government has frequently been accused of covering up civilian deaths, including running what a 2023 investigation by Nigeria’s Premium Times called “a systemic propaganda scheme to keep the atrocities of its troops under wraps.”
The State Department also approved a 2022 sale to Nigeria of nearly $1 billion in AH-1Z attack helicopters and supporting munitions and equipment.
Last year, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., and Jacobs, the California Democrat, called on the Biden administration to scuttle the nearly $1 billion attack helicopter deal.
“We write to express our concern with current U.S. policy on and military support to Nigeria,” the lawmakers said, urging “a review of security assistance and cooperation programs in Nigeria, including a risk assessment of civilian casualties and abuses.”
Jacobs remains opposed to the sale and called for a thorough investigation of the April 10 strike, stressing the need for justice for the victims and survivors. “But more than that,” she said, “I will continue to push the United States to prioritize human rights and accountability in its relationship with the Nigerian military.”
Burkina Faso’s military summarily executed more than 220 civilians, including at least 56 children, in two villages in late February, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
“We saw the bloody corpses riddled with bullets. We were able to save a 2-year-old child whose mother was killed shielding him with her body,” a 19-year-old witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept. “The attackers were soldiers from our own army. They arrived on motorbikes and in vehicles, and they were armed with Kalashnikovs and heavy weapons.”
“The attackers were soldiers from our own army. They arrived on motorbikes and in vehicles, and they were armed.”
The mass killings came as the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the West African Sahel crumbled, with U.S.-trained military officers launching a long string of coups, including in Burkina Faso itself. Despite the coups and massacres, the U.S. has not cut ties with Burkina Faso, and a contingent of U.S. personnel remain in-country to “engage” with the armed forces serving the ruling junta.
Burkinabè soldiers killed 44 people, including 20 children, in Nondin village, and 179 people, including 36 children and four pregnant women, in nearby Soro village in the north of the country on February 25, according to HRW. The mass killings are part of a long-running counterterrorism campaign aimed at civilians accused of collaborating with Islamist militants.
“The massacres in Nondin and Soro villages are just the latest mass killings of civilians by the Burkina Faso military in their counterinsurgency operations,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “The repeated failure of the Burkinabè authorities to prevent and investigate such atrocities underlines why international assistance is critical to support a credible investigation into abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity.”
The February massacres followed several attacks by Islamist militants which killed scores of soldiers and civilians, including an assault on a military base almost 15 miles from Nondin.
Witnesses in Nondin told HRW that a military convoy with over 100 Burkinabè soldiers arrived on motorbikes, pickup trucks, and armored cars about 30 minutes after a group of Islamist fighters on motorcycles passed near the village yelling “Allah Akbar!” The eyewitnesses said the soldiers went door to door, rounding up locals before gunning them down. Villagers said a similar sequence played out in Soro.
“Before the soldiers started shooting at us, they accused us of being complicit with the jihadists,” a 32-year-old survivor from Soro, who was shot in the leg, told HRW. “They showed no mercy. They shot at everything that moved, they killed men, women, and children alike,” said a 60-year-old farmer who witnessed the murders.
The Burkinabè Embassy in Washington did not respond to repeated requests from The Intercept to speak with the defense attaché or other officials.
The United States has assisted Burkina Faso with counterterrorism aid since the 2000s, providing funds, weapons, equipment, and American advisers, as well as deploying commandos on low-profile combat missions.
In 2018 and 2019, alone, the U.S. pumped a total of $100 million in “security cooperation” funding into Burkina Faso, making it one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in West Africa. U.S.-trained Burkinabè military officers have also repeatedly overthrown their government, in 2014, 2015, and 2022.
At the same time, militant Islamist violence skyrocketed. Across all of Africa, the State Department counted just 23 casualties from terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, combined. Burkina Faso alone suffered 7,762 fatalities from militant Islamist attacks last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. That represents an almost 34,000 percent spike.
In 2020, Simon Compaoré, who previously served as Burkina Faso’s interior minister and was then president of the ruling political party, admitted to me that the Burkinabè government was conducting targeted executions of terrorist suspects. “We’re doing this, but we’re not shouting it from the rooftops,” he said.
The democratically elected government of that time was overthrown in 2022 by the U.S.-trained Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who himself was ousted months later by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré. The extrajudicial killings continued.
“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by security forces,” reads the most recent U.S. State Department report on human rights in Burkina Faso, adding that “impunity for human rights abuses and corruption remained widespread.”
Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on three 2023 drone strikes by Burkina Faso’s government — targeting Islamist militants in crowded marketplaces and at a funeral — that killed at least 60 civilians and left dozens more injured.
U.S. Risking Complicity
The “Leahy laws” prohibit U.S. funding for foreign security forces implicated in gross violations of human rights. U.S. law also generally restricts countries from receiving military aid following military coups. The United States, however, has continued to provide training to Burkinabè forces, Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of Africa Command, or AFRICOM, told the House Armed Services Committee last year.
The U.S. provided millions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance to Burkina Faso in 2023, according to State Department data. Last month, a State Department press release touted the fact that the U.S. has given Burkina Faso “hundreds of millions of dollars in development and humanitarian assistance, as well as counterterrorism support to civilian security and law enforcement actors.”
Burkinabè soldiers also took part in Flintlock 2023, an annual exercise sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa. (Past Flintlock attendees, including Damiba, have overthrown the government.)
“The United States should stop all military cooperation with Burkina Faso, otherwise they risk becoming complicit in the abuses,” a civil society activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation, told The Intercept.
Last October, senior White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials told Traoré, now Burkinabè president, that working with Russia-linked Wagner Group mercenaries would irreparably damage his relationship with the U.S. In January, Russia’s Africa Corps — described by Russian officials as the successor to the Wagner Group following the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin — deployed troops to Burkina Faso to, according to their post on Telegram, protect Traoré and battle terrorists.
Even with the raft of atrocities, coups, and transgressions against the Russian red line, a small contingent of U.S. military personnel are nonetheless deployed to Burkina Faso to, according to AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, “engage and interact” with the Burkinabè military and “keep lines of communication and dialogue open.”
On March 1, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller called on the junta to conduct “complete investigations” of the massacres “with integrity and transparency and hold those responsible to account.” (The State Department failed to provide on-the-record responses to questions by The Intercept.)
The Burkinabè activist scoffed at the suggestion that the Burkinabè military could investigate itself and said that the junta would “erase” evidence of the massacres.
“The United States and the international community must demand concrete actions,” the activist told The Intercept. “Real repercussions are needed, such as sanctions against the perpetrators of the crimes, in order to deter them.”
Update: April 25, 2024 This story was republished after being removed following an inadvertent early publication.
The Biden Administration is “actively suppressing intelligence reports” about the state of U.S. military relations with Niger, according to a new report issued by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. U.S. military service members told Gaetz’s office that they can’t get medicine, mail, or other support from the Pentagon.
“The Biden Administration and the State Department are engaged in a massive cover-up,” Gaetz told The Intercept. “They are hiding the true conditions on the ground of U.S. diplomatic relations in Niger and are effectively abandoning our troops in that country with no help in sight.”
Last month, Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for Niger’s ruling junta, took to the national television network to denounce the United States and end the long-standing counterterrorism partnership between the two countries. Abdramane revoked his country’s agreement allowing U.S. troops and civilian Defense Department employees to operate in Niger, declaring that the security pact, in effect since 2012, violated Niger’s constitution.
The Pentagon has maintained in the month since that it is seeking clarification.
“The Biden Administration and the State Department are engaged in a massive cover-up.”
“The U.S. government continues to work to obtain clarification,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, told The Intercept on Thursday.
Gaetz’s report contends that the U.S. Embassy in Niger, under Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon, is “covering up the failure of their U.S. diplomatic efforts in Niger.” The report says the embassy is “dismissing or suppressing” intelligence from the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, or OSI, as well as Special Operations Command Africa.
“When our AFRICOM leaders look to us to provide atmospherics on the ground, they go to the Embassy first and hear a watered down or false story than what is being reported,” according to one service member quoted in the report. “I know of at least 3 reports from OSI about Nigerien sentiment that have been discredited by the Embassy and turned out to be 100% true.” (The State Department denied the allegations but did not provide a statement on the record.)
Gaetz said, “They are suppressing intelligence because they don’t want to acknowledge that their multibillion-dollar flop for Niger to be centerpiece of their Africa Strategy has been a complete and total failure.”
In interviews conducted by Gaetz’s office, U.S. service members currently serving in Niger said they are, as the report put it, “functionally stranded” in the increasingly hostile country. The military officials said they are prohibited from conducting missions or from returning home at the scheduled end of their deployments.
“No flights are authorized by Niger to enter or exit the country in support of DoD efforts or requirements,” reads the report which notes that mail, food, equipment, and medical supplies “are being prevented from reaching” Air Base 201, the large U.S. drone base in the town of Agadez, on the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert.
“Some diplomatic clearances for military flights have recently been denied or not responded to, which has forced extended deployments in some cases,” Langley said, in a statement to The Intercept.
Pentagon spokesperson Pete Nguyen told The Intercept that “sustainment” of U.S. personnel has continued through commercial means, and the Pentagon is in “discussions” with the junta “to approve clearances on our upcoming regularly scheduled flights.”
Military personnel said the blood bank at Air Base 201 is not being replenished, possibly jeopardizing troops in the event of a mass casualty situation.
Next month, critical medications will also run out for individual service members. U.S. personnel “have repeatedly reached out for assistance but their strategic higher headquarters such as AFRICOM routinely overlook their concerns and those of AB101’s higher chain of command, or simply do not provide relief or guidance,” reads the report, referring to Air Base 101, located at the main commercial airport in Niger’s capital, Niamey.
“The Biden administration needs to acknowledge that their plan in Niger has failed and they need to bring these troops home immediately,” Gaetz told The Intercept. “If there is no remedy between Niger and the United States before the end of the month, our troops will be in immediate danger.”
The United States shot down more drones and missiles than Israel did on Saturday night during Iran’s attack, The Intercept can report.
More than half of Iran’s weapons were destroyed by U.S. aircraft and missiles before they ever reached Israel. In fact, by commanding a multinational air defense operation and scrambling American fighter jets, this was a U.S. military triumph.
The extent of the U.S. military operation is unbeknownst to the American public, but the Pentagon coordinated a multination, regionwide defense extending from northern Iraq to the southern Persian Gulf on Saturday. During the operation, the U.S., U.K., France, and Jordan all shot down the majority of Iranian drones and missiles. In fact, where U.S. aircraft originated from has not been officially announced, an omission that has been repeated by the mainstream media. Additionally, the role of Saudi Arabia is unclear, both as a base for the United States and in terms of any actions by the Saudi military.
In calculating the size of Iran’s attack and the overwhelming role of the United States, U.S. military sources say that the preliminary estimate is that half of Iran’s weapons experienced technical failures of some sort.
“U.S. intelligence estimates that half of the weapons fired by Iran failed upon launch or in flight due to technical issues,” a U.S. Air Force senior officer told The Intercept. Of the remaining 160 or so, the U.S. shot down the majority, the officer said. The officer was granted anonymity to speak about sensitive operational matters.
Asked to comment on the United States shooting down half of Iran’s drones and missiles, the Israel Defense Forces and the White House National Security Council did not respond at the time of publication. The Pentagon referred The Intercept to U.S. Central Command, which pointed to a press release saying CENTCOM forces supported by U.S. European Command destroyers “successfully engaged and destroyed more than 80 one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicles (OWA UAV) and at least six ballistic missiles intended to strike Israel from Iran and Yemen.”
Israel says that more than 330 drones, low-flying cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles were launched by Iran, including some 30 Paveh-type cruise missiles, 180 or so Shahed drones, and 120 Emad intermediate-range ballistic missiles, as well as other types of weapons. All of the drones and cruise missiles were launched from Iranian territory, Israel says. Some additional missiles were also launched from inside Yemen, according to IDF data.
Most media reports say that none of the cruise missiles or drones ever entered Israeli airspace. According to a statement by IDF spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari, some 25 cruise missiles “were intercepted by IAF [Israeli Air Force] fighter jets outside the country’s borders,” most likely over Jordanian territory.
Israel’s statement that it shot down the majority of Iranian “cruise missiles” is probably an exaggeration. According to U.S. military sources and preliminary reporting, U.S. and allied aircraft shot down the majority of drones and cruise missiles. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the Royal Air Force Typhoons intercepted “a number” of Iranian weapons over Iraqi and Syrian airspace.
The Jordanian government has also hinted that its aircraft downed some Iranian weapons. “We will intercept every drone or missile that violates Jordan’s airspace to avert any danger. Anything posing a threat to Jordan and the security of Jordanians, we will confront it with all our capabilities and resources,” Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said during an interview on the Al-Mamlaka news channel.
French fighters also shot down some drones and possibly cruise missiles.
U.S. aircraft, however, shot down “more than” 80 Iranian weapons, according to U.S. military sources. President Joe Biden spoke with members of two F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft squadrons to “commend them for their exceptional airmanship and skill in defending Israel from an unprecedented aerial attack by Iran.” Two F-15 squadrons — the 494th Fighter Squadron based at Royal Air Force Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, and the 335th Fighter Squadron from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina — are forward deployed to the Middle East, at least half of the planes at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.
Two U.S. warships stationed in the Mediterranean — the USS Carney (DDG 64) and the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51) — shot down at least six ballistic missiles, the Pentagon says. The War Zone is reporting that those ships may have fired Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptors in combat for the first time. A U.S. Army Patriot surface-to-air missile battery in Erbil, Iraq, shot down at least one ballistic missile. Wreckage of an Iranian missile was also found outside Erbil, as well as in an open area outside the province of Najaf.
Iran’s attack marks the first time since 1991 that a nation state has attacked Israel directly. Contending with extremely long distances and utilizing scores of decoys and swarm tactics to attempt to overwhelm Middle East air defenses, Iran managed to hit two military targets on the ground in Israel, including Nevatim Air Base. According to the IDF, five missiles hit Nevatim Air Base and four hit another base. Despite the low number of munitions successfully landing, the dramatic spectacle of hundreds of rockets streaking across the night sky in Syria, Iraq, and Iran has left Tehran contented with its show of force.
Iran “has achieved all its goals, and in our view the operation has ended, and we do not intend to continue,” Iranian President Mohammad Bagheri said over the weekend. Still, he cautioned, “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger response.”
The U.S. coordinated the overall operation from the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where the overall commander was Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the air commander of CENTCOM. “We take whatever assets we have that are in theater … under our tactical control or in a direct support role across the joint force and the coalition, and we stitch them together so that we can synchronize the fires and effects when we get into that air defense fight,” Grynkewich told Air & Space Forces Magazine after the Iran attack. “We’re trying to stitch together partners in the region who share a perspective of a threat, share concern of the threats to stability in the region — which primarily emanate from Iran with a large number of ballistic missiles — and be in a position where we’re able to share information, share threat warning. And the ultimate goal is to get to a much deeper and fuller integration. We’ve made tremendous progress.”
In a call immediately following Iran’s attack, Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange” and warned of the “risks of escalation” — as if that hadn’t already happened.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets U.S. President Joe Biden upon his arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on Oct. 18, 2023.Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
The Israeli bombing of an Iranian consular office in Damascus on April 1 was the first salvo in a new phase of a regional conflict between the two countries. The attack, which killed several senior Iranian military officials, took the conflict from proxy warfare to direct confrontation.
On Saturday night, Iran launched its long-expected response to Israel, targeting the country with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles. The attacks, reportedly telegraphed in the days beforehand as part of backchannel negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, were mostly intercepted en route to Israel.
The first direct attack by a state military against Israel since Iraq’s Scud missile launches during 1991’s Gulf War, the Iranian salvo — slow, deliberate, and forewarned — appeared calculated not to escalate the situation. The same cannot be said of Israel’s strike against the Iranians in Syria.
While Israeli officials, not least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have sought to portray the Jewish state as the victims of an unprovoked Iranian attack, it was their own deadly strike on the Damascus consulate that triggered the new phase of the conflict. Though the U.S. created the conditions that may have encouraged Netanyahu’s gambit, it was reportedly Israel, acting on its own behalf, without coordination with its allies, that precipitated the latest grave escalation.
Even Israel’s patron and closest partner, the U.S., indicated it had not been involved or aware of planning for the consulate attack. Following this weekend’s Iranian response, which did very limited damage, the U.S. cautioned patience and encouraged Israel to see the barrage as an end to the current standoff.
The reciprocal blows between Israel and Iran have now pushed the Middle East into dangerously uncharted waters, at a time when many U.S. policymakers are seeking to leave the region and refocus attention on Europe and east Asia.
Despite reported pleading from the Biden administration to seek a diplomatic off-ramp, Israeli officials are promising an escalated response to Iran. They are threatening to target military sites inside Iran, as well as sites tied to the country’s nuclear program, a longtime Israeli obsession.
The Iranians have said continuing this cycle of strikes would trigger another reciprocal attack against Israel, far broader in scope and less likely to be coordinated with the U.S. or other regional powers to minimize damage. The result could be a full-scale war between two powerful states, including one whose security is all but politically guaranteed by the U.S. military. In that light, the prospect of the U.S. “pivoting to Asia,” or even recommitting fully to the defense of Ukraine would likely become farcical.
The potential handcuffing of U.S. policy has not gone unnoticed in Washington. A report by NBC News on the morning after Iran’s strikes quoted three individuals close to Joe Biden as saying that the president “privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag Washington into a broader conflict.”
President Joe Biden meets with members of his national security team on April 13, 2024, regarding the unfolding missile attacks on Israel from Iran, in the White House Situation Room in Washington, D.C.Photo: Adam Schultz/White House
Reaping What Is Sown
Despite Biden’s concerns, the U.S. is the one that created a moral hazard by encouraging Israel to act more recklessly. Israel’s decision to attack Iran’s consulate building, where it killed a number of top officials from the elite Quds Force, itself was unlikely to have happened without Netanyahu’s belief that he could count on U.S. support no matter what Israel does.
Who could blame him? There have been sudden U.S. shifts on the war in Gaza, and Biden apparently rejected further Israeli strikes against Iran, but American officials including the president have by and large struck a tone of total, unflinching support for Israel. Though this support has not always extended to Netanyahu himself, the strike against Damascus seemed to be a test of that distinction.
And the violent exchange with Iran also highlights a much wider chasm between the interests of the U.S. and Israel — and the countries’ leaders. The U.S. has material incentives to draw down its focus on the Middle East and does not want to fight another major war in the region, but for Israel and for Netanyahu personally, there are strong reasons to start a direct confrontation with Iran and its allies.
Since the start of its post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Israeli civilians have mostly abandoned the northern area of the country due to the nearby presence, across the Lebanese border, of fighters from the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Many Israeli security officials feel that a war with Hezbollah and by extension Iran is inevitable. They prefer a strategy of initiating one now on Israel’s terms while the U.S. still has a military presence in the region that could be forced into the fight.
From Netanyahu’s perspective, once the current war ends, he is likely to face serious political and legal problems inside Israel. Expanding the conflict to a regional one could delay his day of reckoning — or even change his personal fortunes entirely.
Israeli incentives for war with Iran should logically put it on a crash course with the U.S. political establishment. Yet the deep ideological, economic, and political ties that supporters of Israel have cultivated with U.S. politicians and security elites make it possible that the U.S. may wind up in a war with Iran, whether they like it or not.
It would not be a cakewalk. Iran is larger than Iraq, boasting vastly more sophisticated defenses and a huge web of regional military assets. A major war would not be limited in time or scope. At a moment when the U.S. is running short of munitions and funding to support Ukraine and is nervously eyeing China’s military buildup in east Asia, it is hard to think of worse timing for such a conflict, regardless of how opportune it may be for Israel.
Israeli officials are now reportedly debating whether to “go big” with strikes against Iran, or take a more measured response. Iran meanwhile has said that if Israel lashes out, it will hit back harder — ostensibly in a manner calculated to overwhelm Israeli air defenses. If that happens, Biden will have to confront the contradictions of a policy of embracing Israel and enabling its most extreme tendencies, while at the same time trying to do what is best for the U.S.
Contrary to the words of some sycophantic U.S. politicians, the interests of the two countries are not identical and, today, do not even appear to be aligned.
The regional war in the Middle East now involves at least 16 different countries and includes the first strikes from Iranian territory on Israel, but the United States continues to insist that there is no broader war, hiding the extent of American military involvement. And yet in response to Iran’s drone and missile attacks Saturday, the U.S. flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
The news media has been complicit in its portrayal of the regional war as nonexistent. “Biden Seeks to Head Off Escalation After Israel’s Successful Defense,” the New York Times blared this morning, ignoring that the conflict had already spread. “Iran attacks Israel, risking a full-blown regional war,” says The Economist. “Some top U.S. officials are worried that Israel may respond hastily to Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attacks and provoke a wider regional conflict that the U.S. could get dragged into,” says NBC, parroting the White House’s deception.
The Washington-based reporting follows repeated Biden administration statements that none of this amounts to a regional war. “So far, there is not … a wider regional conflict,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Thursday, in response to a question about Israel’s strike on the Iranian Embassy. Ryder’s statement followed repeated assertions by Iranian leadership that retaliation would follow — and even a private message from the Iranians to the U.S. that if it helped defend Israel, the U.S. would also be a viable target — after which the White House reiterated its “ironclad” support for Israel.
While the world has been focused on — and the Pentagon has been stressing — the comings and goings of aircraft carriers and fighter jets to serve as a “deterrent” against Iran, the U.S. has quietly built a network of air defenses to fight its regional war. “At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.”
As part of that network, Army long-range Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile batteries have been deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and at the secretive Site 512 base in Israel. These assets — plus American aircraft based in Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — are knitted together in order to communicate and cooperate with each other to provide a dome over Israel (and its own regional bases). The United Kingdom is also intimately tied into the regional war network, while additional countries such as Bahrain have purchased Patriot missiles to be part of the network.
Despite this unambiguous regional network, and even after Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, the Biden administration has consistently denied that the Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza. It is a policy stance — and a deception — that has held since Hamas’s October 7 attack. “The Middle East region is quieter than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an ill-timed remark eight days before October 7. “We don’t see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after three U.S. troops were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iran-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan. Since then (and even before this weekend), the fighting has spread to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.
As part of the regional war network, four American ships, part of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) battle group, have played a central role in thwarting Iran-backed attacks. The ships are equipped with long-range Standard surface-to-air missiles and the Phalanx close-in weapon system, a Gatling gun that serves as the ship’s last lines of defense against attack. All of the ships have been conducting offensive and defensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, focused on Houthi attacks (they all shot Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles at targets in Yemen on January 12).
According to maritime spotters and the Navy, the destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107) has been conducting defensive and offensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since mid-March. It has been engaging Houthi drones and missiles fired from inside Yemen toward Israel and toward maritime traffic. The destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) has also been operating in the Red Sea. Just on Tuesday, it targeted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile that was targeting the U.S. commercial ship M/V Yorktown, according to the Navy. The destroyer USS Laboon (DDG 58) arrived in the region in December and has been operating mostly in the Gulf of Aden. The guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea (CG 58) arrived around Christmas and has served as the main air defense command-and-control hub.
American ships have quietly called at ports in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti (the port of Duqm in Oman has been the most often visited foreign port). Lebanon is also involved in the conflict as Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks.
The White House has also said that U.S. fighter jets were involved in some of the shootdowns of Iranian missiles. Flight trackers noticed a U.S. Air Force refueling plane, stationed in Qatar, flying missions over Iraq during the Iranian attack. In total, according to CNN, around 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles were launched at Israel overnight Saturday. All told, US forces were responsible for over 100 interceptions of Iranian drones and missiles, according to Israeli officials.
The White House is worried that Iran might strike a U.S. target as part of a potential retaliation for Israel’s April 1 attack on its embassy in Damascus, Syria, according to notes from a meeting involving National Security Council officials earlier this week. Tehran has vowed that “Israel will be punished” for the Syria strike and the killing of Quds Force commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi.
New concern about a potential Iranian strike comes even though the Biden administration has sought to distance itself from the Israeli airstrike, stressing that it had no advance knowledge of the operation.
“I don’t have anything more to say about the strike in Damascus, except that we weren’t involved in any way whatsoever,” NSC spokesperson retired Adm. John Kirby said on Monday.
On Monday night, Iran conveyed to the Biden administration that if it involved itself in defending Israel were Tehran to undertake a retaliatory strike, it would consider the United States a viable target as well. The issue was discussed at a Tuesday NSC meeting, according to notes reviewed by The Intercept. (The NSC did not respond to a request for comment.)
At the Tuesday meeting, an NSC official conveyed high-level concerns that the administration did not want to publicly appear to be in any official dialogue with Tehran, with whom the U.S. does not have formal diplomatic relations.
Last Friday, four days after the Israeli airstrike, over a dozen Republican senators signed a letter accusing the Biden administration of undertaking a “strategy of appeasement” with Iran.
Despite an-ever widening and escalating military action since the Gaza war began, the Biden administration has insisted that the war remains contained to Israel, despite attacks by Israel in Syria and Lebanon; despite repeated attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen and the retaliatory strike that have followed; and despite attacks and responses against U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. The strikes by the U.S. (and its coalition partners) are always described as taking place against “Iran-backed” organizations and militias.
In January, three American Army soldiers were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iranian-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan called Tower 22. There have been over 150 attacks on U.S. Middle East forces since the Israel–Hamas war began. U.S. Central Command, the Pentagon’s Middle East combatant command, has launched a seemingly endless barrage of strikes on Iranian-backed targets throughout the region, as well as undertaken naval and air attacks in and around Yemen.
The position of the Biden administration has consistently been that it doesn’t see any of this as escalation. “We don’t seek a wider war with Iran,” Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after the three U.S. troops were killed in Jordan. “We don’t seek further conflict, we don’t want to see this widen out into a regional conflict.”
Since then, the U.S. has quietly conducted talks with Iranian officials to seek to avoid direct confrontation between the two countries’ armed forces, according to CNN and other media reports. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Biden and his team are working to prevent escalation with Iran in the Middle East.
On Wednesday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Israel “must be punished and it shall be.” That same day, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz said his country would respond with a direct attack. “If Iran attacks from its own territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran,” Katz posted on X. Since April 2023, the U.S. and Israel have been in close cooperation in sharing and building common Iran contingency plans.
In light of the deadly ISIS-K attack on the Crocus City Hall in Russia last month, the homeland security complex is newly focusing on a high-profile Islamic State attack inside the United States, according to new government reports and statements. For seven months, Hamas has been the primary focus of federal counterterror operations, with the FBI anticipating a terrorist strike intended to highlight America’s military support for Israel.
“I see blinking lights everywhere I turn,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in December, addressing post-October 7 domestic threats and a new obsession with Hamas that came out of the Gaza war.
Within the past week though, members of Congress are demanding that the government provide classified briefings on the ISIS-K threat, expressing “serious concern” about the group’s reach. The New Jersey homeland security department, one of the country’s most active counterterrorism hubs, has also produced an intelligence brief this week warning about potential ISIS-K attacks. And the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has produced a hand-wringing report about the current U.S. capability to conduct “‘over-the-horizon’ counterterrorism operations” in Afghanistan to thwart the group’s future operations.
In a way, the shift from Hamas to ISIS-K is one welcomed by the terror fighters because the focus eliminates all of the tricky politics associated with the Gaza war, especially the difficulty the FBI and others have had separating pro-Palestinian sentiments from support for Hamas. And, not coincidentally, all of the focus on pro-Trump so-called domestic extremists. The Al Qaeda-like attack in Moscow also harkens back to a familiar threat and the 20-year war for the federal government, one even emanating from Afghanistan.
ISIS-K, known as Islamic State Khorasan, is the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate that is now active in south Asia and the Caucasus. The name Khorasan comes from ancient Persian and refers to the region that encompasses Afghanistan and northeastern Iran, and portions of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan. Surviving fighters from Al Qaeda have congregated under the banner of ISIS-K. The Director of National Intelligence labels ISIS-K, founded in 2015, as one of ISIS’s “most lethal branches.”
In some ways, ISIS-K is the actual successor to Al Qaeda, which introduced high-profile attacks in northwest Africa and Yemen, culminating in 9/11. Before the assault in Moscow which killed 140 last month, ISIS-K had attack the U.S. directly when during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan it sent a suicide bomber that killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghans at the Kabul airport. Since assuming command in 2020, the group’s leader, Sanaullah Ghafari, has pledged further attacks, and he has taken on the ISIS goal of trying to create a physical Islamic caliphate.
Beginning in 2022, ISIS-K has also increased its messaging targeted on the United States. The ISIS Al-Naba newspaper commented on the initial indictment of former President Donald Trump, claiming “American unrest is looming on the horizon” and that “this is taking place by the arrangement of Allah.” ISIS-K’s English-language Voice of Khurasan commented on the raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, claiming “America is a ‘banana republic’ corrupt at a level not seen before.” ISIS-K has also commented on gun violence, highlighting gun killings in America and calling them “tit for tat” for U.S. foreign policy failures.
Last month, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of Central Command, said that ISIS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.” When asked whether the military is conducting sufficient strikes on ISIS-K in Afghanistan given the U.S. withdrawal, Kurilla told Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., “in a classified setting, ma’am, I can talk about where we are in terms of the find, fix, and finish on them.”
In a April 3 intelligence brief from the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness obtained by The Intercept, the agency warns, “The ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) attack in Russia highlights the group’s aspiration to become the most active ISIS affiliate, conduct global attacks, and inspire homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) to threaten the U.S. and Europe.”
In the same breath, the brief acknowledges that ISIS itself remains “a low threat to New Jersey and the surrounding region” and that the group has never “successfully conducted a directed attack within the U.S.” thanks to global efforts, such as that of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. The brief says that coalition and U.S. operations have “diminished ISIS’s military capability, territorial control, leadership, financial resources, and online influence.”
“The largest threat from ISIS still comes from [Homegrown Violent Extremists] who consume ISIS propaganda, radicalize, [and] often pledge allegiance to the group,” the brief concludes. (The FBI says that the majority of foreign-inspired terrorists in the U.S. continue to be ISIS-affiliated, as they have been for most of the past decade. On Saturday, the FBI arrested 18 year old Scott Mercurio, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for planning to attack local churches and allegedly providing material support to ISIS. “This case should be an eye-opener to the dangers of self-radicalization, which is a real threat to our communities,” Shohini Sinha, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Salt Lake City field office said.)
The new threat posed by ISIS-K was further amplified in a recent letter sent by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., demanding a classified briefing on the ISIS-K threat.
“ISIS-K’s recent attacks further highlight their ability to strike around the globe. Their operations include a suicide bombing in Iran in January of 2024 and a massacre at a concert hall in Moscow in March,” the senators wrote. “Further, ISIS-K planned attacks against civilians in Germany and the Netherlands were also thwarted. It is evident the potential and desire for strikes by ISIS-K around the globe, including against the United States, remains significant. As former Director of Intelligence for CENTCOM, retired Army Major General Mark Quantock recently stated, ‘The U.S. remains target No. 1 for ISIS-K.’”
Late last month, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also said that Wray confirmed to him that an ISIS-linked smuggling network was penetrating the U.S. southern border. Rubio told ABC News that ISIS-K had “reconstituted itself as we warned would happen when we had this disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. One of the reasons why we didn’t want to withdraw precipitously is because you gave them operating space to reorganize themselves and plan externally.”
As the NCAA finishes up March Madness, another type of madness is unfolding, as the U.S. military retools its weapons of mass destruction response apparatus to focus not on attacks by familiar foreign terror groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, but by American citizens.
Late last month, for the first time ever, the National Guard conducted an exercise simulating a frantic search for a nuclear dirty bomb at a basketball and hockey arena in Trenton, New Jersey. What made the exercise different from hundreds of such similar war games held since 9/11 is that purely domestic terrorists were identified as the perpetrators.
“The FBI has just received intelligence that a well-resourced domestic terrorist group has planted bombs, including one with cesium-137 — a radioactive isotope — in the arena,” the military said about the scenario for the exercise. “The clock is ticking.”
The CURE Insurance Arena in Trenton is a multipurpose facility able to seat 8,000. The arena aims to attract more college basketball matches, having hosted Princeton vs. Rutgers in November.
The mock nuclear materials search took place from March 25-28 and involved National Guard “Civil Support Teams” from New Jersey, Delaware, and Idaho; other military teams; city, county, and state police and hazardous material teams; and federal government agencies, including the local FBI field office and experts from the national Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
Established during the Clinton administration in 1998, the National Guard Civil Support Teams are charged with “consequence management” in the event of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear — known as CBRN — incident. The 20- to 25-member teams can also be assigned to “incidents of national significance” and “national security events” that involve intentional and unintentional CBRN releases. They have been deployed on standby for the Super Bowl and Boston Marathon, as well as for NCAA tournaments. The teams were extensively employed during Covid-19.
The exercise scenario last month resembles the feverish plot of the post-9/11 TV series “24,” which dramatized the concept of a ticking time bomb and the extraordinary measures it might justify. (“24” also had its own sports tie-in, having aired its pilot episode right after the Super Bowl.) But “24” portrayed the dirty bomb plots as being masterminded by foreign terror groups similar to those that carried out 9/11. By pointing the finger at a “domestic terrorist group” — that is, Americans — the U.S. military outpaces not just Hollywood, but also the facts.
Though the FBI says in its fiscal year 2025 budget request to Congress that during 2023, its Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate “disrupted 42 incidents; made 62 arrests; and had 43 indictments, 56 sentencings and 56 convictions,” none involved actual nuclear materials or such a dirty bomb. There’s no evidence that any domestic terrorist group has ever been well-resourced enough to construct a nuclear dirty bomb. But that hasn’t stopped Washington from building on January 6 to feed its current domestic extremism obsession and fearmongering about it.
In November, the Washington-based Stimson Center published a report, “The Threat from Within,” that hypes the purported insider threat to nuclear security posed by “domestic violent extremists.” The report is funded by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The Stimson Center also receives funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (the Defense Department agency charged with weapons of mass destruction).
“The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol revealed the flaws in a system designed to weed out unsuitable candidates for sensitive work protecting nuclear materials, weapons, facilities, technology and personnel,” the Stimson report’s executive summary says.
The report acknowledges a shift from foreign to domestic terrorism, saying, “Rather than focusing on international extremists with foreign ideological motives, federal agencies and law enforcement have begun to recognize the prevalence of domestic violent extremist threats to national security and critical infrastructure, including the nuclear sector.”
As an example of the domestic extremist threat to nuclear security, the Stimson reports cites the case of Ashli Babbitt. An Air Force veteran who participated in the storming of the Capitol building before being killed by a law enforcement officer, the report points to Babbitt’s employment at a nuclear plant as “troubling — especially when considering the appeal of nuclear infrastructure as a target for extremists.”
That’s of course a long shot from saying Babbitt had any intention of targeting that nuclear infrastructure — which there’s no evidence for — in order to, say, construct a dirty bomb.
But that won’t stop the government from playing its own game.
“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him,” Sun Tzu wrote in the 4th century, one of those warfare aphorisms that the modern-day U.S. Army has adopted as part of its psychological operations career group. “Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant,” the Army says in a recruiting video released last year. But it is the Army that is pretending to be strong. A devastating new Defense Department inspector general report finds that its own psyops ranks are critically short at a time when Washington is obsessed with stoking influence against America’s many adversaries.
The IG report, “Evaluation of the DoD Military Information Support Operations Workforce” finds that the Army, the primary Defense Department proponent for battlefield influence and deception, has failed to staff its own psyops units at a time when the Pentagon struggles with fighting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation campaigns, particularly about U.S. military operations and bases.
A December 2010 secretary of defense memorandum, issued during the Obama administration, discontinued the use of the term “psyops” and replaced it with Military information Support Operations, or MISO. The memo stated that the term “psyop” had become misleading and, “although psyop activities rely on truthful information, credibly conveyed, the term psyop tends to connote propaganda, brainwashing, manipulation, and deceit.” The memo noted that for that reason, the Pentagon would “no longer use the term psyop to describe activities (in peacetime or during combat operations) that are intended to influence foreign audiences.” Nonetheless, the Army continues to use the term “psyop” or psyops when referring to its units and to the overall career field.
(The term “information warfare” was also replaced with “information operations” during the same time period. Seeking to soften the terminology of counterterrorism, the Obama administration also sought to change the name of the Global War On Terror to Overseas Contingency Operations, a term that never stuck. The administration also introduced the euphemism “violent extremist” instead of terrorist, a term that is now applied to domestic activists with no connection to any foreign power or influence.)
In its March report, the inspector general found that the Army’s four Psychological Operations Groups (two active duty and two in the reserves) operated with only 60 percent of their authorized strength. It also found that one third of Army Reserve psyops detachments, feeder organizations sprinkled around the country used to beef up the psyops groups during mobilization, exist only on paper, most being completely unmanned. And only a quarter of the detachments had assigned and qualified commands (captains) required to pursue their missions.
According to the report, MISO and other types of information operations are the main way the military responds to adversaries without engaging in armed combat. And yet despite this allegedly critical function, the IG found that “the Army does not have sufficient MISO-qualified military personnel in its Army Reserve and active component MISO units or serving in MISO positions on joint force command staffs to meet the increasing demand.”
The inspector general also found another problem: a comprehensive study of the entire psyops branch, with soldiers spread across the active duty component and the reserve components (Army Reserve and National Guard) has not been completed in 20 years.
Psyops is a military term that refers to efforts to influence enemy battlefield perceptions through leafleting, radio and television broadcasting and deception. Such operations, as Sun Tzu attests, are as old as organized warfare itself. In recent decades, with the growth of online news and communications, ubiquitous cellphone use, and social media, psyops has expanded. That expansion, and the nature of how information circulates, reaches far beyond the battlefield. Though there are national “influence” operations against countries such as Russia, China, and Iran that are run by the State Department and the intelligence agencies, psyops still generally refers to battlefield use.
At a time when the military says that there is “increasing demand” for psyops, it is phasing out psychological operations roles to make room for newer priorities, according to an internal Army paper. “We needed to reduce 32,000 spaces to both shrink overall structure and make room for about 7,500 new billets for emerging efforts like directed energy, the Mobile Short Range Air Defense program, and multi-domain task force teams,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy A. George wrote in February, recommending a reduction of psyops soldiers.
Reducing the number of soldiers allocated to “special operations,” which psyops is a part of, is not without controversy. According to recent reporting, the head of Special Operations Command Gen. Bryan Fenton is fighting the Army plan, taking his complaint up the chain of command to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
In congressional testimony last month, Fenton said that MISO soldiers and units “are indispensable in 21st century warfare, which includes the development of critical information force capabilities such as civil affairs and psychological operations” adding that “MISO [the operations themselves] to counter strategic competitors have more than tripled in the past three years — comprising more than 60% of SOF’s [special operations forces] worldwide MISO activities in FY 2023.” He also pointed to the Joint MISO WebOps Center that helps coordinate combatant commands’ efforts to actively engage “foreign audiences to illuminate and counter hostile propaganda and disinformation.”
The national and regional WebOps centers maintain overt pro-U.S. websites and social media accounts that publish propaganda, but where the connection to the Pentagon is obscured or hidden in the fine print.
Despite Fenton’s push to preserve unfilled positions conducting the Army’s MISO, recent revelations about the Pentagon’s psyops call into question just how effective these programs really are.
In 2022, an extensive report by the Washington Post revealed widespread concern inside DOD that psychological operations were being waged both recklessly and ineffectively by the armed services. The report was spurred by research from the Stanford Internet Observatory which detailed over 150 instances of Facebook and Twitter removing accounts linked to U.S. military influence campaigns.
The Pentagon also has pushed for new powers to fight adversaries in cyberspace. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act gave the Defense Department a green light to engage in offensive psyops campaigns, including clandestine operations that align with the same definition as covert, meaning that the armed forces can carry out influence operations that deny an American connection, according to an analysis by Lawfare.
As the Post detailed, after the congressional authorization, an unnamed defense official said, “Combatant commanders got really excited” and were “eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”
Some of these operations involved anti-Russia narratives describing Russia’s war in Ukraine as imperialist and attempting to shift popular sentiment toward support for Ukraine. Another account apparently targeting Iranian citizens reposted content from Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in Farsi. One account spread misinformation that claimed that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees were reporting that bodies being returned from Iran had missing internal organs. The latter tweet would be in violation of CENTCOM’s psyops directives, according to the Post.
Researchers at Stanford ultimately found that despite the dozens of Defense Department obscured accounts spreading misinformation, the effect on foreign populations was far less than information conveyed overtly from self-identified U.S. sources.
“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu says. As the inspector general report demonstrates, there is a lot of deception going on to convince the American public that military psyops is a good investment. That campaign seems to have been successful.
U.S. intelligence skews its findings to find favor with both Republican and Democratic policymakers, including former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama, a sweeping new study by the Pentagon-backed RAND Corporation finds. The study draws on interviews, some anonymous, with nearly a dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers.
Despite the popular “deep state” characterization of the intelligence community as a rogue army running roughshod over elected leaders, the study concludes the exact opposite. It portrays an intelligence community that naturally tilts its reports and forecasts to curry favor with presidents and their high-level policymakers in Washington, regardless of party or issue.
“Policymakers most frequently introduce bias in intelligence assessments from a desire to minimize the appearance of dissent, while the IC” — intelligence community — “tends to introduce bias through self-censorship,” the report says.
The study, “Has Trust in the U.S. Intelligence Community Eroded? Examining the Relationship Between Policymakers and Intelligence Providers,” was sponsored by the Pentagon.
From 9/11 to January 6, there’s hardly a shortage of intelligence failures to properly assess the big picture or anticipate crises, leading to a decline in trust by policymakers, some of whom have decried the intelligence community as a monolithic “deep state” outside of their control. But the study suggests that these policymakers often have themselves to blame for pressuring the intelligence community to come to certain conclusions in line with their political interests — in many cases successfully.
“Through his time in office, President Trump and other administration officials consistently sought to influence — and, in some cases, bias — intelligence,” the study finds. Interviewees cited almost a dozen such examples, some unsurprising (“Russian interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections,” the Muslim travel ban, and the characterization of “antifa”) but others less obvious (“mass shootings” and “the SolarWinds hack”).
Far from the Hollywood picture of intelligence operatives as ruthless Jason Bourne types, interviewees complained about the pressure analysts and management faced from White House policymakers, with one likening it to bullying.
The “culture of fear was real,” one former intelligence official told RAND. “The IC gets tired of being bullied, then they withdraw.”
“Individuals looked to avoid conflict and please political masters.”
“Individuals looked to avoid conflict and please political masters,” the study says of the intelligence community analysts and officials, adding that the CIA and other agencies have “an incentive to elicit positive feedback from policymakers” in order to “maintain [their] relevance.”
Across multiple administrations, this dynamic of fear appears to have infected the highest echelons of the intelligence community. Former CIA Director Gina Haspel declined to push back on Trump’s equivocations regarding the intelligence community’s conclusion that Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the study notes. (Haspel had reportedly been ordered by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to attend a congressional briefing where she could have challenged Trump’s statements. She didn’t attend.)
The report identifies Russian meddling in elections as among the most prominent scenarios in which the Trump administration pushed to influence the outcome of intelligence analysis.
“With election interference, there were attempts to directly impact/change what the intelligence said,” a former official told RAND. “The IC was going to say that Russia did something, but policymakers would insist on adding more language, like something else about Iran.”
Another former official described election security as “the third rail of intelligence topics,” describing congressionally mandated intelligence reports on foreign interference as “an awkward process.”
Ironically, despite Trump’s repeated insinuations of a “deep state” bent on undermining him, the very intelligence agencies ended up watering down assessments in order to avoid confrontations. As the study observes, “IC analysts looked to avoid conflict with policymakers and avoid charges of being part of the ‘deep state.’”
The intelligence community’s deference to its political masters was by no means confined to the Trump administration. One former official told RAND that the “process always involves some degree of give and take between analysts and policymakers.” Indeed, the report provides a number of examples of intelligence bias during the Obama administration.
John A. Gentry, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst during the Obama administration, is quoted as saying that superiors told analysts to avoid “specifically identified terms that might trigger criticism of administration policy,” the study notes. Gentry also said that during the Obama years, intelligence analysis suffered from “politicization by omission”: leaving out issues from regular updates or assessments “because the results might displease superiors.”
In 2015, the year before Trump was elected, a survey of the members of the U.S. Central Command — the Pentagon’s combatant command for the Middle East — found that over 65 percent of respondents believed that their analysis was suppressed or distorted in the face of evidence due to editorial disagreement, politicization, or a mismatching with existing analytic lines, the study also notes.
Another example was alleged by a former official at the highest levels of the Obama administration. Obama’s former CIA Director Michael Hayden, the report notes, has written that the community turned a blind eye to Russian information operations due to the administration’s efforts to broker new diplomatic relations with Moscow. Not until 2015 did the U.S. come to grips with Russian efforts, by then just a year out from the 2016 elections famously marred by Russian meddling.
Rather than in the direction of Langley, the Pentagon, or any intelligence agency, RAND concludes that the IC largely tilts toward the White House and its army of political appointees.
Clearly the intelligence community tilts its findings; but rather than in the direction of Langley, the Pentagon, or any intelligence agency, RAND concludes that it largely tilts toward the White House and its army of political appointees.
“The RAND report provides an accurate picture of how much the intelligence-policy relationship sometimes departs depressingly far from the ideal of intelligence providing unbiased analysis to policymakers who use it to inform their decision-making,” Paul Pillar, a former national intelligence officer who is now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Study as well as the Quincy Institute, told The Intercept.
“The report shows the variety of ways in which policymakers who are determined to use intelligence not to inform decisions but instead to sell their already established policies can pollute the process, ranging from blatant arm-twisting to subtle effects on the minds of intelligence officers who do not want to rock the boat,” Pillar said.
When Vice President Kamala Harris toured the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this week, site of the infamous 2018 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, she pushed for more gun control and called for communities to accept more federal help in stopping school shootings. “I will continue to advocate for what we must do in terms of universal background checks and assault weapons ban” Harris said.
But in a land where gun control is politically impossible, the only tangible help the Biden administration offers schools are resources to conduct better behavioral profiling of students, doing so through a Secret Service center founded to study the psychology of presidential assassins. The push, supported by a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the role of the Department of Homeland Security in school violence, would turn America’s schools into another adjunct of the national security apparatus, a veritable school for spies.
School shootings are indeed an epidemic in America, and Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 and injured 17 more in Parkland is a tragic example of yet another juvenile who fell through every social service safety net that American society had to offer. He is a poster child for the ease with which mentally ill Americans can acquire guns. But can the Secret Service really help to deal with the scourge, and is it the right agency to do so?
The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, or NTAC, was created in 1998 to examine threats to the president and security at complex public gatherings. Its focus was expanded a year later to the psychology of school shootings after the Columbine shooting resulted in 15 deaths and horrified the nation. Today, NTAC is “a multidisciplinary team of social science researchers” who assist “law enforcement, schools, government, and other public and private sector organizations to combat the ever-evolving threat of targeted violence,” according to its website.
Over decades, the NTAC has created desks in over a half-dozen Secret Service field offices, staffed by domestic security strategists who conduct school visits and staff training that mostly focus on recognizing “behavioral” traits that its study associates with mass violence. Last year alone, the NTAC touted some 331 training sessions, and it brags that over the last five years, it has trained hundreds of thousands of school administrators and teachers. The demand for its assistance, the Secret Service says, is thanks in part to NTAC publications regarding threats to schools. In its most recent report, “Improving School Safety Through Bystander Reporting,” the NTAC suggests schools encourage programs for students to report suspicious behavior, removing barriers that might impede any such tattletale reporting.
“For reporting programs to be a useful tool for intervention and prevention in K-12 schools, students and other members of a reporting community need to be aware of the importance of reporting, their role in reporting, what to report, and any resources that are available when it comes to reporting threats and other concerns,” the NTAC report says. “Research finds that the fear of being ostracized, or experiencing other forms of retaliation, is a significant barrier to reporting. When students view reporting as ‘snitching,’ they are discouraged from coming forward with their concerns.”
Another NTAC study, “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” studied nearly 70 averted attacks against schools, using demographic information to identify school shooters. Attributes tracked by NTAC include history of school discipline, contact with law enforcement, experience being bullied, mental health issues, alcohol and drug use, and the broadly defined psychological trauma “impacted by adverse childhood experiences.”
NTAC stresses that the goal of school monitoring of students and its suggested “see something, say something” practice is successful intervention. It is the same framework originally created to deal with international terrorism and now expanded to thwart domestic “extremists” and government “insider threats.”
But are such government programs created to deal with national security threats appropriate when applied to K-12 schools? Not only is NTAC’s list of behavioral threats just as applicable to skateboarders as they are to potential shooters, but lodging the school safety program in the Secret Service, and its Protective Intelligence Division (where NTAC is assigned), also questionably pushes school systems to adopt a national and homeland security curriculum.
“One thing I learned is that threat assessment doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Bev Baligad, chair of Threat Team Hawaiʻi, said after the Hawaiʻi Threat Assessment Conference last year, where NTAC and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Threat Evaluation and Reporting office made presentations. NTER houses the national “see something, say something” campaign and its own behavioral threat assessment and management program office. “There is a statewide push to build threat assessment capacity on all islands,” Baligad told the conference.
At an NTAC training in Arizona last month, Cochise County School Superintendent Jacqui Clay said, “As the county school superintendent, the reason that we’re doing this is that we have to become a learning community and not be in silos, especially when it comes to school safety.”
“As we come together, the sheriff’s department, the police departments, the (Arizona) Rangers, Border Patrol, superintendents, the community, that’s a deterrent. It’s more of a deterrent because they see we’re working together,” Clay added. “If we all learn the words to the song, then we can sing the song together, better. This is part of the song.” Some of those singing the song are law enforcement agencies without a prior mandate in U.S. schools.
“Messaging should demonstrate to students that there is a big difference between ‘snitching,’ ‘ratting,’ or ‘tattling,’ and seeking help,” a Secret Service guide says.
Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the EAGLES Act to prevent acts of mass violence, a bill that would bolster the NTAC by creating a national program on targeted school violence prevention, while expanding the NTAC’s “research and training on school violence and its dissemination of information on school violence prevention initiatives.”
“Accurate behavioral threat assessments and early interventions are essential to maintaining a safe environment in our schools and communities and preventing another tragedy from taking place,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, in reintroducing the legislation. “The U.S. Secret Service is uniquely equipped to help evaluate these threats, and our bill would enable them to share their tools and expertise with school safety partners across the country.”
Not everyone horrified at the rise of gun violence inside schools has signed on to the mission of reauthorizing and expanding the NTAC as proposed in the EAGLES Act.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote of the bill that “Threat assessment, including as proposed in this legislation, poses major risks for and to students, including increased and early contact with law enforcement, overidentification of students … for ‘threatening’ behavior, distraction from the role of easy access to guns in enabling mass shootings in schools and elsewhere, and undermining of students’ rights under civil rights laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504. School safety belongs in the hands of educators, and those trained in child/adolescent development — not law enforcement, and we should never start from a place of viewing some children as threats.”
The Consortium for Constituents With Disabilities followed suit, adding, “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a border security and counterterrorism agency. This agency has no expertise in student behavior or child development. Nonetheless, they would develop best practices and train school staff on threat assessment, treating children as potential terrorists.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is demanding answers from the Pentagon about coups by U.S.-trained African military officers, according to a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin shared exclusively with The Intercept.
Under the bill that authorizes the 2024 defense budget, the Pentagon is mandated to provide a briefing on coups carried out by U.S.-trained African partners to the Senate and House Armed Services committees no later than 90 days after the bill’s December 2023 passage. The briefing is supposed to cover the number of coups, the vetting process employed by the United States for partners, and steps taken to strengthen trainees’ respect for civilian control of the military.
Last week, during a House Armed Services Committee hearing held a day before the deadline, Gaetz asked Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, about the briefing. “You’ll get your answer, Congressman,” replied Langley.
Days later, the House Armed Services Committee is still waiting for its briefing. In his Wednesday letter, Gaetz laid into the Defense Department for its inaction.
“It’s particularly egregious how the Department of Defense dodges a clear legal order to brief Congress about the coups.”
“Given the DoD has failed to meet the congressionally mandated deadline,” wrote Gaetz, “I am formally requesting the briefing or report on security cooperation with African military units who received DoD training and equipping, and subsequently overthrew their governments within the AFRICOM AOR” — or area of responsibility. The letter was copied to Langley.
“It’s particularly egregious how the Department of Defense dodges a clear legal order to brief Congress about the coups led by African militaries after receiving U.S. military assistance within AFRICOM,” Gaetz told The Intercept by email. “This blatant sidestepping of reporting requirements not only undermines legislative oversight but raises significant concerns about transparency and accountability within the DoD’s foreign military assistance program.”
A request to the Pentagon for comment about the failure to provide the briefing and whether it has the requested data was not immediately returned.
A Dozen Coups
At least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror, according to a series of reports by The Intercept.
At least five leaders of the 2023 Niger coup received American training, according to a U.S. official. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as regional governors, according to the State Department.
Not all U.S.-trained African coup leaders hail from the Sahel. Before Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, he underwent basic training at Fort Benning, now Fort Moore, in Georgia and advanced instruction at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania.
The total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11 may be far higher than is known, but the State Department, which tracks data on U.S. trainees, is either unwilling or unable to provide it. The Intercept identified more than 70 other African military personnel involved in coups since 2001 who might have received U.S. training or assistance, but when provided with names in 2023, State Department spokespeople either failed to respond or replied, “We do not have the ability to provide records for these historical cases at this time.”
The total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11 may be far higher than is known, but the State Department is either unwilling or unable to provide it.
In March 2023, Gaetz grilled Langley about the percentage of U.S.-trained troops who have conducted coups. When asked what datasets with this information were available, Langley responded, “Congressman, we may have that information. I don’t at this time.”
During the exchange, Langley also seemed to say that the U.S. shares “core values” with coup leaders.
Last week, Langley still had no answers for Gaetz on the number of U.S.-trained mutineers in Africa but pushed back on any implication that U.S. support to African military personnel was linked to their rebellions.
“There is no syllabus for overthrowing a government; not in our institutions,” said Langley. “It’s safe to say there’s no correlation or causation of U.S. training to a coup happening.”
How Langley came to this conclusion is unclear. AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan previously told The Intercept that the command maintains no database of U.S.-trained African mutineers nor even a count of how many times they have conducted coups.
In 2022, Cahalan said, “AFRICOM does not actively track individuals who’ve received U.S. training after the training has been completed.”
With the 2024 elections looming, the Department of Homeland Security has a little-noticed weapon in its war on disinformation: comic books. Few have read them, but the series is attracting criticism from members of Congress. Calling the comics “creepy,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., complained earlier this month that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency-produced series was just another way for the federal government to “trample on the First Amendment” in its zeal to fight so-called disinformation.
“DC Comics won’t be adding these taxpayer-funded comic books … to their repertoire anytime soon,” cracked Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s annual report on government waste released in December.
The comics read like well-meaning (if corny) attempts to grapple with efforts by foreign governments to influence American public opinion, as articulated in intelligence community assessments. But there is a risk that the federal government’s fight against foreign disinformation positions it as an arbiter of the truth, which raises civil liberties concerns. The efficacy of the DHS “Resilience Series” of comic books is also far from obvious.
The members of Congress might be comforted to know that few people ever noticed the comics. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urges users to “share” their “Resilience Series” comics, but a search of the webpage’s address on X shows that it is linked to fewer than a dozen times. CISA also produced glossy-looking YouTube trailers for its two graphic novels that garnered just 4,000 and 6,000 views respectively — a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of views trailers for other graphic novels attract.
For CISA, disinformation is no laughing matter. “Disinformation is an existential threat to the United States,” declares CISA’s webpage detailing its “Resilience Series” of comic books.
Third in sales by genre, only behind general fiction and romance novels, graphic novels are particularly popular among the youngest readers. One industry observer notes that in Japan, more paper is used for manga books than for toilet paper. School Library Journal concluded in their graphic novels survey last year that popularity increased over 90 percent year over year in school libraries. The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of school librarians reported opposition to graphic novels from teachers, parents, and others who didn’t consider them “real books.”
Though first released in 2020 in anticipation of the Trump–Biden presidential election, the comics were intended to be an evergreen resource in the war on disinformation. “Learn the dangers & risks associated with dis- & misinformation through fictional stories that are inspired by real-world events in @CISAgov’s Resilience Series,” the U.S. Attorney for Nevada posted on X last April.
CISA produced two graphic novels, “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes.” “Real Fake” tells the story of Rachel O’Sullivan, a “gamer” and a “patriot” who infiltrates a troll farm circulating false narratives about elections to American voters. “Bug Bytes” addresses disinformation around Covid-19, following Ava Williams, a journalism student who realizes that a malicious cyber campaign spreading conspiracy theories about 5G technology is inspiring attacks on 5G towers.
“Fellow comic geeks, assemble!” CISA said when the comic books were initially released. “Let’s band together to take on disinformation and misinformation.” The CISA post quotes another X post by the FBI’s Washington field office recommending the graphic novels and exhorting the importance of “finding trusted information.”
“The resilience series products were released in 2020 and 2021 to raise awareness on tactics of foreign influence and disinformation,” a spokesperson for CISA told The Intercept, noting that despite continued reference by members of Congress and critics, that this series of comic books has now been discontinued.
“The problem is not that panels about African troll farms (Real Fake) or homegrown antivaxxers (Bug Bytes) might make readers feel insecure—it’s that they don’t make readers feel insecure enough,” writes Russ Castronovo, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and professor of American studies and English, in Public Books magazine. “Or, more precisely, these comics might be judged aesthetic failures because—due to their proximity to propaganda—they leave little space for the vulnerabilities inherent in the act of reading. So, while readers learn that meddling by foreign powers ‘is scary, especially in an election year,’ the graphic fictions commissioned by US cybersecurity assume reading itself to be a process whereby information (as opposed to disinformation) is obtained, questions are answered, and doubts are resolved.”
Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.”
All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says.
Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.
“Over the past three years, Russia has implemented and run the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history,” Watts said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017. While Russia’s propaganda regarding its first invasion of Ukraine and Crimea was no doubt effective, that employed in 2016 against the U.S. presidential election was “neither well organized nor especially well resourced” according to a detailed study by the Pentagon-backed Rand Corporation. The think tank later concluded that “the impact of Russian efforts in the West has been uncertain.”
Co-author Haque, according to an interview in Forbes, became involved in the Resilience Series after a chance meeting at a bookstore with actor Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, who would later join Erly Stage’s advisory board and introduce Haque to his Americans contacts, which included Watts.
“There is now a real need for schools and public authorities to educate young people on how much fake news there is across all forms of media,” Haque told Forbes.
Counter-disinformation has become a cottage industry in the federal government, with offices and programs now dedicated to exposing foreign influence, as The Intercept has previously reported. CISA’s Resilience Series webpage directs questions to an email for the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (not to be confused with the FBI’s own effort, the Foreign Influence Task Force, or the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center). In 2021, the CISA Task Force was replaced by a Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation team according to a government audit, which CISA tells The Intercept has now been rolled into something called “the Election Security and Resilience subdivision.” (Malinformation refers to information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate, according to CISA.)
The proliferation of various counter-disinformation entities has been disjointed, prompting the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general to conclude that “DHS does not have a unified, department-wide strategy to set overarching goals and objectives for addressing and mitigating threats from disinformation campaigns that appear in social media.”
CISA’s mission, originally focused on traditional cyber and critical infrastructure security, evolved in the wake of the 2016 election. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson officially designated the election systems as a part of critical infrastructure. Since then, CISA has expanded its focus to include fighting disinformation, arguing that human thought can be said to constitute infrastructure.
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in 2021.
In pursuit of that cognitive infrastructure, CISA launched the Resilience Series, with an eye to mediums that would appeal to popular audiences.
“We have to find new ways to engage with people through mediums that use soft power and creative messaging, rather than being seen to preach,” Haque said in the Forbes interview.
Ten years ago, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.
Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.
In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”
The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.
However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.
While national security letters allow the government to make targeted demands for non-public data on an individual basis, companies like Dataminr continuously monitor public activity on social media and other internet platforms. Dataminr provides its customers with customized real-time “alerts” on desired topics, giving clients like police departments a form of social media omniscience. The alerts allow police to, for instance, automatically track a protest as it moves from its planning stages into the streets, without requiring police officials to do any time-intensive searches.
Although Dataminr defends First Alert, its governmental surveillance platform, as a public safety tool that helps first responders react quickly to sudden crises, the tool has been repeatedly shown to be used by police to monitor First Amendment-protected online political speech and real-world protests.
“The Whole Point”
Dataminr has long touted its special relationship with X as integral to First Alert. (Twitter previously owned a stake in Dataminr, though divested before Musk’s purchase.) Unlike other platforms it surveils by scraping user content, Dataminr pays for privileged access to X through the company’s “firehose”: a direct, unfiltered feed of every single piece of user content ever shared publicly to the platform.
Watching everything that happens on X in real time is key to Dataminr’s pitch to the government. The company essentially leases indirect access to this massive spray of information, with Dataminr acting as an intermediary between X’s servers and a multitude of police, intelligence, and military agencies.
While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business.
“Dataminr has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter, whereby we have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available Tweets,” a representative of the surveillance company wrote to the Secret Service in a July 2023 message about the terms of the law enforcement agency’s surveillance subscription. “In addition all of Dataminr’s public sector customers today have agreed to these terms including dozens who are responsible for law enforcement whether at the local, state or federal level.” (The terms are not mentioned in the emails.)
According to an email from the Secret Service in the same thread, the agency’s interest in Dataminr was unambiguous: “The whole point of this contract is to use the information for law enforcement purposes.”
Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance. (Neither X nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.)
“X’s legal briefs acknowledge that communications surveillance is ripe for government abuse, and that we can’t depend on the police to police themselves,” said Jennifer Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But then X turns around and sells Dataminr fire-hose access to users’ posts, which Dataminr then passes through to the government in the form of unregulated disclosures and speculative predictions that can falsely ensnare the innocent.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users,” Adam Schwartz, the privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of X’s Supreme Court petition. “For example, platforms must not provide special services, like real-time access to the full stream of public-facing posts, to surveillance vendors who share this information with police departments. If X is providing such access to Dataminr, that would be disappointing.”
“Glaringly at Odds”
Following a 2016 investigation into the use of Twitter data for police surveillance by the ACLU, the company went so far as to expressly ban third parties from “conducting or providing surveillance or gathering intelligence” and “monitoring sensitive events (including but not limited to protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings)” using firehose data. The new policy went so far as to ban the use of firehose data for purposes pertaining to “any alleged or actual commission of a crime” — ostensibly a problem for Dataminr’s crime-fighting clientele.
These assurances have done nothing to stop Dataminr from using the data it buys from X to do exactly these things. Prior reporting from The Intercept has shown the company has, in recent years, helped federal and local police surveil entirely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and abortion rights rallies in recent years.
Neither X nor Dataminr have responded to repeated requests to explain how a tool that allows for the real-time monitoring of protests is permitted under a policy that expressly bans the monitoring of protests. In the past, both Dataminr and X have denied that monitoring the real-time communications of people on the internet and relaying that information to the police is a form of surveillance because the posts in question are public.
Twitter later softened this prohibition by noting surveillance applications were banned “Unless explicitly approved by X in writing.” Dataminr, for its part, remains listed as an “official partner” of X.
Though the means differ, national security scholars told The Intercept that the ends of national security letters and fire-hose monitoring are the same: widespread government surveillance with little to no meaningful oversight. Neither the national security letters nor dragnet social media surveillance require a sign-off from a judge and, in both cases, those affected are left unaware they’ve fallen under governmental scrutiny.
“While I appreciate that there may be some symbolic difference between giving the government granular data directly and making them sift through what they buy from data brokers, the end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF.
“The end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process.”
“While X’s efforts to bring more transparency to the National Security Letter process are commendable, its objection to government surveillance of communications in that context is glaringly at odds with its decision to support similar surveillance measures through its partnership with Dataminr,” said Mary Pat Dwyer, director of Georgetown University’s Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. “Scholars and advocates have long argued the Dataminr partnership is squarely inconsistent with the platform’s policy forbidding use of its data for surveillance, and X’s continued failure to end the relationship prevents the company from credibly portraying itself as an advocate for its users’ privacy.”
U.S. commandos have shown a special interest in strengthening ties with one of the most corrupt, abusive, and repressive regimes on the planet. The delivery of aid by Special Operations forces to the coastal African nation of Equatorial Guinea last month followed pilgrimages to the country’s pariah president by top U.S. officials.
The move came amid shifting West African geopolitics. A Pentagon report last year mentioned Equatorial Guinea as the potential site of a future Chinese military base. At the same time, U.S. relations with longtime allies in Central and West Africa have frayed, often in the aftermath of coups d’état by American-trained military officers.
The aid to Equatorial Guinea appears to be the latest facet of a U.S. charm offensive to woo the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, a tyrant now in his sixth decade in power, as the U.S. has lost influence in the African Sahel.
“We hope that this donation is the beginning of additional cooperation,” said Commander Michael White, the defense attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, after U.S. Special Operations Command Africa spearheaded a modest donation of humanitarian aid to the tiny, oil-rich central African nation.
U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea David Gilmour expressed hope that the recent donation of medical supplies would be the “first of many opportunities to partner with” the government there. It follows high-level engagement by the administration of President Joe Biden with Obiang’s regime.
“This seems to run counter to every value that the Biden administration publicly espouses when it comes to democracy, human rights, and anticorruption.”
“This seems to run counter to every value that the Biden administration publicly espouses when it comes to democracy, human rights, and anticorruption,” said Cameron Hudson, a former Africa analyst at the CIA, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The administration is doing everything it can to maintain a military foothold on the continent. And if we don’t already have a foothold, to create one. So establishing or deepening relationships with particularly odious regimes like Equatorial Guinea are not off the table.”
Efforts to improve relations with the notorious kleptocracy come as the U.S. has been forced to scale back its military reach on the continent. (Kelly Cahalan, a spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, said the command was unaware of any increased U.S. engagement with Equatorial Guinea.) The Pentagon curtailed military ties with Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger following coups and reduced its counterterrorism activities in Cameroon due to human rights abuses by the country’s military.
Earlier this month, Niger’s ruling junta, which includes a number of officers trained by the U.S. military, announced it was severing a long-standing security cooperation agreement with the United States “with immediate effect.”
Crisantos Obama Ondo, Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador to the U.S., did not respond to requests for an interview.
Corruption and Torture
Equatorial Guinea has been plagued by oppression, corruption, and poverty for decades. After seizing power in a military coup in 1979, Obiang and his family have ruled it as their personal fiefdom. Despite significant oil wealth, the country suffers widespread poverty due to rampant embezzlement.
The most recent State Department report on human rights in Equatorial Guinea details credible reports of extrajudicial killings, torture, “inhuman” punishment, arbitrary arrest, and political imprisonment by the state, among many other abuses. It also chronicles corruption at all levels of government, especially the top: “The president and members of his inner circle continued to amass personal fortunes from the revenues associated with monopolies on all domestic commercial ventures, as well as timber and oil exports.”
In 2011, the U.S. Justice Department seized a beachfront mansion in Malibu, California; a private plane; and a fleet of luxury cars — purchased with looted funds laundered in the U.S. — from Teodoro “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang Mangue, the president’s son and now Equatorial Guinea’s vice president. The U.S. settled the case after Teodorin forfeited nearly $30 million in assets.
Swiss prosecutors took possession of 11 of the younger Obiang’s luxury cars in 2016, seizing Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bentleys, a Bugatti, and a Rolls-Royce. In 2021, France seized $170 million of Teodorin’s assets including a 101-room mansion near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
The seizures have not affected Teodorin’s conspicuous consumption, typified by his penchant for enjoying the high life on a luxury superyacht and, last year, staying in a $75,000-a-night New York hotel suite while asking the United Nations for aid.
Pentagon’s China Fears
In recent years, U.S. officials have publicly fretted about China establishing a naval outpost in West Africa. “The thing I think I’m most worried about is this military base on the Atlantic coast, and where they have the most traction for that today is in Equatorial Guinea,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, then-chief of AFRICOM, told the House Armed Services Committee in March 2022.
In an October 2023 analysis for Congress, the Defense Department reported it was “likely” that China has considered locating a “military logistics” facility in Equatorial Guinea. Earlier this month, Gen. Michael Langley, the current AFRICOM commander, warned the Senate Armed Services Committee: “China is actively pursuing a naval base on Africa’s Atlantic coast.”
The pariah state has been invited, since 2019, to participate in AFRICOM’s Obangame Express, the largest multinational maritime exercise in Western and Central Africa. AFRICOM also conducted a maritime capability assessment for the country in 2021.
That same year, when a Navy ship made a port call there, a U.S. news release called Equatorial Guinea “an important partner of the United States.” A visit by another ship in 2022 prompted Navy commander Tim Rustico to highlight the “great opportunity to continue building our partnership with Equatorial Guinea.”
“U.S. forces worked … with the government of Equatorial Guinea to facilitate this engagement signifying sustained relations between the two nations,” reads an Army news release about the February donation of $24,000 worth of supplies, including baby formula and first-aid kits to the country where most of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, but where the president has a reported net worth of $600 million.
Tutu Alicante, the head of EG Justice, a nonprofit organization that promotes human rights in Equatorial Guinea, said that the Biden administration’s high-level engagement with the Obiang government was even more damaging than providing aid.
Biden Engages
Since Biden took office, Obiang, his son, or both have met with Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee, Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, and Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman, the director of strategy, engagement, and programs at AFRICOM.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Hudson said, “Equatorial Guinea seems blatant about the fact that they are very much for sale to the highest bidder. They are very happy to be courted by Washington and Beijing because they occupy a strategic spot in the world and sit on a strategic resource and they have the money to allow them an independence that other countries in the region don’t have.”
“Equatorial Guinea seems blatant about the fact that they are very much for sale to the highest bidder.”
Following rigged presidential elections in 2022 — in which Obiang won 95 percent of the vote — Phee wrote a letter to the newly reelected president. Posted to X by an Equatoguinean government official, the letter shows that Phee welcomed “close collaboration” in which their countries would “act together” and seize “opportunities to strengthen” and “enhance our mutual security.” (The State Department verified the authenticity of the letter to The Intercept, but did not respond to other questions about engagement with Obiang’s government.)
“The United States is committed to a world in which human rights are protected … and those who commit human rights abuses are held accountable,” said Phee’s boss, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in a 2021 statement defining the Biden administration’s core principles. “President Biden is committed to a foreign policy … centered on the defense of democracy and the protection of human rights.”
Experts said engagement with Equatorial Guinea makes a mockery of this pledge and undermines U.S. credibility across Africa.
“The hypocrisy of publicly saying that democracy, human rights, and anticorruption are the cornerstone of your foreign policy and then to go down a path that does not put those values into any kind of real practice is most troubling,” Hudson told The Intercept. “It sends a message to everyone on the continent that everything we say is negotiable.”
Among the many hawks on Capitol Hill, few have as effectively frightened lawmakers over Chinese control of TikTok as Jacob Helberg, a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission. Helberg’s day job at the military contractor Palantir, however, means he stands to benefit from ever-frostier relations between the two countries.
Helberg has been instrumental in the renewed legislative fight against TikTok, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Spearheading the effort to create the bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks is Jacob Helberg,” the Journal reported in March 2023. The paper noted collaboration between Helberg, previously a policy adviser at Google, and investor and fellow outspoken China hawk Peter Thiel, as well as others in Thiel’s circle. The anti-China coalition, the Journal reported this past week, has been hammering away at a TikTok ban, and Helberg said he has spoken to over 100 members of Congress about the video-sharing social media app.
From his position on the U.S.–China commission — founded by Congress to advise it on national security threats represented by China — Helberg’s rhetoric around TikTok has been as jingoistic as any politician. “TikTok is a scourge attacking our children and our social fabric, a threat to our national security, and likely the most extensive intelligence operation a foreign power has ever conducted against the United States,” he said in a February hearing held by the commission.
Unlike those in government he’s supposed to be advising, however, Helberg has another gig: He is a policy adviser to Alex Karp, CEO of the defense and intelligence contractor Palantir. And Palantir, like its industry peers, could stand to profit from increased hostility between China and the United States. The issue has been noted by publications like Fortune, which noted in September 2023 that Palantir relies heavily on government contracts for AI work — a business that would grow in a tech arms race with China. (Neither the U.S.–China commission nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.)
“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations.”
Experts told The Intercept that there didn’t appear to be a legal conflict that would exclude Helberg from the commission, but the participation of tech company officials could nonetheless create competing interests between sound policymaking and corporate profits.
“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations about economic and security relations between the U.S. and China,” said Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and scholar of the U.S. defense industry. “From their perspective, China is a mortal adversary and the only way to ‘beat’ them is to further subsidize the tech sector so we can rapidly build next generation systems that can overwhelm China in a potential conflict — to the financial benefit of Palantir and its Silicon Valley allies.”
Big Tech’s China Hawks
Helberg’s activities are part of a much broader constellation of anti-China advocacy orbiting around Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir in 2003 and is still invested in the company. (Helberg’s husband, the venture capitalist Keith Rabois, spent five years as a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund). Thiel, also an early investor in Pentagon aerospace contractor SpaceX and weaponsmaker Anduril, has for years blasted the Chinese tech sector as inherently malignant — claims, like Helberg’s, made with more than trace amounts of paranoia and xenophobia.
Thiel’s remarks on China are characteristically outlandish. Speaking at the MAGA-leaning National Conservatism Conference in 2019, Thiel suggested, without evidence, that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” — and urged a joint CIA–FBI investigation. In 2021, at a virtual event held by the Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel said, “I do wonder whether at this point, bitcoin should also be thought [of] in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”
For Thiel’s camp, conflict with China is both inevitable and necessary. U.S.–China research cooperation on artificial intelligence, he says, is treacherous, and Chinese technology, generally, is anathema to national security. As he inveighs against Chinese tech, Thiel’s portfolio companies stand by with handy solutions. Palantir, for instance, began ramping up its own Made-in-the-USA militarized AI offerings last year. Anduril executives engage in routine fearmongering over China, all the while pitching their company’s weapons as just the thing to thwart an invasion of Taiwan. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey told Bloomberg TV last year.
Palantir is making a similar pitch. In a 2023 quarterly earnings call, Palantir Chief Operations Officer Shyam Sankar told investors that the company had China in mind as it continues to grow its reach into the Western Pacific. On another Palantir earnings call, Karp, the company’s CEO and Helberg’s boss, told investors the more dangerous and real the Chinese threat gets, “the more battle-tested and real your software has to be. I believe it’s about to get very real. Why? Because our GDP growth is significantly better than China’s.” Even marketing images distributed by Palantir show the company’s software being used to track Chinese naval maneuvers in the South China Sea.
Thiel is not alone among Silicon Valley brass. At a February 2023 panel event, a representative of America’s Frontier Fund, a national security-oriented technology investment fund that pools private capital and federal dollars, said that a war between China and Taiwan would boost the firm’s profits by an order of magnitude. Private sector contributors to America’s Frontier Fund include both Thiel and former Google chair Eric Schmidt, whose China alarmism and defense-spending boosterism rivals Thiel’s — and who similarly stands to personally profit from escalations with China.
TikTok, Bad! China, Bad!
Repeated often enough, anti-TikTok rhetoric from tech luminaries serves to reinforce the notion that China is the enemy of the U.S. and that countering this enemy is worth the industry’s price tags — even if the app’s national security threat remains entirely hypothetical.
“Just like tech had to convince people that crypto and NFTs had intrinsic value, they also have to convince the Pentagon that the forms of warfare that their technologies make possible are intrinsically superior or fill a gap,” Shana Marshall, an arms industry scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, told The Intercept.
Marshall said bodies like the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission can contribute to such conflicts because advisory boards that encourage revolving-door moves between private firms and government help embed corporate interests in policymaking. “In other words,” she said, “it’s not a flaw in the program, it’s an intentional design element.”
“The tensions with China/Taiwan are tailor made for this argumentation,” Marshall added. “You couldn’t get better cases — or better timing — so grifters and warmongers like Helberg and Schmidt are going to be increasingly integrated into Pentagon planning and all aspects of regulation.”
Forcing divestiture or banning TikTok outright would not trigger armed conflict between the U.S. and China on its own, but the pending legislation to effectively ban the app is already dialing up hostility between the two countries. After the House’s overwhelming support last week of the bill to force the sale of the app from Chinese hands, the Financial Times reported that Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the U.S. of displaying a “robber’s logic” through legislative expropriation. An editorial in the Chinese government mouthpiece Global Times decried the bill as little more than illegal “commercial plunder” and urged TikTok parent company ByteDance to not back down.
“There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”
Of course, self-interest is hardly a deviation from the norm in the military-industrial complex. “This is the way Washington works,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. “There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”
Although it’s common for governmental advisory boards like Helberg’s U.S.–China commission to enthusiastically court the private sector, Amey said it would be important for Helberg to make clear when making policy recommendations whether he’s speaking as an adviser to Palantir’s CEO or to Congress, though the disclosure wouldn’t negate Helberg’s personal interest in a second Cold War. Such disclosures have been uneven: While Helberg’s U.S.–China commission bio leads with his Palantir job, the company went unmentioned in the February hearing. Given the ongoing campaign to pass the TikTok bill, Helberg’s lobbying “certainly raises some red flags,” Amey said.
He said, “The industry is hawkish on China but has a financial interest in the decisions that the executive branch or Congress make.”
Retired Navy four-star Adm. William McRaven — highly paid leadership guru, business consultant, and special operations commander — received a $50 million “Courage and Civility Award” from richest-person-on-Earth Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this past week. Actress Eva Longoria received the other half of the $100 million grant: the exact amount the Bezos-owned Washington Post lost last year before cutting nearly 10 percent of its staff.
For Bezos, the Post’s financial woes are mere pocket change. (With his net worth of $200 billion, covering the Washington Post’s financial deficit would be the equivalent of a person making $100,000 a year paying $50 to save over 200 jobs.) All of which is ironic given that Bezos says his motivation for buying the newspaper was “stewardship.”
“Support of American democracy through stewardship of the Washington Post, and financial contributions to the dedicated and innovative champions of a variety of causes,” Bezos said in 2018, demonstrates his “investment in the future of our planet and civilization.”
Now, he is focused on repairing America’s descent into division, searching for leaders who “aim high, pursue solutions with courage, and always do so with civility.” The three-year-old award follows Bezos’s vow to donate most of his fortune toward reducing inequality and combating climate change.
Bezos is also a growing defense contractor who sat on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board during the Obama administration, an advisory panel that McRaven was also on at the same time. The admiral — famous for overseeing the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, and for his commencement address at the University of Texas where he told graduates to start by making their beds — retired in 2014 and has been making a killing in the civilian world. He sits on the board of oil giant ConocoPhillips, is senior adviser to investment firm Lazard, and on the federal advisory board of Palantir, the Pentagon contractor founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. McRaven has also parlayed his military career into paid speaker and bestselling author of motivational titles like “The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived” and “The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy),” paper-thin books that each dispense featherweight advice on civil life.
All of this has turned the friendly admiral into a multimillionaire, making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from board membership, publishing, and speaking. He holds $2 million worth of stock from ConocoPhillips according to a January 17 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. As chancellor for the University of Texas System, he raked in $2.5 million, making him the highest-paid public university official in the U.S. in 2018. He is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau and the Celebrity Speakers Bureau, where his fees range between $50,000 and $100,000 per speech. He owns two homes: one in Alexandria, Virginia, and another in Austin, Texas, worth some $5 million, property records reviewed by The Intercept show.
“Man’s compassion far exceeds his greed,” McRaven writes in his book “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations,” one of his many treatises that sprinkles the telling of his career from the first Gulf War through the death of bin Laden.
Since 2021, the Courage and Civility Award has found five recipients, all of whom, in their own ways, have taken a stand against Donald Trump and amassed vast personal fortunes — attributes that Bezos seems to value. The 2021 award recipient Van Jones has blasted the former president for years, alongside chef José Andrés who sued the president after comments he made about Mexican Americans. The 2022 recipient Dolly Parton rejected Trump’s offer for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and this year, Eva Longoria used her celebrity status to mobilize Latino voters against the former president.
Following this pattern, McRaven is also a very political admiral, writing multiple op-eds in Bezos’s Washington Post denouncing Trump. He has said that Trump’s criticisms of the news media represent “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.” In an opinion piece that took the form of a letter to the president, he denounced Trump’s own incivility. “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”
His partisanship doesn’t necessarily disqualify him from receiving millions in a charity grant that will in theory give others a leg up in the world and level the playing field, but it does raise the questions: Why him, and why can Bezos be so generous while starving a top-tier newspaper that is clearly in need of his benevolence?
Among his duties as paragon of civility, McRaven has declared his alliance with his national security blood brothers. When Trump stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance, McRaven jumped to his defense, daring Trump to “revoke my security clearance, too,” in the pages of the Washington Post. McRaven called Brennan, who is a vociferous Trump hater, “a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question.”
McRaven also took to the Washington Post defending Acting Director of National Intelligence Joe Maguire, whom Trump had just fired after his subordinate, Shelby Pierson, briefed Congress that the Russian government appeared to prefer Trump over Democratic candidates for the 2020 election. CNN later reported that Pierson had “overstated” the findings of the intelligence community.
Similarly when an obscure Navy Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was passed up for a second star, McRaven again went public, decrying Congress’s “trend of disrespect to the military.” Mr. Civility just didn’t mention why Congress blocked Losey’s promotion: Multiple investigations found he had retaliated against whistleblowers.
When it comes to national security, McRaven is deployed everywhere. He sits on the board of the Gates Global Policy Center founded by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He sits on the board of the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation Advisory Council. He is an honorary board member of the International Spy Museum. He is on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Retired Adm. William McRaven discusses special operations and the CIA during a daylong symposium on Sept. 16, 2015.Photo: Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images
The Washington Post reports that McRaven will split the money from his Bezos award between the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which supports the families of fallen service members, and the BrainHealth Project, which provides mental health resources to veterans.
The racket goes something like this: A billionaire pays a famous admiral, to pay charities that he is connected with (McRaven’s wife Georgeann is on the board of the Warrior Foundation), to pay disabled veterans, who are the victims of the failures of the national security elite to begin with. It is a modern trickle-down parable that, as always, leaves the worst off with a shiny consolation prize for sacrificing life and limb to their country.
The national security-obsessed, veteran-loving, cowboy-hat-adorned Bezos has become the ultimate commander in chief of the national security elite, an ersatz Mr. Magoo with a trillion-dollar business that actually tears at the seams of America’s mottled social fabric, decimating small businesses that, unlike McRaven, cannot survive on “courage” and “civility” alone.
Alongside Bezos, McRaven has formulated a certain conception of civility in which niceties that maintain the status quo emerge as the highest form of service. The destruction of the working class and the injuries sustained in their mad-man wars go unexamined as the admirals hand out Band-Aids. They perpetuate a certain elite consensus with regard to national security, one that drowns out every attempt to impact the societal needs like inequality and climate change which Bezos claims to address. (Bezos evidently doesn’t care that McRaven collects millions from the oil industry.)
One can read McRaven’s “Sea Stories,” review his speeches, and search through the Bezos philanthropy for a sense of who these blood brothers are, what they really believe in. But following the money is a far more telling endeavor.
Who is McRaven really? Former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condensed his storied military career into a G.I. Joe caricature, writing in his autobiography “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace”that “Bill made a big impression with his booming baritone, wide smile, and huge biceps.”
The purported threat of TikTok to U.S. national security has inflated into a hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a different story: U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing. That fact hasn’t stopped many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with empty conjecture and innuendo.
In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical. With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they are well placed to know.
The basic charge is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese company, could be compelled by the government in Beijing to use their app in targeted operations to manipulate public opinion, collect mass data on Americans, and even spy on individual users. (TikTok says it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked. This week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that “there’s no CCP ownership” of ByteDance, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.)
Though top national security officials seem happy to echo these allegations of Chinese control of TikTok, they stop short of saying that China has ever actually coordinated with the company.
Typical is an interview CIA Director William Burns gave to CNN in 2022, where he said it was “troubling to see what the Chinese government could do to manipulate TikTok.” Not what the Chinese government has done, but what it could do.
What China could do turns out to be a recurring theme in the statements of the top national security officials.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a 2022 talk at the University of Michigan that TikTok’s “parent company is controlled by the Chinese government, and it gives them the potential [emphasis added] to leverage the app in ways that I think should concern us.” Wray went on to cite TikTok’s ability to control its recommendation algorithm, which he said “allows them to manipulate content and if they want to [emphasis added], to use it for influence operations.”
In the same talk, Wray three times referred to the Chinese government’s “ability” to spy on TikTok users but once again stopped short of saying that they do so.
“They also have the ability to collect data through it on users which can be used for traditional espionage operations, for example,” Wray said. “They also have the ability on it to get access, they have essential access to software devices. So you’re talking about millions of devices and that gives them the ability to engage in different kinds of malicious cyber activity through that.”
Wray is referring to the potential ability, according to U.S. intelligence, to commandeer phones and computers connecting to TikTok through apps and the website.
In testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee in November 2022, Wray was even more circumspect, stressing that the Chinese government could use TikTok for foreign influence operations but only “if they so chose.” When asked by Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., if the Chinese government has used TikTok to collect information about Americans for purposes other than targeted ads and content, Wray only could acknowledge that it was a “possibility.”
“I would say we do have national security concerns, at least from the FBI’s end, about TikTok,” Wray said. “They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm which could be used for foreign influence operations if they so chose.”
The lack of evidence is not for lack of trying, as Wray alluded to during the same hearing. When asked by Harshbarger what is being done to investigate the Chinese government’s involvement in TikTok, Wray replied that he would see whether “any specific investigative work … could be incorporated into the classified briefing I referred to.”
The FBI, when asked by The Intercept if it has any evidence that TikTok has coordinated with the Chinese government, referred to Wray’s prior statements — many of which are quoted in this article. “We have nothing to add to the Director’s comments,” an FBI spokesperson said.
The fiscal year 2025 FBI budget request to Congress, which outlines its resource priorities in the coming year, was unveiled this week but makes no mention of TikTok in its 94 pages. In fact, it makes no mention of China whatsoever.
Since at least 2020, the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has investigated the implications of ByteDance’s acquisition of TikTok. The investigation followed an executive order by former President Donald Trump that sought to force TikTok to divest from its parent company. When that investigation failed to force a sale, a frustrated Congress decided to get involved, with the House passing legislation on Wednesday that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok.
In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the highest-ranking intelligence official in the U.S. government, was asked about the possibility that China might use TikTok to influence the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. Haines said only that it could not be discounted.
“We cannot rule out that the CCP could use it,” Haines said.
The relatively measured tone adopted by top intelligence officials contrasts sharply with the alarmism emanating from Congress. In 2022, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., deemed TikTok “digital fentanyl,” going on to co-author a column in the Washington Post with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling for TikTok to be banned. Gallagher and Rubio later introduced legislation to do so, and 39 states have, as of this writing, banned the use of TikTok on government devices.
None of this is to say that China hasn’t used TikTok to influence public opinion and even, it turns out, to try to interfere in American elections. “TikTok accounts run by a [People’s Republic of China] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022,” says the annual Intelligence Community threat assessment released on Monday. But the assessment provides no evidence that TikTok coordinated with the Chinese government. In fact, governments — including the United States — are known to use social media to influence public opinion abroad.
“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,” computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. “In 2016 Russia did this with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads like everybody else.”
This week, Reuters reported that as president, Trump signed a covert action order authorizing the CIA to use social media to influence and manipulate domestic Chinese public opinion and views on China. Other covert American cyber influence programs are known to exist with regard to Russia, Iran, terrorist groups, and other foreign actors.
In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, the intelligence community and the FBI believe that the threat of Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States has increased to its highest point since 9/11, according to testimony of senior officials. “It’s long been the case that the public and the media are quick to declare one threat over and gone, while they obsess over whatever’s shiny and new,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point earlier this month. Wray said that though many “commentators” claimed that the threat from foreign terrorist organizations was over, “a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations [are calling] for attacks against Americans and our allies.”
Though Wray cites Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and ISIS as making new threats against America, he said that the bureau was actually more focused on “homegrown” terrorists — Americans — as the primary current threat. “Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” he said at West Point.
Soon after the Gaza war began, Wray appeared before the House Committee on Homeland Security and said that homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs, posed the single greatest immediate foreign terrorist threat to the United States.
According to the FBI, while inspired by the actions of foreign terrorist groups, HVEs are lone actors or members of small cells disconnected from material support of the established extremist groups they draw inspiration from. Though Wray isn’t willing to discount the likelihood of a 9/11 magnitude attack — in fact, at West Point he cites the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as the equivalent of an attack on the United States that would have killed nearly 40,000 people in the single day — he says small-scale and “lone wolf” attacks are more likely. “Over the past five months, our Counterterrorism Division agents have been urgently running down thousands of reported threats stemming from the [Israel-Hamas] conflict,” Wray said on March 4.
“The FBI assesses HVEs as the greatest, most immediate international terrorism threat to the homeland,” Wray said in his November testimony to Congress, adding that “HVEs are people located and radicalized to violence primarily in the United States, who are not receiving individualized direction from [foreign terrorist organizations] but are inspired by FTOs, including the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (“ISIS”) and al-Qa’ida and their affiliates, to commit violence.”
Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for North America, echoed Wray’s concern in his testimony this month before Congress. “The likelihood of a significant terrorist attack in the homeland has almost certainly increased since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Multiple terrorist groups — including ISIS and al-Qa’ida — have leveraged the crisis to generate propaganda designed to inspire followers to conduct attacks, including in North America. The increasingly diffuse nature of the transnational terrorist threat challenges our law enforcement partners’ ability to detect and disrupt attack plotting against the homeland and leaves us vulnerable to surprise.” Guillot’s counterpart in U.S. Southern Command, responsible for the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, Gen. Laura Richardson, did not raise the domestic terror threat during her congressional testimony.
Though the FBI is focused on homegrown threats, Wray does say that after months of chasing down an influx in leads, his counterterrorism division has started “to see those numbers level off,” adding that “we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.”
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence and the highest-ranking U.S. intelligence official, agreed with Wray’s view, testifying this week, “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world.”
“While it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” she warned, setting the stage for a renewed priority of Middle East terrorism at the very time when much of the intelligence apparatus had shifted to a different type of domestic terrorist threat after January 6. In the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment, praise for the October 7 attack by the Nordic Resistance Movement, a European neo-Nazi group, was cited as evidence of the spread of extremist ideology. No direct neo-Nazi plots, however, were identified.
Among the foreign threats raised during his West Point address, Wray mentioned Hezbollah support and praise for Hamas posing “a constant threat to U.S. interests in the region,” Al Qaeda issuing its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or Yemen, calling on jihadists to attack Americans “and Jewish people,” and ISIS urging its followers to target Jewish communities in both Europe and the United States.
To embellish the domestic threat picture, earlier this week, Wray said that immigrant crossings at America’s southern border were extremely concerning, with foreign terrorist organizations infiltrating into the country through drug smuggling networks. “There is a particular network that has — some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have — ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about, and we’ve been spending enormous amounts of effort with our partners investigating,” he said.
Picking up where Wray left off, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News this week that illegal immigration was one of the greatest catalysts for America’s imperilment. “The terror threat to this country is enormous.” Cruz said. “It is greater than it’s ever been at any time since September 11th.”
Other members of Congress have similarly seized on Wray’s warnings about the Hamas threat to push for their own policy objectives. As Wired reported this week, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, met with lawmakers in December in an attempt to dissuade them from initiating reforms that could cripple the FISA 702 authority, a law enshrining the intelligence community’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance.
According to the report, Turner “presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms may prove detrimental to national security.”
In the past three months, the only Hamas-connected prosecution carried out by the Department of Justice appears to be the arrest of Karrem Nasr, a U.S. citizen who allegedly traveled from Egypt to Kenya in an effort to wage jihad with the Somalia-related terrorist group al-Shabab. “Karrem Nasr, motivated by the heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, devoted himself to waging violent jihad against America and its allies,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a press release, saying that they had been able to disrupt his plot.
As the immigration crisis continues and the Biden administration pursues a muscular enforcement strategy with an eye to public opinion and the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security prospers. One obscure $6 billion program has grown silently: a network of over 1,000 surveillance towers built along America’s land borders, a system that it describes as “a unified vision of unauthorized movement.”
A broad outline of the Biden administration’s plan to solve the immigration crisis in America was unveiled this week, including 5,800 new border and immigration security officers, a new $4.7 billion Southwest Border Contingency Fund, and more emergency authority for the president to shut down the border when needed. Moving forward on these programs will “save lives and bring order to the border,” President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address last week.
Homeland Security’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget request, released yesterday, includes $25.9 billion to “secure the border,” mostly through more government agents and more (and more capable) technology. Hidden in the fine print is the $6 billion tower surveillance program, one that has been in the works and growing since 2005 for years.
The system is called Integrated Surveillance Towers, and it is projected to reach “full operational capability” in 2034, a network of over 1,000 manned and unmanned towers covering the thousands of miles that make up America’s northern and southern borders. IST includes four ever-growing programs: Autonomous Surveillance Towers (AST); Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT); Remote Video Surveillance System Upgrade (RVSS-U); and the Northern Border RVSS (NB-RVSS). The deployment of various towers have been going on so long, some are already obsolete, according to the DHS 2025 budget request.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, IST detects and identifies “threats in near real time,” plugging up one gap that allows for “the exploitation of data collected by sensors, towers, drones, assets, agents, facilities, and other sources informing mission critical decisions in the field and at Headquarters.” Modern technology, including AI and “autonomous capabilities,” the Border Patrol says, is key to “keeping front-line personnel safer, more effective, and one step ahead” of border enemies.
Towers are currently being built and netted together by Elbit America (part of Israel’s Elbit Systems), Advanced Technology Systems Company, and General Dynamics. Defense Daily reported in September that DHS plans to acquire about 277 new IST towers and upgrade about 191 legacy surveillance towers in the latest set of contracts. A January press release from General Dynamics celebrates the distinction of being named one of the three recipients of a piece of a $1.8 billion indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract: “The Consolidated Tower & Surveillance Equipment (CTSE) system consists of all fixed and relocatable sensor towers, and communications and power equipment necessary for CBP [Customs and Border Protection] to perform surveillance along the southern and northern borders of the United States.” The company says it may take up to 14 years to complete.
The network of towers hosts various day and night capable cameras and radars, and can also be equipped with other sensors, including cellphone communications intercept devices, to paint a picture of hostile terrain below. The main focus of DHS today is to net all of the towers into “a single unified program” and integrate AI into the ability to detect movement and activity to create a “common operating picture.”
Though billions have been spent on the IST program, government auditors have consistently questioned whether it actually reduces unlawful border crossings. A General Accountability Office assessment from 2018 concluded that the DHS was “not yet positioned to fully quantify the impact these technologies have on its mission,” that is, whether the towers actually help to stem the flow. The GAO then recommended that DHS establish better metrics to “more fully assess … progress in implementing the Southwest Border Technology Plan and determine when mission benefits have been realized.”
A new GAO report issued last month updates progress on the IST program and says that finishing the network in Texas has been a problem. “According to the IST program manager,” the report reads, “… ease of access and willingness of property owners are key factors when considering sites for tower placement. The program manager stated that sites in the Laredo and Rio Grande Valley sectors … are still challenging because these areas need permissions from multiple landowners and road access may be an impediment.”
Though the vast majority of undocumented immigrants cross the southern border at just a handful of locations, homeland security equally seeks to cover the entire Canadian border with towers, according to DHS documents. And not only that: Homeland security is eyeing the California coast and the coastal Atlantic for future expansion, portending a ubiquitous nationwide system of ground surveillance.
ResearchAndMarkets.com’s November report on “Border Security Technologies”says that the market will exceed $70 billion globally in 2027, rising from $48 billion in 2022. “The adoption of AI-integrated surveillance towers will be critical to driving growth, with the total value of camera systems globally expected to reach $22.8 billion by 2027; up from $10.1 billion in 2022. Surveillance towers are capable of creating a virtual border, detecting, identifying, and tracking threats over great distances.”
“AI-integrated surveillance towers are at the centre of growing concern by campaign groups regarding their potential to analyse the behaviour of the general population, possibly infringing upon people’s human rights. These concerns may slow adoption unless addressed,” the report says.
Since retiring from the military last year, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit. From military pay of $204,000 a year, Milley is sure to skyrocket to compensation in the millions, especially because he is represented by the same high-powered speakers’ agency as Hillary Clinton, who faced criticism in 2016 for her paid speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Called “cashing in” by military officers, transitioning from capped government salaries to defense industry, private consulting for global risk management, or work with venture capital brings in lavish paydays. For retired generals, the invasion is swift. The recently retired chief of space operations for the Space Force, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, for example, has joined the board of directors for aerospace companies Impulse Space and Axiom Space, as well as becoming senior managing director for investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. Gen. James C. McConville, who served as chief of staff of the Army before retiring last year, has joined the board of directors of drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy and aerospace investment firm AE Industrial Partners, as an operating partner.
Milley’s speaker’s agency, Harry Walker Agency is touting the retired general, who crossed swords with former President Donald Trump and continues to be a polarizing figure, for his insights on leadership and international conflicts. “His perspective is invaluable for audiences looking to understand the impact of current conflicts and managing risks on boards of directors and leadership teams who are responsible for making strategic decisions and identifying vulnerabilities,” the website says.
According to the speaker’s agency, Milley recently participated in a Q&A at a gathering of 160 CEOs organized by investment bank Moelis & Company, where he provided his “insider’s perspective on world affairs.”
The engagement has not been previously reported.
“He was terrific — we loved him!” said Moelis & Company, a global investment bank, in a review featured on the agency website. “It was fantastic!”
According to the agency website, Milley “provided crucial perspective to business leaders,” but provided little more detail.
On March 4, Milley also spoke at the American Council on Education’s 2024 Presidents and Chancellors Summit at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to an event page. A portrait of Milley appears on the list of major speakers and links to his Harry Walker Agency page.
His speech at the summit was sponsored by Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting and accounting firms, an event page notes. The page describes his speech as exploring “the convergence of democracy, higher education, and moral leadership during times of crisis”; as well as “emphasizing the responsibilities of leaders to uphold democratic principles and inspire resilience in challenging times.”
“The Summit was exclusively for presidents and chancellors, and there is no transcript,” Jonathan Riskind, vice president of public affairs and strategic communications for the American Council on Education, told The Intercept in response to a query.
Asked for transcripts of this and other speaking engagements, and for Milley’s compensation, Moelis & Company, the Harry Walker Agency, and Milley himself did not respond to requests for comment.
Speaker’s fees for former top officials like Milley are often substantial. During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Clinton came under fire for receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs alone in one year. Along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the couple raked in over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House.
Milley has emerged as an ardent critic of Trump — unusual for high-ranking military officers who typically eschew politics. In his final speech as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, in a swipe at Trump, Milley said that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
Trump replied with a statement on his social media platform Truth Social: “Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week.”
Clinton’s speeches reportedly earned her around $200,000 a pop — about the same as Milley’s annual salary when he was in uniform.
Gaming companies are coordinating with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to root out so-called domestic violent extremist content, according to a new government report. Noting that mechanisms have been established with social media companies to police extremism, the report recommends that the national security agencies establish new and similar processes with the vast gaming industry.
The exact nature of the cooperation between federal agencies and video game companies, which has not been previously reported, is detailed in a new Government Accountability Office report. The report draws on interviews conducted with five gaming and social media companies including Roblox, an online gaming platform; Discord, a social media app commonly used by gamers; Reddit; as well as a game publisher and social media company that asked the GAO to remain anonymous.
The Intercept reached out to the companies identified in the GAO report for comment, but none responded on the record at time of publication.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have mechanisms to share and receive domestic violent extremism threat-related information with social media and gaming companies,” the GAO says. The report reveals that the DHS intelligence office meets with gaming companies and that the companies can use these meetings to “share information with I&A [DHS’s intelligence office] about online activities promoting domestic violent extremism,” or even simply “activities that violate the companies’ terms of service.” Through its 56 field offices and hundreds of resident agencies subordinate field offices, the FBI receives tips from gaming companies of potential law-breaking and extremist views for further investigation. The FBI also conducts briefings to gaming companies on purported threats.
The GAO warns that FBI and DHS lack an overarching strategy to bring its work with gaming companies in line with broader agency missions. “Without a strategy or goals, the agencies may not be fully aware of how effective their communications are with companies, or how effective their information-sharing mechanisms serve the agencies’ overall missions,” the GAO says. The report ends with a recommendation that both agencies develop such a strategy — a recommendation that DHS concurred with, providing an estimated completion date of June 28 this year.
“All I can think of is the awful track record of the FBI when it comes to identifying extremism,” Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who often streams while playing video games under the handle HasanAbi, says of the mechanisms. “They’re much better at finding vulnerable teenagers with mental disabilities to take advantage of.”
The GAO’s investigation, which covers September 2022 to January 2024, was undertaken at the request of the House Homeland Security Committee, which asked the government auditor to examine domestic violent extremists’ use of gaming platforms and social media. While there is no federal law that criminalizes domestic violent extremism as a category of crime, since 2019 the U.S. government has employed five domestic terrorism threat categories. These are defined by the FBI and DHS as racial/ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism, abortion-related violent extremism, and all other domestic terror threats.
The GAO study also follows pressure from Congress to top gaming companies to crack down on extremist content. Last March, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to gaming companies Valve, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Riot Games, Roblox Corp, and Take-Two Interactive demanding that they take actions to police gamers.
“Unlike more traditional social media companies — which in recent years have developed public facing policies addressing extremism, created trust and public safety teams, and released transparency reports — online gaming platforms generally have not utilized these tools,” Durbin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the letter, Durbin requested a briefing from the Justice Department on what channels exist “for DOJ and the online video game industry to communicate and coordinate” on the threat of “online video games by extremists and other malicious actors.”
The federal government’s interest in combating extremism has risen sharply following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed his national security team to conduct a comprehensive review of federal efforts to fight domestic terrorism, which the White House has deemed “the most urgent terrorism threat facing the United States” — greater than foreign terrorist groups like the Islamic State group. Biden’s directive resulted in the first ever national strategy for fighting domestic terrorism, released by the White House in June 2021. The strategy mentions “online gaming platforms” as a place where “recruiting and mobilizing individuals to domestic terrorism occurs.”
According to the national strategy, the intelligence community assessed that extremists emboldened by events like January 6 “pose an elevated threat to the Homeland”; and that “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult.”
The federal government says that sharing information with gaming and social media companies is another avenue to identify and combat extremism. The government also recognizes that there are constitutional and legal questions about Americans’ free speech rights. According to the GAO report, both the FBI and DHS indicated that they are proceeding with caution in light of federal litigation on such matters, including one case on its way to the Supreme Court.
In response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, a federal judge last year prohibited the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies from communicating with social media companies to fight what they consider misinformation.
Federal law enforcement and intelligence have long focused on gaming as an avenue for both radicalization and as a backdoor platform for extremists to communicate. A 2019 internal intelligence assessment jointly produced by the FBI, DHS, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the National Counterterrorism Center and obtained by The Intercept warns that “violent extremists could exploit functionality of popular online gaming platforms and applications.” The assessment lists half a dozen U.S.-owned gaming platforms that it identifies as popular, including Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net, Fortnite, Playstation Xbox Live, Steam, and Roblox.
“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” former President Donald Trump said in 2019 after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “This includes the gruesome video games that are now commonplace.”
The GAO report cites over a dozen expert participants in their survey, including three from the Anti-Defamation League as well as the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and several academic institutions.
The Anti-Defamation League has testified to Congress multiple times about extremists’ use of gaming platforms. In 2019, ADL’s then-senior vice president of international affairs, Sharon Nazarian, was asked by Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., if gaming platforms “are monitored” and if there’s “a way AI can be employed to identify those sorts of conversations.”
Nazarian replied that gaming platforms “need to be better regulated.”
The Pentagon has known of fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa for nearly 20 years but has nonetheless forged ahead, failing to address glaring problems, according to a 2007 study obtained exclusively by The Intercept.
“There is no useful, shared conception of the conflict,” says the Pentagon study, which was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and has not previously been made public. “The instruments of national power are not balanced, which results in excessive reliance on the military instrument. There is imbalance within the military instrument as well.”
The 50-page analysis, conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a private think tank that works solely for the U.S. government, is based on anonymized interviews with key U.S. government officials from across various departments and agencies. It found America’s nascent war in the Horn of Africa was plagued by a failure to define the parameters of the conflict or its aims; an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy; and barriers to coordination between the military and other government agencies like the State Department and local allies like the Somali government.
“Damn, this almost could have been written yesterday.”
After more than 20 years of U.S. efforts, the Pentagon’s own metrics show that America’s war in the region was never effectively prosecuted, remains in a stalemate or worse, and has been especially ruinous for Somalis.
“Damn, this almost could have been written yesterday,” said Elizabeth Shackelford, a former State Department Foreign Service officer who served in Somalia, after The Intercept shared the full IDA analysis with her. “I’ve known these problems have persisted throughout my career with the U.S. government, but I didn’t quite expect this has been thoroughly studied, by DoD, with these issues conclusively identified and yet not addressed for two decades now.”
From the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s to the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the 2000s to the 2020s, the Pentagon — and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in particular — has taken an active interest in investigating its failures, even as it has publicly claimed progress. Like the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the Vietnam War commissioned by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the Afghanistan Papers, a collection of internal interviews and memos documenting problems with the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, the IDA study demonstrates that U.S. officials were aware of structural defects in American efforts in Africa from the earliest days of the conflict.
In 2002, the U.S. military established the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa, or CJTF-HOA, to conduct operations in support of the global war on terror in the region. That same year, U.S. Special Operations forces were dispatched to Somalia. They were followed by conventional forces, helicopters, surveillance aircraft, outposts, and drones.
Commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted from 2003 to 2007, the IDA analysis, “Achieving Unity of Effort: A Case Study of US Government Operations in the Horn of Africa,” was designed to understand the “national security challenges” faced by the U.S. government writ large in the Horn of Africa and improve policies and their implementation.
In 2007, the year the IDA report was completed and U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, began operations, the U.S. conducted its first declared airstrike in Somalia. Since then, it has carried out more than 280 air attacks and commando raids, aimed primarily at the terrorist group al-Shabab, while the CIA and elite troops created local proxy forces to conduct low-profile operations on behalf of the United States. At the same time, the U.S. has provided Somalia with billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance.
All this went on despite deep-seated problems identified by IDA researchers at the beginning of the conflict. Interviews with senior U.S. government officials about the Global War on Terror convinced the IDA team of flawed coordination between U.S. government agencies and a need for a unified strategy.
The IDA study team “could not find documentation for a ‘whole of government’ U.S. strategy that would compel the coordination of all USG efforts in the region of the Horn.” Lacking an “organizing principle” for U.S. efforts there, roles and missions were murky, and agencies were sometimes “in conflict over ends, ways, and means” to prosecute the war. The team also found that counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies were “competing rather than complementary in the Horn.”
“Establishing a combatant command in Africa puts too much emphasis on the military arm of U.S. foreign policy.”
The IDA researchers not only interviewed senior government officials but also rank and file personnel working on the ground in the Horn of Africa for the military, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some interviewees told the research team that “establishing a combatant command in Africa puts too much emphasis on the military arm of U.S. foreign policy.” But the Pentagon pressed ahead, establishing AFRICOM “to work with Africans to bring peace and security to their continent.”
In 2010, the Government Accountability Office examined CJTF-HOA and found a host of problems akin to those mentioned in the IDA study. The task force was “generally not setting specific, achievable, and measurable goals for activities”; had made “cultural missteps” that undermined U.S. efforts and put additional burdens on other government agencies; and was not doing enough to determine whether its efforts were “having their intended effects or whether modifications are needed to best align with AFRICOM’s mission.”
In a 2016 interview with researchers for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, offered a frank assessment of U.S. military aims there. “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” he said. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”
The same could be said of Somalia. The IDA study lamented the “presence of al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa and the “failed state of Somalia.” Both remain realities despite two decades of forever war. Twenty years after the IDA’s research began, AFRICOM called al-Shabab “the largest and most kinetically active al-Qaeda network in the world.” The Fund for Peace’s most recent “fragile states index,” which effectively measures “failed state” status, ranked Somalia first.
America’s “objective is to produce a level of security and stability that denies sanctuary and opportunity to our enemies,” said the IDA study. But two decades into the conflict, security and stability have been in short supply for Somalis. Death and destruction have, however, been on the rise. Last year, deaths in Somalia from Islamist violence hit a record high of 7,643 — triple the number in 2020, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution.
In addition to a 22 percent rise in fatalities from terrorism in Somalia from 2022 to 2023, violence has increasingly bled across the border into Kenya which saw deaths from al-Shabab attacks double over the same span.
In a conference call with The Intercept and other reporters last month, the Biden administration’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Michael Hammer, said the United States is “focused on trying to alleviate the suffering that we’ve seen throughout the Horn,” adding that “we are prepared to remain very much engaged, not only to end the conflicts but also to help Africans in the Horn of Africa build a better future for themselves.”
The IDA study offers answers about why the United States is still “trying” to alleviate suffering and end conflicts in the Horn of Africa after 20 years of effort and billions of U.S. tax dollars. Experts say that lawmakers in both parties need to come together to end America’s failed campaign there.
“It will surprise no one to hear that the U.S. lacked an achievable or coherent strategy in this region from the beginning. But it’s still stunning when new information reveals just how adrift the policy has been,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “With so many pressing crises in the world, it’s deeply disturbing that this failed and counterproductive approach could easily continue for another decade or more. Hopefully, after 20 years, there can be some bipartisan consensus to rein in this war and bring it to a close.”
Aaron Bushnell’s death by self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington last month has provoked nationwide soul-searching about the war in Gaza. For the U.S. government though, the airman’s death excites a different kind of search: for so-called extremists, particularly left-wing ones.
Last Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former Army officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking why and how the Pentagon could tolerate an airman like Bushnell in its ranks. Calling his death “an act of horrific violence” that was “in support of a terrorist group [Hamas],” Cotton goes on to ask about the Defense Department’s internal efforts to address extremism and whether Bushnell was ever identified as exhibiting extremist views or behaviors.
Cotton’s agitation to find Hamas supporters in uniform twists Bushnell’s political act, which Bushnell said was in support of the Palestinian people. But it also follows a longstanding urging by other members of Congress like Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — ranking Republican of the Judiciary Committee and former president pro tempore of the Senate — for the military to pursue some kind of similar treatment for leftists.
While studies show that support for extremism is similar or even lower among veterans than the general population, extremism in the active-duty military has become an obsession of the Washington brass since January 6. Soon after taking office, new secretary of defense Austin, a retired Army general, directed the military to conduct an all-hands “stand down” to address extremism in the ranks, commissioning a number of panels and studies to evaluate white nationalism and neo-Nazi support among service members.
Outside of the Defense Department, the FBI is responsible for domestic counterterrorism. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began last October, it has been focused on any foreign blowback on the United States.
“In a year when the [foreign] terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans inside the United States to a whole ‘nother level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told cadets at West Point on Monday. “We cannot — and do not — discount the possibility that Hamas or another foreign terrorist organization may exploit the current conflict to conduct attacks here, on our own soil,” Wray told Congress right after the Gaza war began.
Will Bushnell’s death, and congressional pressure, open the door to build some speculative link between domestic supporters of Palestine and the bureau’s foreign-oriented anti-Hamas work?
Though Bushnell’s suicide was intended to demonstrate his anguish over the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he also embraced anarchism, or at least a present-day articulation of anarchism that is a general rejection of established authority. Bushnell’s posts on Reddit and other social media platforms before his death reflected this embrace of anarchism, and he chose the anarchist symbol as his profile picture for the Twitch account he used to livestream his self-immolation. His Facebook page also followed and liked pages for several anarchist groups. The anarchist collective CrimethInc. also said in a blog post that Bushnell had emailed the group shortly before his death.
Bushnell was also a community activist in San Antonio, Texas, where he was stationed. The Democratic Socialists of America San Antonio chapter issued a statement expressing solidarity with Bushnell and mentioning his work with them on homelessness. “He was an anarchist,” a San Antonio DSA member who interacted with Bushnell told The Intercept, asking that their name not be used. “He had a good nose for recognizing coercive / unhealthy organizing structures and practices; and was very intentional about his relationships with other people.”
Anarchism and the FBI
Since 2019, the FBI has used five “threat categories” to describe domestic terrorism: Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism (AGAAVE), Animal Rights or Environmental Violent Extremism, Abortion-Related Violent Extremism, and “All Other Domestic Terrorism Threats,” which is defined as “furtherance of political and/or social agendas which are not otherwise exclusively defined under one of the other threat categories.”
The AGAAVE threat, the FBI says, “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists.” FBI data reveals that 31 percent of its investigations relate to AGAAVEs and 60 percent of all investigations include cases categorized as AGAAVE and “civil unrest.” Most of that focus since January 6 has been on groups that participated in the protests at the Capitol and supporters of Donald Trump.
Behind the scenes though, according to congressional testimony reported here for the first time, the FBI maintains a program specifically for combatting anarchists, called the Anarchist Extremism Program. In Senate testimony, the FBI says that it had increased its targeting of anarchist “violent extremists” across the country by using both human and technical sources to spy on them. Since the nationwide protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the bureau has tasked field offices to tap confidential informants to develop better intelligence about anarchists. In 2021, the FBI more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload; and Wray told Congress that arrests of what the bureau calls “anarchist violent extremists” were more numerous in 2020-2021 (the months around January 6) than in the three previous years combined.
An internal FBI threat advisory obtained by The Intercept defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as individuals “who consider capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive,” and “oppose economic globalization; political, economic, and social hierarchies based on class, religion, race, gender, or private ownership of capital; and external forms of authority represented by centralized government, the military, and law enforcement.”
By the FBI’s definition, little of this applies to Bushnell’s own articulation of his political views, despite the anarchist label. But the airman’s protest fulfills the push by many Republicans and conservatives to get the FBI to equally focus on leftists. In a 2021 hearing, Grassley pushed for more investigations of those on the left, alluding to the bureau’s anarchist extremism program.
“Former Attorney General Barr stated that the FBI has robust programs for white supremacy and militia extremism, but a significantly weaker anarchist extremism program,” Grassley said to Wray. “How do you plan to make your left-wing anarchist extremism program as robust as your white supremacy and malicious extremism program?”
At a press briefing last Thursday that discussed Bushnell’s ties to anarchism, the Pentagon appeared to hint that his death might be considered an act of extremism.
“A review of Aaron Bushnell’s social media account indicates that he has some pretty strong anarchist views,” a reporter asked. “Under the Pentagon’s definition of extremists, would he fall under that?”
“I do think it’s fair to say that suicide by self immolation is an extreme act,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder replied, promising a “full investigation.”
Now that the party nominees for president have all but been decided, America’s entire election infrastructure is under assault, from foreign governments, hackers, and extremists. Or at least that’s the frenzied message being conveyed from on high these days. Russian warning lights are flashing. Think tanks are working overtime to grind out panicked reports about cybersecurity and disinformation. Fear mongering proliferates on both sides of the political aisle.
But it is the federal government that is most active in this effort, and in its zeal to “protect” the elections, Washington is building a narrative that achieves exactly what it blames foreign adversaries for. By arguing that the elections can and will be manipulated, federal agencies are delegitimizing the highly effective and secure electoral system, and affirming the view of too many Americans that the vote can’t be trusted.
Polling shows that conservative voters continue to be distrustful of America’s electoral system. The opinion of the electorate at large is murkier to assess, but some Democrats have also waded into the election denialism.
Last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that election interference is a major priority in the coming months. As evidence of the Bureau’s work on the issue, Wray cited an FBI investigation into two Iranian hackers who had used voter rolls to disseminate misinformation about illegal ballots being cast overseas.
In his testimony, Wray conflates the threat posed by cyber attacks with targeted disinformation campaigns. There is abundant evidence that foreign governments like Russia engaged in efforts to influence the 2016 and 2020 elections. But there are no examples of successful cyber attacks on the election system itself.
More recently, the FBI, Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security reported in late December that despite incessant hand-wringing over election security, foreign adversaries had no impact on the 2022 midterm elections. This week, they reported that there were no credible threats against Super Tuesday’s primary election.
“While the government detected some foreign government-affiliated and criminal cyber activity targeting election infrastructure, including activity by suspected People’s Republic of China cyber actors and activity claimed by pro-Russian hacktivists, there is no evidence that this activity prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes or to transmit election results in a timely manner; altered any technical aspect of the voting process; or otherwise compromised the integrity of voter registration information or any ballots cast during the 2022 federal elections,” the report states.
“Additional identified activity involved Russian, Iranian, and Chinese government-affiliated cyber actors scanning and, in some instances, accessing political campaign infrastructure, that is, information and communications technology and systems used by, on behalf of, or closely associated with a political organization, campaign, or candidate. However, there is no evidence that any information obtained through such activity was used in any foreign influence operation or was otherwise deployed, modified, or destroyed.”
None of these conclusions have deterred the now vibrant election protection apparatus of the federal government from accelerating their work. After the 2016 Democratic National Committee cyber attack, the Department of Homeland Security took much of the lead, designating election systems as critical infrastructure and pushing cyber security. DHS not only gained greater power over the U.S. voting system, but it also stoked fears that the decentralized and highly eclectic state and voting system was weak.
Earlier this month, former DHS intelligence chief John Cohen told ABC News that America is “heading into a highly dangerous, perfect storm” as the 2024 election approaches. Former DHS assistant secretary Elizabeth Neumann added that “there are barrages of threats coming from multiple vectors – and multiple components of election infrastructure. It’s not just the voting machine.”
According to a DHS bulletin obtained by ABC, Homeland Security today is sounding the alarm regarding foreign influence operations, which they say are “designed to undermine” the democratic “processes and institutions, steer policy, sway public opinion or sow division.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, housed within DHS, is also distributing information to voters in an effort to combat what it labels as “disinformation,” which it claims is an unprecedented threat to democracy. Earlier this month, CISA announced the creation of a new election interference program: #Protect2024, suggesting it is the duty of American civilians to fight a domestic war for election security.
In addition to dozens of materials warning of potential threats and urging state and local teams to practice “emergency response plans,” CISA has also extended its offer to conduct physical and cyber security assessments, alluding to the notion that elections cannot be safe without the federal government’s helping hand. An FBI report detailing federal agency responsibilities for election security further describes CISA’s role as providing “election infrastructure partners with no cost physical security assessments to identify vulnerabilities and provide recommended mitigation measures.”
Outside the FBI and the DHS, the director of national intelligence is also overseeing a governmentwide push to raise the specter of foreign election interference. In a Q&A with DNI’s Election Threats Executive Shelby Pierson — a position created in 2019 — the top elections intelligence chief outlined her desire to see the federal government further penetrate into local election infrastructure.
“We are focused on how the IC” — intelligence community — “can best support the FBI and DHS. … I want to see us evolve and continue to cultivate this whole-of-government approach to securing our elections and encourage our mission partners to reach beyond their limits and look beyond 2020,” Pierson said in the interview soon after being appointed, adding an allusion to the intelligence community’s efforts to police social media. “Through our FBI and DHS partners, the IC shares appropriate intelligence to state and local election officials, and private sector partners to include social and digital media platforms.”
Pierson was later criticized for repeating her own disinformation before Congress in a classified briefing. Contrary to Pierson’s testimony that Russia was working to tilt the 2020 election for Donald Trump, multiple national security officials contradicted this statement, clarifying that there was no intelligence to that effect, and offering solely that Russia was intending to sow discord in America.
The federal government seems intent on conveying the message that the electoral system is vulnerable, despite the fact that the highly distributed state and local electoral system — protected in part by its decentralization and diversity — inherently makes it resilient and overall invulnerable. Michael Cornfield, an associate professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management told CBC: “The chances that the actual ballot tabulation could be hacked are next to nothing. … It’s almost impossible.”
Because the federal government knows this, it has shifted its emphasis to a far more ambiguous and unprovable threat, that “foreign malign influence” is the problem. That Russia or China are trying to influence American public opinion isn’t new and shouldn’t ring alarms. Martin Libicki, a cyber warfare expert at the Rand Corporation, points out that all countries regularly attempt to influence foreign elections, highlighting Barack Obama’s visit to the U.K. to advocate against the Brexit referendum.
The federal government’s argument is that Russia and China (and even Iran) — through “malign influence” — are clandestinely seeking to undermine American’s faith in elections and even damage American democracy. Acceptance of this proposition, and the belief that “they” are succeeding, is central to the federal government’s larger effort to combat disinformation, which plays out in new efforts to police social media and even regulate free speech. For local election officials, the only solution on tap from Washington is offering to supply secret “intelligence.”
To deal with protecting the vote itself against interference or manipulation, the federal government has been offering cybersecurity “hygiene” audits of state and local systems, while employing the National Security Agency and the military’s Cyber Command to thwart any incoming electronic attacks. While “election security” makes sense on the surface, the overall effect, particularly as the bureaucrats push greater centralization and standardized machines and procedures, is that it might actually increase the vulnerability of a system that is already secure because of its very decentralization and variety.
None of this directly addresses “malign influence” or the vitality of American democracy, neither of which are solvable by government efforts to restrict information. And by increasingly doling out security clearances to state and local officials so that they can get “intelligence” on foreign influence efforts, the federal government enlists election officials into a bifurcated public and secret world, one that undermines transparency and consequently lessens public confidence.
Amonth before the 2020 presidential election, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose pandemic lockdown measures drew harsh criticism from President Donald Trump and his supporters.
The alleged plot coincided with growing concern about far-right political violence in America. But the FBI quickly realized it had a problem: A key informant in the case, a career snitch with a long rap sheet, had helped to orchestrate the kidnapping plot. During the undercover sting, the FBI ignored crimes that the informant, Stephen Robeson, appeared to have committed, including fraud and illegal possession of a sniper rifle.
The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Those cases too raised questions about whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents and informants.
Thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and hundreds of hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept offer an extraordinary view into the alleged conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
The Intercept exclusively obtained a five-hour recording of the FBI’s interrogation of Stephen Robeson, a paid informant central to the alleged kidnapping plot.
The reports and recording reveal how the FBI has adapted abusive war-on-terror sting tactics to target perceived domestic extremists and raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger effort to encourage political violence ahead of the 2020 election.
Federal agents running the Whitmer kidnapping investigation put the public in danger to avoid undermining their operation, the files show.
When FBI agents feared their informant might reveal the investigation’s flaws, they sought to coerce him into silence, at one point telling him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?”
For the FBI, the stakes in the Whitmer case were high. If defense lawyers learned of Robeson’s role in the kidnapping plot, the FBI agents feared, they’d be accused of entrapment. The collapse of the case, built over nearly a year using as many as a dozen informants, two undercover agents, and bureau field offices in at least four states, would have been a public relations coup for right-wingpoliticians and newsmedia. Both groups have used the problematic investigation as evidence that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against conservatives — despite a decadeslong public record proving the opposite — and as fuel for conspiracy theories that the January 6 Capitol riot was engineered by the FBI.
But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward, using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.
The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.
The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado.
The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.
Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.
So on December 10, 2020, agents called Robeson into the FBI’s office in Milwaukee in an apparent attempt to silence him. In an extraordinary five-hour conversation, which FBI agents recorded, one of Robeson’s handlers told him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.
“A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.’”
The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “double agent” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.
“We know we have power, right?” an FBI agent told Robeson during this meeting. “We know we have leverage. We’re not going to bullshit you.”
“We’re speaking from a position of power. That’s why we’re here. We planned this out. We know we have power.”
Robeson’s role as an informant in the Whitmer kidnapping plot was supposed to be a tightly held secret. FBI agents had written the charging documents to conceal his identity.
But the FBI’s paperwork was sloppy. Supporters of the 14 defendants began to piece together clues from details like the FBI’s descriptions of passengers in a car that had been driven near Whitmer’s vacation home in Antrim County, Michigan. The clues appeared to point to Robeson as a snitch — or, in the FBI’s terminology, a confidential human source. After the October 2020 arrests, a panicked Robeson started calling targets of the FBI investigation and denying that he was an informant.
“So when you call, your intentions are to keep some of the heat off of you, right?” an FBI agent asked Robeson during the December 2020 meeting. “To point people in the other direction?”
“Anywhere but me,” Robeson answered. “Not at anyone specific, just away from me.”
FBI Special Agent Henrik “Hank” Impola, one of the lead investigators in the Whitmer kidnapping conspiracy, testifies in a Michigan court on Aug. 31, 2020. Photo: Eric L. VanDussen
Robeson was talking to Henrik “Hank” Impola and Jayson Chambers, two of the lead FBI agents in the Michigan case. Chambers, who previously played in a rock band that “bases all of its music on the fact that Christians are in a spiritual war,” was the registered owner of a private intelligence company whose purported CEO ran a Twitter account known for right-wing trolling and that appeared to tweet about the Michigan case before it was announced.
The two agents started up a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Robeson. Chambers assured him they had done all they could to conceal his role as an informant. Impola, meanwhile, said they needed to come up with a plausible cover story.
Adam Fox, left, and Stephen Robeson, right, in a 2020 photo, became fast friends. The FBI tried to position Fox as the leader of the Whitmer kidnapping plot, but Robeson was also deeply involved, FBI records show. Photo: FBI evidence
“Robey’s Idea From Day One”
From the start of the investigation, the FBI knew that Robeson, likemanypaidinformants, had credibility problems. Robeson has been in and out of the criminal justice system since the early ’80s, charged with having sex with a minor, writing bad checks, bail jumping, and many other offenses. Robeson also acknowledged to the agents that he was previously a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. “I can’t blame what I did on anybody else,” Robeson told FBI agents of his criminal record. “I’m doing what I hope is better now.”
Sexual misconduct is a repeated claim in allegations involving Robeson, and his handlers at the FBI knew this. A local police report in the FBI’s files describes how a 17-year-old claimed Robeson coerced her to have sex in return for a promise to put her pictures in a calendar. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge.
More recently, according to an internal FBI report, a woman who lived in Robeson’s garage in Wisconsin told federal agents that Robeson pressured her for sex because he said she wasn’t contributing enough to the household. “I would not call it rape,” the woman said, though she acknowledged to federal agents that she did not believe she had a choice. The woman also told FBI agents that Robeson sold marijuana and prescription drugs out of his house, according to internal bureau documents. She reported that she suspected he was selling firearms as well. (The Intercept is not publishing these reports because they contain identifying information about alleged sex crime victims.)
Robeson’s career as a government cooperator appears to have coincided with his career as a criminal. In 1985, he testified that a member of a violent motorcycle gang with whom he had shared a jail cell confessed to him that he had “hit a girl on top of the head” before her body was found in a burned-out bar, which was allegedly set ablaze for insurance money. More recently, in the mid-2000s, Robeson helped police set up a Wisconsin farmer, who wanted to harm a romantic rival, in a murder-for-hire scheme.
Defense lawyers say the FBI used a nondisclosure agreement with Robeson — which they claim was never turned over as evidence in the Whitmer cases — to prevent Robeson from talking publicly about his work as an informant. As Special Agent Chambers reminded Robeson in their recorded meeting: “So when you get asked, ‘Why did you have to go to the FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ You don’t have to talk about what we’re talking about here.”
Federal agents were particularly troubled by messages Robeson had sent to Barry Croft Jr., a primary target in the investigation, that alluded to using violence against elected officials. Croft’s lawyer could use those messages to suggest that the kidnapping plot had been Robeson’s idea, not Croft’s, the agents feared.
“This is something that we’re all going to have to overcome,” Impola told Robeson, adding a few minutes later: “It quickly becomes, from a defense strategy, ‘Well, this was Robey’s idea from day one.’”
Joe Morrison (third from right), Paul Bellar (second from right), and Pete Musico (right) of the Wolverine Watchmen were among protesters inside the Michigan Capitol on April 30, 2020.Photo: Seth Herald/REUTERS
“I Let the FBI Know”
In the spring of 2020, as the United States grappled with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a “stay home, stay safe” order in Michigan that barred “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Covid-19 skeptics, along with many Republicans, were enraged. On April 17, Trump weighed in with a tweet: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
Two weeks later, as many as 1,000 protesters attended a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing in what a state senator later described as a “dress rehearsal” for January 6. The so-called American Patriot Rally was organized by Ryan Kelly, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for taking part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Many of the protesters inside the Michigan Capitol were armed, including an FBI informant and former Army sergeant named Dan Chappel. The FBI had hired Chappel to infiltrate a ragtag group of gun enthusiasts he’d met through Facebook who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. “I let the FBI know that there was talks of storming the Capitol,” Chappel, known to the militia group as “Big Dan,” later testified.
About 10 members of the Wolverine Watchmen were with Chappel at the state Capitol, unaware that he was working for the FBI. Although he informed the FBI in advance that the Wolverine Watchmen planned to storm the Capitol that day, federal agents did not try to stop them, Chappel later testified. FBI agents knew the militia members had discussed the locations of police officers at the Capitol and how to start “the boogaloo,” code for a civil war. (A year after arrests were made in the Whitmer kidnapping plot, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed in a podcast interview that law enforcement perceived violence at the Capitol as a real threat. “There was a plan for mass execution that day,” Nessel said.)
The April rally in Lansing was so successful that the same organizers held another, on June 18, 2020. The protesters, including Chappel and other members of the Wolverine Watchmen, milled about outside the Capitol that day, showing off their firearms and military cosplay for the news cameras.
That’s where Chappel first met Adam Fox, who lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop and liked to work out, smoke marijuana, and rant on social media. A stout man with a beard, Fox had already met Robeson, who was the Wisconsin chapter president of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had started working for the FBI as an informant in October 2019, according to the bureau.
Adam Fox, photographed outside the Michigan Capitol on June 18, 2020, lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop. He liked to work out, smoke marijuana, rant on social media, and had become fascinated by the militia movement.Photo: Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State/USA Today Network
Robeson had come to the FBI’s attention in part through a secret program known as Operation Bronze Griffon — first revealed publicly in 2022 to Republican House investigators by a whistleblower who misspelled it as Bronze Griffin — through which Facebook provides user activity information to federal agents without a search warrant or subpoena. According to an FBI report obtained by The Intercept, agents received a Bronze Griffon lead on Robeson for posting “possibly violent rhetoric in support of the militia movement and the Boogaloo concept.” The FBI recruited Robeson to be an informant, and he told agents that he knew of fellow militia members who had spoken about attacking law enforcement officials.
Once on the FBI payroll, Robeson organized and led several militia planning meetings, including one in Dublin, Ohio, that Fox and Croft attended on June 6, 2020.
Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox at the Michigan Capitol would bridge two federal investigations, known internally as Operation Cold Snap and Operation Kessel Run, and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.
Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox would bridge two federal investigation and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.
The informants went to great lengths to position Fox as a leader. Robeson suggested that Fox launch a Michigan chapter of the Patriot Three Percenters. On June 21, 2020, just three days after Fox met Chappel, a third FBI informant, Jenny Plunk, created a private Facebook group called “Michigan Patriot III%ers.” (The FBI classifies Three Percenters as a domestic terrorism threat.)
The Facebook group’s first members were Plunk and Robeson, both on the FBI’s payroll, and Fox and his girlfriend, Amanda Keller. Plunk lived in Tennessee, where, according to her FBI cover story, she led a small militia. While Plunk and Robeson administered the Facebook group, Fox invited several Wolverine Watchmen and other gun enthusiasts to join, bringing the group’s membership roster to 28. Although the FBI’s informants had created the Facebook group for Fox, Robeson announced in a welcome message that Fox was the “C.O.” — a military acronym for “commanding officer.”
Robeson often spoke in the vernacular of a soldier. He never served in the military, but he was so gung-ho that he had obtained forged paperwork that made it appear he’d been a Marine, according to FBI reports. Using military lingo, Robeson posted an invitation to the new Facebook group for a weekend tactical training session in Cambria, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Madison.
More than 30 people attended that weekend event in July 2020, including Fox, his girlfriend, and a few members of the Wolverine Watchmen. At the time, Robeson was running scams related to a fake charity he called Race to Unite Races, whose mission was “to bridge the racial divide.” Internal FBI reports indicate that Robeson used proceeds from the fake charity to buy supplies to build a shooting range to train in close-quarters combat, known as a “kill house.”
Militia members practice inside a “kill house” during a July 2020 training session in Wisconsin organized and partially financed by FBI informant Stephen Robeson. Screenshot: The Intercept/FBI evidence
Videos from the FBI files show the attendees shooting at targets in the kill house. Robeson, a firearm holstered at his side, can be seen giving directions. Chappel, who had combat experience in Iraq, also appears in several videos demonstrating tactics. FBI agents gave Chappel permission in advance to share combat tactics with the militia members, telling him: “You can do what’s on YouTube.”
In a group photo from the event, many attendees hold up rifles, offering the reluctant half-smiles of an awkward family picture. Robeson is off to the left, wearing flip-flops, American-flag swimming trunks, and a sleeveless T-shirt that hangs over his large belly. He’s holding up three fingers, the sign of the Three Percenters.
The events of that weekend were critical to the Justice Department’s case, as they appeared to show the men training for scenarios they’d encounter in their supposed attempt to kidnap Michigan’s governor. But by the time the FBI spoke to Robeson in December 2020, federal agents were deeply concerned that the fine details of that weekend might suggest entrapment.
“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping with Wolverine Watchman at the training you’ve set up, right?” Impola, the FBI agent, said to Robeson.
“It wasn’t just me,” Robeson said. “I set it up and —”
“These are things we need to discuss,” Chambers interrupted.
“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping, with Wolverine Watchmen at the training you set up, right?”
Impola told Robeson that the FBI’s case notes show that a Wisconsin agent was aware of the training, but that federal agents did not know that Robeson was the one who had organized it.
“I don’t want to put these words in your mouth, but the question is —” Impola said.
“Did I do it under FBI directive?” Robeson interrupted.
“Right,” Impola answered.
“No, it wasn’t just — What I’m saying is, it wasn’t me. It was Adam [Fox] that asked if they could do that —”
“Yup,” the two FBI agents said in unison.
“It was Barry [Croft] who asked if we could get a joint one together. It was Illinois. And I asked before I said yes.”
“The question becomes: Did a bunch of terrorists Shanghai your training for their purposes, or did you set up a training for terrorists?” Impola asked. “That’s the question, right? There’s a training that happened in which a terrorist operation was planned and played out, and you’re involved in setting it up.”
“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”
Robeson’s organizing and financing of the weekend training in Wisconsin wasn’t the FBI’s only problem.
In multiple videos from the training, Robeson can be seen using firearms. As a felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. But FBI agents apparently believed that handling firearms would be critical to his credibility among the militia members, so they had asked the Justice Department for a waiver to let Robeson handle “nonfunctional” weapons in his undercover capacity, according to internal emails.
In photos and videos taken during the FBI sting, informant Stephen Robeson can be seen with firearms even though the Justice Department had instructed the FBI not to allow Robeson, a convicted felon, to use guns during the operation. Photo: FBI evidence
The Justice Department said no, reminding Robeson’s handlers that he was prohibited from handling even an inoperable firearm. “Just the receiver satisfies the federal definition of a firearm,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rita Rumbelow told the FBI in a May 21, 2020, email, referring to the tube that houses the firearm’s bolt.
Internal FBI records show that Robeson and his handlers found creative ways to get around the Justice Department’s directive. One month after the Wisconsin training event, the FBI assigned Robeson a new handler, Corey Baumgardner, an agent in Wisconsin. Baumgardner later testified that he collected a firearm from Robeson: an AR-15-style rifle with an illegal suppressor and a launcher attachment. Instead of handing the firearm to the agent, Robeson left it on the ground in front of his truck. Baumgardner collected the gun, without having to see Robeson handle it.
The gambit appeared to allow Robeson and the FBI to have it both ways: Robeson could have access to guns, maintaining his credibility with the militia members, and FBI agents wouldn’t directly see him handle firearms.
Federal agents went to great lengths to maintain this sleight of hand. As part of the sting, the FBI in early August 2020 went to Delaware, where Robeson and Plunk met with a group that included Croft, a truck driver Robeson started messaging online in 2019 about targeting politicians for violence, and Frank Butler, a Navy veteran from Virginia.
Butler had been in contact online and in person with both Robeson and Chappel, and Chappel had discussed with him a fantastical plan to fly an explosives-laden drone into the Virginia governor’s North Carolina vacation home, though the plot went nowhere. Butler, who was never charged with a crime, later told investigators that Robeson and Chappel “were literally brainwashing me” and “weaponizing me.” (Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that Robeson had offered to provide money to “purchase weapons for attacks” and “the use of a drone, to aid in acts of domestic terrorism.”)
After their meeting in Delaware, Robeson had something for Croft. Baumgardner, the FBI agent in Wisconsin, had driven the AR-15-style rifle he’d collected next to Robeson’s truck more than 900 miles to Delaware. The rifle had originally belonged to Croft, and Robeson tried to give the weapon back to him. According to internal FBI reports, Croft refused to accept it, saying he couldn’t keep it at that moment. Plunk, the other FBI informant, took the illegal gun instead.
The following month, two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants — Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk — gathered for another training event in Luther, Michigan, with around 26 others, including Croft from Delaware and Fox from Michigan. Plunk secretly recorded audio and video during the training event. In one recording, Robeson proclaimed that he was now the national leader of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had appointed someone else to run his chapter in Wisconsin. “I’m no longer the state C.O.,” Robeson said. “I’m the national C.O.”
Also during this training event, on the afternoon of September 13, 2020, Plunk gave the rifle to Croft, who, in turn, handed it over to Chappel, according to FBI reports.
The story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation.
FBI agents appeared to view the rifle with an illegal suppressor and attached launcher as a critical piece of evidence in their conspiracy case. But the story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation. The illegal rifle made a full circle, from the FBI and back, through the hands of three paid informants, never staying long with any targets of the investigation.
The gun anecdote is emblematic of the larger sting: The FBI’s informants were ham-fistedly encouraging their targets to discuss plots to harm elected officials. Those efforts reached farcical levels on September 12, 2020, during a meeting and training exercises in Luther.
For that meeting, Chappel brought a friend nicknamed “Red,” a slender man with a 187th Airborne sleeve tattoo on his right arm. “Red” was in fact Timothy Bates, an undercover FBI agent who identifies himself in government recordings as “UCE 7775,” referring to his FBI undercover employee number. Just three weeks earlier, Bates had been in Denver, where he encouraged political violence. In Colorado, an FBI informant named Mickey Windecker introduced Bates to a racial justice activist who expressed interest in assassinating the state’s attorney general — a plot that, like the one targeting Virginia’s governor, ultimately fizzled.
Bates and Chappel, both Army veterans, led a close-quarters combat training for the Wolverine Watchmen. Bates also told the group gathered in Michigan that he could supply explosives. The group’s rough plan to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home involved possibly blowing up a nearby bridge to slow rescue efforts.
“So my guy up in Minnesota, he can pretty much get whatever. He has access to whatever one would want,” Bates said in an undercover recording. Bates had brought along several videos showing men assembling and detonating homemade bombs. These videos were all stage-managed by the FBI, with agents pretending to be rogue bomb-makers.
In this screenshot from a video produced by the FBI, a man demonstrates how a pipe bomb can destroy a vehicle. An FBI undercover agent showed this video to attendees at a training session in Luther, Mich., on Sept. 12, 2020. Photo: FBI evidence
One showed an SUV obliterated by a pipe bomb. “It’s a short video,” Bates told the group.
“Oh, yeah!” Robeson said, laughing approvingly at the explosion.
Bates explained that some of the bombs used C-4 inside pipes, with timing devices. Others used liquid explosives, he said.
“I need to come play with y’all,” Plunk said excitedly.
As he watched the video, Fox asked Bates: “What kind of price tag we looking at?”
“Depending on how big you want it,” Bates answered. “For that right there? That’s pretty cheap — 1,600 bucks, maybe. Maybe a thousand bucks.”
It wasn’t the first time Bates had offered bargain prices. In Colorado, Bates suggested he could hire a hitman for $500 to kill the state’s attorney general. In Michigan, he was offering explosives for pennies on the dollar.
That evening, Robeson, Chappel, Bates, and a few militia members drove near Whitmer’s vacation home. They inspected the bridge they’d bomb, tried to view Whitmer’s home from across the lake, and drove down her road. This apparent reconnaissance trip was central to the government’s case.
But true to form, Robeson mucked up the evidence. Fellow Wisconsinite Brian Higgins was the one who drove past Whitmer’s home — a seemingly incriminating act — but Higgins later told federal agents that Robeson had said they were hunting for sexual predators. In his December meeting with FBI agents, Robeson confirmed that Higgins was not initially aware of the kidnapping plot and instead believed they were out “hunting pedophiles.” But once he was in Michigan, Higgins learned that some of the attendees had a rough plan to kidnap Whitmer. Higgins drove down Whitmer’s road using a dash camera and provided the video to Chappel. After he returned to Wisconsin, Higgins claims he told Robeson he didn’t want to be involved in the plot.
The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.
Feeling guilty for tricking him, Robeson tried to protect Higgins from criminal exposure — a fact federal prosecutors admitted to in a court filing. Robeson called Chappel, still unaware that he was also an FBI informant, and told him to destroy his copy of Higgins’s dash-cam video. The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.
During the December 10, 2020, recorded interview with Robeson, Impola tried to coerce the informant into changing his story about what Higgins knew before the drive: “If you’re sticking with the story that [Higgins] was out there on a pedophile ring,” the FBI special agent said, “you’ll be his star witness in the defense. There’s zero options for that.”
A Confederate flag hangs from a porch on a property in Munith, Mich., where members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia group trained with an FBI informant named Dan Chappel. Photo: Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP
On October 7, 2020, as the government was making arrests in the case, Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk were on a recorded phone line talking about who should make future calls to action — in other words, who should be the leader.
“I was thinking we should have one person … to make the call for both states.”
“I mean, I’m good with Robey, because you’re the national guy, the president,” Chappel said, adding a minute later: “We have one chief.”
“We can definitely roll,” Robeson said. “That’s fine.”
The FBI arrested 13 people that day, and the foiled kidnapping plot made national news. (Higgins, the 14th defendant, was arrested a week later.) After the initial arrests, Robeson made a series of calls to Chappel; the girlfriend of one of the militia members; and others who orbited the supposed kidnapping plot. Robeson offered several outlandish claims, including that he believed Croft, a primary target of the investigation, had leaked information that caused the arrests. FBI reports indicate that Robeson again called Chappel, still unaware that he was also working for the FBI, and told him to throw the rifle with the illegal suppressor and attached launcher into a lake. Chappel, however, had already returned the gun to his bureau handlers.
During these calls, Robeson told fellow informant Plunk that he believed Chappel was an informant. Robeson appeared to be flailing after the arrests, pointing fingers to avoid being revealed as a government snitch.
His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the arrests was so concerning to FBI agents that federal and state prosecutors discussed charging him with witness tampering, according to emails that circulated among more than a dozen FBI agents the day after the kidnapping plot was announced. The bureau then began to investigate Robeson, internal records show. Agents reinterviewed the woman living in his garage, who claimed he had coerced her into having sex with him. That woman told the FBI that during the undercover sting, Robeson had an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom; that he was bringing in drugs from out of state; and that he had proposed taking her to rallies and training events in other parts of the country so she could make money, which she described to the FBI as “sex trafficking.”
For his part, Robeson appeared to realize that he had crossed the line from informant to participant in the kidnapping plot, putting himself in legal jeopardy. An internal FBI report said Robeson told another informant that he was worried he could be linked to “product,” by which he meant explosives.
Illustration: Jess Suttner for The Intercept
“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”
The Whitmer kidnapping plot has yielded five acquittals, five convictions, and four guilty pleas in federal and state courts. Robeson didn’t testify in any of the trials. When defense lawyers tried to compel him, he told the federal court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The Justice Department claimed that Robeson was a “double agent” whose statements would not be “binding admissions of the government itself.”
The recording of Robeson’s December 2020 meeting with the FBI reveals that the “double agent” ploy was a carefully planned strategy. When Robeson was called into that Wisconsin FBI office, agents described three possible scenarios for him.
The first was that all the defendants would take plea deals, in which case “your name is not on the witness list,” Impola said. The second was that Robeson could be a government witness or, in the third option, a witness for the defendants whose testimony could support their claims of entrapment.
At the time, the agents errantly assumed that option one was the likeliest. “I am fairly confident that when anybody looks at that witness list, they’re not going to trial now because they know the ramifications,” said Impola.
But what he didn’t say was that the second and third options — involving Robeson testifying in court — weren’t real options at all, at least not in the view of the FBI. There was also a fourth option that the agents didn’t mention: The Justice Department could jam Robeson, a felon, with firearms charges for crimes he committed while working undercover for the FBI.
And that’s what happened. On March 3, 2021, the Justice Department indicted Robeson in Wisconsin on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged that Robeson bought a .50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms available to civilians in the United States, and later sold it on Facebook — all while working for the FBI.
At his plea hearing, Robeson claimed he’d bought the gun to bolster his FBI cover. “I did this trying to keep my undercover position where I was at and kind of make me look a little more aggressive in the organization,” Robeson said in court.
Robeson was sentenced to probation on a federal felony charge that could have carried a 10-year sentence. He and his handlers knew he had illegally possessed, purchased, and sold multiple firearms in the course of the sting; the single gun charge represented a threat of more to come if he were to testify in any of the state or federal prosecutions.
With that threat, FBI agents stopped the facts from getting in the way of their “good story” about the Whitmer kidnapping plot. In their zeal to protect a career-making case, those federal agents also poured jet fuel on conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the January 6 Capitol riot that will be central to this year’s presidential election.
An expanding chorus in Congress is urging the Pentagon to make amends to a Somali family following an investigation by The Intercept into a 2018 U.S. drone strike that killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.
The growing pressure on the Pentagon coincided with a government watchdog’s rebuke of the Defense Department for failing to accurately track law of war violations. The Government Accountability Office last month singled out officials at U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, who they said “may not be reporting all alleged law of war violations as required.”
Since late January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Jim McGovern, D-Mass., have called on the Pentagon to compensate the family of the woman and child killed in the U.S. strike, Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse. They’ve joined Reps. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who made the same demand earlier this year. In December 2023, two dozen human rights organizations — 14 Somali and 10 international groups — also called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate the family for the deaths.
“We cannot condemn other nations for civilian casualties if we are not following best practices.”
The April 1, 2018, attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including Luul and Mariam. A formerly secret U.S. military investigation, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, acknowledged the deaths of a woman and child in the strike but concluded their identities might never be known. This reporter traveled to Somalia and spoke with seven members of Luul and Mariam’s family. For more than five years, they have tried to contact the U.S. government, including through AFRICOM’s online civilian casualty reporting portal, but never received a reply.
“America needs to apologize, take responsibility, and make amends. We can’t take away the pain and suffering felt by this family, but the fact that we haven’t even tried is awful,” McGovern told The Intercept. “We cannot condemn other nations for civilian casualties if we are not following best practices. It makes no difference that these civilian casualties happened under the previous administration.”
In December, the Defense Department released its long-awaited “Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response,” or DoD-I, which established the Pentagon’s “policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to civilian harm” and directed the military to “respond to individuals and communities affected by U.S. military operations,” including by “expressing condolences” and providing so-called ex gratia payments to next of kin.
“I have worked to provide the Department of Defense the authority and the funds to make amends for civilian harm as a result of U.S military action,” Warren told The Intercept. “I am deeply concerned that the failure to make payments to impacted families seriously undercuts the credibility of the Department’s commitment to preventing and addressing civilian harm.”
The GAO report issued last month criticized Pentagon policies concerning potential war crimes. “DOD lacks comprehensive records of alleged law of war violations,” reads the investigation, which calls out both AFRICOM and U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM.
“AFRICOM and CENTCOM have issued policies to implement the [law of war violation] reporting process, but AFRICOM’s policy is outdated and not fully aligned with current DOD policy,” the GAO found. “As a result, AFRICOM may not be aware of all such allegations or be in a position to forward reporting to DOD leadership as required.”
Similarly, the investigation found that “CENTCOM did not have records for all of the alleged law of war violations … that occurred within its area of responsibility.” The GAO noted that these were more than mere clerical errors. “Without a system to comprehensively retain records of allegations of law of war violations,” the report says, “DOD leadership may not be well positioned to fully implement the law of war.”
In June 2023, The Intercept asked AFRICOM to answer detailed questions about its law of war and civilian casualty policies and requested interviews with officials versed in such matters. Despite multiple follow-ups, Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director public affairs, has yet to respond.
The Pentagon’s inquiry into the attack that killed Luul and Mariam found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. The U.S. strike cell members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male, killing Luul and Mariam in a follow-up attack as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the strike — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths.
“This case — and others — reflect the tragic cost of the decades-long war on terror, a war that is increasingly fought remotely,” Lee, the California representative, told The Intercept. “The Pentagon needs to re-examine this and other cases, hold itself accountable for missteps, and make amends with innocent victims of U.S. actions.”
In late October, President Joe Biden issued two supplemental funding requests. The first, primarily to support Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s war against Russia, became the $95 billion National Security Act, which the Senate passed in February. This week, Biden urged House leadership to pass the bill as soon as possible.
Never has the president appeared more committed to advancing one of his priorities. Biden delivered a rareOval Office address specifically to market the plan — something he hasn’t done for any other proposal — and designated the funding as “emergency requirements.” In the weeks and months that followed, he ensured that it remained at the top of Congress’s agenda, even if that meant delays to other legislative business. His hard work paid off: The current bill gives Biden pretty much exactly what he asked for.
The second proposal is half the size of the first and funds domestic programs such as grants to child care providers and disaster relief. This request wasn’t designated as emergency spending.
While Biden personally and repeatedly urged Congress to approve his foreign policy plan, there is not a single instance of him even mentioning his domestic proposal in a statement since offering it on October 25. It hasn’t made an appearance on his personal or presidential X accounts either. Indeed, the way the proposal is written suggests that Biden never intended it to be taken seriously. The foreign policy request is a 69-page, fully drafted legislative proposal that’s formally addressed to the House speaker; the domestic request is a two-page summary table.
The disproportionate amount of political — and regular — capital Biden put into his military spending proposal compared to his domestic, anti-poverty measure characterizes the disconnect between Washington’s idea of “national security” and what security actually means to working-class people and families. If there were alignment, the domestic proposal would be a bill by now.
The National Security Act 2024 puts the U.S. on track to spend more on its military this year than it did annually on average during World War II. Seventy percent of the $95 billion bill is designated for the Pentagon, as is another $886 billion Congress authorized in December. Altogether, the pending fiscal year 2024 Pentagon budget stands at $953 billion.
But as Biden pushes for the largest military budget in the postwar era, 63 percent of U.S. adults say rising prices are a source of hardship; 41 percent report difficulty paying for basic needs like food, housing, child care, and utilities; and 23 percent said they were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last year. These measures of financial distress are all higher than what they were on average in fiscal years 2021, 2022, or 2023. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, the president’s focus is on weapons.
In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, the president’s focus is on weapons.
The largest provision in the domestic plan is a one-year, $16 billion extension to the American Rescue Plan’s Child Care Stabilization program, which saved the already-fragile child care sector from collapse during the pandemic by keeping workers employed and costs down for families. More than 220,000 child care programs received assistance, including the Sammy Center, a nonprofit preschool in Salt Lake City, Utah. “I am eternally grateful for the stabilization grants,” founder Maria Soter told me. “The funding was my lifeline.”
The expiration of stabilization grants on September 30 set in motion an unfolding disaster. To compensate for the funding shortfall, child care programs across the country are closing, downsizing, cutting wages, or raising costs. In October, more than a third of providers who once received stabilization funding said they had already increased tuition. Knowing she would have to raise tuition at her preschool, Soter said that in the lead-up to the grants’ expiration, “there were nights I didn’t sleep.” Although most parents could afford the extra $300 per month to keep their child enrolled, she lost four students because of the increase.
Absent new stabilization funding, 3.2 million children could lose access to child care. Financial hardship will likely get worse too: Many working parents are now paying more for child care or working less to assume those duties themselves. Households are projected to lose nearly $9 billion in earnings annually from parents reducing their work hours or leaving their jobs entirely to cover the new gaps in child care coverage.
Spending $16 billion on child care would blunt rising financial hardship and promote children’s well-being. The National Security Act, meanwhile, spends $16.5 billion to sustain Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 12,500 Palestinian children.
This bill shouldn’t exist for another reason. Providing military aid to Ukraine wouldn’t require a supplemental bill had Biden not excluded funding for it from the $886 billion Pentagon budget hoping to avoid trade-offs.
To the delight of military contractors, his plan worked. All told, the U.S. arms industry should expect a windfall of about $64 billion from the National Security Act, or four times the money it would take to mitigate America’s child care crisis.
Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty U.S. Air Force airman who set himself on fire Sunday to protest Israel’s war on Gaza, appears to have grown disillusioned with the U.S. military and his own role as a service member, according to posts on the online forum Reddit under a handle matching one used by Bushnell.
Bushnell, 25, made international news when he professed that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and recorded himself shouting “Free Palestine!” as he burned to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on Sunday. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” Bushnell had announced on a livestream before his self-immolation, “but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers is not extreme at all.”
The Reddit posts, by a user named acebush1 and mostly from the past four years, chronicle a young person’s experience struggling with money as the pandemic took hold. The Reddit poster turned to the military and was initially enamored with the Air Force, but quickly came to denounce it.
In the months leading up to Bushnell’s act of self-immolation, several of acebush1’s posts showed how sharply their view of the military had shifted. On the r/Airforce subreddit, a user asked veterans whether, in hindsight, they would still choose to join the military. Acebush1 answered, “Absolutely not.”
“I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world,” they said, “and I will never get the blood off my hands.”
The Intercept analysis linked the acebush1 Reddit account to Bushnell by analyzing his social media activity. In a post on Facebook the same day as his self-immolation, Bushnell had posted a link to the video streaming platform Twitch with the username LillyAnarKitty. Using a Twitch username history tool that identifies a user’s prior account names, The Intercept found that the same Twitch User ID number used by LillyAnarKitty previously employed the handle acebush1.
A Reddit user with the same username — acebush1 — posted over a thousand times since 2014. The Reddit posts mention details that align closely with Bushnell’s life, including being in the Air Force, having a friend who was a conscientious objector, and studying computer science.
As this story was being drafted, acebush1’s posts started to be removed from Reddit. The posts were archived and, though Reddit instantly deletes posts from their new interface, visiting the old-style Reddit user profile page reveals their recently deleted posts.
“A Regret I Will Carry”
The acebush1 Reddit user joined the military soon after posting about their financial struggles at the beginning of the pandemic. On March 19, 2020, acebush1 inquired about becoming an Uber Eats driver. The following month they posted asking for financial help: “HELP – Can’t get stimulus or unemployment benefits, about to run out of money.”
In May, acebush1 posted a photo with the caption “My Dad getting suited up to give me a goodbye? hug before I leave for BMT” — basic military training. According to Bushnell’s LinkedIn page, he enrolled in “Basic & Technical Training” in the Air Force in May 2020.
Several months into enrollment, acebush1 appeared excited by the Air Force, reposting a video of a military aircraft in August 2020 and giving it a heading that said: “Man, the Air Force does some cool-ass shit.”
Acebush1 also regularly posted in various video game Reddit communities, including one dedicated to the video game “Valheim.” In Bushnell’s self-immolation livestream, the liquid container he is carrying has a sticker with the slogan ‘the bees are happy,’ a meme from “Valheim.”
In November 2021, acebush1 made multiple posts asking about advice in pursuing a computer science degree. Bushnell’s LinkedIn profile, which has been memorialized “as a tribute to Aaron Bushnell’s professional legacy,” lists him as having been in the process of pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer software engineering.
Nearly a year later, acebush1’s posts shifted from largely video game-based content to posts with titles like “Solidarity with Prisoners!” with a link to a Guardian article about an Alabama prison strike, and to reposting a meme image of anarchist philosopher Max Stirner. In 2023, acebush1 made a post with the title “Free Palestine!” and linked to a video of an activist takeover of UAV Tactical Systems, a drone company operated in part by the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems.
“I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through.”
Shortly after the pro-Palestine post, in June 2023, acebush1 wrote, “I’m sticking it out to the end of my contract as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through, and I only have a year left at this point. However it is a regret I will carry the rest of my life.”
The poster mentioned a friend who left the armed services on the basis of conscientious objection; Bushnell’s friend Levi Pierpont, according to the Washington Post, objected and left the military.
Acebush1’s posts became more stridently pro-Palestinian as Israel’s war in Gaza got underway. In one, they denounce Israel as a “settler colonialist apartheid state,” and exclaim that there are no Israeli “civilians” because the entire country is engaged in oppression. They refuse on several occasion to denounce armed Palestinian resistance, saying in the apartheid post that they “work for the air force and would also have no right to complain about violent resistance against my actions.”
In November 2023, acebush1 made another post describing “the moral necessity of getting out.”
In the last few months, acebush1 accelerated their posting across various anarchism-related Reddit communities, as well as on other various communities. “Piracy is always ethical,” acebush1 posted. “If you think that you’re making a difference with who you do and don’t choose to give your money to, you don’t understand how markets work.”
Acebush1’s last Reddit post was on February 24, expounding on how “whiteness erases culture” — a day before Bushnell’s self-immolating direct action. In an earlier post, acebush1 had written, “I’ve never been one for bullshit.”
![Demonstrators rally during the "American Patriot Rally: A well-regulated militia" at the Michigan State Capitol in downtown Lansing Thursday evening, June 18, 2020. [MATTHEW DAE SMITH/USA Today Network] Md7 9858](https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/USATSI_14436846-Adam-Fox.jpg?fit=2500%2C1952&w=1200)
