For the past week, the large Chinese balloon floating over the United States has consumed the attention of the American media.

Before the balloon was shot down by the U.S. on Saturday, China’s government stated it was a “civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological.” For its part, the Pentagon says it has “very high confidence” that the balloon was conducting surveillance.

It’s understandable that the U.S. government would be suspicious, given that America sent spy balloons exactly the same size over both the Soviet Union and China in 1956 — and made exactly the same claims as China is making today about what we were up to.

The balloons the U.S. used were, oddly enough, manufactured by General Mills. The General Mills website describes its mission as “making food the world loves,” and it’s certainly best known today for its products like Cheerios, Chex, and Lucky Charms. But the company bragged in a 2011 blog post that it hired “the ‘daddy’ of the balloon industry,” thanks to the Aeronautical Research Division it established in 1946. (Another division of General Mills made the Alvin submarine that explored the Titanic.)

The General Mills balloons were supplied to the U.S. Air Force for Project Genetrix, a secret program to garner electronic and photographic information on communist countries. The Defense Department’s National Reconnaissance Office published a book in 2012 titled “HEXAGON (KH-9) Mapping Camera Program and Evolution” that covers Genetrix.

A photograph of a General Mills “Skyhook” high altitude balloon launching in partnership with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in 1952 from New Brighton, Minn..

Photo: General Mills, U.S. Navy

The balloons were about 20 stories tall, or around 200 feet. CBS today reported that the Chinese balloon “is believed to have been up to 200 feet tall” in a story breathlessly headlined “Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon Shot Down Over Atlantic Was Taller Than the Statue of Liberty.” Perhaps the Chinese chose this size balloon because of the demands of balloon physics, or perhaps they did it to taunt our freedom.

According to the NRO book,

The cover story to account for the existence of the large balloons stated that the project was part of a worldwide meteorological survey … to secure vital high altitude scientific data in conjunction with the International Geophysical Year.

The International Geophysical Year was envisioned, as Dwight Eisenhower stated at the time, as a demonstration of the “ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good.” At first, this seems distastefully cynical. But maybe it was an expression of Eisenhower believing that American spying was the common good and everyone was pulling together to do their part, the spies and the spied-upon.

“HEXAGON” records that the first of 512 balloons was launched on January 10, 1956. But the Soviet Union quickly noticed what was happening, and the program was suspended less than a month later on February 6 after the Politburo’s protests.

Of the 512 balloons, only 54 were recovered. But the NRO book reports that these 54 balloons provided photographs of 1.1 million square miles of “the Sino-Soviet area.” This was quite a lot, almost one-tenth of the area of the Soviet Union and China combined.

The film was analyzed by photointerpreter team from the U.S. Army and Navy, the CIA, the Royal Air Force, the Strategic Air Command, and the Far East Air Force. “HEXAGON” optimistically states that “there were many benefits derived from this product. New targets were located, and confirmation of intelligence on previously known targets was possible.”

At a February 7, 1956, news conference, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles engaged in lengthy, hilarious prevarication about the spy balloons. First, there was straightforward lying. “The information that is being sought,” he said, “is not essentially or even at all military information.”

What was the U.S. goal with all these balloons, then? Why, to help all humanity: “They are gathering an extraordinary amount of new and useful information about these jet stream air currents. … [it] is a part of a project which has worldwide significance.”

Asked if “the United States feels that they have the right to send these balloons at a certain height anywhere around the globe,” Dulles answered, “Yes, I think that we feel that way.” He did then generously allow that the U.S. would “try” to avoid the territory of other countries that didn’t like it. This generosity apparently didn’t extend to American- (and British-) manned U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, which began several years later.

David Haight, an archivist at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, produced a 2009 article about this general issue titled “Ike and His Spies in the Sky.” In it, he writes, based on records of White House deliberations, “Eisenhower authorized aerial intelligence ­collecting programs in order to better assess the military capability of the Soviet Union, China, and other Communist ­bloc nations to launch a surprise attack on the United States.” In other words, the U.S. saw its balloon and U-2 programs as being essentially defensive.

If indeed the Chinese balloon turns out to have been carrying out surveillance, it’s plausible that they saw its incursion over the U.S. in the same way. Internal historical records show that countries almost always see their actions, even the most aggressive, as an understandable attempt to protect themselves against a dangerous foe. But what the U.S. did in 1956 didn’t feel like that to the Soviet Union and China, so China shouldn’t be surprised that it doesn’t feel like that to some in the U.S. today.

In any case, the lesson of the current balloon excitement is unclear. It may be that China is 70 years behind the U.S. in either weather or spying technology, or both. But there are some who believe we are on the brink of a Balloon Revolution — and this is merely the first shot in what sounds like something fun but wouldn’t be: a Balloon War.

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A war between China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America’s Frontier Fund, a tech investment outfit whose co-founder and CEO sits on both the State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board and President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board, according to audio from a February 1 event.

The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. According to attendee Jack Poulson, head of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, an individual who identified himself as “Tom” attended the event in place of Jordan Blashek, America’s Frontier Fund’s president and chief operating officer.

Following the panel discussion, “Tom” spoke with a gaggle of other attendees and held forth on AFF’s investment in so-called choke points: sectors that would spike in value during a volatile geopolitical crisis, like computer chips or rare earth minerals. It turns out, according to audio published by Poulson, that a war in the Pacific would be tremendous for AFF’s bottom line.

“If the China-Taiwan situation happens, some of our investments will 10x, like overnight.”

“If the China-Taiwan situation happens, some of our investments will 10x, like overnight,” the person who identified as “Tom” said. “So I don’t want to share the name, but the one example I gave was a critical component that … the total market value is $200 million, but it is a critical component to a $50 billion market cap. That’s like a choke point, right. And so if it’s only produced in China, for example, and there’s a kinetic event in the Pacific, that would 10x overnight, like no question about it. There’s a couple of different things like that.”

AFF is surely not the only venture fund that would see stratospheric returns throughout their portfolio in the case of a destabilizing global crisis, like a “kinetic event in the Pacific” — that is to say, war. Unlike most other investment firms, though, AFF is closely tied to the upper echelons of American power, the very people who would craft any response to such a war.

Gilman Louie, AFF’s co-founder and current CEO, serves as chair of the National Intelligence University, advises Biden through his Intelligence Advisory Board, and was tapped for the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022. Louie previously ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.

In other words, AFF stands to massively profit from a geopolitical crisis while its CEO advises the Biden administration on geopolitical crises. (America’s Frontier Fund did not respond to a request for comment.)

AFF was founded in 2021, according to its website, “to build the companies, platforms, and capabilities that will generate once-in-a-generation returns for investors, while ensuring long-term economic competitiveness for the U.S. and its allies.” Last year, the New York Times reported the techno-nationalist fund had met with U.S. lawmakers to request a $1 billion injection. AFF currently leads the Quad Investor Network, a White House-sponsored alliance of investors from the so-called Quad: a geopolitical bloc aimed at countering Chinese hegemony constituted by the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan.

The fund also has close ties to some of the American private sector’s most vocal and influential China hawks. AFF was founded last year with support from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose closeness to Biden’s government is attracting growing scrutiny and skepticism, and investor Peter Thiel. Thiel and Schmidt, whose business interests in national security and defense both stand to profit immensely from war in the Pacific, have both advocated for a more hostile national stance toward China.

Schmidt is particularly dedicated to China alarmism, having spent much of his post-Google career thus far drumming up anti-China tensions; first at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which he chaired, and today through his new think tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project, which regularly depicts China as a direct threat to the United States.

AFF’s own Schmidt connections run deep: Louie, the CEO, worked alongside Schmidt at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, while Balshek, the fund’s COO, was previously an executive at Schmidt’s philanthropic fund.

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The White House is unwilling to say whether the U.S. will provide depleted uranium anti-tank rounds to Ukraine, according to the transcript of a press briefing, despite decades of research suggesting the weapon causes cancer and birth defects long after the fighting ends.

At a background briefing on January 25, an unnamed reporter asked the unnamed “senior administration officials” at the session whether the Bradley Fighting Vehicles now being sent to aid in Ukraine’s defense against Russia would come armed with the 25 mm armor-piercing depleted uranium rounds they’re capable of firing. As the reporter noted, firing these radioactive rounds “is part of what makes them the ‘tank killer’ that Pentagon officials called them.” The administration official who responded declined to answer, saying, “I’m not going to get into the technical specifics.”

But the technical specifics of these weapons could have dire consequences for Ukrainians. Depleted uranium is a common byproduct of manufacturing nuclear fuel and weaponry, and, owing to its extreme density, ammunition made from the stuff is a fantastic way of punching through the thick armor of a tank and igniting everyone inside. But these anti-tank rounds also happen to be radioactive, extremely toxic, and have been linked with a variety of birth defects, cancers, and other illness, most dramatically in Iraq, where doctors reported a spike in birth defects and cancers since the Gulf War, when the U.S. fired nearly a million depleted uranium rounds, and the 2003 invasion of that country.

“[Uranium] binds avidly to bio-molecules including DNA,” according to Keith Baverstock, a radiobiologist at the University of Eastern Finland, former World Health Organization researcher, and longtime scholar of depleted uranium arms and their effects. “Where [uranium] is used in munitions (bullets and bombs) to penetrate hardened targets (using its high density) the munition may shatter and since [uranium] is pyrophoric, catch fire and burn, producing oxide particles which are partially soluble and, thus, potentially a source of systemic [uranium] if inhaled.” Uranium particles may remain embedded in the land where these rounds were fired, too, presenting a possible environmental hazard years later.

While research linking depleted uranium weapons to adverse health effects is disputed — and heavily politicized given who’s fired it and at whom — experts told The Intercept that the risk alone means the White House owes the public transparency.

“It’s been a concern since the start of the invasion,” said Doug Weir, research and policy director with the Conflict and Environment Observatory, particularly given that Russia claims to have its own depleted uranium arsenal, though it’s not clear whether any have been used in Ukraine. Were the U.S. to provide uranium rounds for Ukraine to deploy against Russia, the odds might increase of Russia using its arsenal too (if it hasn’t already).

Generally speaking, Weir explained that “the most severe contamination incidents will occur where a vehicle with a full load of DU cooks off after being struck. This may be a tank, or a supply vehicle. Similarly, arms dumps containing large volumes of DU may create contamination incidents when destroyed or burned.” Weir added, “It is important that journalists pin down the U.S. government on its DU decision.”

Despite our popular associations with uranium, “the biggest problem there is metal pollution, not radiation,” explained Nickolai Denisov, an environmental scientist who has closely monitored the health impacts of the Ukraine war. “Still, pollution by heavy metals is dangerous and long term, hence transparency in these matters is indeed important.”

It can be uncomfortable to advocate against the use of a weapon that would no doubt be a near-term boon for Ukrainain resistance. As the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons put it at the onset of the Russian invasion, “When there is war, everything else is secondary compared to sheer survival. On the other hand, the outcry because of environmental destruction must not be omitted if the country is to be habitable again afterward.”

If the Pentagon sends uranium rounds to Ukraine, it would surely have supporters: The ammo would be highly effective at destroying the armored vehicles Russia has poured into the country. As the White House faces — and bends to — growing pressure to share increasingly powerful arms with Ukraine, candid discussions about the unintended consequences of these arm transfers can become unpopular. But some scientists who’ve spent careers scrutinizing these weapons will likely remain opposed, despite the immense sympathy of the Ukrainian cause.

Asked about the White House’s refusal to discuss uranium rounds in Ukraine, Baverstock, the Finnish scientist, replied simply, “I would certainly hope that there is no intention to use it.”

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A month after Russia invaded Ukraine last February, a private American organization with an unusual name — the Mozart Group — was created to train Ukrainian soldiers who were scrambling to the front lines with little preparation. Initially composed of a handful of retired Marines, the Mozart Group attracted extensive media coverage as a noble effort by American volunteers to transfer their combat skills to the embattled Ukrainians.

Mozart’s name was an attention-getting retort to the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian paramilitary company accused of war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere. In contrast, Mozart was described by the American veterans who formed it as a donor-funded initiative to provide humanitarian assistance as well as military training; its members do not engage in combat and say they do not even carry weapons. By August, Mozart deployed three teams of former soldiers — two teams for military training, one for extracting civilians from the front lines — with each one costing up to $100,000 a month in expenses, according to a fundraising email from the group’s public leader, former Marine officer Andy Milburn.

But war is a messy business, and last week a landmine exploded under the Mozart Group.

Andy Bain, a businessman in Kyiv since the 2000s and a former Marine, filed a lawsuit in Wyoming, where Mozart is registered as a limited liability company, accusing Milburn of financial fraud, sexual misconduct, burglary, attempted bribery, avoidance of U.S. weapons-transfer regulations, and even threatening a retired American general. The lawsuit asks the court to remove Milburn from the company and order him to pay damages of more than $50,000. According to the suit from Bain — who says he is the majority shareholder of Mozart — Milburn presided over the group “in a manner which has caused senior Ukrainian military officers to remark ‘can’t he go home and stop saving our country.’”

Milburn, reached for comment by The Intercept, described the suit’s allegations as “completely ridiculous.” He added that he had “placed this matter in the hands of legal experts.”

The last few decades of global warfare have seen a profusion of private military companies operating with little scrutiny and engaging in widespread abuses. The most notorious after 9/11 was Blackwater, led by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, whose highly paid mercenaries — mostly retired U.S. service members — ran amok in Iraq and were implicated in war crimes there, though Prince was not personally charged. Wagner’s troops have been accused of atrocities in pretty much every war zone where they fight.

Mozart casts itself in a different mold, as it claims its members are unarmed and help civilians in addition to soldiers; Milburn reacted with public anger when an American magazine described him as a “foreign fighter.” Nonetheless, Mozart has found a unique way of marching into controversy.

A day after Bain’s lawsuit was filed, Milburn responded with a barrage of counter-accusations in posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He described Bain as Mozart’s disgruntled former chief financial officer and said that Bain had been accused of financial and sexual misconduct. He also said Bain was “heavily invested in Russia,” which in wartime Ukraine is not a trivial accusation. And in a particularly surprising twist, Milburn even alleged that Bain had tried to sell Mozart to the Taliban. Milburn subsequently deleted those posts, though he told The Intercept he still stands by them.

“I apologize for allowing this individual to be affiliated with the Mozart Group,” Milburn wrote on Twitter. “We are reevaluating our vetting process and will not allow this to happen again.”

Bain, asked to respond to Milburn’s accusations, told The Intercept, “I am not going to comment on pending litigation, but recent posts and comments ensure defamation will be a much larger part of the proceedings than originally envisioned.”

The full story of what’s happening inside Mozart is not yet known. While it’s not unusual for a startup’s founding partners to have a falling out, it doesn’t tend to happen in an active war zone. And an intriguing subplot may involve an alleged effort to monetize Mozart’s high-profile work in Ukraine by turning it into a private military company with global aspirations.

While Milburn consistently presents Mozart as surviving off donations and being singularly devoted to saving Ukraine, the lawsuit accuses him of seeking military contracts in Armenia. That accusation does not seem unfounded: a recent article in Intelligence Online reported that Mozart “is now planning to become a conventional for-profit private military contractor (PMC) and expand into other war-torn areas.” The article said Mozart’s chief operating officer, former Marine officer Martin Wetterauer, confirmed it was “looking for new clients in other locations in the world.”

Whatever its outcome, the lawsuit calls into question the stability and credibility of what the New York Times described a few months ago as “one of the biggest private military companies in Ukraine.” It seems certain to lend strength to Russia’s vivid criticisms of not just Mozart but also the overall U.S. effort to aid Ukraine, as Mozart has been one of America’s most visible citizen-led initiatives.

Ukrainians train during courses with the Mozart Group, in the Donetsk region on Sept. 22, 2022.

Photo: Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images

From Iraq to Ukraine

From its birth, Mozart has been intricately connected to Milburn, who describes himself as the group’s founder.

A British-born American, Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after more than three decades of service that included deployments in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, most recently as deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Central, which plans special operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. He has written a memoir about his career, “When the Tempest Gathers,” and has contributed military-themed articles to publications including The Atlantic, USA Today, The Hill, and Task & Purpose.

He traveled to Kyiv as a freelance journalist within weeks of the Russian invasion in February, filing five stories for Task & Purpose, a military website. His last story, published on April 2, was about a former Marine accused of rape in Ukraine, but that story was subsequently withdrawn and now carries an editor’s note that says it is “undergoing editorial review for standards and practices and will be unavailable until the review is complete.” Editors at Task & Purpose did not respond to messages from The Intercept about the editorial review; Milburn told The Intercept he stands by the story.

A day after that article was published, Milburn made what appears to be his first public mention of Mozart Group in an April 3 tweet that said it “comprises former US SOF [special operations forces] personnel who deliver critically required capabilities to front line units in Ukraine. The Group’s activities primarily consist of advising, training and equipping Ukraine SOF and Resistance units.” A day after that, his first fundraising effort on PayPal raised the maximum allowed, $20,000, “within hours,” he tweeted; half of the total, $10,000, came from a military contractor, Obsidian Solutions Group. Two weeks later, Milburn explained in an article for Newsweek that his work for Task & Purpose seemed “frivolous” with a war raging around him, so he decided to organize military training after people “who I knew from previous visits, who are now in the Ukrainian military, asked me for help.”

With U.S. military personnel largely staying out of the country and U.S. diplomats departing in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Milburn attracted a considerable amount of media attention: He was one of the few Americans on the ground with combat experience who was working with the Ukrainian military and willing to talk with journalists. He has been interviewed frequently on cable and broadcast TV, especially CNN and ABC, while major newspapers in the U.S., U.K., and France have published articles about him. A New York Times profile bore the headline, “An American in Ukraine Finds the War He’s Been Searching For.”

None of these stories hinted at the accusations Bain has now lodged against Milburn.

“Crazy American”

Bain announced his 12-page lawsuit in a LinkedIn post last week that challenged Milburn’s self-portrayal as Mozart’s founder. “At the outset of the war,” Bain wrote, “having lived in Kyiv near on 30 years and recognizing Ukraine’s dire need for basic military training, I contacted a retired U.S. Marine general friend asking if he knew anyone who could come develop training. He put me in contact with Andy Milburn, who came to Ukraine a few weeks later.” According to Bain’s post, “I registered, named and arranged financing to launch the Mozart Group with a goal of providing training and support as needed for the war.”

Bain’s LinkedIn post states that he owns 51 percent of the shares in Mozart Group, while Milburn owns 49 percent. In response to a request from The Intercept for documentation, Bain provided three pages from a 35-page “Operating Agreement” for Mozart. One of the pages shows a chart that attributes 51 percent of the company’s “units” to Bain and 49 percent to Milburn.

While Bain has not previously publicized his ownership of Mozart — it is not disclosed on the group’s website and has not been mentioned by Milburn — there is a public record of the two men collaborating. On April 10, they started a YouTube channel called “Two Marines in Kyiv,” which now hosts seven videos, most of which feature discussions between them. The channel’s “About” page describes Milburn as CEO of the Mozart Group and Bain as president of Ukrainian Freedom Fund, which according to its website is a nongovernmental organization that has raised more than $3 million since February for military and humanitarian aid.

Bain’s most serious allegations revolve around Milburn’s handling of donated money — what the suit describes as efforts to “facilitate the diversion of funds away from Mozart Group LLC.” The lawsuit alleges that Milburn was “insisting on personal compensation payments exceeding $35,000 per month from company accounts … and not accounting to the company for donated funds received which were received in personal or other accounts controlled by him.” At least some of Milburn’s personal fundraising was not hidden from donors: His social media solicitations for donations have included clear links to his Venmo and PayPal accounts, which he said was necessary because Mozart’s donation platform was not working at the time, possibly due to Russian interference. But until Bain’s suit, he had not been accused of misusing funds deposited into those or other accounts he controlled.

That wasn’t all, however. According to the suit, Milburn hired as his personal assistant a woman he met on a social media dating site and had a relationship with, paying her an annual salary of $90,000, which according to the suit was “at least four times more” than the going rate. The suit further alleges that Milburn made “unwanted sexual advances and propositions to a female office manager.”

The lawsuit even accuses Milburn of “orchestrating and participating” in the burglary of a warehouse leased by Bain’s Ukrainian Freedom Fund. In addition, it claims Milburn was intoxicated and broke Kyiv’s curfew, leading to his temporary detention by Ukrainian authorities on more than one occasion. And according to the suit, Milburn sent “hostile and caustic messages” to a retired commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe after the general declined to join Mozart (the retired general was not named). Milburn’s conduct, the suit added, exasperated senior Ukrainians.

“Defendant Milburn is now commonly referred to by Ukrainian military leadership as the ‘Crazy American,’” it alleges.

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In a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday, a small group of journalists, mostly from Mexico, gathered in a remote-viewing room. They were there to watch the proceedings down the hall, in the courtroom itself, where the object of their interest would soon appear. The anticipation was palpable as Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former secretary of public security, the well-connected “architect” of the Mexican side of the drug war, stepped into view of the cameras and onto the television screen before the journalists.

With his white hair, navy suit, and gray tie, García Luna looked every bit of his former job: being a top cop in Mexico. Now, federal prosecutors are accusing him of colluding and collaborating with drug cartels.

The trial holds the potential for explosive revelations about the brutal 16-yearlong drug war in Mexico. Though the proceedings may not receive as much fanfare as that of the notorious kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, García Luna holds an insider’s knowledge of the conflict in all its unflattering detail, including potential criminal behavior by top Mexican and U.S. officials.

García Luna was the top security official under former President Felipe Calderón, who launched the Mexican drug war in 2006. Fueled by U.S. funds, equipment, and support, the violence has only deepened in Mexico. The conflict has seen some 400,000 people killed, 82,000 have disappeared, and hundreds of thousands displaced.

García Luna, who flaunted his relationship with the U.S., has long been a confidant and right-hand man to Mexican leaders, including former presidents, amassing a collection of Mexican government and U.S. intelligence. At the same time, prosecutors say García Luna worked with the Sinaloa and Beltrán-Leyva cartels by accepting bribes, establishing protection rackets, providing sensitive information, arresting rival cartel members, and helping them traffic drugs into the U.S., in addition to immigration-related charges.

“This just shows the power of organized crime and the futility of the strategy we’ve pursued for the past 40 years.”

García Luna’s defense attorneys deny any wrongdoing by their client. At the close of the first day of jury selection, one of the lawyers told reporters outside the court that García Luna had not been offered a deal by the U.S. government and that they would continue with the trial: “There’s been no offers, there’s been no deals. We’re not interested unless they want to dismiss the charges,” said César de Castro, García Luna’s lead attorney.

For close observers of Mexico, García Luna’s trial could provide not only a glimpse into the inner workings of the failed drug war, but also some high-level accountability — a vanishingly rare occurrence for the many families touched by the war’s violence.

“This just shows the power of organized crime and the futility of the strategy we’ve pursued for the past 40 years,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America. “The only way there would be justice for the victims is if not just García Luna, but an entire class of corrupt Mexican and perhaps U.S. political and law enforcement leaders get named and have charges filed against them.”

A protester holds a sign reading “García Luna make amends for your mistake and do not cover for anyone. Calderon did know,” during jury selection ahead of the trial of former Mexican Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna, in the Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 17, 2023.

Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

Before taking his seat in the presidential cabinet, García Luna began his law enforcement career in 1989 at the Center for Investigation and National Security, an agency created with the help of the CIA. He worked in counterterror and counterinsurgency before joining the Federal Preventive Police in 1999, where he grew close to the inner circle of newly elected President Vicente Fox.

A year later, Fox dissolved the Federal Preventive Police and replaced it with the Federal Investigation Agency, or AFI, with García Luna at the head. The AFI, modeled after the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, had a budget in the millions. At his new perch, García Luna showed a flare for the dramatic: Some AFI operations were broadcast on live television. In one instance, after a high-profile kidnapping rescue, an AFI official gave the victim a T-shirt to wear that read “THANK YOU AFI.”

In 2006, when the right-wing Calderón assumed office, García Luna was again promoted, this time appointed secretary of public security. He was now Mexico’s top law enforcement official and Calderón’s closest confidant. He oversaw the country’s prisons and a sprawling intelligence-gathering network. In short order, Calderón launched the drug war, and García Luna sent the Federal Police and military into the streets.

His roles in security brought García Luna into close contact with his U.S. counterparts. Robert Mueller, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, and others were all on his meeting agenda. As The Intercept previously reported, U.S. State Department cables called García Luna a “trusted liaison, partner and friend of the FBI.” Another cable outlines a meeting between John Brennan, who would later become director of the CIA, and García Luna: “Garcia Luna expressed his appreciation for President Calderon’s undivided commitment to fighting organized crime and his satisfaction with U.S.-Mexican cooperation, suggesting if both sides held firm we would see a reduction in violence.”

“Having someone like García Luna is extraordinarily beneficial, and they” — U.S. officials — “were not going to stop having the benefit of that huge open door just because the guy was most likely taking money, or extorting money, out of traffickers and committing all kinds of crimes,” said Oswaldo Zavala, a journalist and professor at the City University of New York.

Prosecutors have asked the court to reject evidence “depicting meetings between him and senior U.S. government officials.” They’ve also asked that there be no mention of Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, the former Mexican secretary of national defense who was arrested by the U.S. in 2019 but whose charges were later dropped in a diplomatic scandal that shook the U.S.-Mexico security relationship.

García Luna is no stranger to headlines. Sinaloa leader El Chapo’s 2018 trial saw a raft of bombshell allegations against García Luna. Jesús “El Rey” Zambada, one of El Chapo’s closest collaborators, testified that the Sinaloa and Beltrán-Leyva cartels gave García Luna nearly $60 million. Court records suggest El Rey will be a key witness at García Luna’s trial.

García Luna denied the accusations, threatening to sue El Rey for defamation. He tweeted old pictures of himself with Hillary Clinton, who at the time was secretary of state, and other U.S. officials.

The allegations against García Luna in El Chapo’s trial were only the most recent. For close to two decades, Mexican journalists have published books and investigations, exposing the alleged links between García Luna and organized crime. As secretary of public security, García Luna was also the subject of multiple investigations by Mexican officials.

Meanwhile, calamity tended to befall those who could potentially damage García Luna’s standing. Two officials who began probing his alleged links with the Sinaloa cartel died in an airplane crash in 2008. That same year, Javier Herrera Valles, a top Federal Police official, wrote Calderón a letter accusing García Luna of ties to organized crime. Herrera Valles was arrested shortly thereafter on unsubstantiated charges that he was working with the Sinaloa cartel and tortured in prison. He was exonerated and released in 2012.

With a change in presidential administration in 2012, García Luna left Mexico for Miami, where he lived a lavish lifestyle. He established a security consulting company called GL & Associates Consulting, or GLAC. Former law enforcement officers served on the board of GLAC, including Jose Rodriguez, the former top CIA official who ordered the destruction of CIA torture tapes. In December 2019, García Luna was arrested in Texas. (García Luna’s lawyers said in court filings that he made his wealth through legitimate means after arriving in the U.S.)

With his drug war machinations, close relationships with top officials from both sides of the border, and contacts with a raft of drug cartel operatives, García Luna left in his wake a host of potential witnesses against him. Many are themselves narcos who were arrested and turned on the cartels, such as Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal, who wrote in a 2012 public letter that García Luna had taken bribes.

“If he becomes the scapegoat for everything wrong with Mexico’s system and the rise of organized crime in Mexico, then they’re doing it wrong.”

According to previously sealed sentencing records, first reported by Aristegui Noticias and reviewed by The Intercept, between 2008 and 2010, La Barbie, who found Christianity after his arrest, fed information to the DEA, the FBI, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as “possibly communications with intelligence services in the United States.” Little is known of what La Barbie fed U.S. officials. His contact with the American agencies suggests the U.S. government may have known of the allegations against García Luna a decade before his indictment.

“This is all guesswork,” said Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America. “I suspect that the DEA may have still found him useful for some things. You have several cartels in Mexico and some of them are clearly not working with García Luna — a sort of ‘enemy of my enemy’ situation.”

Other narco witnesses expected to testify include Sergio “El Grande” Barragan, a former lieutenant for the Beltrán-Leyva Organization, and Ivan “La Reina” Reyes Arzate, a Federal Police officer with close ties to the DEA, who was sentenced for feeding information to organized crime.

The DEA and the CIA referred all questions about García Luna to federal prosecutors. The Justice Department declined to comment. ICE and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests.

The Mexican government, under the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, launched its own investigations into García Luna. In 2021, the government filed a lawsuit against the former security chief, his wife, and several associates, alleging that they stole $250 million in contracts with the government and laundered the money. (His defense lawyers in the Brooklyn case asked the court not to allow any evidence related to García Luna’s post-2012 life in Florida, saying it’s irrelevant to the charges.)

Last June, the Mexican government obtained its own arrest warrant for García Luna, alleging association with criminal groups and illicit enrichment. The arrest warrant included charges of illegal arms trafficking related to Fast and Furious, the botched operation in which the U.S. government attempted, but failed, to track firearms sold to Mexican organized crime. In December, during a presidential morning briefing, a top security official presented a slideshow describing who García Luna allegedly conspired with during his time in office.

Whether García Luna’s trial will implicate top Mexican or U.S. government officials remains to be seen. Critics of the drug war worry that if the focus remains narrowly on García Luna, the larger import of holding him to account will be missed, even as the conflict continues to become more militarized and the death toll mounts.

“He’s clearly the tip of a much larger iceberg,” said Isacson. “But if he becomes the scapegoat for everything wrong with Mexico’s system and the rise of organized crime in Mexico, then they’re doing it wrong.”

As Zavala, the CUNY professor, put it, “This is much more horrible, much more endless, much more difficult to stop than just one guy in a high office taking some bribes.”

The post Mexico’s Former Top Cop Is on Trial in New York. Will the U.S. Be Implicated? appeared first on The Intercept.

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Joko Widodo, the president of Indonesia, expressed regret on Wednesday about 12 instances of “gross human rights violations” over the past decades of the nation’s history — including an extraordinary U.S.-backed bloodbath carried out by the Indonesian military following a coup in 1965.

The carnage targeted the Indonesian Communist Party — known as Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI — as well as their family members, purported sympathizers, or people who stood next to a member of the PKI at a bus stop once. (It was not an exact science.) At least 500,000 Indonesians were killed, often up close with machetes or knives. Soon afterward the Central Intelligence Agency, which played a key role in supporting the massacre, called it “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”

Remarkably, Barack Obama used similar language in a passage in his 1995 autobiography “Dreams From My Father,” referring to the killings as “one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times.” Yet this section of the book has received almost no notice. A Google search finds references to that sentence from Boston public radio station WBUR; the student newspaper at Northwestern; the New York Review of Books; my dormant blog; and little else.

As Obama describes it, he moved with his mother from the U.S. to Indonesia in 1967 after she divorced his father and married Lolo, an Indonesian engineer. Obama recorded the audiobook version of “Dreams From My Father” himself, so we can hear the president-to-be describing the terrifying facts his mother learned about both their adopted country and the country they’d come from:

Or if you prefer to read rather than listen, here are Obama’s words:

She found herself a job right away teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the American embassy. … The Americans were mostly older men, careerists in the State Department, the occasional economists or journalists who would mysteriously disappear for months at a time, their affiliation or function in the embassy never quite clear. …

These men knew the country, though, or parts of it anyway, the closets where the skeletons were buried. Over lunch or casual conversation they would share with her things she couldn’t learn in the published news reports. They explained how Sukarno had frayed badly the nerves of a U.S. government already obsessed with the march of communism through Indochina, what with his nationalist rhetoric and his politics of nonalignment — he was as bad as Lumumba or Nasser! — only worse, given Indonesia’s strategic importance. Word was that the CIA had played a part in the coup, although nobody knew for sure. More certain was the fact that after the coup the military had swept the countryside for supposed Communist sympathizers. The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million. Even the smart guys at the Agency had lost count.

Innuendo, half-whispered asides; that’s how she found out that we had arrived in Djakarta less than a year after one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times. The idea frightened her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened. …

Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power, learning the wisdom of forgetting.

The 1965 coup and its hideous aftermath is covered in detail in the recent book “The Jakarta Method” by former Washington Post reporter Vincent Bevins.

Indonesia was governed from World War II until 1965 by President Sukarno (some Indonesians have a single name) who had previously led the resistance to Dutch colonization. This made the U.S. increasingly unhappy. Indonesia was enormous, with the world’s sixth-largest population, and the PKI was the third-biggest Communist Party on Earth, after China’s and the Soviet Union’s. It mattered little to the American government that Sukarno was not himself a Communist, or that the PKI had no plans or capacity for violence. It was bad enough that Sukarno did not leap to put the Indonesian economy at the service of U.S. multinationals, and that he helped create the Non-Aligned Movement of countries that wished to stay out of both the Soviet and American blocs.

The U.S. goal, then, was to extract Sukarno from power in favor of someone reliable (from the American perspective), while creating a pretext for the Indonesian military to destroy the PKI. But how to make this happen?

Howard P. Jones, the American ambassador to Indonesia until April 1965, told a meeting of State Department officials just before leaving his post, “From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.” This, he believed, would give the army a “clear-cut kind of challenge that would galvanize effective reaction.” A British Foreign Office official made the case that “there might therefore be much to be said for encouraging a premature PKI coup during Sukarno’s lifetime.”

Coincidentally enough, this is exactly what appeared to happen. On September 30, 1965, a group of young military officers kidnapped six Indonesian generals, claiming that they planned to overthrow Sukarno. All six generals somehow soon ended up dead.

Suharto, an Army general who was, fortuitously, not targeted, announced with his allies that the dead generals had been castrated and tortured by female members of the PKI in a “depraved, demonic ritual,” according to Bevins. Years later it was discovered that none of this was true; all but one of the six generals had simply been shot.

To this day, it’s impossible to say what truly happened. Bevins lists three theories. First, the leader of the PKI may have helped plan the events of September 30 with contacts in the military. It may have been the young members of the military acting alone with no PKI involvement. Or Suharto may have collaborated with the September 30 officers, pretending that he would support them and then betraying them as part of a plan to seize power for himself.

In any case, Suharto certainly seemed to have a plan ready to execute. Soon afterward, Sukarno was out and Suharto was in charge. Then the killing began, in what the Indonesian army internally called Operasi Penumpasan, or Operation Annihilation.

The U.S. was not only aware of what was happening, but was also an eager participant, providing lists of PKI members to the Indonesian military.

The butchery lasted for months, into early 1966, with the New York Times referring to it as a “staggering mass slaughter of Communists and pro-Communists.” The U.S. was not only aware of what was happening, but was also an eager participant, providing lists of PKI members to the Indonesian military. One American official later said, “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” According to Time magazine, there were so many corpses that it created “a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies.”

New York Times columnist James Reston soon wrote about these events under the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” Americans needed to understand these “hopeful political developments,” including the fact that the “Indonesian massacre” could not have occurred “without the clandestine aid [Indonesia] has received indirectly from here.” Recently declassified records illustrate just how right Reston was.

Suharto ruled Indonesia brutally for the next three decades, remaining a key U.S. ally until he fell from power in 1998. Only now, over 57 years since the coup, is the Indonesian government barely beginning to face its own past.

“Acknowledging some of the crimes of the Suharto regime is a start,” says Bradley Simpson, a historian and expert on this period. “But President Widodo must do more to initiate a long overdue process of accountability and restitution for victims and survivors of the 1965–1966 killings. So do governments like the United States and Great Britain, which were willing accomplices in the Indonesian army’s campaign of mass murder.”

There is no sign of that happening in U.S., however. Obama, with his direct personal knowledge of Indonesia and this history, might seem to be a natural leader for this process. But you shouldn’t get your hopes up. He also explains in “Dreams From My Father” that he learned in Indonesia that “the world was violent … unpredictable and often cruel.” His stepfather, he records, taught him that “Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. … Better to be strong. If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

The post Listen to Barack Obama’s Chilling Description of U.S. Involvement in the Gigantic 1965 Indonesia Massacre appeared first on The Intercept.

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“I’m trying to be OK,” Sabri al-Qurashi texted me one afternoon after I asked how he was. Al-Qurashi has made it through a lot, but he’s increasingly depressed, tired, and has become desperate for his living conditions to change. By now, he has spent two decades feeling trapped with no end in sight.

Al-Qurashi lived the nightmare of languishing in a cage as a detainee at the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He never expected he’d be living in another version of a cage after he was released in 2014. For nearly a decade, he has found himself stuck in Kazakhstan. Promises once made to him of starting a life and starting a family after Guantánamo have now been all but shattered. His life now feels like one of permanent purgatory as he holds no form of basic identification at the mercy of the Kazakh government. With no hope or patience left, al-Qurashi is now threatening a hunger strike.

“Truly, my life now is just as bad as w­­hen I was in Guantanamo, and in many aspects even worse. At least there, I knew I was in prison and that I would get out one day,” al-Qurashi wrote in an account shared with The Intercept, which is set to be published by CAGE, a group that advocates for “war on terror” victims and detainees. “Now I’m living as if I’m dead and being told I am free when I am not.”

“Now I’m living as if I’m dead and being told I am free when I am not.”

When al-Qurashi met with representatives from Kazakhstan’s government while still at Guantánamo, he was optimistic about being sent to a new strange home. He agreed to a secretive resettlement deal negotiated by the U.S. State Department.

Unable to return to Yemen because of the country’s instability, al-Qurashi said he was offered a good life elsewhere. His understanding, and that of his legal team, was that, after living under some restrictions for two years, he would be a free man, with all the same rights as Kazakh citizens. It is a Muslim country, he was told, and he would be treated as a member of society. Instead, he said now he finds himself without the most basic needs.

“I have no official status, no ID card, no right to work or education, and no right to see my family,” al-Qurashi said. “I have been married for eight years, but my wife is not allowed to come and live with me.”

Al-Qurashi lives under conditions that are in stark contrast to the stability that the State Department had tried to guarantee in his deal. “The United States’ goal in resettling former Guantánamo detainees was to create conditions for these men to integrate into their new societies and give them the opportunity to start a new life in a manner that protected the security of the United States,” a former State Department official familiar with the Obama administration’s efforts to transfer Guantánamo detainees told The Intercept. “Among other things, successful resettlements entailed housing, access to medical care, educational opportunities, the ability to work, and the opportunity to start or reunify with their families.”

In an interview with The Intercept, al-Qurashi said that he has been repeatedly told over the years that his wife and other family are not allowed to visit, much less join him, from Yemen because he is “illegal.” He said he was told, “You have no rights.” According to a message viewed by The Intercept, the Red Crescent Society is currently negotiating with Kazakh officials for al-Qurashi’s wife to finally be allowed a brief first visit. “We are waiting for a reply. I will keep you informed,” an International Committee of the Red Cross representative working on al-Qurashi’s behalf texted him in late October. Al-Qurashi hasn’t heard anything since.

A spokesperson for the State Department said that once security agreements around resettlement expired, responsibility for treatment of the former detainees fell to the host governments. “Repatriation or resettlement of former detainees is a carefully negotiated process between the United States and receiving countries based on mutually reached security and humane treatment assurances. While security assurances are time-limited, assurances related to humane treatment do not expire,” said Bureau of Counterterrorism spokesperson Vincent Picard in a statement. “While host governments are encouraged to consult with us, the U.S. government does not exercise any sort of custody over the treatment of resettled individuals. We encourage all host governments to exercise their responsibilities humanely and with consideration of appropriate security measures.” (The Kazakh Embassy to the U.S. did not respond to a request for comment.)

For al-Qurashi to have gone so long without even documentation of his identity, in defiance of the diplomatic efforts of the State Department, is something his legal advocates never imagined.

“Ultimately, he never received proper identification to be a documented individual in the country, and that poses problems in any country,” Greg McConnell, al-Qurashi’s pro bono counsel, said. “That’s something that was never appropriately fulfilled in the way that we understood it would be by the Kazakh government.”

Following the broken promises, al-Qurashi now feels that no one cares about him. With the ICRC financing his apartment, food, and even a place to paint, al-Qurashi worries that Kazakh officials may ask, “What more could you possibly want?” For al-Qurashi, though, the new life he signed up for was one where his wife could join him, and they could build a home together. His existence now, he said, is sustained by aid, but it isn’t really life at all.

“Of course, I try not to give up,” he said, “but everything is against me.”

A painting Sabri al-Qurashi made while imprisoned at Guantánamo shows an airplane in the sky, seen through a broken chain-link fence, in 2014.

Illustration: Sabri al-Qurashi

Road to Guantánamo

Al-Qurashi maintains a calm confidence. His infectious smile is matched by a warm hospitality that can be felt through our WhatsApp video calls. His big hands wave around and often stop suddenly, palms up toward the ceiling when he emphasizes his most exasperating moments. When he’s not caught up in despair, his humor shines through.

On a call one afternoon in late fall, he asked me where I was sitting. “It’s a little backyard, like a garden,” I said, panning the laptop around my ground-floor, concrete yard in Brooklyn.

“Oh, I’ve got a garden too,” he said. “Let me show you.” He walked through a stark apartment and plunges the camera into the saddest-looking attempt at an indoor herb garden I’ve ever seen. Small green seedlings of basil and mint fight for life in a halved plastic water jug. A big laugh follows, his face transformed by a joyful moment of self-deprecation. A few weeks later, all the plants were dead.

For years, al-Qurashi has tried to keep himself sane by painting; his illustrations are sophisticated and conceptual, and his talent, discovered at Guantánamo, is immense. The power of escape afforded by making art, however, has diminished lately. “Even drawing, which is the best thing in my life, and I love it — I’m no longer enthusiastic about it,” he told me.

Al-Qurashi opened up about his youth in a series of interviews. Born in Saudi Arabia to Yemeni parents, he spent all his youth in Hafar al-Batin, doing odd jobs for vendors at the market so he could run home with 10 or 20 riyals in his pocket after school. With dreams of becoming a “rich man,” he began selling perfume oils in the Saudi markets in his mid-20s. Eventually, he took a trip to the wholesale factories in Pakistan, his first such solo visit. That’s when the 9/11 attacks happened. In a desperate attempt to leave the country while security forces were rounding up foreigners, al-Qurashi was grabbed in a raid of the apartment he was staying in.

“It is in my nature that I forgive even those who have wronged me.”

At the time, the U.S. government was doling out up to $5,000 to Afghan warlords and to the government of Pakistan for capturing suspected members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban and turning them over. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, 86 percent of the men jailed at Guantánamo were sold for a bounty. Al-Qurashi had no idea he was about to join hundreds of men handed over to American intelligence by Pakistani officials.

At the American makeshift prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, al-Qurashi said he was stripped naked, shaved, intimidated with dogs and deprived of water, warmth, and basic dignity. The worst day of his life, he said, was the flight to Cuba. He waited for his captors to realize their mistake, but the day never came. Through brutal interrogations, hunger strikes, and solitary confinement, he maintained his innocence.

Al-Qurashi said he feels no bitterness about what happened to him, even expressing gratitude for the friends he’s made along the way. I asked if he forgave the people who tortured him. “Of course,” he responded without hesitation. “It is in my nature that I forgive even those who have wronged me.”

A painting by Sabri al-Qurashi of a snowy landscape scene in Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan, in 2021.

Illustration: Sabri al-Qurashi

Another Prison

By the end of 2014, three Yemenis, including al-Qurashi, and two Tunisian men arrived in Kazakhstan from Guantánamo Bay — the first and last group to be sent to the former Soviet country. The destination may seem odd, but Kazakhstan is majority Muslim and could address the U.S.’s security concerns about a handoff. Harsh treatment, intensive surveillance, and harassment started immediately, as documented in a Vice investigation shortly after the men arrived.

Al-Qurashi and Lotfi bin Ali, a 6-foot-8 Tunisian, were first placed along the Russian border in Semey, a small city in the shadow of the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapon testing site. The men expected to be welcomed in a Muslim country, but instead they found outward hostility.

Al-Qurashi struggled to learn Kazakh from a non-Arabic-speaking teacher, in a city that mostly spoke Russian. Lotfi, at the time, couldn’t find a winter coat that fit his huge frame.

Bin Ali frequently spoke to reporters about his conditions in Kazakhstan and, perhaps because of the embarrassing media reports, was resettled again in Mauritania, along with fellow Tunisian, Adel Hakimi. Never having returned home to Tunisia, bin Ali died on March 9, 2021, after struggling to find adequate medical treatment for heart disease.

“The State Department didn’t even pretend to give a shit,” said Mark Denbeaux, bin Ali’s former lawyer. “All they wanted to do was get people out of Guantánamo. They dumped them in Kazakhstan and didn’t care what happened.”

Another former Guantánamo detainee shipped to Kazakstan — Asim Thabit Al Khalaqi, a Yemeni without documented health problems — died four months after the transfer from a sudden severe illness. Friends and family allege medical malpractice and say his body was never returned to Yemen or properly buried.

Al Qurashi, too, now struggles to find adequate medical care for an injury he sustained three years ago, when a man violently assaulted him on the street. Struck in the face and left with nerve damage, he was told after the attack that he could not report the incident or have any sort of day in court. The police said al-Qurashi, because of his lack of status in the country, did not have standing to bring charges. His treatment for the partial facial paralysis is ongoing — he’s been given acupuncture and a jar of blood-sucking leeches — but he needs a complicated surgery that he is afraid to have performed because of how he’s been treated so far.

In addition to leaving his body in peril, the Kazakhs authorities’ approach to al-Qurashi has left him virtually unable to make meaningful social contact with those around him, he said.

“I have no basic dignity or freedom to move even in the streets around my apartment,” al-Qurashi explained in the CAGE account. “The government harasses anyone I get in contact with which makes it impossible to socialize. The government deters people from associating with me by telling us that we are terrorists and dangerous. Because of not wanting to put anybody in harm, I have stopped attempting to integrate with locals.”

Because of his lack of identification, al-Qurashi is unable to do basic things like send and receiving money, packages, or mail. He is unable to work. When he wants to leave his apartment, for instance to go fishing nearby, he must call the Red Crescent office and ask for his assigned chaperone to accompany him. Sometimes the wait is days long. He cannot leave his neighborhood, let alone drive or travel outside Kyzylorda, his open-air prison. “I exist in life, but I do not live it,” al-Qurashi told me.

The experience echoes those of other former prisoners speaking out against the relentless stigma of life after Guantánamo. “When they leave Guantánamo, it’s not as if they’re exonerated, it’s not as if the United States says that they’re innocent or that they were wrongfully detained,” said Maha Hilal, author of “Innocent Until Proven Muslim” and a scholar of the effect of the so-called war on terror on Muslims. “And so, obviously, they leave Guantánamo with the stigma of ‘terrorist’ on their back.”

Al-Qurashi said, “I have been treated like a terrorist since the day I stepped off the plane here.”

Of the five detainees sent to Kazakhstan, only al-Qurashi and Muhammad Ali Husayn Khanayna, who declined to comment, remain today in Kyzylorda.

Whose Responsibility?

When the Obama administration ended, so, too, did the diplomatic effort of the State Department working with men cleared for release from Guantánamo. The Trump administration disbanded the office responsible for the resettlements, then called the Special Envoy for the Closure of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facilities. Former Guantánamo prisoners were left with no support to hold their host countries to account for mistreatment. The men cleared for release from Guantánamo remained in prison as President Donald Trump canceled all outbound transfers.

Once the two-year deal between a host country and the State Department expired, there was no longer a means for maintaining that the hosting countries would treat the resettled detainees with basic human rights, said Martina Burtscher, a fellow at the human rights group Reprieve who works on Guantánamo issues. (“Once security assurances have expired, and pending any specific renegotiation of assurances, it largely falls to the discretion of the host country to determine what security measures they continue to implement,” said Picard, the State Department spokesperson.)

The complete collapse in communication and lack of diplomatic pressure allowed host countries like Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates, and Senegal to do whatever they wanted with the resettled detainees — including imprisoning them and, in the case of Senegal, forced repatriation to Libya.

“This is not the solution the U.S. wanted, but [it happened] because of lack of care and lack of resources,” Burtscher said. “I understand that they need to empty Guantánamo. But they also have a responsibility to follow up.”

“They implanted these men in countries where they have no family, no friends, no connections, don’t speak the language, have nothing,” she continued. “The very least they can do is make sure that they have a solid legal status.”

“They implanted these men in countries where they have no family, no friends, no connections, don’t speak the language, have nothing. The very least they can do is make sure that they have a solid legal status.”

After Joe Biden assumed the Oval Office in 2021, the State Department created a desk with a mandate similar to the old special envoy, now the office of the Senior Representative for Guantánamo Affairs. Tina Kaidanow was appointed in August.

For resettled men like al-Qurashi, the appointment makes them no less desperate for their host country’s mistreatment to radically change. Through his lawyer, Greg McConnell, al-Qurashi sent a message to Kaidanow asking for help in his case. “Please, I’m asking you to review my case,” al-Qurashi wrote. “If I stay in Kazakhstan, I must be given the right to live and work as a free man, have legal status, be able to travel, and be allowed for family visits. If this is not possible in Kazakhstan, please, help [me] be relocated to another country where I can live as a free man.”

As al-Qurashi’s advocates continue to request legal status for him in the country, al-Qurashi said the only offer on the table from Kazakh officials is a trip back to Yemen — an offer that may violate the international law of nonrefoulement, Burtscher said. He has so far refused, the stigma of being branded an Al Qaeda terrorist by the U.S. potentially making him a target for various factions in the Yemeni civil war.

The State Department’s new office could conceivably intervene — should they make it a priority over transfers of detainees out of Guantánamo — and negotiate for al-Qurashi to be transferred to a more hospitable country.

Al-Qurashi, however, said he would stay in Kazakhstan if the authorities give him legal residence and allow his wife to live with him. “If I were given my freedom and rights, I could achieve so much more here,” he told me.

So far, the new State Department office has seemed slow to act. “Having the ambassador named is helpful and that certainly shows some level of commitment from the Biden administration,” McConnell said. “I have yet to really hear anything meaningful from them about what’s happening to remedy this situation. They’re very polite, very appreciative, and absorb a lot of information — and I get nothing back — and that hasn’t changed in a long time.”

Mansoor Adayfi, another Yemeni that was formerly held in Guantánamo, said nothing will happen without meaningful U.S. moves. “His case needs the U.S. government to get involved again to fix the problem. And either they need to talk to Kazakhstan to guarantee legal status, so he can see his wife, be able to get permission to work and live legally, like anyone else,” Adayfi said. “Or they should send him to a better country so he can build his life.”

McConnell said, “This was something of their making. It’s failed. And they need to help rectify it.”

The post Sabri al-Qurashi Has Lived Without Legal Status in Kazakhstan Since His 2014 Guantánamo Release appeared first on The Intercept.

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