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.

The post Spy Agencies Skewed Intel to Please Trump, and Obama Too appeared first on The Intercept .

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.”

The post Kamala Harris Touts Homeland Security Program Encouraging High School Spying appeared first on The Intercept .

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.

The list includes military personnel from Burkina Faso ( 2014, 2015, and twice in 2022 ); Chad ( 2021 ); Gambia (2014); Guinea ( 2021 ); Mali ( 2012 , 2020, 2021 ); Mauritania (2008); and Niger ( 2023 ).

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.”

The post Pentagon Ignores Law Calling for Report on How It Trained So Many African Coup Leaders appeared first on The Intercept .

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.

The post Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation appeared first on The Intercept .

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.”

It’s the kind of ideological contradiction typical of X’s owner. Musk has managed to sell himself as a heterodox critic of U.S. foreign policy and big government while simultaneously enriching himself by selling the state expensive military hardware through his rocket company SpaceX.

“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.”

The post Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept .

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.”

The post Squeezed by African Coups, Biden Cozies Up to the World’s Worst Dictator appeared first on The Intercept .

As the Biden administration ratchets up its criticism of Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza, it has failed to implement its own civilian casualty avoidance policies for the U.S. armed forces, according to a scathing new government audit.

“The right number of civilian casualties is zero,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of Israel’s war last week.

In December, a year after the Pentagon announced a new program to address civilian casualties, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for an “urgent” effort to get units and headquarters throughout the military to take on the task of mitigating civilian harm.

“Hard-earned tactical and operational successes may ultimately end in strategic failure if care is not taken to protect the civilian environment as much as the situation allows – including the civilian population and the personnel, organizations, resources, infrastructure, essential services, and systems on which civilian life depends,” says the new Joint Chiefs of Staff directive to the armed services. The January 2024 document, obtained by The Intercept, has not been previously reported.

But as the Defense Department pushes forward to revamp its protocols addressing civilian harm, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, released an audit this month that finds that field commands have so far largely rejected the Pentagon’s effort. The scathing GAO report , “Civilian Harm: DOD Should Take Actions to Enhance Its Plan for Mitigation and Response Efforts,” finds that Washington has failed to inculcate a new appreciation of the impact of civilian harm and that its top down directives have been met with ire and confusion from both military commanders and rank-and-file soldiers alike.

In December 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued an instruction formalizing the department’s new civilian harm response, which “Establishes policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for civilian harm mitigation and response.”

“Protecting civilians from harm in connection with military operations is not only a moral imperative, it is also critical to achieving long-term success on the battlefield,” the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan said, as previously reported by The Intercept.

Wide-ranging in its scope, the directive and plan sets in motion 11 core objectives that establish a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Steering Committee, a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the creation of dedicated staff positions at battlefield commands to help mitigate civilian harm, and multiple initiatives to gather more information on incidents and trends with the goal of reducing civilian casualties.

The new regulation, Dan E. Stigall, director for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Policy in the Office of Secretary of Defense, wrote in December 2023, “provides important policy guidance to shape how DoD conceptualizes, considers, assesses, investigates, and responds to civilian harm.”

And yet the GAO report, issued earlier this month, finds that despite the Pentagon mandate, Middle East and Africa regional commanders have failed to change practices for how civilian harm prevention is being factored into military operations. The GAO also found that the Defense Department “has not addressed uncertainty about what constitutes improvement and how the action plan applies to certain operations.” In other words, there is an absence of processes and metrics to record civilian deaths and then interpret incidents and causes for the purpose of learning lessons. The Pentagon itself has also failed to think through civilian casualties and harm caused in the context of all types of operations.

The GAO generally excuses the failure of the fighting commands to take adequate measures to revamp their practices given the military’s focus on small-scale counterterrorism operations over the past two decades. According to the report’s findings, “in our discussions with DOD components about challenges in implementing the action plan, some [commanders] indicated that they are unclear about how to mitigate and respond to civilian harm for large-scale conflicts. This is because they felt that the action plan is geared toward counterterrorism operations.” Creating a culture of civilian harm reduction “will require much more time, resources, and personnel than during the counterterrorism or irregular warfare operations of the past 20 years,” the GAO concludes.

Large-scale conflicts refer to potential wars with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But building up a capacity inside the military to assess civilian harm for conflicts like Ukraine and Israel is also a Pentagon goal in order to properly assess the use of U.S. weapons by American arms recipients , experts say.

U.S. Central Command officials, responsible for the Middle East, told the GAO that they didn’t understand the end goal of the Defense Department plan, given that they felt it fails to provide any way to measure the number of civilian deaths. The command also told the GAO that it was already working to mitigate civilian harm even without the new directives, saying that “the [Pentagon] action plan may be more helpful to other combatant commands that have not had recent experiences with combat and civilian harm mitigation.” It is a strange position for CENTCOM to take given that Austin’s directive itself was precipitated by successful lobbying by human rights groups for the military to address civilian harm in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen , and Syria, where it became clear that CENTCOM was not doing enough .

U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, similarly told the GAO that it should be allowed to continue with its operations as they are being conducted and that nothing more needed to be done to implement Austin’s plan. According to the report, a SOCOM official “told us that there is currently no deficiency in DOD’s civilian harm mitigation and response efforts and the action plan codifies what the command is already doing.”

Officials from Africa Command and Indo-Pacific Command expressed similar skepticism about the Pentagon’s effort, according to the GAO report. A Navy officer said that the new regulations were unpopular within the rank and file: “some staff at lower levels of the Navy are asking questions about what DOD is fixing by implementing the action plan,” the officer said.

On December 13, 2023, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a new staff functional task, contained in its Unified Joint Task List, or UJTL, that directs all military organizations to “manage civilian harm mitigation and response.” The UJTL is the standard “library of tasks, which serves as a foundation for capabilities-based planning across the range of military operations.” It is a comprehensive menu of “tasks, conditions, and measures” used to establish standards and even job descriptions across the entire defense enterprise. A printout of the tasks is over 1,600 pages, but the UJTL is maintained electronically.

According to an electronic copy obtained by The Intercept, the “urgent” priority new task directs the armed forces to “plan, integrate, and/or manage approaches for mitigation and response to civilian harm in plans, operations and/or training.”

“This task may include the Civilian Environment Teams at operational commands, composed of intelligence professionals; experts in human terrain, civilian infrastructure, and urban systems; and civil engineers, to assist commanders in understanding the effects of friendly and adversary actions on the civilian environment. This task may also include the development of command red teaming policies and procedures appropriate to relevant operational environments, with a focus on combating cognitive biases throughout joint targeting processes,” the description of the task says. It calls for reporting on the number of “trained, qualified, and certified personnel ready to support civilian harm mitigation and response requirements.”

With Austin’s civilian harm reduction rollout in 2023 and now with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chiming in, demanding that the services and commands incorporate civilian harm reduction into its staff and operations, a fundamental disagreement inside the military comes into focus, pitting top brass in Washington against combat commanders serving overseas. In the field, according to the GAO report, commanders believe that they are abiding by the laws of war and that their jobs which require putting their lives on the line are difficult and dangerous enough without having to modify them to satisfy Washington. They view the Pentagon as out of touch, catering more to public opinion and negative news coverage than to military reality.

The Pentagon, by focusing on “managing” and “mitigating” civilian harm is also being cautious about directing any mandate to count (or account for) civilian casualties because of the legacy of the dreaded “body count” from the Vietnam era, where commanders were pressured to inflate the number of enemy killed to demonstrate the false success of their operations. In Desert Storm (the first Gulf War in 1991), then CENTCOM commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf fashioned his own experiences into a creed that his command would refuse to count not only Iraqi combatants killed, but Iraqi civilians as well. For many in the military, that bias not to count civilian casualties has continued to this day.

Pressure from human rights and civilian casualty organizations began to change this practice after the Kosovo war in 1999, holding NATO and individual military forces accountable for civilian casualties and harm. Two decades of fighting after 9/11 accentuated the need to account for civilian harm, not just for legal and humanitarian reasons, but also because the effort to kill terrorists without accounting for civilian effects was shown to just increase the number of terrorists in succeeding generations.

In the formulation of its civilian harm “mitigation” strategy, the Pentagon has chosen specifically to ignore the work of the human rights and warfare-monitoring community, as revealed in a 2022 RAND Corporation report on “U.S. Department of Defense Civilian Casualty Policies and Procedures.” The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the report says, rejected the use of “third party” assessments because it did “not want to be held accountable to a range [of number] that is not an accurate estimate.”

The GAO report notes that a Joint Staff official said that the Defense Department still chooses to ignore civilian casualty assessments from third-party sources even though it itself fails to aggregate its own data and make its own efforts. Citing the RAND study, the GAO notes however that “Third-party groups tend to identify a range of estimates and leverage local news, social media sites, and footage of incidents posted to YouTube or other outlets” and that these estimates, though they can vary widely from the DOD’s internal numbers, are still essential to improve the accuracy of the military’s own assessments.

The GAO urges the DOD to establish effective metrics and “to get buy-in from DOD components and officials at all levels implementing the [civilian harm] action plan.” It also says that the Pentagon needs to “better monitor progress in implementing [its own plan] to help ensure that the improvements endure.” It is not an optimistic prognosis for civilians after years of external pressure and more than a year after Austin unveiled his new plan.

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Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.

Kissinger helped to prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported , and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David , and five grandchildren .

As National Security Adviser , Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia , resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.

In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”

“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.

Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”

North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister .

As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians ; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population .

In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “ You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende ,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans . In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, Cesar Augusto Guzzetti: “ If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly .” The so-called “Dirty War” that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa . In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”

Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as “ the playboy of the western wing ” and “ the sex symbol of the Nixon administration ,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.

“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Never Lose: Nixon, Kissinger and the Illusion of National Security,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions , including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo, broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”

Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.

In his 2001 book-length indictment , “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Henry Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.

“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”

Kissinger continued to win coveted awards , and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners , Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “ relied on his counsel ” while serving as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken , also had a long , cordial relationship with his distant predecessor .

Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken ; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star general David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg ; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.

To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.

“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied .

When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”

“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly – “

“Come on now.”

“No, no, no, were particularly – “

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia – in a more pointed manner – 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”

Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “ Kissinger’s Shadow .” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.

“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds – as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran – to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”

The post Henry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100 appeared first on The Intercept .

On Wednesday , the Justice Department announced it had filed charges against a man allegedly working for the Indian government to orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. citizen earlier this year. An Indian government official allegedly instructed Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, to coordinate the murder a Sikh separatist living in New York.

The indictment alleges that Gupta, after being recruited by the Indian government official to orchestrate the killing, hired a hitman and paid him a $15,000 advance to carry out the murder this past summer. The hitman was actually an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA. According to a report on the indictment in the Washington Post, the intended target of the killing was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikh activist group Sikhs for Justice. In the DEA’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said investigators had “foiled and exposed a dangerous plot to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil.”

The alleged assassination plot against Pannun was in the works around the same time as the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was also a leader in the Sikh separatist movement. Nijjar was murdered outside Vancouver in June; the Canadian government has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence in his death.

The Indian government has come under scrutiny over an alleged transnational assassination program targeting its opponents in foreign countries. In addition to the murder of Nijjar, The Intercept has also reported on alleged FBI warnings to Sikhs in the U.S. as well as alleged plots by India to assassinate Sikh activists in Pakistan. Both the Nijjar killing and the Gupta plot came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the U.S. in June.

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil, coinciding with Modi’s White House visit,” said Pritpal Singh, a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee who was among the Sikh American activists who were contacted by the FBI after Nijjar’s killing.

The details in the indictment reveal a murder-for-hire plot gone awry. Gupta, 52, described as being tied to the international weapons and narcotics trade, was alleged to have worked as a co-conspirator to an Indian government official with a background in security and intelligence. Along with others based in India and elsewhere, Gupta helped plan the murder of Pannun over his advocacy of an independent Sikh state and criticisms of the Indian government. In return, the government official indicated he would help secure the dismissal of criminal charges against Gupta in India, including during a meeting in New Delhi to discuss the plot. The Indian government official provided Gupta with details about Pannun, including his address, associated phone numbers, and his daily routine, which Gupta then gave to the DEA agent working undercover as a hitman.

According to the indictment, the Indian government official told Gupta that he was targeting multiple people in the U.S. In communications, the Indian official told Gupta that he had a “target in New York” as well as another target in California. Gupta replied: ”We will hit our all Targets.” The indictment also indicated that Pannun was surveilled in New York using a cellphone application that tracks GPS coordinates and enables the user to take photographs. The Indian official allegedly agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder of Pannun, with a $15,000 advance paid to the undercover agent around June 9, according to the indictment. Nijjar was fatally shot less than 10 days later outside a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburbs.

According to the indictment, Gupta instructed the DEA hitman to kill Pannun “as soon as possible,” but not during a period when high-level meetings were expected to take place between U.S. and Indian officials. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was scheduled to visit the U.S. on an official trip between June 21 and 23. On June 18, the day of Nijjar’s murder, the Indian government official sent Gupta a video of the Sikh leader slumped dead in his car. The next day, Gupta allegedly contacted the undercover DEA to tell them that Nijjar, like Pannun, had also been targeted for his opposition to the Indian government, telling the agent, “we have so many targets.”

Gupta also allegedly promised “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman, referring to more assassinations that would be carried out in the future. In a video call with the undercover DEA agent, roughly a week before the killing of Nijjar, Gupta and a group of men dressed in business attire and seated in a conference room allegedly told the hitman on the other end of the call, “we are all counting on you.”

There is mounting evidence that India is running a transnational targeted killing program targeting dissidents. Documents previously reported by The Intercept alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing was coordinating the murder individuals in Pakistan, using local criminal networks and assets based in the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. A slew of Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in Pakistan have been killed over the past few years, the pace of which has picked up in recent months. Such killings may be taking place in the West as well. In addition to Nijjar, in recent years a number of Sikh activists have died in mysterious circumstances in the United Kingdom and Canada, prompting accusations from family members and others of Indian government involvement.

According to the indictment, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in late June. He is charged with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Gupta is currently “in jail waiting to answer to these charges,” according to the U.S. Attorney Office press release.

The accusations against Gupta expand the scope of what is publicly known about India’s alleged assassination campaign in Western countries.

“These revelations are deeply unsettling and have shocked our community,” said Pritpal Singh of the American Sikh Caucus Committee “The Indian rogue regime must be held accountable, and the perpetrators must face justice.”

The post India Accidentally Hired a DEA Agent to Kill Sikh American Activist, Federal Prosecutors Say appeared first on The Intercept .