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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Welch asked in English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As automated text generators have rapidly, dazzlingly advanced from fantasy to novelty to genuine tool, they are starting to reach the inevitable next phase: weapon. The Pentagon and intelligence agencies are openly planning to use tools like ChatGPT to advance their mission — but the company behind the mega-popular chatbot is silent.

OpenAI, the nearly $30 billion R&D titan behind ChatGPT, provides a public list of ethical lines it will not cross, business it will not pursue no matter how lucrative, on the grounds that it could harm humanity. Among many forbidden use cases, OpenAI says it has preemptively ruled out military and other “high risk” government applications. Like its rivals, Google and Microsoft, OpenAI is eager to declare its lofty values but unwilling to earnestly discuss what these purported values mean in practice, or how — or even if — they’d be enforced.

“If there’s one thing to take away from what you’re looking at here, it’s the weakness of leaving it to companies to police themselves.”

AI policy experts who spoke to The Intercept say the company’s silence reveals the inherent weakness of self-regulation, allowing firms like OpenAI to appear principled to an AI-nervous public as they develop a powerful technology, the magnitude of which is still unclear. “If there’s one thing to take away from what you’re looking at here, it’s the weakness of leaving it to companies to police themselves,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and former AI adviser to the Federal Trade Commission.

The question of whether OpenAI will allow the militarization of its tech is not an academic one. On March 8, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance gathered in northern Virginia for its annual conference on emerging technologies. The confab brought together attendees from both the private sector and government — namely the Pentagon and neighboring spy agencies — eager to hear how the U.S. security apparatus might join corporations around the world in quickly adopting machine-learning techniques. During a Q&A session, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s associate director for capabilities, Phillip Chudoba, was asked how his office might leverage AI. He responded at length:

We’re all looking at ChatGPT and, and how that’s kind of maturing as a useful and scary technology. … Our expectation is that … we’re going to evolve into a place where we kind of have a collision of you know, GEOINT, AI, ML and analytic AI/ML and some of that ChatGPT sort of stuff that will really be able to predict things that a human analyst, you know, perhaps hasn’t thought of, perhaps due to experience, or exposure, and so forth.

Stripping away the jargon, Chudoba’s vision is clear: using the predictive text capabilities of ChatGPT (or something like it) to aid human analysts in interpreting the world. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, a relatively obscure outfit compared to its three-letter siblings, is the nation’s premier handler of geospatial intelligence, often referred to as GEOINT. This practice involves crunching a great multitude of geographic information — maps, satellite photos, weather data, and the like — to give the military and spy agencies an accurate picture of what’s happening on Earth. “Anyone who sails a U.S. ship, flies a U.S. aircraft, makes national policy decisions, fights wars, locates targets, responds to natural disasters, or even navigates with a cellphone relies on NGA,” the agency boasts on its site. On April 14, the Washington Post reported the findings of NGA documents that detailed the surveillance capabilities of Chinese high-altitude balloons that had caused an international incident earlier this year.

Forbidden Uses

But Chudoba’s AI-augmented GEOINT ambitions are complicated by the fact that the creator of the technology in question has seemingly already banned exactly this application: Both “Military and warfare” and “high risk government decision-making” applications are explicitly forbidden, according to OpenAI’s “Usage policies” page . “If we discover that your product or usage doesn’t follow these policies, we may ask you to make necessary changes,” the policy reads. “Repeated or serious violations may result in further action, including suspending or terminating your account.”

By industry standards, it’s a remarkably strong, clear document, one that appears to swear off the bottomless pit of defense money available to less scrupulous contractors, and would appear to be a pretty cut-and-dry prohibition against exactly what Chudoba is imagining for the intelligence community. It’s difficult to imagine how an agency that keeps tabs on North Korean missile capabilities and served as a “silent partner” in the invasion of Iraq, according to the Department of Defense , is not the very definition of high-risk military decision-making.

While the NGA and fellow intel agencies seeking to join the AI craze may ultimately pursue contracts with other firms, for the time being few OpenAI competitors have the resources required to build something like GPT-4, the large language model that underpins ChatGPT. Chudoba’s namecheck of ChatGPT raises a vital question: Would the company take the money? As clear-cut as OpenAI’s prohibition against using ChatGPT for crunching foreign intelligence may seem, the company refuses to say so. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referred The Intercept to company spokesperson Alex Beck, who would not comment on Chudoba’s remarks or answer any questions. When asked about how OpenAI would enforce its use policy in this case, Beck responded with a link to the policy itself and declined to comment further.

“I think their unwillingness to even engage on the question should be deeply concerning,” Myers of the AI Now Institute told The Intercept. “I think it certainly runs counter to everything that they’ve told the public about the ways that they’re concerned about these risks, as though they are really acting in the public interest. If when you get into the details, if they’re not willing to be forthcoming about these kinds of potential harms, then it shows sort of the flimsiness of that stance.”

Public Relations

Even the tech sector’s clearest-stated ethics principles have routinely proven to be an exercise in public relations and little else: Twitter simultaneously forbids using its platform for surveillance while directly enabling it, and Google sells AI services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense while its official “AI principles” prohibit applications “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm” and “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” Microsoft’s public ethics policies note a “commitment to mitigating climate change” while the company helps Exxon analyze oil field data , and similarly professes a “commitment to vulnerable groups” while selling surveillance tools to American police.

It’s an issue OpenAI won’t be able to dodge forever: The data-laden Pentagon is increasingly enamored with machine learning, so ChatGPT and its ilk are obviously desirable. The day before Chudoba was talking AI in Arlington, Kimberly Sablon, Principal Director for Trusted AI and Autonomy at the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, told a conference in Hawaii that “There’s a lot of good there in terms of how we can utilize large language models like [ChatGPT] to disrupt critical functions across the department,” National Defense Magazine reported last month. In February, CIA Director of Artificial Intelligence Lakshmi Raman told the Potomac Officers Club, “Honestly, we’ve seen the excitement in the public space around ChatGPT. It’s certainly an inflection point in this technology, and we definitely need to [be exploring] ways in which we can leverage new and upcoming technologies.”

Steven Aftergood, a scholar of government secrecy and longtime intelligence community observer with the Federation of American Scientists, explained why Chudoba’s plan makes sense for the agency. “NGA is swamped with worldwide geospatial information on a daily basis that is more than an army of human analysts could deal with,” he told The Intercept. “To the extent that the initial data evaluation process can be automated or assigned to quasi-intelligent machines, humans could be freed up to deal with matters of particular urgency. But what is suggested here is that AI could do more than that and that it could identify issues that human analysts would miss.” Aftergood said he doubted an interest in ChatGPT had anything to do with its highly popular chatbot abilities, but in the underlying machine learning model’s potential to sift through massive datasets and draw inferences. “It will be interesting, and a little scary, to see how that works out,” he added.

Persuasive Nonsense

One reason it’s scary is because while tools like ChatGPT can near-instantly mimic the writing of a human, the underlying technology has earned a reputation for stumbling over basic facts and generating plausible-seeming but entirely bogus responses. This tendency to confidently and persuasively churn out nonsense — a chatbot phenomenon known as “hallucinating” — could pose a problem for hard-nosed intelligence analysts. It’s one thing for ChatGPT to fib about the best places to get lunch in Cincinnati, and another matter to fabricate meaningful patterns from satellite images over Iran. On top of that, text-generating tools like ChatGPT generally lack the ability to explain exactly how and why they produced their outputs; even the most clueless human analyst can attempt to explain how they reached their conclusion.

Lucy Suchman, a professor emerita of anthropology and militarized technology at Lancaster University, told The Intercept that feeding a ChatGPT-like system brand new information about the world represents a further obstacle. “Current [large language models] like those that power ChatGPT are effectively closed worlds of already digitized data; famously the data scraped for ChatGPT ends in 2021,” Suchman explained. “And we know that rapid retraining of models is an unsolved problem. So the question of how LLMs would incorporate continually updated real time data, particularly in the rapidly changing and always chaotic conditions of war fighting, seems like a big one. That’s not even to get into all of the problems of stereotyping, profiling, and ill-informed targeting that plague current data-drive military intelligence.”

OpenAI’s unwillingness to rule out the NGA as a future customer makes good business sense, at least. Government work, particularly of the national security flavor, is exceedingly lucrative for tech firms: In 2020, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle landed a CIA contract reportedly worth tens of billions of dollars over its lifetime. Microsoft, which has invested a reported $13 billion into OpenAI and is quickly integrating the smaller company’s machine-learning capabilities into its own products, has earned tens of billions in defense and intelligence work on its own . Microsoft declined to comment.

But OpenAI knows this work is highly controversial, potentially both with its staff and the broader public. OpenAI is currently enjoying a global reputation for its dazzling machine-learning tools and toys, a gleaming public image that could be quickly soiled by partnering with the Pentagon. “OpenAI’s righteous presentations of itself are consistent with recent waves of ethics-washing in relation to AI,” Suchman noted. “Ethics guidelines set up what my UK friends call ‘hostages to fortune,’ or things you say that may come back to bite you.” Suchman added, “Their inability even to deal with press queries like yours suggests that they’re ill-prepared to be accountable for their own policy.”

The post Can the Pentagon Use ChatGPT? OpenAI Won’t Answer. appeared first on The Intercept .

The war in Yemen looks like it’s coming to an end. U.S. media reported on Thursday that a cease-fire extending through 2023 had been agreed to, but those reports also included Houthi denials. On Friday, Al Mayadeen, a generally pro-Houthi Lebanese news outlet, reported optimism from the Houthi side that the deal is real and the war is winding down. Reuters later on Friday matched Al Mayadeen’s reporting , confirming that Saudi envoys will be traveling to Sana’a to discuss the terms of a “permanent ceasefire.”

What’s startling here is the apparent role of China — and complete absence of the U.S. and President Joe Biden — in the deal-making.

“Biden promised to end the war in Yemen. Two years into his presidency, China may have delivered on that promise,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Decades of militarized American foreign policy in the Middle East have enabled China to play the role of peacemaker while Washington is stuck and unable to offer much more than arms deals and increasingly unconvincing security assurances.”

“Biden promised to end the war in Yemen. Two years into his presidency, China may have delivered on that promise.”

The U.S. always backed Saudi Arabia to the hilt and vociferously opposed the Houthis, who are backed by Iran. Now China has extracted concessions from the Saudis that made the cease-fire talks possible. The Saudis seem like they are fully capitulating to the Houthi demands, which include opening the major port to allow critical supplies into the country, allowing flights into Sana’a, and allowing the government to have access to its currency to pay its workers and stabilize the economy. Reasonable stuff.

“The Saudi concessions — including a potential lifting of the blockade and exit from the war — demonstrate that their priority is to protect Saudi territory from attack and focus on economic development at home,” said Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, which has been working for an end to the war in Yemen for years. “This diverges from the approach preferred by many Washington foreign policy elites who continued to hope that the Saudi war and blockade could force the Houthis to make concessions and cede more power to the U.S.-backed Yemeni ‘government.’”

The Yemen deal is undergirded by another China-brokered deal for rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia . On Thursday, the Iranian and Saudi foreign ministers met in Beijing to finalize an agreement that reinstates direct flights between Riyadh and Tehran, reopens embassies, and expands commercial cooperation.

“The full scope of this appears to have been unlikely without the Saudi-Iranian normalization brokered by China,” Parsi said. “Whether China played a crucial role in the Yemeni dimension is unclear. Beijing will, however, get some credit for it because of its role in bringing Riyadh and Tehran together.”

U.S. policy toward the Yemen conflict has been so hostile to peace it managed to do the impossible: make Saudi Arabia appear reasonable in comparison. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the U.S. is deeply frustrated at how reasonably various parties are behaving:

In an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this week, CIA Director William Burns expressed frustration with the Saudis, according to people familiar with the matter. He told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that the U.S. has felt blindsided by Riyadh’s rapprochement with Iran and Syria—countries that remain heavily sanctioned by the West—under the auspices of Washington’s global rivals.

This is all part of a larger program of Chinese diplomacy — as opposed to U.S. saber-rattling — in the Middle East. The Iranian minister of foreign affairs said publicly that he also held an expansive, two-hour meeting with his French counterpart while she was also in China. The meetings come ahead of a planned regional summit that will be organized by China and include both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

With the Saudis no longer backing militants in the Yemen war, those rump factions won’t have much capacity left to fight, though there will still probably be some clashes before a final peace is reached. Some observers said the U.S. could still aid efforts to bring the war to its ultimate close.

“Now is the time for the United States to do everything it can to support these negotiations to finally end the war and support robust humanitarian funding to address the suffering of the Yemeni people,” said Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee On National Legislation. “If Washington rejects regional power-sharing and obstructs a world in which other nations have a vested interest in peace, it risks jeopardizing America’s own economic and security interests and its international reputation. Now is the time to prioritize and reap the benefits of diplomacy, not reject those who advocate for it.”

The way the war is ending also underscores just how illegitimate the U.S.-backed “government” of Yemen has been the last several years. In reality, it’s a group of exiles living in hotels in Riyadh, fully propped up by and under the thumb of Saudi Arabia. For a while, Saudi Arabia was referring to it in official documents as “the Legitimate Government of Yemen,” though it did no actual governing and had no legitimacy outside its hotel.

The exiled “government” is now led by the “Presidential Leadership Council,” and look at how the news was delivered to the “Legitimate Government of Yemen,” according to Al Mayadeen : “The sources stated that Riyadh informed the Presidential Leadership Council of its decision to end the war and conclude the Yemeni file permanently.” Such was the ignoble end of the U.S.-recognized government of Yemen.

“The Saudis are smart to cut their losses, end their complicity in this human rights nightmare, and refocus their attention to their own economic development.”

“While the Houthis are a deeply flawed movement, it is both immoral and ineffective to try to counter them by pushing tens of millions of Yemenis to the brink of starvation ,” said Sperling. “The Saudis are smart to cut their losses, end their complicity in this human rights nightmare, and refocus their attention to their own economic development.”

The Chinese may find, however, that running a constellation of satellites is harder than it looks and that brokering peace may be more difficult than keeping it. This week, Iran-allied groups in Lebanon launched airstrikes on Israel in response to a raid on Jerusalem’s holy Al Aqsa Mosque by Israeli police . Israel, which has moved increasingly closer to Saudi Arabia , responded to the rockets by attacking both Gaza and Lebanon. President Xi Jinping will have no shortage of disputes to work out at his upcoming summit.

The post To Help End the Yemen War, All China Had to Do Was Be Reasonable appeared first on The Intercept .

A Utah-based outfit overseen by a former CIA consultant has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying intelligence and defense agencies, including the CIA and DHS, to adopt its automated lie detection technology, public lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept show. Converus, Inc., boasts on its website that its technology has already been used for job screenings at American law enforcement agencies, corporate compliance and loss prevention in Latin America, and document verification in Ukraine. The company’s management team includes chief scientist John Kircher, a former consultant for the CIA and Department of Defense; Todd Mickelson, former director of product management at Ancestry.com; and Russ Warner, former CEO of the content moderation firm ContentWatch.

Warner told The Intercept that lobbying efforts have focused on changing federal regulations to allow the use of technologies other than the polygraph for lie detection. “The Department of Defense National Center of Credibility Assessment (NCCA) is in charge of oversight of validation and pilot projects throughout the U.S. government of new deception detection technologies,” Warner wrote in an email. “DoD Directive 5210.91 and ODNI Security Agent Directive 2 currently prohibit the use of any credibility assessment solution other than polygraph. For this reason, we have contacted government agencies to consider the use of EyeDetect and other new technologies.”

After finding success in corporate applications and sheriff’s offices, Converus has set its sights on large federal agencies that could apply its EyeDetect technology to a host of uses, including employee clearance screenings and border security. Unlike a polygraph, a device which relies on an operator asking questions and measuring physiological responses like heart rate and perspiration, Converus’s technology measures “cognitive load” with an algorithm that processes eye movement.

Using cognitive load as a metric for lie detection relies on the assumption that it takes greater cognitive effort to invent a unique lie than to tell the truth. But the correlation between the cognitive effort recorded in involuntary eye movements and lying isn’t clear cut. Converus’s technology follows decades of research that has failed to identify a method that can reliably differentiate between stress and lying. As The Intercept reported in 2020 , the shaky science underlying lie detection hasn’t stopped new technologies and methods from proliferating in law enforcement agencies across the country.

“If I asked you now, exactly one year ago today, what did you do? It’s probably easier to come up with a story than to really think about what I was doing,” Ewout Meijer, a professor of psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, told The Intercept. Meijer, who studies lie detection technologies and the psychological theories underlying them, says that while some machines are accurate in reading physiological responses, those results don’t directly translate to accuracy at detecting lies. “There are boundary issues that mean this correlation between cognitive load and lying doesn’t always apply. But at least it is an alternative to the arousal-based approach,” he said.

Converus’s EyeDetect+, an upgraded version of EyeDetect, combines elements of the arousal-based assessment — which relies on traditional polygraph metrics like heart rate — with ocular measurement to increase accuracy, according to the company, which says EyeDetect+ can boast an accuracy rate of 90 percent. But Meijer says there are also problems with this approach. “The problem is not that we do not have the technology to measure emotions, we’ve had that for decades. The problem is in the underlying inference. If I measure emotion, what does that mean? It could mean that you’re lying. But it also could also mean that you are telling the truth, but you are really stressed and nervous about not being believed.”

“Comments by critics that the physiological changes recorded during polygraph and ocular-motor tests for deception do not directly correlate to truth-telling do not understand the meaning of ‘correlation,’” Warner told The Intercept. “If there were no correlation between certain physiological changes and a person’s deceptive status, it would not be possible to distinguish between truthful and deceptive people.”

In 2020, a member of Converus’s own advisory board expressed skepticism about the reliability of EyeDetect in an interview with MIT Technology Review. “I find the EyeDetect system to be really interesting, but on the other hand, I don’t use it,” he said. “I think the database is still relatively small, and it comes mostly from one laboratory. Until it’s expanded and other people have replicated it, I’d be reluctant to use it in the field.”

The scenarios for which Converus is marketing its lie detection tools are wide-ranging, according to the case studies presented as part of its sales pitch.

Life Renewal, a Christian counseling service in Texas, uses EyeDetect for marriage counseling. “The practice works with many sexual betrayal situations and — as is a common trend — lie detection is often used to help get to the truth so that healing can begin for the betrayed and the betrayer,” the Life Renewal case study reads. “With a lie detection solution, couples get to the truth more quickly.”

Another counseling center in Florida uses EyeDetect to address the challenges “with determining if unfaithful spouses or those in sex addiction therapy were truthful when disclosing the details of their sexual misconduct or sobriety in their therapeutic disclosure letter.”

Outside of therapy, the technology is being marketed for security applications including sex offender monitoring and truth-telling in border control scenarios. Converus also says its testing could be applied to intelligence scenarios related to espionage, terrorism, and trafficking. The company has presented at border security conferences and recently added Jayson P. Ahern, the former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to its board.

“We have not tested EyeDetect for every application in which it is used. However, in published research, we have established its generalizability across different ages, genders, educational level, languages, and cultures. Importantly, we compared ocular-motor changes in lab and field settings in a study with over 300 lab and field subjects and found no significant difference,” Warner said. “If results generalize across individual differences … and from the lab’s artificial and sterile conditions to the uncontrolled real-life conditions of the field, we are willing to conclude the technology is robust and can be applied effectively in a wide range of applications.”

Converus’s tests do not rely on a human operator but instead use an algorithm linked to monitoring components to assess truthfulness. Converus says that the lack of human operators reduces biases and creates a more accurate test. Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist at Brandeis University and a longtime skeptic of polygraph tests, says the operator is irrelevant.

“A machine that gives you a wrong reading, even if it’s a machine, is just as unreliable as a person that gives you a wrong reading,” Saxe said.

“It’s not a question of whether they’re telling the truth or not,” he added. “It’s a question for people at the border of whether they’re going to be admitted or imprisoned, and of whether they are scared or cognitively burdened with trying to give the right answer. For almost anybody being subjected to these tests, it’s an anxiety-provoking experience.”

“It’s a question for people at the border of whether they’re going to be admitted or imprisoned, and of whether they are scared or cognitively burdened with trying to give the right answer.”

Citing Saxe’s work, the American Psychology Association published a review largely discrediting polygraph testing in the early 2000s. “Most psychologists and other scientists agree that there is little basis for the validity of polygraph tests,” the review found. “Courts, including the United States Supreme Court … have repeatedly rejected the use of polygraph evidence because of its inherent unreliability.”

When asked why polygraph tests are still used in federal clearance screenings and hiring assessments, both Meijer and Saxe told The Intercept that the mere threat of polygraph testing can elicit pretest confessions and steer untruthful applicants away, regardless of the test’s accuracy. Whether the government should be relying on lie detection technologies as tools for truthfulness is another issue.

“When we think about ideal evidence-based medicine, we have a pyramid of evidence with case reports at the bottom and then meta-analysis of preferably randomized, double blind clinical trials,” Meijer said. “Based on that evidence, we decide what should be funded from public money and what shouldn’t. If you look at security, anybody who claims that they have a method that works gets government contracts, without this rigorous analysis. I find that weird, because this is public money, and also this is public money funding technology used in life-or-death situations.”

The post Lie Detector Firm Lobbies CIA, DOD on Automated Eye-Scanning Tech appeared first on The Intercept .

Members of the United States Senate are patting themselves on the back. They officially just voted to end the war in Iraq — sort of.

The Senate voted Wednesday to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the legislation is being praised by its supporters in the Senate as a reassertion of the war-making powers of Congress. “This vote shows that Congress is prepared to call back our constitutional role in deciding how and when a nation goes to war,” said Sen. Bob Menendez , the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Republican Todd Young of Indiana, argued that the vote sent a signal that the American people are still in charge when it comes to deciding when to go to war.

But the Senate vote came 20 years too late. It was as if Congress had voted to end the Vietnam War in the 1990s.

U.S. counterterrorism operations around the world, including drone strikes and Special Operations raids, will not be affected, even in Iraq.

It was a symbolic vote, not an act of courage. It was a historical artifact, like endorsing a new monument honoring the war’s dead. It came just days after the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion, and, even if passed by the House and signed into law by President Joe Biden, it will have no impact on any ongoing U.S. military operations in Iraq or anywhere else. American combat operations ended in Iraq years ago, and there are now only about 2,500 U.S. military personnel in the country, acting as trainers and advisers to Iraqi forces; their work in Iraq will continue uninterrupted. U.S. counterterrorism operations around the world, including drone strikes and Special Operations raids, will not be affected, even in Iraq; the broader 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in the war on terrorism remains intact .

As if to underscore the abstract nature of Wednesday’s vote, the Senate threw in a repeal of the authorization for the 1991 Persian Gulf War for good measure.

The vote was so meaningless that it was not really a reassertion of Congress’s constitutional authority over matters of war and peace. The congressional battle over the Iraq war that really mattered took place 16 years ago, in 2007, when the debate in the Senate involved a young Democratic senator from Illinois named Barack Obama and the veteran chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee , Joe Biden.

That congressional battle had truly high stakes, and it went very badly for the war’s opponents. They failed to end the war, and the conflict raged on for years.

Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration ginned up support for going to war in Iraq by spreading a White House-sanctioned conspiracy theory that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. They followed that up with misleading claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force with significant bipartisan support, and President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Bush won reelection in 2004, but the war turned so grim and bloody that the 2006 midterm elections became a referendum on Iraq. The Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in November 2006, leading to a showdown beginning in early 2007 between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over Iraq.

The Democrats wanted the United States to begin withdrawing troops, but Bush wanted to escalate the war, and he wanted Congress to pay for it. The two sides dug in.

As the months passed, Democratic leaders struggled with how to force Bush to set a timetable for withdrawal without looking like they were withholding funds needed to support American troops in the field. “We’re not about to cut off funding for troops,” Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat who was chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said at the time . “That would be injurious to our troops and their families.”

In February 2007, Obama announced that he was running for president, and his views on Iraq at the time were clearly influenced by his fledgling campaign. He had been an early opponent of the war, which would prove to be an advantage in the Democratic primaries, yet he was also trying to carefully calibrate his language and his votes so as to avoid any political damage that would come from appearing not to support U.S. troops. When he was asked at the time if he could find a way to support American soldiers while not paying for Bush’s escalation, Obama said : “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. My understanding so far is that we can do it constitutionally, but as a practical matter if the president chooses to go ahead with a deployment and then simply runs out of money halfway through and those troops are already there, then you start getting into a game of chicken. That is the big dilemma in trying to figure out what mechanism we can use to stop what I’m convinced is the wrong policy, without shortchanging the young men and women who’ve already been deployed.” Obama’s comments at the time provided an early sign of his excessively cautious approach to national security as president.

Biden, then the influential chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed the idea of only paying for some operations in Iraq. “We have a standing army with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. You can’t go in and, like a tinker toy, and play around and say, ‘You can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece.’” Biden’s comments were probably a rebuke of Obama, a presidential rival at the time; Biden announced he was running for president in January 2007, not long before Obama.

In the end, Congress backed down. Bush vetoed Democratic-backed legislation that would have set a deadline for the start of troop withdrawals, and the Democrats lacked the votes to override the veto. Next, Bush won the game of chicken that Obama had warned about. With money for the war about to run dry, Congress approved another $100 billion in Iraq war funding; Bush signed that bill in May 2007.

Congress never again came as close to ending the war in Iraq on its own.

Until Wednesday.

The post The Anti-War Vote That Came 20 Years Late appeared first on The Intercept .

Thieves have made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in artillery equipment, unspecified “weapons systems,” and specialized ammunition meant for U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept.

The thefts, which occurred on, or in transit to, far-flung U.S. outposts in the region, remain unsolved. They are just the latest evidence of a persistent problem that has allowed enemy forces from ISIS in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan to arm themselves — and even kill Americans and their foreign partners — at U.S. taxpayer expense.

The previously unreported thefts illuminate America’s shadow wars in the region, where a U.S. contractor was killed and six other Americans were wounded last week in a suicide drone assault on a U.S. base in northeast Syria. The kamikaze airstrike on the outpost known as RLZ was one of roughly 80 attacks on American bases in Iraq and Syria since January 2021 that the U.S. has blamed on Iranian proxy groups. President Joe Biden ordered retaliatory airstrikes in response to the latest attack “in order to protect and defend the safety of our personnel.”

The thefts and losses uncovered by The Intercept are just the latest weapons accountability woes to afflict the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria. A 2020 audit by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that works with America’s Syrian allies, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for those local surrogates.

Losses of weapons and ammunition are exceptionally significant — and the military has taken pains to prevent them. When the U.S. withdrew forces from an outpost near Kobani, Syria, in 2019, it conducted airstrikes on ammunition that was left behind . The military also destroyed equipment and ammunition during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Nevertheless, groups like Amnesty International and Conflict Armament Research have found, for example, that a substantial portion of the Islamic State group’s arsenal was composed of U.S.-made or U.S.- purchased weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or otherwise obtained from the Iraqi Army and Syrian fighters.

The criminal investigations files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal evidence of at least four significant thefts and one loss of U.S. equipment — roughly $200,000 worth — in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, including 40mm high-explosive grenades stolen from U.S. Special Forces.

Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, does not even know the extent of the problem.

“This is shocking and tragic,” said Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. “These stolen weapons will circulate and intensify political and illicit violence and make it more lethal, as we’ve seen happen in other wars and conflicts.”

Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, does not even know the extent of the problem. The task force has no record of any thefts from U.S. forces, said a spokesperson. “[W]e do not have the requested information,” Capt. Kevin T. Livingston, CJTF-OIR’s director of public affairs told The Intercept when asked if any weapons, ammunition, or equipment were stolen in the last five years.

U.S. troops are ostensibly deployed to Iraq and Syria — alongside Iraqi Security Forces, Kurdish troops , and Syrian surrogates — to defeat ISIS, but they also increasingly fight Iran-backed militia groups in a legally murky sideshow war . Americans operate on bases where anonymity is sometimes the norm and local partners such as the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed Kurdish-led group, are not always trusted. With little outside oversight or unembedded coverage of American operations, information about these conflicts is largely limited to dubious statements by U.S. commanders , military press releases , and officially sanctioned reporting . The criminal investigation files obtained by The Intercept offer a rare, unvarnished glimpse at how the U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria are actually fought.

Sometime in late 2020 or early 2021, according to the files, “multiple specialized field artillery tools and equipment” were stolen from a military vehicle while being transported to Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq. When the truck arrived at the outpost in that country’s Kurdistan region, U.S. personnel found it was missing gear valued at $87,335.35. “All probative leads were exhausted,” according to the investigation file. No suspects were identified.

In February 2021, 400 armor-piercing rounds and 42 40mm “High-Explosive Dual Purpose” grenades, which are “ capable of penetrating three inches of steel ,” according to the Army, were stolen from a Special Forces ammunition supply at Mission Support Site Green Village in northeast Syria. A criminal investigation found “negligent ammunition handling and accountability practices” allowed “unknown person(s) to … pilfer the ammunition,” which was valued at $3,624.64.

Sometime in July or August 2021, “five weapons systems” valued at a total of $48,115 were stolen while being transported via “ground convoy” from Mission Support Site Conoco — a base not far from Green Village — to RLZ, Syria. The weapons were taken from a shipping container. No witnesses were found nor were any leads developed.

Last January, according to the documents, thieves broke into a shipping container en route to Erbil Air Base in Iraq and stole more than $57,000 worth of unspecified military equipment and personal items. Four months later, approximately 2,100 full metal jacket rounds that can pierce body armor and three boxes of unspecified “repair parts” were loaded onto a Blackhawk helicopter at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq and flown to Erbil Air Base, where they were supposedly provided to personnel from a unit called Task Force Attack. That unit, however, claimed that they never received the ammunition, kicking off the investigation. About a month later, Task Force Attack personnel allegedly located a crate containing 1,680 rounds of the missing ammunition, but the records do not account for the remainder of the bullets and parts.

In all but the last case, Army criminal investigators determined that there was probable cause to charge those responsible with larceny of government property or government weapons — if they could only find the thieves.

The 2020 Pentagon inspector general report that detailed improper accounting for more than $700 million in equipment bought for America’s Syrian partners found that Special Operations forces did not “maintain comprehensive lists of all equipment purchased and received.” Another unit, the 1st Theater Sustainment Command, improperly stored weapons such as machine guns and grenade launchers, according to the audit. Both units “left thousands of … weapons and sensitive equipment items vulnerable to loss or theft.” Because of sloppy record keeping and security measures, 1st TSC could not even “determine whether items were lost or stolen.”

Losses of arms and ammunition have been a persistent problem for the Pentagon. By the mid-2010s, the U.S. had already lost track of hundreds of thousands of guns in Afghanistan and Iraq according to research led by Iain Overton of Action on Armed Violence, a London-based charity.

U.S. troops left behind $7 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan.

Even before the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan , the Taliban had captured significant quantities of American weaponry. When U.S. troops withdrew in 2021, they left behind $7 billion worth of military equipment. The results have sometimes been disastrous. From Afghanistan to Iraq, these U.S.-supplied weapons were turned on U.S. allies and likely even on American troops .

“Every single one of these weapons that will be provided to our partner forces will be accounted for and pointed at #ISIS,” CJTF-OIR pledged in a 2017 tweet . But CJTF-OIR does not seem to have any information about the thefts, let alone a certainty that American weapons and ammunition stolen between 2020 to 2022 have not been turned on U.S. forces or their partners.

The U.S. military has a long history of cover-ups regarding weapons losses. A 2021 Associated Press investigation found that “at least 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes” and that the “U.S. Army has hidden or downplayed the extent to which its firearms disappear, significantly understating losses and thefts … [a] pattern of secrecy and suppression [that] dates back nearly a decade.”

CJTF-OIR’s lack of records and transparency make it impossible to know how often U.S. weapons have been lost or stolen in Syria and Iraq and if those arms have been used against U.S. troops or their allies, but Savell of the Costs of War Project fears history will repeat itself. “More people will be injured and killed as a result,” she said of the thefts documented in the criminal investigation files. “This is yet another reverberating consequence of having U.S. military operations in so many overseas locations.”

The post Thieves Rip Off U.S. Weapons as Shadow War in Syria Escalates appeared first on The Intercept .

Derrick Miller, a former U.S. Army National Guard sergeant who spent eight years in prison for murdering an Afghan civilian in 2010, now serves as a legislative assistant covering military policy for Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.

While on a combat mission in Afghanistan’s Laghman province on September 26, 2010, Miller shot 27-year-old Atta Mohammed in the head during an interrogation. Miller has maintained that he was acting in self-defense, alleging that Mohammed, who had walked through a defensive perimeter established by Miller’s unit, could be a threat to his unit and that he had tried to grab Miller’s weapon during the interrogation. But another National Guard member testified he heard Miller threaten to kill Mohammed if he did not tell the truth; and then sat on top of him — Mohammed was lying prone — before shooting him in the head, killing him. According to the prosecutor, Miller then said, “I shot him. He was a liar.”

Mohammed’s body was left in a latrine , in violation of military standards.

Miller covers armed forces and national security, international affairs, and veterans affairs for Gaetz, according to the Congress-tracking website LegiStorm.

“We proudly stand with our Military Legislative Assistant Derrick Miller,” Joel Valdez, a spokesperson for Gaetz, told The Intercept. “He was wrongfully convicted and served our country with honor.”

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

“Over the course of nearly a decade, members of Congress, multiple advocacy groups, and over 16,000 individuals on a petition have all signaled their support for clearing his name and recognizing him as innocent of charges imposed by a weaponized military injustice system under President Obama,” the spokesperson continued. “Mr. Miller advises our office on many matters, including ways to make the military justice system consistent with our constitutional principles and values.”

Court-martialed and found guilty of premeditated murder of a civilian by a 10-member military jury after a two-hour deliberation, Miller was sentenced to life in prison in 2011, before being released on parole following a lobbying effort for his release. In 2017, Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to review the case. “As you know, our troops face extremely difficult decisions while serving in the heat of battle,” the letter stated .

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, also testified in his defense. By 2018, following a clemency hearing, the Army reduced Miller’s sentence to 20 years, making him eligible for parole. He was released on May 20, 2019.

Miller previously served as a military adviser for Gohmert from July 2019 to September of last year. During the same time period, Miller was executive director of the Congressional Justice for Warriors Caucus, which describes itself as “dedicated to educating members of Congress about combat-related incidents where U.S. service members who are fighting for our freedoms have been unjustly incarcerated under the [Uniform Code of Military Justice].” CJWC’s membership includes five Republicans: Reps. Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ralph Norman, Greg Murphy, and Brian Babin.

Gaetz has intervened on behalf of another soldier accused of war crimes. In 2019, Gaetz reportedly wrote a letter to Trump on behalf of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher , then charged with war crimes in relation to the killing of an Iraqi prisoner of war in Mosul in 2017. Gallagher was charged with stabbing a 17-year-old ISIS prisoner to death, posing with his corpse, and sending the photo to friends. He was convicted of posing for the photograph but acquitted of the other charges. United American Patriots, an organization that provides legal defense for U.S. servicemembers it believes were wrongly convicted of war crimes, also advocated for Miller and Gallagher.

“We completely comprehend and appreciate the necessity for good order and discipline within our Armed Forces,” the letter from Gaetz stated. “However, our experience has witnessed a verifiable bias against the warfighter that is completely political in nature by the United States Navy’s Justice system.”

The post Matt Gaetz’s Legislative Aide Is a Convicted War Criminal appeared first on The Intercept .

The U.S. media has recently been filled with retrospectives on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Most of these outlets eagerly helped the George W. Bush administration sell the war, publishing lavish falsehoods about how Iraq posed a terrible danger to the U.S. (It did not.)

So you might hope that in the past two decades, the same publications have learned the most basic facts about Iraq — and would steer clear of publishing obvious and stupendous errors yet again. You would hope in vain.

One incredible example appeared in a March 13 article in The Atlantic by David Frum, who is best known for serving as a speechwriter for President Bush and coming up with the phrase “axis of evil” in the 2002 State of the Union address. Frum is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, which is probably the most prestigious magazine in America behind the New Yorker. The Atlantic is forthrightly endorsing Frum’s fabrication and will not respond to basic questions about it.

As you may have heard, Bush’s case for war was that Iraq had programs to produce “weapons of mass destruction” — that is, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. In his article, “The Iraq War Reconsidered,” Frum tells us in the first paragraph that Iraq was found to possess “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads.”

This is false. You don’t even need to know the details to understand why.

Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, never said a word about this arsenal of chemical weapons that Frum says were discovered by the U.S. This means there are two possibilities:

1. Iraq did have an arsenal of chemical weapons, thus totally vindicating Bush and Cheney and proving that they were right about the most famous political issue on Earth. However, they never mentioned this because they’re super-modest.
2. Iraq did not have an arsenal of chemical weapons.

If you’d like to understand this subject in detail, you can read this long explanation I wrote a few years ago. But the basic story is this:

Iraq deployed a huge quantity of chemical weapons during its war with Iran in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Iraq turned over almost all its chemical munitions to United Nations inspectors, and they were destroyed.

However, Iraq lost track of some of those weapons. It was not intentionally hiding them before the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003; just the opposite. As we now know from the CIA’s $1 billion investigation of the weapons of mass destruction issue, in December 2002, Saddam Hussein’s regime ordered Iraq’s military to “cooperate completely” with the renewed U.N. inspections. Commanders established committees “to ensure their units retained no evidence of old WMD.”

Nonetheless, while occupying Iraq, the U.S. stumbled upon about 5,000 old shells from the 1980s. According to Charles Duelfer, who headed the CIA inquiry, “Keeping in mind that they used 101,000 munitions in the Iran-Iraq War … it’s not really surprising that they have imperfect accounting. I bet the U.S. couldn’t keep track of many of its weapons produced and used during a war.”

Indeed, this is true: The U.S. military lost $1.2 billion of material during just the first year of the Iraq War. It’s also true about chemical weapons specifically. In 1993, a significant quantity of chemical munitions from World War I were discovered in what’s now one of the toniest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, grew up just a few blocks from the site. In other words, even the most dangerous weapons can be lost in the most unlikely places. The cleanup was still going on decades later, at a cost of more than $250 million.

In fact, lost chemical weapons from World War I continue to be located across the world. During the same period the U.S. was finding 5,000 Iraqi chemical munitions, about the same number were discovered in Europe, mostly in Belgium and France.

Duelfer, asked for his perspective on The Atlantic’s claim, responded via email: “I disagree with [Frum’s] characterization of residual CW stuff as ‘an arsenal.’ What was found were militarily useless remains left over from production during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam did not know it was around.”

You’d think, well, case closed. All that’s necessary is to notify The Atlantic of its mistake, and they’ll correct it. Obviously they believe in adhering to the most basic standards of honesty.

Nope. In response to questions, Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s senior vice president for communications, emailed, “What is being described in our article matches the definition of ‘arsenal.’ I’m not seeing the point of objection, and certainly not any need for a correction.” (Notably, the current editor of The Atlantic is Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most prominent journalistic supporters of the Iraq War, and last night The Atlantic won a General Excellence award from the American Society of Magazine Editors.)

I sent Bross some obvious follow-up questions. Is The Atlantic saying that Charles Duelfer — again, the head of the Bush administration’s investigation of this — is wrong, and they’re right? Would they publish something saying the U.S. and France both recently possessed an arsenal of chemical weapons? Does The Atlantic think Bush and Cheney just forgot to ever mention this arsenal?

Bross did not write back. I guess that’s for the best because I was planning to move on to ask her about several other astonishing mistakes in Frum’s article.

I’ve followed this issue closely for over 25 years. By the time of the U.S. invasion, I was so sure Iraq had no banned weapons that I bet someone $1,000 about it (quite a lot of money to me).

I was barely a professional writer then. I didn’t even have a blog. So when I saw the media’s blatant, grievous errors in the run-up to war, all I could do was send lots of emails to the fancy publications that were getting it so wrong. They didn’t care, and hundreds of thousands of people died.

They still don’t care. They will continue deceiving their readers about Iraq. There must be something we can do about this, but so far, I haven’t figured out what it is.

The post The Atlantic Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Iraq War With Lavish Falsehoods About Iraq War appeared first on The Intercept .