The U.S. Army began to strip its bases of their old Confederate names last week, as Donald Trump faced a possible criminal indictment. The timing was hardly a coincidence.

Neither reckoning would have been possible if Trump were still president. Both have been winding their way through the government bureaucracy for the past two years since Trump left office and are now happening at the same time as part of a growing repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.

The big question is whether Trump, who held a surreal rally in Waco on Saturday, can stage a comeback and halt the nation’s efforts to move on, or whether he will finally be thrown into history’s dustbin.

Trump’s Waco event, the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign, where thousands of MAGA zealots cheered as the ex-president raged, came one day after a much smaller but more significant event on an Army base in Virginia.

At a modest ceremony on Friday, Fort Pickett, named for Confederate Gen. George Pickett, remembered as the losing commander of “Pickett’s Charge,” the doomed Confederate assault on Union lines at the battle of Gettysburg, was officially renamed Fort Barfoot, in honor of Col. Van T. Barfoot, who won the Medal of Honor in Italy during World War II. Barfoot received the medal for his actions on May 23, 1944, when he single-handedly took out three German machine gun nests, capturing 17 German soldiers, and then blew up a German tank with a bazooka.

It was the first time a U.S. Army base named for a Confederate had been renamed, marking an official repudiation of white supremacy by the U.S. military. Fort Pickett, now Fort Barfoot, is the first of nine Army bases scheduled to be renamed this year, as the Pentagon moves to purge the military of its tradition of commemorating Confederate fighters. The bases were originally named when they were built in the South in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, the Army agreed to name them after Confederates to satisfy white Southern leaders, whose demands were part of a broader reassertion of Southern white supremacy during the Jim Crow era.

The Pentagon resisted calls to change the base names for years. They refused to do so after a 2015 shooting by a white supremacist at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killed nine people, and again after the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pressure grew more intense following the social protest movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, but Trump, then president, fiercely opposed the idea. Claiming that the Confederate names were part of the nation’s heritage, he attacked the Pentagon for even considering any changes. In June 2020, Trump tweeted : “These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” In an interview with Fox News at the time, he said: “We won two world wars, two world wars, beautiful world wars that were vicious and horrible, and we won them out of Fort Bragg, we won them out of all of these forts. And now they want to throw those names away.”

After Trump was defeated in 2020, he vetoed legislation creating a commission to rename the bases, but Congress was finally able to override it. If Trump had been reelected, he almost certainly would have continued trying to obstruct the renaming efforts.

With Trump gone, the commission completed its work, and many of the nation’s largest and most prominent military bases will get new names this year; Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the base Trump talked about in 2020, will be renamed Fort Liberty at an event tentatively scheduled for June.

The renaming of Fort Pickett last week prompted no protests and hardly a murmur of criticism, apart from a few nasty comments on the Facebook page of the Virginia National Guard, which uses the base. Indeed, the lack of outrage seems to be one more small sign that Trump’s power, and his ability to generate anger outside of his devoted base, are waning.

Trump’s mounting legal problems pose a more direct threat to his power and are a more personal form of reckoning. Although some Republican pundits and political figures have claimed that Trump will regain political strength by being indicted, the ex-president’s own fury at the prospect, which was on full display in Waco, reveals the truth: Trump is deeply afraid of ending up in prison.

He has spent his life exploiting legal loopholes and has often succeeded by outlasting his opponents. But his victories have mostly come in civil lawsuits when he was in business or while he was president and controlled the Justice Department . He has never faced the kind of legal peril that he does now .

The threat seems to be driving him even further around the bend than ever before. He now openly engages in full-throated conspiracy theories while inciting violence against his opponents; he held his rally in Waco knowing that it was scheduled in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound there , which ended with a deadly government raid and fire that has taken on deep symbolism among violent, far-right extremists.

Trump is so obsessed with the criminal investigations against him — there are now at least four underway — that he talks about little else in public. Last week, he viciously attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who seems likely to seek an indictment of Trump in connection with an alleged $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s rhetoric is once again inciting his rabid supporters, just as it did during the January 6 insurrection. After Trump publicly attacked Bragg last week, calling him, among many other things, a “degenerate psychopath,” Bragg’s office received an envelope containing white powder and a typewritten death threat that stated “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU,” followed by 13 exclamation points, according to The New York Times .

Trump’s public descent into vengeful fury plays well with his rage-fueled base. Other Republican politicians — even his likely GOP opponents in the 2024 presidential race, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — are still so intimidated by Trump’s hold on the MAGA crowd that they refuse to confront him, so he may yet win the Republican presidential nomination.

But this time, he may be forced to campaign from a prison cell.

The post America May Finally Be Done With Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept .

American journalists and soldiers have published countless memoirs about their experiences in the Iraq War. But a new book by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad provides a radically different perspective: that of an ordinary Iraqi who witnessed firsthand the decimation of his country.

“The occupation was bound to collapse and fail,” Abdul-Ahad writes of the U.S. invasion in his remarkable memoir, “A Stranger in My Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War.” As Abdul-Ahad goes on to explain, “A nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy.”

Abdul-Ahad is among a generation of Iraqi writers and journalists who lived through the conflict and, two decades later, are finally being heard. What he has to say not only confronts the self-serving narratives of the war’s supporters and revisionists, but also bitterly confronts how the Iraqi people were used as pawns in a war that was launched in their name.

“We were all merely potential collateral damage in a war between the dictator and American neocons adamant that the world should be shaped in their image.”

“Why were the only options for us as a nation and a people the choice between a foreign invasion and a noxious regime led by a brutal dictator? Not that anyone cared what we thought,” Abdul-Ahad writes. “We were all merely potential collateral damage in a war between the dictator and American neocons adamant that the world should be shaped in their image.”

Abdul-Ahad grew up under the rule of Saddam Hussein, a man whose power was so omnipresent that as a youth Abdul-Ahad pictured the dictator as “God or Jesus, or maybe both of them.” Prior to the invasion, Abdul-Ahad eked out a living as an architect as Iraq reeled from economic sanctions. He witnessed the first U.S. troops invade the country in March 2003 in his hometown, the capital of Baghdad.

Like most Iraqis, Abdul-Ahad was against the war and fearful of its consequences, but at the same time, many considered a Faustian bargain in which the U.S. removal of Saddam might be accepted if it transformed Iraq for the better. As one old man in a decrepit alleyway in Baghdad insisted to him that May, before the war turned sour, “The Americans who had brought all these tanks and planes would fix everything in a matter of weeks.” The cautiously hopeful would soon be brutally disappointed.

“The initial guarded optimism of the Iraqis — who were promised liberation, prosperity and freedom with the removal of Saddam — shattered with the first car bomb,” Abdul-Ahad writes. “It became evident that the long-awaited peace was not coming — and that the occupation had unleashed something far worse.”

Instead of freedom from Saddam’s predictable tyranny, the U.S. invasion delivered violent anarchy: extrajudicial killings, torture, warrantless detention, and the destruction of Iraq’s basic infrastructure. Following a chance encounter with a British reporter covering the invasion, Abdul-Ahad became a journalist himself, bearing witness to the total destruction of his country.

Much of this havoc was catalyzed by foreign soldiers and mercenaries, Abdul-Ahad writes, who were often openly racist toward the people they claimed they were liberating. With no one in charge, save for a trigger-happy foreign occupier with no plan to restore basic services, Iraq slowly descended into “Mad Max”-style chaos.

Abdul-Ahad describes how the war sectarianized the Iraqi social order with devastating consequences. Religion, once a minor detail of Iraqi identity, suddenly became the most crucial affiliation for navigating the new Iraq, as the new politics of the country were organized around sects. Growing up, Abdul-Ahad writes, he never knew the religious backgrounds of any of his school friends. Post-invasion, it became the most vital detail one needed to know about others, whether as a reporter or ordinary person simply trying to survive.

Waves of horrific violence emerged from the security vacuum created by the war. Competing gangs and militias carried out abductions, murders-for-hire, and mass killings that tore the country’s social fabric to shreds. Kidnapping, mostly of innocent members of other sects, became a lucrative business of militia gangsters. “We ask the families of the terrorists for ransom money, and after they pay the ransom, we kill them anyway,” a militia leader tells Abdul-Ahad, with each hostage reaping between $5,000 and $20,000 for an enterprising commander.

Unlike Americans who tend to divide the Iraq War into distinct periods, for example, separating the 2003 invasion from the later war against the Islamic State group, for Iraqis like Abdul-Ahad, the conflict has been experienced as long and unrelenting, starting with U.S. economic warfare in the 1990s and into the present day.

Over 2,500 American soldiers remain in Iraq, mostly to fight the remnants of ISIS, a terror group the nihilistic violence of the war helped produce. With millions of Iraqis killed or displaced and entire cities in ruins, Iraq today, Abdul-Ahad writes, is “a wealthy, oil-exporting country, whose citizens live in poverty without employment, an adequate healthcare system, electricity or drinking water.”

In his analysis of the legacy of the war, he notes a perverse outcome among Iraqis: a sense of nostalgia for authoritarian politics. Many who suffered the horrors of post-Saddam Iraq have come to yearn for a new strongman to come along and simply restore order. The war also undermined democracy throughout the region, Abdul-Ahad writes, giving neighboring dictators an example with which to frighten their own people from demanding political change. However bad dictatorship may be, the argument goes, few people would want to suffer the fate of Iraqis.

In the initial years of the invasion, Iraqi voices were scarce in American public discourse, save for hand-picked figures close to the U.S. establishment, like the notorious exile dissident Ahmad Chalabi . While some recent accounts have sought to help rehabilitate the image of the war and its proponents, Abdul-Ahad’s book stands firm on the realities of this horrifying conflict and the permanently altered futures of Iraqis.

“The Iraq of this new generation is an amalgam of contradictions, born out of an illegal occupation, two decades of civil wars, savage militancy, car bombs, beheadings and torture,” he writes. “Men — and they were only men — shaped this new metamorphosis of a country based on their own images and according to the whims and desires of their masters, with no regard for what actually may have been good for its people.”

The post After Tide of Memoirs From Americans, an Iraqi Journalist Offers Inside Account of War’s Destruction appeared first on The Intercept .

The Russian government has accused Germany, Denmark, and Sweden of a cover-up in their investigations into the sabotage attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines last September. Moscow, with the support of China, plans to introduce a resolution before the United Nations Security Council on Monday calling for an independent international investigation.

The White House declined to answer questions from The Intercept about whether the U.S. has ordered its own investigation, saying only that it is supporting its allies in their individual probes. Germany, along with Denmark and Sweden, are each conducting separate investigations but say they are cooperating with one another.

In a series of letters to European governments and the United States in February, made public by Moscow earlier this month, Russian officials complained that they have been barred from examining evidence gathered from the sites where the blasts occurred. Despite Russia’s majority ownership of the pipelines, Russian officials said, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have rejected Russia’s repeated requests for a joint investigation — confirming their “suspicions that these countries are trying to conceal evidence, or to cover up the sponsors and perpetrators of these acts of sabotages.”

Russia has been doing its own investigation into the sabotage, including underwater surveys. It has not, to date, released any forensic evidence to support its assertion that “Anglo-Saxon” powers or the U.S. were behind the explosions. At a U.N. Security Council meeting in February, Russia’s representative Vassily Nebenzia cited investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report accusing the U.S. of carrying out the attack. “This journalist is telling the truth,” he said . “This is more than just a smoking gun that detectives love in Hollywood blockbusters. It’s a basic principle of justice; everything is in your hands, and we can resolve this today.”

Denmark and Sweden have cited procedural matters and national regulations as to why they aren’t collaborating with Russia. But it’s pretty obvious that they have also adopted the position that Russia should be viewed as a suspect in the sabotage and wouldn’t want to invite it into the probe, particularly given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It should be noted that Sweden also refused an official joint investigation with its own allies from the onset, opting for a less formal cooperative arrangement. German officials have publicly confirmed their investigation into a “pro-Ukrainian” group and its possible connection to the attack on the pipeline, but have also cautioned that it could be a “false flag” intended to conceal the sponsor.

Russia’s recent maneuvers signal that it is becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric toward the two Scandinavian nations and Germany and is breaking some diplomatic protocols by making public its private communications with various nations. It is effectively arguing that the three national probes, which are backed by the U.S., are part of the Nord Stream bombing plot, and it wants to pull the U.N. in, where Russia would find a more neutral audience than NATO or the European Union. The backdrop to all of this, of course, is the public display of Russia-China unity that’s unfolded over the past year, culminating with President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow. China, which is officially co-sponsoring the Russian resolution, has said it believes the attack was carried out by a state actor and that a U.N. investigation is needed to “uncover the truth and identify those responsible.”

Underwater Evidence?

Almost immediately after the pipeline explosion on September 26, 2022, the Russian government asked the governments of Sweden, Germany, and Denmark to participate in their national investigations into “deliberate acts of sabotage” against “one of the most important investment projects of the Russian Federation.” All three governments rejected Russia’s requests, and Moscow has said that they are not sharing any meaningful information with Russian authorities.

That position is hardly surprising given the war in Ukraine and the massive NATO and European weapons shipments aimed at defeating Moscow. Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Vladimir Barbin, has been outspoken in his criticisms of the Danish government’s refusal to cooperate with Russia. He has rejected speculation Russia was behind the attacks, saying that its ships did not have access to the waters where the explosives were placed. “The preparation of such attacks requires time and direct presence in the area of sabotage, which was carried out in the exclusive economic zones of Denmark and Sweden,” Barbin said . “The Russian side, unlike the others, did not have permission for any underwater work or research in this area before the gas pipelines were blown up.”

Russia is effectively arguing that the three national probes, which are backed by the U.S., are part of the Nord Stream bombing plot.

The sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines occurred in the Baltic Sea waters stretching around the Danish island of Bornholm and extending to the southeast of the Swedish coast. The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, nestled between Lithuania and Poland, is to the east of the area. The Nord Stream pipelines are majority-owned by Russia’s state-run energy firm Gazprom.

In contrast to Barbin’s contentions, a new report published by the German outlet T-Online, asserts that Russian vessels, possibly including a mini-submarine, were operating in the waters near the blast sites days before the sabotage. The article cites open-source satellite data and relied on information provided by an anonymous “intelligence source.”

On February 17, the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry fired off letters not only to Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, but also to the U.S. and Norway, charging an apparent cover-up. On March 1, Russia submitted its correspondence with those nations to the U.N. Security Council as part of Moscow’s push for the U.N. to initiate its own independent probe of the Nord Stream attack.

The U.S., which opposes the resolution, has portrayed Russia’s efforts to litigate the pipeline bombing at the security council as a “blatant attempt to distract” from its yearlong war in Ukraine. In a joint letter submitted to the council in late February, Germany, Sweden and Denmark claimed, “Russian authorities have been informed regarding the ongoing investigations,” adding that the three nations “have been in dialogue regarding the investigation of the gas leaks, and the dialogue will continue to the relevant extent.”

On February 21, a Gazprom-contracted ship doing a survey discovered an antenna-like device that Russia alleged might be a component of the materials used in the sabotage of the pipeline or part of a triggering mechanism for an unexploded bomb on an underwater pipe. “Specialists believe it might be an antenna to receive a signal to detonate an explosive device that could have been — I’m not certain, but it’s possible — planted under the pipeline system,” said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Russian television on March 14. “It appears that several explosive devices were planted,” Putin said, adding, “Some of them went off, and some didn’t. The reasons are unclear.”

He also alleged that the device was discovered attached to an undersea pipe junction on the only string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline where no explosion was registered last September. “We would like to receive permission from the Danish government [to] conduct the necessary examination either on our own, or jointly with them,” Putin said. “Better yet, establish an international group of experts and bomb engineers that could work at a depth like that. And if need be, to defuse the explosive device, of course, if there is one down there.” Putin said his government had made discreet inquiries to the Danish authorities proposing a joint effort. “Their response was ambiguous,” he said. “To put it bluntly, there was really no answer at all. They said that [we] need to wait.”

Denmark’s government ultimately confirmed that there was an object in the area identified by the Russians and that it was investigating. There was a flurry of activity in late March — with Danish military vessels and diving ships congregating in the waters around the site identified by the personnel aboard the Glomar Worker, the ship that reportedly found the suspicious object. On March 21, the Danish newspaper Berlingske reported that Russia believes the “antenna” was “part of a device from an explosive charge on the last of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines.” Only three of the lines were successfully damaged in the sabotage, and it has confounded researchers why one was left intact. “It is a cylindrical object about 30 centimeters high and 10-15 centimeters in diameter and was located approximately 28 kilometers from the explosion site,” Barbin said in a statement to Berlingske. “It was installed at a welding joint on the B line.”

On March 23, the Danish Energy Agency released a photograph of an object roughly fitting the dimensions offered by Russia. The object appeared to have been submerged for a long time and was covered by a layer of algae or other foliage. “It is possible that the object is a maritime smoke buoy,” asserted the Danish statement. Such devices are commonly used to mark an area where someone has gone overboard or to alert other ships to a problem. The government agency said it had invited the owners of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, effectively Russia, to participate in the salvage. The Kremlin labeled the Danish invitation “positive news.”

It’s possible that the Danish government is essentially trolling the Russians by posting the photo and making a public offering to allow Russia to participate in the retrieval of what Denmark alleges is a harmless civilian device but that Moscow implied was potentially an unexploded bomb.

In its initial news report on the Danish invitation to Russia to participate in retrieving the object, the Russian state-owned TASS news agency did not mention the possibility it was a “smoke buoy,” instead doubling down on Russian theories it may be a component of an unexploded device. “It is critically important to determine what kind of object it is, whether it is related to this terrorist act — apparently it is — and to continue this investigation,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on March 24. “And this investigation must be transparent.” Denmark has said “the object does not pose an immediate safety risk.”

In a recent op-ed in the Danish newspaper Altinget , Barbin, the Russian ambassador, accused Denmark of engaging in speculative analysis since the explosion last September with an aim to assign blame for the attack. In Danish media, some prominent military analysts have spent considerable time discussing potential Russian culpability for blowing up its own pipeline. Barbin asserted that this “intellectual exercise, without presenting facts that should be verifiable, leads to a dead end and benefits only those who are afraid of the truth.” He said Denmark should provide an update to a variety of questions: “Which naval vessels — including military ships — were present in the sabotage area? Are there any witnesses who have been questioned and what is their testimony? Were fragments of broken gas pipelines raised and what are the results of their research? Which companies — especially foreign ones — were allowed to work in Denmark’s and Sweden’s exclusive economic zone, and were their activities audited?”

These are all fair questions, which may well be answered once the governments complete their probes. Denmark and Sweden have both remained tightlipped, and scant details have leaked from either government. While there are likely multiple layers contributing to the hyper-secrecy, the stakes are obviously high, particularly if evidence leads to a nation-state actor, such as the U.S., Russia, or Ukraine, as the perpetrator.

False Flag vs. “False Concoctions”

In the public discourse, Seymour Hersh’s report in February that the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in a covert operation authorized by President Joe Biden has become something of a Rorschach test in the broader context of the war in Ukraine and the hostilities between the U.S., NATO, and Russia.

Hersh himself is entirely unfazed by the mounting attacks on his credibility. This, he asserts, is what powerful forces do: They seek to destroy the messenger to distract from the crime. When pressed on some of the criticism of his reporting, including apparent inconsistencies raised by open-source data on ship and aircraft movements during the alleged operation, Hersh has cut his questioners short and asserted that he hasn’t even published 20 percent of what he knows or what his sources have told him. He has all but said that he used additional sources and is playing his own game of cat and mouse to protect them. Moreover, he has argued, these OSINT warriors are naive to believe that the CIA and other U.S. agencies would not have taken extensive steps to cloak the operation.

At 85 years old, Hersh is staking his storied and well-earned reputation as one of the premiere muckrakers in modern U.S. history on the veracity of this one story. It may appear to be a crazy gamble, particularly if it is based on a single source, but it also serves as a powerful symbol of how right Hersh believes he is. In essence, Hersh is forcing the question: Do we really believe Sy Hersh would do this if it wasn’t true?

This same dynamic has played out with several of Hersh’s stories over the past decade since he left the New Yorker. It was true of his 2015 story for the London Review of Books alleging that President Barack Obama and his administration lied about almost every detail of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And it was also the case with both his 2013 LRB article and his 2017 story for the German newspaper Welt asserting that the U.S. was falsely accusing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian army of using chemical weapons. Hersh’s detractors say he is not the journalist he once was and is peddling false theories based on dubious or fictional assertions from anonymous sources. Hersh maintains he got these stories right and that he continues to use the same quality of fact-checker, editor, and lawyer he had reviewing his work at the New Yorker.

In his most recent post on Substack, Hersh criticizes reports in the New York Times and multiple German media outlets that among the perpetrators of the sabotage was a “pro-Ukrainian group” that rented a private boat using false passports. Hersh alleged that the entire story, based on anonymous U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement sources, was a false-flag operation and that the assertions published by the Times and Die Zeit “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.” Hersh writes:

“It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” I was told by a source within the American intelligence community. The disinformation professionals inside the CIA understand that a propaganda gambit can only work if those on receiving are desperate for a story that can diminish or displace an unwanted truth. And the truth in question is that President Joe Biden authorized the destruction of the pipelines and will have a difficult time explaining away his action as Germany and its Western European neighbors suffer as businesses are shuttered amid high day-to-day energy costs.

Hersh also asserted that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to the White House in early March was, in part, aimed at preparing the rollout of the cover story developed by the CIA and its German counterparts. “I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2,” Hersh writes. “In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was ‘to pulse the system’ in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction.”

Hersh is staking his storied and well-earned reputation as one of the premiere muckrakers in modern U.S. history on the veracity of this one story.

For people who have already concluded that Hersh is either fabricating this story or relying on bad sources, his latest story is evidence that he is trapped in a hall of mirrors and seeing conspiracies in every direction he looks. Holger Stark, the lead reporter on the German story Hersh claims was the product of a CIA deception campaign, addressed Hersh in a tweet : “Sy, old colleague, I admire your historical work and it hurts tremendously to say it: But this is, at least in respect to our work at Die Zeit, complete BS. And if you write about me: call next time before you publish. You would avoid a lot of mistakes.” Stark has collaborated with The Intercept on an investigation into the U.S. drone program and Germany’s role and was one of the main German journalists reporting on Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency documents for Der Spiegel .

For those who believe that Hersh has correctly identified the perpetrator of the Nord Stream bombing — the U.S. government — it is plausible that the information fed to the Times and German news outlets about the “pro-Ukrainian group” is suspicious and part of a deception operation. Last June — two months before the Nord Stream explosions — the CIA reportedly offered German intelligence and other European governments a “strategic warning” of a potential plot to blow up the pipeline. According to the Wall Street Journal , “The warning included information about three Ukrainian nationals who were trying to rent out ships in countries bordering the Baltic Sea, including Sweden.”

It could well be that the U.S. was simply sharing its intel with allies with a direct stake in such an action. It could also be that this is where a potential deception operation involving a “pro-Ukrainian group” began. What does not seem likely is that the cover story was created in response to Hersh. More plausible, if this is indeed a cover story, was that it was planned long before Hersh wrote his story and was designed to deceive or misdirect U.S. allies and the world about who was responsible. Stark, the German journalist who heads Die Zeit’s investigative unit, said he had been working on his story , based on the German criminal probe, for months and rushed to publish only after he learned the New York Times was going to post its “pro-Ukraine group” story , which was based on the claims of anonymous U.S. intelligence operatives. Hersh later updated his piece to reflect this.

In his latest story, Hersh lambasted the U.S. press corps for refusing to ask the White House about his assertions the U.S. blew up the pipeline. “There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally ‘task’ the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea. According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he. Why not? Because he knows the answer.”

I asked the White House Hersh’s specific question and also for comment on Hersh’s assertions about the private meeting between Biden and Scholz and the CIA manufacturing a cover story. In a statement, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson did not directly address any of my questions. “These stories are totally false concoctions,” Watson said. “We can say categorically that the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosions in any way. We continue to support efforts with our allies and partners to get to the bottom of what happened.”

During Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appearance before the House Committee on Appropriations on March 23, Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, asked Blinken: “You’re now in a formal setting. Can you assure the world that no agency of the U.S. government blew up those pipelines or facilitated that action?”

“Yes, I can,” Blinken replied.

The post Russia Calls for U.N. Investigation of Nord Stream Attack, as Hersh Accuses White House of False Flag appeared first on The Intercept .

Every revolutionary movement needs martyrs. The modern U.S. militant right­ has long had its own, and the most important among them have been dead for three decades: the 70-plus men, women, and children killed in the spring of 1993 at the conclusion of a 51-day government siege at a compound outside the Central Texas city of Waco. They were members of an armed Christian sect, unfamiliar and isolated, and for many Americans, Waco was another footnote in the country’s long history of violence. In the worldview of right-wing militancy, however, Waco is foundational — a gory testament to the dangers of gun control and the deadly power of federal authorities. Waco fueled the rise of the militia movement in the 1990s and inspired the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; it continues to influence contemporary militant thinking. All of this should be borne in mind when Donald Trump holds the first official rally of his 2024 presidential campaign in Waco on Saturday.

In the run-up to the rally, Trump hasn’t mentioned the events of 1993. Instead, he has grabbed hold of the news cycle by warning of his potential indictment and arrest over an alleged campaign-finance violation in 2016 and evoking the specter of violence. He urged his followers to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” He warned that an indictment could lead to “ death and destruction ” and “ create years of hatred, chaos, and turmoil .” He added : “They are not coming after me. They are coming after you. I’m just standing in their way.” These statements channel the same anxieties that Waco has long stirred about the existential danger of a federal government controlled by Democrats.

Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes — who was convicted last fall of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6, 2021, the last time Trump called on his followers to defend him — told me in an interview before his arrest that he’d seen the “existential slaughter” of Waco as “a huge wake-up call.” Mike Vanderboegh, founder of the Three Percenters, another national militant group whose members were charged over January 6, viewed Waco similarly. It made him and other militia leaders believe they could be the government’s next victims. Before his 2016 death, Vanderboegh told the historian Robert Churchill of Waco: “It scared the crap out of us, and we couldn’t count on anybody but ourselves.” Trump’s message to militants on the right has long been that they can count on him. He speaks their language about the deep state, traitorous liberals, and the potential for civil violence. His presidency marked the first time militant groups felt they had an ally in the White House; neither Vanderboegh nor Rhodes had love for either Bush administration. This was why people from a constellation of groups, from Oath Keepers and Three Percenters to small, little-known outfits around the country, joined the crowd at the Capitol on January 6.

Look just beneath the surface and you can see Trump and his allies playing directly into the particular fears and narratives of right-wing militancy. On November 19, 2020, Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani unleashed his campaign’s master theory of how the election had been stolen. It went something like this: America’s foreign adversaries, including Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, had teamed up with powerful business interests and politicians to hack Dominion voting machines. It may have sounded strange, but it also fit the outlines of something called the New World Order conspiracy theory. The militant right has been fascinated by this for decades, including in the post-Vietnam era, when the movement was dominated by Ku Klux Klan paramilitaries. The theory can take several forms, the most virulent of which holds that a cabal of elite Jewish businessmen are trying to undermine America and other Western democracies from within to establish a global tyranny; they pay off politicians and sow chaos via animalistic hordes of immigrants and racial and religious minorities. The more palatable version of the story does away with race and religion and keeps the focus on the threat of tyranny at the hands of a globalist elite intent on taking away the rights of patriotic Americans, starting with guns. Rhodes expressed sympathy with the latter version, and Vanderboegh with a less conspiratorial reading of it. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a believer in the former. He thought that Waco previewed a coming battle against the New World Order. In the lead-up to his rally there, Trump and his allies have echoed the New World Order theory, claiming that George Soros, the Jewish American investor and philanthropist, is behind the pending charges against him. Trump called Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney leading the investigation, who is Black, a “SOROS BACKED ANIMAL.” The Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance accused Bragg of being “bought by George Soros,” pursuing baseless charges against Trump while he “allows violent criminals to walk the streets.”

The investigation, which centers on an alleged hush-money payment by Trump to porn star Stormy Daniels, is arguably the least serious of the litany he faces. This has made it even easier for Trump to bring rank-and-file Republican leaders such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on board with his persecution narrative. It’s the typical dynamic with Trump: an opposition that seems to inadvertently strengthen his hand while he lines up the backing of deeply irresponsible and cynical Republican allies. Yet Trump has been signaling that this campaign will be different from his last two: more divisive and violent in its rhetoric, more revolutionary in its aims, and more openly intertwined with right-wing militancy and its apocalyptic mindset. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month, he called his 2024 campaign “the final battle.”

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” he said at the conference. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

“A Coded Message of Revolution”

Trump’s campaign has denied choosing to hold the rally in Waco because of its history. But the event, which will be held at the city’s airport, comes as the violence of 1993 resurfaces in the public consciousness. Last month marked 30 years since the start of the siege, an anniversary that will continue until April 19. Two television series have been launched to coincide with it: a six-part dramatization on Showtime and a three-part documentary on Netflix called “Waco: American Apocalypse.”

Back in 1993, the people living in a compound known as Mount Carmel on the outskirts of Waco were members of the Branch Davidians. Their leader, David Koresh, said he was a prophet and that God had spoken to him, telling him to prepare his followers for an apocalyptic battle. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives suspected the Davidians of having an illegal weapons cache in the compound that included machine guns and grenades. Instead of speaking with Koresh, the ATF sent agents to raid the compound in a military-like operation. Four were killed in the ensuing fight, which ended in a ceasefire, requested by the ATF so it could evacuate its wounded and dead. A joint siege of the compound by the ATF and FBI followed, featuring armored vehicles, heavily armed federal agents, and a crush of TV news teams. Then-President Bill Clinton had come into office a month earlier with promises of stricter gun control; some Americans saw their worst fears about gun confiscation and federal overreach coming true. The siege reached its ugly conclusion on April 19, as federal agents again went on the offensive, sparking another shootout and a massive fire inside the compound. The number of Branch Davidians who died was deemed unsettled in a special counsel’s report because some of the bodies were commingled and burned beyond recognition.

On the far right, the Waco dead became martyrs for gun rights and a scare story about the willingness of a Democratic-controlled federal government to violently crush resistance.

On the far right, the Waco dead became martyrs for gun rights and a scare story about the willingness of a Democratic-controlled federal government to violently crush resistance. Militia groups mobilized. Churchill, the historian who interviewed key militia leaders from this period for his definitive book on the movement, put Waco at the center of their motivations, tied closely to Clinton’s gun-control push, the steady militarization of law enforcement agencies, and an earlier federal raid that had killed the wife and child of a white supremacist in Ruby Ridge in Idaho. The movement was rooted, Churchill wrote, “in its members’ perception that their government had turned increasingly violent.” One militia leader told him, “Waco was the second shot heard round the world.”

McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran and white nationalist in his 20s, had visited Waco during the siege and was incensed by its bloody outcome. When he set off a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, he billed it as revenge for Waco. He did it on April 19, 1995, the two-year anniversary of the mass death at Mount Carmel.

Militia leaders of the 1990s condemned McVeigh, but as fears of right-wing militancy spiked and investigative pressure intensified, the movement dwindled. Yet Waco remained central to the militant movement’s belief system when it reemerged in 2009 after Barack Obama’s election. Vanderboegh, who’d first become a leader in the 1990s, told Churchill, in an interview the historian shared with me, that he believed the government had sent a message: From now on, it would be “operating by Waco rules. It’s this catch-22: ‘We will do anything that you can’t keep us from doing.’ And it told the rest of us out here, you know, we’re kind of paying attention and we’re saying, ‘We’re next year’s Davidians, or the year after that. Somebody has got to do something.’”

This created a mindset across the movement, Vanderboegh added, that “[an] attack on one is an attack on all.”

Vanderboegh went on to found the Three Percenters, one of the two largest militant organizations in the post-2009 wave, alongside Rhodes’s Oath Keepers. Rhodes hadn’t been involved in the movement’s earlier iteration but remembered well watching Waco play out on TV as a young libertarian working at a gun store in Nevada. He often cited a quote attributed to Vanderboegh: “No more free Wacos.” For Rhodes, it wasn’t that the Branch Davidians or Koresh were heroes. In his telling, the story was primarily about the bad guys: the Clinton-led government and mainstream politicians and journalists who, as he saw it, “dehumanized” the hard-line Christian gun owners cordoned off in their compound. This dehumanization, he believed, helped to pave the way for the government violence that followed. He worried about a similar dynamic playing out in the political and media climate of the present day. Rhodes, who has a law degree from Yale and is of Mexican descent, seemed to sympathize with one Waco victim in particular: Douglas Wayne Martin, a Black, Harvard-educated attorney in his 40s. Martin called police when the initial ATF raid began, claiming the government had fired the first shots, and then called a city council member, asking him to contact the media. He died in the compound on April 19, along with three of his children.

In an interview in the summer of 2021, as he braced for his own possible arrest, Rhodes recounted the arsenal government forces brought in for the Waco siege and raid — armored vehicles, helicopters from the National Guard — and the violence that followed. He saw the heavy-handed government tactics at Waco as designed “to prove a point, set an example.” I asked him what point they were making. His response: “Don’t fuck with us.” On trial last fall for seditious conspiracy, Rhodes cited Waco again, saying that when he’d infamously gotten the Oath Keepers involved in the Bundy Ranch standoff with federal authorities in 2014, it was to keep the Bundy family “from being Waco’d.”

The contradiction, of course, is that there is no overreach greater than overturning an election, which is what Trump tried to do — and what Rhodes aimed to help him accomplish. In open letters in the buildup to January 6, Rhodes asked Trump to overturn the vote and deploy the National Guard to administer a new election, then call the Oath Keepers and other armed Americans to help put down any pushback. Trump’s segment of the right, Rhodes included, spent 2020 dehumanizing liberals as traitors and Black Lives Matter protesters as domestic terrorists. The idea that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy was necessary to justify the idea of launching an anti-democratic power grab of their own.

Tom O’Connor, who was an expert on right-wing militant violence in the FBI before retiring in 2019, recalled how Trump’s infamous request in a 2020 debate for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” had been taken by members of the group as a call to action. He worried that — whatever Trump might have intended with the rally’s location and whatever he might say on Saturday evening — the decision to hold it in Waco will send a powerful signal to those who are listening for it: “It will be perceived as a coded message of revolution to those on the extreme.”

Tactical Patience

I had called up a different former FBI agent, Michael German, after Powell and Giuliani gave their Dominion press conference in November of 2020. German had gone undercover in militia groups in the post-Waco era, and he recalled the times during his embeds when the faxes would begin to whir with rumors of black helicopters and warnings that the globalist invasion by forces of the New World Order was finally happening. These were the most dangerous moments, he told me — when militiamen were so paranoid that violence felt more likely. Only in late 2020, the rumor-mongering was happening on a national scale, and the messages were coming from the president and his legal team. As January 6 approached, Rhodes published an open letter urging his members to D.C., “to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup.”

At Rhodes’s trial, this letter and other extreme rhetoric were used against him. The prosecution never proved that there’d been a plan among Rhodes and the Oath Keepers to storm the Capitol — a fact that gave pause to some journalists observing the proceedings, including me. Prosecutors focused instead on the general sense that Rhodes had given his members that they needed to do something to stop the transfer of power and halt the conspiracy he believed was playing out before it was too late. Trump, more than anyone else, created this sense, yet the buck has not stopped anywhere close to that high. And now again, Trump is asking his supporters to rally to his defense. It reminds me of something Rhodes told me days before his arrest: that Trump had used the Oath Keepers as “ cannon fodder .” After Rhodes’s arrest, Powell reportedly stepped in to fund Rhodes’s legal defense. Trump has since vowed that he will pardon January 6 convicts if he returns to the presidency.

“They’re not anti-government. They’re anti-Democrat.”

I was talking recently about militancy with Eric Robinson, a lawyer who was an official with the Joint Special Operations Command until 2018 and before that worked at the National Counterterrorism Center. His professional focus was overseas, and his study of American militancy is personal in nature. It comes from growing up with an interest in America’s Civil War and then seeing one for himself as a captain with the 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad, where he learned, he says, “what civil war thinks and talks like.” Robinson noted how poorly the typical label of “anti-government” fits the militant groups on the right today. “They’re not anti-government. They’re anti-Democrat,” he said. They see themselves, he added, “as the legitimate authority” in America, awaiting the time when they will come to power.

One trait of a successful insurgency is what military strategists call tactical patience. The Taliban had this mindset. So did insurgents in Iraq: Defeats were temporary, and eventually the war would tilt back in their favor. Members of Al Qaeda in Iraq who were imprisoned during the U.S. occupation could wait it out until their side regained enough power to spring them; one of the first things ISIS did when it took the city of Mosul in 2014 was open the jails. This is not to ascribe any similarity between people convicted over January 6 and jailed Islamist militants, except for one: Both are cadres of the committed. I imagine Rhodes and others will be paying close attention to Trump’s inaugural rally and wondering what it means for the once and perhaps future president to be giving his speech at the airport in Waco. They might be thinking that all along, time has been on their side.

The post What It Means for Trump’s Campaign to Start In Waco appeared first on The Intercept .

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T he young woman with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.

“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable ,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.

The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.

“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”

But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

The work of Rogers, or “Chelsie,” is a direct offshoot of the FBI’s summer of 2020 investigation in Denver , where Mickey Windecker, a paid FBI informant, drove a silver hearse, rose to a leadership role in the racial justice movement, and encouraged activists to become violent. Windecker provided information to the FBI about an activist who attended demonstrations in both Denver and Colorado Springs, prompting federal agents to launch a new investigation in the smaller Colorado city. I tell the story of Windecker and his FBI work, as well as the investigation in Colorado Springs, in “ Alphabet Boys ,” a 10-episode documentary podcast from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts.

As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.

Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes , including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.

To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation , a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.

The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.

For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.

This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”

The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.

“Nowhere Is Safe”

The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey , who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.

On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.

“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”

“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”

They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.

Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted : “Nowhere is safe.”

Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.

A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.

“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”

The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.

“Boot to the Face”

Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.

“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”

Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”

As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.

“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”

And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.

Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”

As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.

“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”

The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.

“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.

Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.

“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”

A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.

Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”

Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.

Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.

“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.

Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.

“I Never Saw Any Grenades”

Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.

One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.

Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.

Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”

Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.

Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.

Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”

But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.

Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.

Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.

“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.

The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”

That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.

“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”

In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.

“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”

Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.

“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.

Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.

The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.

“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”

Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.

Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously , you know?”

Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.

“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”

In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.

During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.

The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.

“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.

“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.

“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.

“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.

“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”

“I respectfully decline to answer.”

“People have become more cautious, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.

“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.

Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.

The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.

Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.

Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

“Something Went Boom”

A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.

Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.

As with the killer in the Pulse attack , the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich . They closed that inquiry less than a month later.

As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.

“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”

Eleanor Knight contributed research.

The post The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes appeared first on The Intercept .

The precise locations of the U.S. government’s high-tech surveillance towers along the U.S-Mexico border are being made public for the first time as part of a mapping project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

While the Department of Homeland Security’s investment of more than a billion dollars into a so-called virtual wall between the U.S. and Mexico is a matter of public record, the government does not disclose where these towers are located, despite privacy concerns of residents of both countries — and the fact that individual towers are plainly visible to observers. The surveillance tower map is the result of a year’s work steered by EFF Director of Investigations Dave Maass, who pieced together the constellation of surveillance towers through a combination of public procurement documents, satellite photographs, in-person trips to the border, and even virtual reality-enabled wandering through Google Street View imagery. While Maass notes the map is incomplete and remains a work in progress, it already contains nearly 300 current tower locations and nearly 50 more planned for the near future.

As border surveillance towers have multiplied across the southern border, so too have they become increasingly sophisticated, packing a panoply of powerful cameras, microphones, lasers, radar antennae, and other sensors designed to zero in on humans. While early iterations of the virtual wall relied largely on human operators monitoring cameras, companies like Anduril and Google have reaped major government paydays by promising to automate the border-watching process with migrant-detecting artificial intelligence. Opponents of these modern towers, bristling with always-watching sensors, argue the increasing computerization of border security will lead inevitably to the dehumanization of an already thoroughly dehumanizing undertaking.

While American border authorities insist that the surveillance net is aimed only at those attempting to illegally enter the country, critics like Maass say they threaten the privacy of anyone in the vicinity. According to a 2022 estimate by the EFF, “about two out of three Americans live within 100 miles of a land or sea border, putting them within Customs and Border Protection’s special enforcement zone, so surveillance overreach must concern us all.” Taking the towers out of abstract funding and strategy documents and sticking them onto a map of the physical world also punctures CBP’s typical defense against privacy concerns, namely that the towers are erected in remote areas and therefore pose a threat to no one but those attempting to break the law. In fact, “the placement of the towers undermines the myth that border surveillance only affects unpopulated rural areas,” Maass wrote of the map. “A large number of the existing and planned targets are positioned within densely populated urban areas.”

The map itself serves as a striking document of the militarization of the U.S. border and domestic law enforcement, revealing a broad string of surveillance machines three decades in the making, stretching from the beaches of Tijuana to the southeastern extremity of Texas.

In 1993, federal officials launched Operation Blockade, a deployment of 400 Border Patrol agents to the northern banks of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The aim of the “virtual wall,” as it was described at the time, was to push the ubiquitous unauthorized crossing of mostly Mexican laborers out of the city — where they disappeared into the general population and Border Patrol agents engaged in racial profiling to find them — and into remote areas where they would be easier to arrest. Similar initiatives, Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Safeguard in southern Arizona, Operation Rio Grande in South Texas, soon followed.

Though undocumented labor was essential to industries in the Southwest and had been for generations, an increasingly influential nativist wing of the Republican Party had found electoral success in attacking the Democrats and the Clinton administration for a purported disinterest in tackling lawbreaking in border cities. The White House responded by ordering the Pentagon’s Center for Low-Intensity Conflict, which had spent the previous decade running counterinsurgency campaigns around the world, as well as the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, to devise a tactical response to the president’s political problem.

The answer was “prevention through deterrence,” a combination of militarization and surveillance strategy that remains the foundation for border security thinking in the U.S. to this day. Bill Clinton’s unusual team of immigration and counterinsurgency officials saw the inherent “mortal danger” of pushing migrants into remote, deadly terrain as a strategic advantage. “The prediction is that with traditional entry and smuggling routes disrupted, illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement,” the officials wrote in their 1994 national strategy plan . The architects of prevention through deterrence accepted that funneling migrants into the most remote landscapes in the country would have deadly consequences, noting, “Violence will increase as effects of the strategy are felt.”

Violence did increase, albeit in the slow and agonizing form one finds in the desiccated washes of the Sonoran Desert and the endless chaparral fields of South Texas . Before prevention through deterrence, the medical examiner’s office in Tucson, Arizona, averaged roughly 12 migrant death cases a year. After the strategy went into effect, that number skyrocketed to 155.

The September 11 attacks made the already deadly situation far worse. In Washington, the cliched quip that “border security is national security” led to the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the CIA and the Defense Department. With the Department of Homeland Security up and running, U.S. taxpayers began funneling more money into the nation’s border and immigration agencies than the FBI; Drug Enforcement Administration; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives combined. Immigration offenses became the most common charge on the federal docket. An unprecedented network of for-profit immigration jails went up across the country.

On the border itself, a massive new industry of surveillance tech, much of it repurposed from the war on terror, was born. The more money the U.S. government poured into interdiction on the border, the more money there was to be made in evading the U.S. government. For migrants, hiring a smuggler became unavoidable. For smugglers, engaging with Mexican organized crime, many with links to Mexican government officials, became unavoidable. With organized crime involved, U.S. agencies called out for more resources. These dynamics have been extremely lucrative for an array of individuals and interests, while at the same time making human migration vastly more dangerous, radically altering life in border communities, and exacting a heavy toll on borderland ecosystems.

Surveillance towers have been significant part of that vicious cycle, even though, as Maass’s EFF report notes, their efficacy is far less certain than their considerable price tag.

Nobody can say for certain how many people have died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the recent age of militarization and surveillance. Researchers estimate that the minimum is at least 10,000 dead in the past two and a half decades, and most agree that the true death toll is considerably higher.

Sam Chambers, a researcher at the University of Arizona, studies the relationship between surveillance infrastructure and migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert and has found the two inextricable from one another. While the purpose of surveillance towers in theory is to collect and relay data, Chambers argues that the actual function of towers in the borderlands is more basic than that. Like the agents deployed to the Rio Grande in Operation Blockade or a scarecrow in a field, the towers function as barriers pushing migrants into remote areas. “It’s made in a way to make certain places watched and others not watched,” Chambers told The Intercept. “It’s basically manipulating behavior.”

“People cross in more remote areas away from the surveillance to remain undetected,” he said. “What it ends up doing is making the journeys longer and more difficult. So instead of crossing near a community, somebody is going to go through a mountain range or remote area of desert, somewhere far from safety. And it’s going to take them more energy, more time, much more exposure in the elements, and higher likelihood of things like hyperthermia.”

“There’s nothing to suggest anybody’s trying to make this humane in any manner.”

Last year was the deadliest on record for migrants crossing the southern border. While the planet is already experiencing a level of human migration unlike anything in living memory, experts expect human movement across the globe to increase even further as the climate catastrophe intensifies. In the U.S., where the nation’s two leading political parties have offered no indication of a will to abandon their use of deadly landscapes as force multipliers on the border, the multidecade wave of dying shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

“They’ve been doing this, prevention through deterrence, since the ’90s,” Chambers said. “There’s nothing to suggest anybody’s trying to make this humane in any manner.”

The post Mapping Project Reveals Locations of U.S. Border Surveillance Towers appeared first on The Intercept .

When a low-profile U.S. military base in Syria came under rocket attack last week, a U.S. Central Command spokesperson accused the assailants of endangering civilians and undermining “the hard-earned stability and security of Syria and the region.”

But exclusive records obtained by The Intercept suggest that U.S. personnel at Mission Support Site Green Village in northeast Syria have been under attack before — not just by local fighters, but also by fellow U.S. personnel. A National Guard soldier was assaulted by a U.S. Marine there in July 2018, according to a detailed criminal investigation report obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

Shortly after being deployed to the base in northeast Syria, the soldier from the 65 ^th Field Artillery Brigade said that, during a bathroom break while on guard duty, she was approached by a Marine. “I heard from one of your guys that you like to get around,” he allegedly said before grabbing her arms, pulling her toward him, and attempting to kiss her. As she struggled, the soldier threw a punch that connected with her attacker’s right jaw, then shoved her way free, according to the report.

The criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept provide details about a base where anonymity was the norm, and local partners — the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed Kurdish-led group — were not trusted. “For operational security reasons relative to coalition members the U.S. military works alongside, there were no name tapes on U.S. military members’ uniforms at Green Village,” according to the investigation report. “Additionally, U.S. military members at Green Village commonly did not ask other military members their names and members of [redacted] platoon only identified themselves as being assigned to Green Village and attached to Task Force 95.” As a result, while the soldier recognized the distinctive digital camouflage pattern worn by Marines, she did not know the identity of the man who attacked her.

The lack of basic transparency that protected the identity of the Marine accused in the assault is a direct consequence of the penumbra of secrecy covering U.S. military operations in Syria and so much of the Pentagon’s activities around the world. Since 9/11, a proliferation of covert and clandestine activities, unattributed attacks, and programs employing foreign proxies has, as a 2022 Brennan Center report noted, resulted in the U.S. waging more than a dozen “secret wars.”

Conflicts cloaked in secrecy allow the U.S. to conduct missions without meaningful oversight — preventing the public and Congress from knowing where and why U.S. forces are operating — and have led the U.S. to partner with abusive allies and cover up its role in the killing of civilians in countries where the U.S. isn’t even at war . In Syria, for example, the U.S. is currently fighting an overt, if low-profile, war against the Islamic State group and a shadow conflict of dubious legality against Iranian proxies.

Far-flung military operations and the secrecy that surrounds them have also allowed the Pentagon to manipulate its sexual assault statistics. A 2021 investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault of U.S. military personnel in Africa was far more widespread than the Pentagon reported to Congress.

While the 2018 assault at Green Village has not previously been disclosed, the outpost has periodically attracted attention. It has been the subject of intermittent — and frequently inaccurate — attacks over the years , including on March 13, when two rockets landed harmlessly nearby . Green Village was also in the news two days later when an American airman accused of an insider attack there last year was acquitted at court martial. The government argued that, in April 2022, Air Force Tech. Sgt. David Dezwaan , an enlisted explosive ordnance disposal technician, detonated explosives that injured four service members, including himself, and destroyed $50,000 worth of military equipment. Dezwaan was charged with destruction of military property, reckless endangerment, and aggravated assault but was acquitted on all counts.

The case against Dezwaan resulted in an eight-day court-martial proceeding. The 2018 sexual assault case, on the other hand, never got off the ground. After noticing red scratches that ran from her elbows to her wrists and that she was unusually quiet, the soldier’s platoon sergeant asked her what was wrong. When she told him about the attack, it was passed along to her commanding officer, prompting the investigation. Unable to identify her attacker, uncomfortable with the attention generated by the complaint, and with the Marines scheduled to rotate out of Syria in a matter of days, the soldier told a Navy criminal investigator that she wished to “let it be” and not take part in an investigation. The inquiry was subsequently closed.

Even if she had pursued the case, the military justice system rarely results in significant accountability for victims of sexual assault. Just 225 of 5,640 eligible cases went to court-martial and only 50 of those resulted in convictions for nonconsensual sexual offenses, according to 2020 Defense Department statistics . That’s a conviction rate of less than 1 percent.

About 900 U.S. personnel are currently deployed in Syria, according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dana Stroul. American forces are ostensibly stationed at Green Village and elsewhere in that country “to ensure ISIS cannot resurge” according to Maj. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, the officer in charge of U.S. operations in Iraq and Syria. Those forces increasingly also fight Iran-backed militia groups. The legal basis for this unacknowledged mission is murky at best and has been questioned repeatedly by experts and members of Congress .

“The highest priority for President Biden and for Secretary of Defense [Lloyd] Austin is the security and safety of [U.S.] forces while they continue to implement the one mission that they are in northeast Syria for, and that is the deterrent — enduring defeat of ISIS,” Stroul said in a recent conference call with The Intercept and reporters from other media outlets. “U.S. forces are present in Syria for no other purposes, and we seek conditions that enable us to continue our focus on that mission.”

The post The Pentagon’s Obsession With Secrecy Protected a Marine Accused of Sexual Assault appeared first on The Intercept .

Paul Wolfowitz walked among the tombstones of the Iraq war dead.

It was April 9, 2009, and Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration and one of the chief architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, had come to Arlington National Cemetery to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

He came to Section 60, the portion of Arlington where American soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan lay buried, as the most prominent guest at a small ceremony to mark the day six years earlier when the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square had been pulled down. Wolfowitz and other Iraq war hawks had decided that April 9 should be commemorated as “Iraq Liberation Day.”

The 2009 celebration was organized and hosted by Viola Drath, a former journalist, longtime socialite, and, at 89, a tireless networker on Washington’s cocktail circuit.

She was now married to her second husband, Albrecht Muth, who claimed to be a general in the Iraqi Army. He wore his uniform to public events around Washington and possessed a certificate of his appointment signed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Using her Washington connections, Drath had managed to attract a smattering of VIPs to Section 60 for the Iraq Liberation Day ceremony, including both Wolfowitz and Iraq’s ambassador to the United States at the time, Samir Shakir M. Sumaida’ie.

Two years after that celebration in Section 60, Drath was found dead in her Georgetown townhouse. She had been strangled. Her husband, Muth, the supposed Iraqi general, was arrested for her murder. The certificate of his appointment as an Iraqi general was found to be a forgery; in Drath’s townhouse, police discovered a receipt from a Washington print shop where he had created the official-looking document. Muth was later convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison .

Two decades after the March 19, 2003, U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is still difficult to peel back all the layers of deceit that enveloped the war. Some were thin and nearly transparent, like the fabricated generalship of Albrecht Muth. Others were enormously consequential, like the false assertion, peddled by the White House, the CIA, and the American press, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. There was also much self-deceit, like the notion confidently shared by the war’s most ardent supporters that April 9 would forever be remembered as Iraq Liberation Day.

But one piece of deceit and disinformation stands out. Along with other official lies, it morphed into a lasting conspiracy theory that set a dangerous precedent and helped pave the way for the rise of Donald Trump: the assertion by the Bush White House that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

Bush and his advisers saw the Saddam–9/11 connection as the silver bullet that could guarantee public support for an invasion of Iraq.

There was never any evidence that it was true, and the Bush administration knew it had nothing to support the claims. Yet the White House began to push the theory almost immediately after the September 11 attacks; President George W. Bush and his advisers saw the Saddam–9/11 connection as the silver bullet that could guarantee public support for an invasion of Iraq.

The Bush team pushed the false notion with such unrelenting ferocity during the 18 months between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion that most Americans were soon convinced. Efforts by the press to debunk it made little difference. It was a powerful piece of disinformation that became so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that it was nearly impossible to dislodge.

The Bush White House was so successful that two years after 9/11, polls showed that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the attacks on New York and Washington. By 2007, despite the administration’s failure to find proof of the connection over the previous six years, polls revealed that one-third of Americans still believed it .

The equally specious argument that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction never enjoyed such a powerful hold on the American imagination as the belief that the war in Iraq could be justified as payback for 9/11.

It was a powerful piece of disinformation that became so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that it was nearly impossible to dislodge.

As with any good propaganda campaign, the Bush team was careful and lawyerly in making its case. In his public statements, Bush himself never explicitly said Saddam was responsible for 9/11; but he constantly used language in speeches and other public statements linking Saddam with terrorism, and he talked more broadly about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda-style militancy. The Bush team did a masterful job of making it difficult for the public to distinguish between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The public got the message that 9/11 and Iraq were inextricably linked.

The Bush White House kept pushing the false narrative surrounding a Saddam–9/11 connection despite resistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, where some officials were quietly furious at these dubious claims. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, some CIA officials, speaking anonymously, told reporters that the intelligence didn’t support the White House notion of a Saddam–9/11 connection.

The battle between the Bush White House and the CIA over the intelligence on Saddam’s connections to 9/11 and terrorism consumed much of the 18-month interregnum between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion and turned increasingly bitter after Vice President Dick Cheney personally visited CIA headquarters and, along with his aides, began to pressure analysts to agree to the White House position. But the battle was waged almost entirely behind the scenes; it would surface only through occasional anonymous leaks to the press from CIA officials, accusing the administration of politicizing the intelligence, and conversely through statements from Iraq hawks close to the administration complaining about CIA intransigence.

The agency’s stance was badly weakened when CIA Director George Tenet refused to publicly engage in the battle, or even to criticize the Bush White House for pushing the Iraq–Al Qaeda link. At the time, Tenet’s hold on his job was fragile, and he believed he owed Bush for not firing him after the intelligence failures related to 9/11 prompted many critics to call for his ouster. In fact, there were several instances when CIA officials, speaking on background without attribution, would discuss the lack of an Iraq–Al Qaeda connection with reporters, only to see Tenet then publicly deny that there was any disagreement between the White House and the CIA, including when he was questioned by Congress. Tenet’s actions thus left CIA dissenters badly exposed to political pressure.

In the years since the U.S. invasion, this secret war between the White House and CIA over evidence of Iraq–Al Qaeda links has largely been lost to history, overshadowed by the subsequent debacle over intelligence on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and by the failure of the war itself. But the 2002 White House–CIA fight over Iraq–Al Qaeda intelligence nonetheless wreaked lasting damage, creating a model for Trump in how to build conspiracy theories around intelligence reporting.

Rather than concede that the CIA analysts might be right that there was no proof of Saddam–9/11, Iraq–Al Qaeda connections, the Bush team created a rival intelligence unit of their own to hunt for the evidence they claimed the CIA was ignoring. A two-man intelligence team, handpicked by Iraq hawk Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and one of Wolfowitz’s lieutenants, set up shop in the Pentagon and began scouring raw intelligence for signs of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

The amateurish effort was linked to Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative close to Wolfowitz, and a longtime critic of the CIA. Perle told me at the time that he thought the “people working on the Persian Gulf at the CIA are pathetic,” and that “they went to battle stations every time someone pointed to contrary evidence.”

Feith’s Pentagon team never proved their case. But the Bush White House became convinced they had found their silver bullet when they obtained a report claiming that Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the September 11 attacks.

Before long, the “Prague meeting” became the central piece of evidence used by the Bush team in their push for war. It seemed to provide the long-sought missing link between Saddam and 9/11. For the Bush White House, it was the perfect intelligence report.

The problem was that the meeting never happened . Yet the Bush White House kept peddling the story.

The battle to stop the White House from using the Saddam–9/11 connection to justify war with Iraq exhausted battered CIA officials and analysts. The fight so weakened the CIA that by the fall of 2002, Tenet and his top lieutenants were relieved when the Bush team finally began to switch the focus of its argument for war to Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it. In 2002, for example, the CIA sent more than 30 Iraqi American relatives of Iraqi weapons scientists back to Iraq to secretly ask about the status of Saddam’s WMD programs. All the relatives reported back to the CIA that their relatives had said that the WMD programs had long since been ended. The CIA simply ignored those reports .

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Dissent within the CIA over the WMD intelligence was much weaker than it had been on the Saddam–9/11 connection. Now, the hardy few critics of the intelligence were not only fighting the White House, but also their own management, which was fully on board with WMD. Whenever they were confronted by the few CIA skeptics who noted that the intelligence on WMD was thin, Tenet and his lieutenants would say that they “would find it when we get there” — after the invasion. And Tenet and his aides would point to Saddam’s refusal to meet Bush’s demands to allow Western weapons inspectors back into Iraq. That had to be proof that he was still hiding covert WMD programs; they never allowed for the possibility that Saddam was bluffing and didn’t want to admit his own weakness.

The CIA’s utter failure on WMD intelligence ultimately cost Tenet his job and poisoned American attitudes toward the war in Iraq. Yet the Bush administration’s persistence in pushing the obviously false narrative of a connection between Saddam and 9/11 may have had more lasting consequences for American politics. Bush set a precedent by officially sanctioning a conspiracy theory. His White House had engaged in a bitter battle with intelligence analysts, who Bush’s lieutenants and most ardent supporters saw as the enemy, to disseminate that conspiracy theory.

Bush set a precedent by officially sanctioning a conspiracy theory.

Donald Trump followed that model when he sought to convince Americans that he had won the 2020 presidential election, but that dark forces — including a “deep state” inside the U.S. intelligence community — had rigged the outcome to make Joe Biden president.

George W. Bush helped lay the groundwork for Trump to engage in conspiracy theories and spread them from the Oval Office. There is a direct line from the Prague meeting to “Stop the Steal,” and from March 19, 2003, to January 6, 2021.

The post Bush’s Iraq War Lies Served as a Blueprint For Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept .