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      Joe Biden Can’t Quit the Saudi “Pariahs”

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 14 December, 2022 - 20:29 · 8 minutes

    US President Joe Biden being welcomed by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on July 15, 2022.

    President Joe Biden being welcomed by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on July 15, 2022.

    Photo: Royal Court of Saudi Arabia/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

    It’s hard to imagine what more Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could do that would actually spur the Biden administration to use the full force of the presidency to oppose his murderous reign in Saudi Arabia. Ordering the execution and literal butchering of a Washington Post journalist certainly didn’t do it. Conducting mass executions of its own citizens? Old news. Waging a merciless scorched-earth campaign against the civilian population of a poor neighboring country? The U.S. continues to support that one. Let’s have another fist bump, old pal.

    Two years into Biden’s presidency, it is crystal clear that the Saudis have nothing significant to fear from the U.S. government. From a historical perspective, that is not in the least shocking. For decades, Democratic and Republican administrations have propped up the Saudi monarchy, lathering it with weapons sales and intelligence sharing, all while normalizing the draconian, antidemocratic grip on power held by the monarchy.

    When Donald Trump was president, a lot of Democrats were given political cover to finally come around to opposing the Saudi-led campaign of annihilation in Yemen. Trump was so cartoonishly cozy with MBS and the royals as their air war intensified and arms sales escalated that it became an almost irrelevant footnote that it was the Obama-Biden administration that gave the initial green light to the Saudi-led war in the first place. Or the fact that Barack Obama began bombing Yemen in December 2009 and continued to hit the country with drone strikes and cruise missile attacks throughout most of his presidency. In fact, by the time Obama left office, his administration had offered the Saudis more military support , $115 billion, than any in the history of the seven-decade U.S.-Saudi alliance.

    By 2019, particularly in the aftermath of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s October 2018 murder, Yemen had become a Trump-made humanitarian disaster. That framing — which was bolstered by Trump’s garish public support for MBS after the murder — meant it was OK for more Democrats to oppose continued U.S. support for the Saudi’s brutal military campaign. A bipartisan war powers resolution aimed at doing that passed in 2019. Trump ultimately vetoed it , but it was nonetheless an achievement. Biden’s current national security adviser Jake Sullivan — along with Samantha Power, Colin Kahl, Susan Rice, and Wendy Sherman — signed a letter calling on Congress to override Trump’s veto.

    Enter the 2020 election.

    On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to continue the momentum and end U.S. bodyguarding of Saudi Arabia’s crimes, particularly after the execution of Khashoggi, a permanent U.S. resident, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. If elected president, Biden said in a November 2019 Democratic primary debate, “I would make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them. We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” Biden asserted that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.” As for the war in Yemen, Biden promised to “end the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children.”

    Well, that was then and this is now. Politicians say stuff when they are running for office that they don’t really mean. In fact, sometimes they mean just the opposite.

    On Tuesday, the Biden White House went into legislative guerrilla battle mode to undermine support for the updated version of the war powers resolution that Trump vetoed. The resolution, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would have prohibited U.S. support for offensive Saudi operations in Yemen. Biden administration officials aggressively lobbied lawmakers to oppose the measure, and told them Biden “strongly opposed” it and that they would recommend he veto it should it pass. Sanders ultimately pulled the resolution, saying : “[T]he Biden administration agreed to continue working with my office on ending the war in Yemen. Let me be clear. If we do not reach agreement, I will, along with my colleagues, bring this resolution back for a vote in the near future and do everything possible to end this horrific conflict.” Make sure to check out the excellent reporting on this by Ryan Grim and Ken Klippenstein.

    Now, you might be forgiven for believing that there would be actual consequences for MBS and Saudi Arabia given Biden’s pledges as a candidate for president, particularly that business about making them a pariah. In fact, Biden made the same promise about another world leader in February when he launched a murderous war against a neighbor. “Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly, economically and strategically,” he said the day Russian forces began the attack on Ukraine. “We will make sure that Putin will be a pariah on the international stage.”

    It is, at times, tempting to imagine what would happen if Biden were to use even a modest fraction of the weight of American power in confronting Saudi Arabia that it has brought to bear on Russia. But doing so would be an exercise in fantasy. As president, Biden has greenlighted a series of U.S. weapons purchases by the Saudis, including $3 billion worth of Patriot missiles in August. These weapons deals, in the words of the administration, “will support U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives by helping to improve the security of a friendly country that continues to be an important force for political stability and economic growth in the Middle East.”

    Sanders says he is not giving up on the Yemen resolution and that the White House has indicated it will “work with us on crafting language that would be mutually acceptable.” Even if some form of a compromise is reached that allows a version of the resolution to pass, it will be a far cry from bringing any meaningful accountability for the crimes of the Saudi regime. And it will not result in any action vaguely resembling the promises Biden made as a candidate for president. The resolution is narrowly focused on ending U.S. support for explicitly “offensive” Saudi operations in Yemen.

    Former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a longtime opponent of U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia who left the Republican Party and became an independent, criticized Sanders for withdrawing the resolution. “Totally unacceptable. You know this is the game administrations and congressional leaders have been playing for years,” Amash tweeted . “They won’t respond to your gesture with anything but further delay and obfuscation. Biden wants it held until Rs control the House so they can block it for him.”

    In its talking points opposing the Sanders measure, obtained by The Intercept , the White House argues that its own strategy was already succeeding in deescalating the Yemen war: “The situation is still fragile, and our diplomatic efforts are ongoing. … A vote on this resolution risks undermining those efforts.”

    Some administration allies also argued that the language of Sanders’s resolution defining the term “hostilities” could set a precedent that potentially undermines the legal framework for U.S. military support to Ukraine. According to the definition in the resolution, the U.S. would be prohibited from “sharing intelligence for the purpose of enabling offensive coalition strikes” and “providing logistical support” for such strikes “by providing maintenance or transferring spare parts to coalition members flying warplanes engaged in anti-Houthi bombings in Yemen.” It also stated that neither military nor civilian personnel from the Defense Department would be permitted “to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of the Saudi-led coalition forces in hostilities against the Houthis in Yemen or in situations in which there exists an imminent threat that such coalition forces become engaged in such hostilities.”

    In his December 8 “ War Powers Report ” to Congress, Biden asserted that ongoing U.S. military support for the “Saudi-led Coalition” does not “involve United States Armed Forces in hostilities with the Houthis for the purposes of the War Powers Resolution.”

    What was notably absent from the White House talking points was any mention of Iran. Throughout both the Trump and Biden administrations, support for Saudi Arabia has been viewed in part through the lens of the U.S. effort to prepare for the possibility of future overt conflict, or even war, with Iran. In his War Powers Report last week, Biden stated that there are currently 2,755 U.S. military personnel deployed in Saudi Arabia “to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups.” In coordination with the Saudis, these forces “provide air and missile defense capabilities and support the operation of United States military aircraft.”

    With Tehran and Moscow developing closer ties in the midst of the Ukraine war, and Iran shipping drones and other munitions to Russia, the Biden administration may well be concerned about legally soldering any explicit limitations to its support for Riyadh. The U.S. also continues to wrestle with how to respond to Saudi maneuvers around global oil supply and pricing.

    The White House campaign this week to stop the Yemen resolution is taking place against the backdrop of the Biden administration intervening in a lawsuit against MBS for Khashoggi’s murder. On December 6, despite “the credible allegations of his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder,” a federal judge threw out the case because “the United States has informed the court that he is immune.” That move drew harsh words, even from some of Biden’s most passionate supporters in the Senate. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, charged that the Biden administration “has chosen to take the side of the party that our own intelligence agencies have concluded is responsible for the murder.” Kaine called it a “deliberate and callous decision” by the administration that “sends a horrific message to despots around the world.”

    The next time Joe Biden promises to make an international leader a pariah, he should clarify which of his interpretations of the word he means: the universally accepted definition or the one he has applied to MBS and Saudi Arabia, which has proven to mean the exact opposite.

    The post Joe Biden Can’t Quit the Saudi “Pariahs” appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Bernie Sanders Pulls Yemen War Powers Resolution Amid Opposition From White House

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 14 December, 2022 - 02:07 · 10 minutes

    The White House and Sen. Bernie Sanders clashed Tuesday in the run-up to a Senate vote on the war powers resolution, put forward by the Vermont independent, banning U.S. support for Saudi-led offensive operations in its war on Yemen. By the evening, Sanders had agreed to withdraw his resolution, saying on the Senate floor he would enter negotiations with the White House on compromise language.

    “I’m not going to ask for a vote tonight,” Sanders concluded. “I look forward to working with the administration who is opposed to this resolution and see if we can come up with something that is strong and effective. If we do not, I will be back.”

    If it had happened, the vote may have been close, as advocates believed they had five to eight Republicans lined up to vote yes. But getting back, as Sanders said, will be a challenge, as Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives in early January. A growing block of House Republicans have become resistant to U.S. military adventures overseas, but current House Republican leadership has been opposed to curtailing U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

    On Tuesday morning, the White House privately circulated talking points making the case against the resolution, saying President Joe Biden’s aides would recommend a veto if it passed and that the administration was “strongly opposed” to it. The White House argued, in part, that a vote in favor is unnecessary because, significant hostilities have not yet resumed in Yemen despite a lapse in the ceasefire, and the vote would complicate diplomacy.

    Sanders — leaving a rally in support of sick days for rail workers, at which he called on the White House to take executive action on their behalf — said that he was aware of the administration’s efforts. “I’m dealing with this as we speak,” he said in the early afternoon.

    Pushed by the White House press corps, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre initially declined to comment on the administration’s posture toward the resolution, but when confronted with the confirmation by Sanders, she acknowledged the administration was pushing its preferred approach. “We’re in touch with members of Congress on this. Thanks to our diplomacy which remains ongoing and delicate, the violence over nine months has effectively stopped,” she said, adding that the administration was wary of upsetting that balance.


    Jamal Benomar, formerly UN under-secretary general who served as special envoy for Yemen until 2015, was critical of the White House’s claim that it was engaged in diplomacy, much less that the war powers resolution would imperil that. “There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever,” he told The Intercept. “There’s been no political process, no negotiations, or even a prospect of them. So an all-out war can resume at any time.”

    The administration’s opposition represents a reversal on the part of top Biden administration officials including Jake Sullivan, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, and Colin Kahl, who signed a letter in 2019 calling on Congress to override then-President Trump’s veto of the Yemen war powers resolution. Warning that the legislation represented “a constitutional matter facing Congress that may be unparalleled in its impact on millions of lives,” the letter argued that the war powers resolution would go beyond just alleviating Yemeni suffering and addressed a core constitutional question of checks and balances that affects all Americans. “The executive branch would be emboldened to launch and sustain unconstitutional wars” without the legislation, the letter said.

    Jean-Pierre’s reasoning — that a peace resolution would actually mean war — aligns with the talking points distributed by the White House, which were obtained by the Intercept.

    “The Administration strongly opposes the Yemen War Powers Resolution on a number of grounds, but the bottom line is that this resolution is unnecessary and would greatly complicate the intense and ongoing diplomacy to truly bring an end to the conflict,” the talking points read. “In 2019, diplomacy was absent and the war was raging. That is not the case now. Thanks to our diplomacy which remains ongoing and delicate, the violence over nearly nine months has effectively stopped.”

    A coalition of antiwar groups, in dueling counterpoints that were also circulated privately and obtained by The Intercept, argued that the question of timing and delicacy did not militate against the resolution:

    A UN-brokered truce in Yemen expired more than two months ago. The Saudis can resume airstrikes at any time. A previously announced end to U.S. “offensive support” did not prevent devastating and indiscriminate Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, which occurred as late as March 2022. Passing this legislation allows Congress to play a constructive role in the negotiation of an extension of the truce and a long-term peace.

    “There’s been a lull in the fighting, but since there was no concerted effort to move the political process forward, the lull is a temporary one and all sides are preparing for the worst,” Benomar, the former UN under-secretary general said. He also warned that the situation is more volatile now than it was in the past and that subsequent fighting would likely be bloodier. “The situation is extremely fragile because Yemen has fragmented now and you have different areas of Yemen under the control of different warlords.”

    Biden’s own Yemen envoy, Tim Lenderking, has warned that a failure to reach a new peace agreement would precipitate a “return to war.” While a UN-brokered six-month ceasefire was agreed to earlier this year, it ended on October 2. On Monday, the UNICEF warned that 2.2 million Yemeni children are malnourished, with over 11,000 children having been killed or maimed in the war.

    The war began in 2015 under Saudi Arabia’s then-Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman, pitting the richest country in the region against the poorest,. MBS, as he’s known, told former CIA Director John Brennan that the military operation, initially codenamed Operation Decisive Storm, would “finish off the Houthis in a couple of months,” according to Brennan’s memoir. “I looked at him with a rather blank stare and wondered to myself what he had been smoking,” Brennan recalled.

    The White House also argued that the resolution should be rejected because it goes further than one passed in 2019. “I know that many of you supported a similar war powers resolution in 2019,” the talking points read. “But the circumstances now are significantly different. And the text of the resolution itself is also different.”

    The text of the resolution may be different, the goal is the same, advocates of the resolution said:

    This legislation reflects the latest developments in the conflict and its directives have been adopted by the House of Representatives for three years in a row. Its operative text was endorsed in 2019 by Jake Sullivan, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Robert Malley, Wendy Sherman, and Colin Kahl. While midair refueling ended as a result of previous votes on war powers resolutions, offensive Saudi bombings in Yemen continued, including for more than a year after the Executive Branch announced an end to “offensive” support. S.J.Res.56 bans any U.S. logistical involvement in offensive Saudi-led coalition strikes in Yemen. Such involvement is operationally essential for the bombings. It differs from previous legislation only in that it is tailored to end future operational U.S. involvement in offensive Saudi airstrikes, ensuring that they cannot resume without affirmative authorization from Congress.

    The White House talking points do not explain how it is that withdrawing U.S. support for the Saudi-led war would upset the diplomatic balance, but the argument makes up the bulk of their case against the resolution, according to the talking point:

    Here are the facts: The Yemen war was ongoing and escalating at the start of the Biden Administration through early this year. Hundreds were dying each month, the Yemeni people were experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe, and dozens of Houthi-launched missiles were flying at KSA.

    That violence has effectively stopped for a period now going on nine months, in no small part due to the robust diplomatic efforts by the United States.

    However, the situation is still fragile, and our diplomatic efforts are ongoing. The most intense diplomacy right now is directly between the Houthis and KSA, which is what we’ve always wanted — and they are making progress, but it’s far from done. A vote on this resolution risks undermining those efforts.

    Some advocates say the White House’s opposition to the war powers resolution represents a gift to MBS, which could embolden him. “Despite the catastrophic failure of Biden’s fist bump approach with MbS and the Saudi government, it seems that while MBS gets more brutal and emboldened, the administration doubles down on protecting him,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, research director for Saudi Arabia and the UAE at Democracy in the Arab World Now, referring to Biden’s controversial meeting with MBS in Jeddah this summer. “Now, they protected him legally in US courts with a legal immunity request, protected him militarily with weapons and arms sales, and protected him politically with pressure on Congress to impede efforts to end the Yemen war.”

    Biden, who in his campaign vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, more recently said that “there will be consequences” after Riyadh cut oil production shortly before midterm elections — consequences which have yet to materialize .

    The resolution scrambled the partisan spectrum, with major players on both the right and left teaming up against the war. Advocates of the resolution said that Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was prepared to vote yes, and Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, Concerned Veterans for America were pushing for a yes vote.

    Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who serves as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the war, announced on Mehdi Hasan’s show Tuesday that he would be supporting the resolution, a major boost for supporters. (Late last year, Murphy supported a missile sale to Saudi Arabia to “defend” against the Houthis.)

    Murphy specifically cited the resolution’s restrictions on U.S. maintenance of the Saudi bomber fleet, saying it was appropriate that this resolution goes beyond the previous one. “I just think it’s time,” he told Hasan. “The Saudis have not shown a level of seriousness in ending this war despite the misery that has been visited upon Yemenis.”


    California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said during the day that he would be a no vote, and staffers for Sen. Dianne Feinstein indicated she would also vote no. She had been a yes on past years, though her Senate operation is known to be largely staff-driven at this point, which may change the calculus.

    Finally, some administration allies made the argument that the resolution’s definition of hostilities could set some type of precedent that could hamper support for Ukraine in its war against Russia’s invasion, though the resolution is clear that it is limited to Yemen and only applies to offensive operations.

    “The whole thing is just embarrassing for the Democrats,” said Dan Caldwell, vice president for foreign policy for the conservative group Stand Together, backed by the Koch organization, and a senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America. “Even though this started under Obama, they were able to claim moral high ground on this issue during Trump. They just surrendered it again. The logical end of the Biden Administration argument is that you need to starve Yemeni children to support Ukraine.”

    The coalition of groups backing the resolution said they expect Sanders to introduce the same language in the beginning of January, engage the administration in negotiations, but move forward alone if the White House continues in opposition.

    The post Bernie Sanders Pulls Yemen War Powers Resolution Amid Opposition From White House appeared first on The Intercept .

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      The War Caucus Always Wins

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 7 December, 2022 - 19:38 · 13 minutes

    The B-21 Raider is unveiled during a ceremony at Northrop Grumman's Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, December 2, 2022. The high-tech stealth bomber can carry nuclear and conventional weapons and is designed to be able to fly without a crew on board and is on track to cost nearly $700 million per plane.

    The B-21 Raider is unveiled during a ceremony at Northrop Grumman’s Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif., on Dec. 2, 2022. The high-tech stealth bomber can carry nuclear and conventional weapons; it’s designed to be able to fly without a crew on board and is on track to cost nearly $700 million per plane.

    Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images


    The dominant political story emanating from Washington, D.C., these days centers around the battles between the Trumpist movement and the bipartisan “adults in the room” caucus — the Democratic Party and fragments of the Republican Party consisting of lawmakers and politicians who have affirmed the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Often obscured by the media focus on this clash is the enduring influence of a long-standing faction of the U.S. power structure: the bipartisan war caucus. Throughout the Trump and Biden administrations, the U.S. has been on an escalating trajectory toward a new Cold War featuring the prime adversaries from the original, Russia and China. The ratcheted-up rhetoric from U.S. politicians — combined with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the tensions between China and Taiwan , and Beijing’s major advancements and investments in weapons systems and war technology — has heralded a bonanza for the defense industry.

    Congress will soon vote on a record-shattering $857 billion defense spending bill that authorizes $45 billion more than Biden requested. Included in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023, finalized on December 6, is the establishment of a multiyear no-bid contract system through which Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other weapons manufacturers are being empowered to expand their “industrial base” and business. Lawmakers determined that “providing multi-year procurement authority for certain munitions programs is essential,” in part because it will “provide the defense industrial base with predictable production opportunities and firm contractual commitments” to “increase and expand defense industrial capacity.”

    The NDAA authorizes $800 million in new military aid to Ukraine, which is separate from the supplemental funding measures the U.S. has implemented since Russia’s invasion. The unprecedented flow of weapons to Ukraine has included a substantial transfer of weapons from the U.S. stockpile, amounting to approximately $10 billion worth of weapons. U.S. lawmakers have used this fact to push for expanding the scope of not only weapons procurements to “replenish” the arsenal, but also to maintain the pipeline of weapons to Ukraine and European-allied nations through at least the end of 2024. The defense industry position is that such multiyear acquisitions are preferable to emergency surge-demand scenarios, in part because such contracts allow for a long-term expansion of production facilities and increased workforce. It appears that Congress is heading in that direction.

    On November 30, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. Army had awarded a $1.2 billion contract to Raytheon to produce six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems “in support of the efforts in Ukraine.” The estimated completion date was listed as November 2025. The next day, the Defense Department announced a $431 million contract for Lockheed to produce M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers to replenish those transferred to Kyiv. In November, Lockheed also received a $521 million contract to resupply the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems given to Ukraine.

    The lion’s share of major defense contracts goes to a handful of companies : Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. The Pentagon routinely engages in no-bid contracts or awards contracts that are, by default, single-bid contracts. What lawmakers are seeking to do with the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, however, is to extend that practice to the refilling of weapons stockpiles. The legislation would empower the Pentagon to engage in no-bid contracts to replenish arms supplies if the weapons were transferred “in response to an armed attack by a foreign adversary of the United States.” While the legislation specifically refers to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it could also apply to officially designated adversaries such as China, Iran, Cuba, or North Korea. The NDAA authorizes more than $2.7 billion in new funds to “boost munitions production capacity.” Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante recently said the Pentagon has already put into contract $4 billion worth of deals “to replenish our inventories of equipment we have sent to Ukraine.”

    The war industry is clearly elated. “We spend a lot of money on some very exquisite large systems and we do not spend as much on the munitions necessary to support those,” said Raytheon’s CEO Gregory Hayes at the recent Reagan National Defense Forum. “We have not had a priority on fulfilling the war reserves that we need to fight a long-term battle.” Politico reported that discussions at the forum, which featured defense company CEOs, members of Congress, and U.S. military officials, identified China as the greatest “long-term threat.” But the China focus “was eclipsed by the need to kick into much higher gear to tackle a problem that many here didn’t imagine just a year ago: a hot proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that has sent the Pentagon and the defense industry scrambling.” Noting recent moves by Congress to increase munitions production, the U.S. Army’s top weapons buyer, Doug Bush, said, “I think we’re closer to a wartime mode, which has been something I’ve been working on to build.”

    In pushing their case for expanding the weapons acquisitions process, some lawmakers are striking somber notes about the danger of depleting the U.S. arsenal. “Our nation’s ability to defend itself should never suffer because of bureaucratic policies and red tape,” declared Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “As the United States continues to lead the global military aid response to Ukraine amid Putin’s unprovoked war, it has become increasingly critical that we simultaneously ensure the sustainment of our defensive weapons stockpile while also providing the materials our allies and partners need to defend themselves,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who spearheaded the no-bid procurement legislation. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., asserted that the “lethal aid provided to Ukraine has diminished U.S. stockpiles and left defense contractors with uncertainty on timing and orders for backfill, negatively affecting their ability to quickly ramp up production.” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the legislation would ensure that “helping our allies and partners doesn’t diminish our ability to protect ourselves.”

    There is no actual shortage of defensive weapons in the U.S.

    This rhetoric is largely a parlor game. There is no actual shortage of defensive weapons in the U.S. The “stockpile” is based on U.S. war-gaming theory and preparation for various imagined future wars and simultaneous campaigns. Ultimately, this NDAA would represent the latest narrative triumph for the hawks who falsely complained that Bill Clinton and the Democrats had gravely endangered America by “gutting” defense spending in the 1990s. Declaring war against the threats posed by nation states like Russia and China is a far better vehicle to sell large-scale defense spending than Osama bin Laden or the Islamic State group, in part because it justifies massive expenditures on the most expensive weapons systems.

    While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains a central focus, the appetite for countering China’s own expansive weapons and technology development is on track to grow for years to come. The 2023 NDAA expands military support for Taiwan with a five-year package worth up to $10 billion in financing to purchase U.S. weapons, as well as a contingency fund of up to $100 million a year through 2032 to maintain a munitions stockpile. It also provides for running “wargames that allow operational commands to improve joint and combined war planning for contingencies involving a well-equipped adversary in a counter-intervention campaign” and exercises that “develop the lethality and survivability of combined forces against” China. Under the NDAA, the Pentagon would develop a plan “to expedite military assistance to Taiwan in the event of a crisis or conflict.” All of this is aimed at maintaining “the capacity of the United States to resist a fait accompli that would jeopardize the security of the people on Taiwan” by deterring China from using force to “invade and seize control of Taiwan before the United States can respond effectively.”

    Since taking office, Biden has stewarded the multi-administration expansion of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. In September, he approved a new round of more than $1 billion in weapons, the largest authorization Biden has made since taking office. In its October 12 National Security Strategy , the White House claimed that “Russia’s strategic limitations have been exposed following its war of aggression against Ukraine” and designated China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.” It asserted that China “presents America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.” While noting that “Russia poses an immediate and ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and it is a source of disruption and instability globally,” the White House report said Russia “lacks the across the spectrum capabilities of” China.

    “This Isn’t Just Another Airplane”

    On the evening of Friday, December 2, in a ceremony attended by senior U.S. officials, members of Congress, and industry executives, Northrop Grumman unveiled the Pentagon’s next-generation nuclear-capable strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider. The first new stealth bomber produced in more than 30 years, the Raider “will form the backbone of the future Air Force bomber force.” The $700 million bat-winged aircraft will be capable of both manned and unmanned operations, and a first flight is scheduled for 2023. The Pentagon reportedly plans to build at least 100 of the warplanes, with an estimated cost of $32 billion, including research and development, through 2027.

    Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with an almost religious reverence for the nuclear bomber as a large tarp was pulled from its body in a sort of baptismal ceremony at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. “This isn’t just another airplane. It’s not just another acquisition. It is a symbol and a source of the fighting spirit that President Reagan spoke of,” Austin said. “It’s the embodiment of America’s determination to defend the republic that we all love.” He declared that “50 years of advances in low-observable technology have gone into this aircraft. Even the most sophisticated air defense systems will struggle to detect a B-21 in the sky,” adding, “This bomber will be able to defend our country with new weapons that haven’t even been invented yet.”

    24 July 2022, Poland, Rzeszow: MIM-104 Patriot short-range anti-aircraft missile systems for defense against aircraft, cruise missiles and medium-range tactical ballistic missiles are located at Rzeszow Airport. Photo by: Christophe Gateau/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

    MIM-104 Patriot short-range anti-aircraft missile systems produced by Raytheon, located at Rzeszow Airport, close to the Ukraine border on July 24, 2022 in Poland.

    Photo: Christophe Gateau/picture-alliance/dpa/AP


    Russian President Vladimir Putin should be given some scraps of credit for aiding the U.S. war party. His decision to invade Ukraine helped obliterate the (admittedly paltry) roadblocks to even more massive payouts to war corporations. For many D.C. politicians, the Ukraine war is not just the U.S. coming to the aid of a victim of aggression by a U.S. adversary; the endeavor also emits a strong scent of domestic political dynamics involving Donald Trump and the allegations that his 2016 election was part of a Russian Manchurian candidate operation. With Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives in January, it seems that all these factors will begin to converge in a carnival of congressional hearings. Presumptive House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has pledged to bring oversight to Ukraine expenditures. But when pressed, he has made clear that his promise to end the “blank check” for Ukraine does not alter his fundamental support for arming and aiding Kyiv.

    For months, Trumpist political figures in the House, led by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been pushing legislation to “audit” the Ukraine aid spending. While it is difficult to take Greene seriously for a volcanic flow of reasons, including her own purchase of as much as $15,000 in Lockheed Martin stock two days before the Russian invasion in February, there is a reasonable case to make for investigating the money being spent, the weapons flowing to Kyiv, and who is ultimately benefiting. “As of early November, U.S. monitors had performed just two in-person inspections since the war began in February — accounting for about 10 percent of the 22,000 U.S.-provided weapons,” according to the Washington Post. The Biden administration, the paper reported, has said it does not want to send inspectors to the front lines in Ukraine because the inspectors would likely require armed guards, potentially creating “a situation that risks being interpreted by the Kremlin as direct American involvement in the war.”

    On Tuesday, Greene’s resolution , which would have required the Biden administration to hand over all documents related to Ukraine spending within 14 days, failed to pass the Democrat-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee. Democrats, who united to block the proposal, portrayed the resolution as undermining the war effort against Russia. “This is not the time for us to be divided,” said New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, the Democratic chair of the committee. “We’ve held together with NATO and the E.U. and our allies. Let’s not fall into this trap.” While the loudest opponents of Ukraine aid on Capitol Hill have been far-right Republicans — many but not all aligned with Trump — Greene’s resolution showed that more mainstream Republicans are getting on board the audit train ahead of January when the GOP takes control of the House. Most Republicans support Biden’s Ukraine weapons transfers, with some saying they would back a Ukraine audit “because it did not claw back any current or future funding for Ukraine.”

    Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a supporter of the Ukraine war cause, led a successful bipartisan effort to include some oversight provisions in the NDAA. The bill would require the Pentagon’s inspector general to report to Congress any and all efforts to oversee and track the weapons and other aid delivered to Ukraine. The Senate Armed Services Committee described the authority in the bill as requiring “a report on the framework the Inspectors General have adopted to oversee U.S. assistance to Ukraine and whether there are any gaps in oversight or funding for such activities.” It requires the inspector general by next March to present congressional defense committees “with a comprehensive briefing on the status and findings of Inspector General oversight, reviews, audits, and inspections of the activities conducted by the Department of Defense responds [sic] to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine.”

    Throughout the year, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been pushing for a special inspector general to oversee Ukraine spending and temporarily delayed a Ukraine spending measure in May to prove his point. “You shouldn’t shove all $40 billion out the door without any oversight,” Paul said . “And having a special inspector general, we did it in Afghanistan — it didn’t stop all the waste — it at least makes the thieves think twice about stealing the money.” In May, 57 House Republicans and 11 Senate Republicans voted against the Ukraine spending bill . No Democrats voted against the measure.

    The Biden White House has shown no sign of pumping the brakes on Ukraine spending and arms transfers. Biden also has made clear he intends to push ahead with the aggressive U.S. military buildup in preparation for future conflict with China, a position with widespread backing across the aisle. With a divided Congress, the 2024 elections looming, and the Trump question hovering over it all, a lot of the Democrats’ legislative agenda will be tough to implement after the new year. But the short and long-term future looks bright for the Russia and China hawks, the defense industry, and its Democratic and Republican patrons on Capitol Hill. On these matters, bipartisanship remains alive and well. The House could vote on the NDAA as soon as this week, and the Senate is expected to swiftly follow suit to get the bill to Biden’s desk.

    The post The War Caucus Always Wins appeared first on The Intercept .

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      War Industry Looking Forward to “Multiyear Authority” in Ukraine

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 30 November, 2022 - 18:43 · 9 minutes

    Gen. Mark Milley , chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently offered some matter-of-fact observations about the immense human suffering and death caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and placed the responsibility for ending the war squarely on Moscow’s shoulders. “There’s one guy that can stop it — and his name is Vladimir Putin,” Milley said. “He needs to stop it.”

    But then Milley crossed what he most certainly never imagined to be a tripwire when he said, “And they need to get to the negotiating table.”

    The general cited the multiyear death toll of 20 million during World War I — caused, he said, by the failure to negotiate an earlier end to the war — and went on to suggest that it would be better for the war in Ukraine to end soon in negotiation rather than continue on indefinitely.

    “There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably — in the true sense of the word — is maybe not achievable through military means, and therefore you have to turn to other means,” Milley said during the November 9 event at the Economic Club of New York. Referring to recent Russian setbacks at the hands of Ukrainian forces and the coming winter, Milley went on: “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment.”

    Milley clearly did not think he had said anything controversial. A day later, he was making similar points during an interview on CNBC. “We’ve seen the Ukrainian military fight the Russian military to a standstill,” Milley said. “What the future holds is not known with any degree of certainty, but we think there are some possibilities here for some diplomatic solutions.”

    But as snippets of Milley’s remarks in New York started to spread, the White House began fielding angry calls from Ukrainian officials protesting Milley’s comments and asking if they indicated that the U.S. might be getting soft in its support for Ukraine’s stated goal of militarily expelling Russia from its territory. Or if the White House did not believe that Ukraine could win the war.

    As the Biden administration “ scrambled ” to “ clean up Milley remarks ” and “ handle Ukraine’s feelings ,” Milley defended his assessment in a press briefing at the Pentagon alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “The probability of a Ukrainian military victory defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they define or what the claim is Crimea, the probability of that happening anytime soon is not high, militarily,” Milley said in response to a reporter’s question on November 16. “There may be a political solution where, politically, the Russians withdraw, that’s possible.” He added: “You want to negotiate from a position of strength. Russia right now is on its back.”

    This made some Russia hawks apoplectic. In an essay for The Atlantic titled, “Cut the Baloney Realism: Russia’s war on Ukraine need not end in negotiation,” Eliot A. Cohen, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asserted that “the argument for diplomacy now is wrongheaded,” writing: “The calls for negotiations, like the strategically inane revelations of our fears of escalation — inane because they practically invite the Russians to get inside our head and rattle us — are dangerous.” Instead, Cohen declared, it is “time to pass the ammunition and to stop talking about talking,” suggesting that Ukraine should be given top-tier U.S. drones and advanced fighter aircraft like F-16s as well as “a tank fleet superior to that of Russia.”

    In a column for the Wall Street Journal, former Pentagon official Seth Cropsey suggested that Milley should be replaced and said his comments on Ukraine were part of a track record of being soft on China and “apparently resisting then-President Trump’s desire to strike the [Iranian] regime in the final months of his term.” Like Cohen, Cropsey — who served under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush — also argued for increasing weapons shipments to Ukraine. “U.S. interests would be better served by providing Ukraine with support to retake more territory from Russia and declaring Ukrainian victory the aim of U.S. policy,” he wrote . “At some point there might be negotiations in which Russia gains something. Yet these talks should be undertaken only when Ukraine has a superior position.”

    Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told Politico that he believed Ukraine would expel Russian forces from the country by summer. “People should get their heads around the idea that Ukraine is going to defeat Russia on the battlefield, the old fashioned way. They have irreversible momentum,” he said . “Now is the time to put the pedal to the metal.”

    Conceding the massive, unprecedented U.S. military shipments and other support to Ukraine, it is undeniable that President Joe Biden has at key points treaded cautiously in his stance toward Moscow. He and other U.S. officials have consistently said they do not want to risk direct military conflict with Russia. The president recently won some praise from the Kremlin for the “measured and more professional response” to his handling of the missile that landed in Poland killing two people on November 15. While major news organizations reported that it was a Russian attack, Biden urged caution and refuted the claims, which turned out to be false. The White House has also stopped several weapons transfers to Ukraine — in some cases on grounds that misuse of the weapons against Russia could lead to further escalation. At times, the White House has sought assurances from Ukraine that it would not use long-range U.S. weapons “to attack Russian territory.” Biden has also slow-walked a decision on whether to give Gray Eagle weaponized drones to Ukraine, despite mounting pressure from the industry, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, and Kyiv.

    Biden isn’t dovish on Russia. But the administration has its own calculus for how it wants this war to proceed, and frequently games out how it might end.

    None of that indicates that Biden is dovish on Russia — he isn’t. But the administration has its own calculus for how it wants this war to proceed, and frequently games out how it might end. Some news reports have described “a broad sense” within the Pentagon that winter will provide an opportunity to reach a political settlement, while senior national security officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have opposed pushing Ukraine to negotiate. “One official explained that the State Department is on the opposite side of the pole from Milley,” according to CNN. “That dynamic has led to a unique situation where military brass are more fervently pushing for diplomacy than U.S. diplomats.” Milley’s public remarks offered a glimpse into the informed analysis of one powerful camp within the administration. “Milley is much more willing to just say what he thinks,” one U.S. official said . “I’m sure they sometimes wish he wouldn’t always say the quiet part out loud.”

    Despite some moments of narrow strategic restraint from the White House, Biden and virtually the entirety of established political power across the U.S. government is unified in the project of flooding Ukraine with weapons and other military support. Milley, it must be noted, has been a major proponent of heavily arming Ukraine and has advocated continuing to do so indefinitely. Biden currently has a request before Congress for nearly $40 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and the military component of his proposal would, with the swipe of a pen, more than double the entire U.S. expenditure since the invasion began in February.

    There is legislation pending in Congress that indicates that the U.S. government believes the Ukraine war may continue for years. On October 11, the Senate Armed Services Committee submitted its amended draft of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2023. Nestled within the draft is a provision that would establish an “emergency” multiyear plan to award massive defense contracts to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and other war corporations to produce weapons for Ukraine and to “replenish” U.S. stockpiles as well as those of “foreign allies and partners.” An amendment , spearheaded by New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and co-sponsored by Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, would allow the Pentagon to award noncompetitive no-bid contracts to arms manufacturers under the plan.

    Congress is “supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base — and I’m talking billions of dollars into the industrial base — to fund these production lines,” said the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, Bill LaPlante, in remarks reported by Defense News. “That, I predict, is going to happen, and it’s happening now. And then people will have to say: ‘I guess they were serious about it.’ But we have not done that since the Cold War.”

    Among the weapons that would be preauthorized for procurement by the Pentagon, according to the legislation, are: 100,000 Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, 30,000 Hellfire missiles, 36,000 Joint Air-to-Ground missiles, and 700 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — all manufactured by Lockheed Martin. The list also includes a staggering stream of other missiles, rockets, and ammunition.

    It is often said that in war there are no winners. But that has never really been true, certainly not in modern U.S. wars. From Vietnam to Korea, and Iraq to Afghanistan, the winner has always been the same. That victor also prevailed in the Cold War and will most certainly do so again throughout this new cold war that is being rapidly ushered into existence. The winner is the war industry.

    That a powerful U.S. general would suggest that it might be better for the war to end through negotiation rather than prolonging the bloodbath, with Ukrainian civilians paying the highest price, is not an earth-shattering development. But the response to Milley’s expression of that sentiment, combined with the ever-intensifying preparations for a protracted war in which the U.S. is the premiere arms dealer, should spur a discussion over whose interests are being served right now.

    Perhaps more significant than Milley’s comments about negotiations was his assessment that a victory for Ukraine is likely unachievable on a purely military level. Already, some European officials are warning that the appetite in their countries to continue the war in Ukraine is waning and that “the double hit of trade disruption from U.S. subsidies and high energy prices risks turning public opinion against both the war effort and the transatlantic alliance.” As one senior European Union official told Politico, “The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.”

    The NDAA now before Congress is a reminder of the prescience exhibited by President Dwight Eisenhower in his January 1967 farewell address . “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” Eisenhower said. “We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.” Eisenhower warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

    The post War Industry Looking Forward to “Multiyear Authority” in Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept .

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      In U.S. Military, Sexual Assault Against Men Is Vastly Underreported

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Tuesday, 29 November, 2022 - 12:00 · 20 minutes

    It was 2002, and Justin Rose was on a losing streak. The 20-year-old South Boston native had washed out of the University of Maine after just one semester, held a string of terrible jobs, and had just gone through a bad breakup with a girlfriend. He was hawking cellphones at the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, when a Marine walked into his store. Rose went into his standard pitch but lost the sale. The Marine Corps recruiter did not. Three weeks later, Rose shipped out to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina, for basic training.

    The war in Afghanistan was about to enter its third year, and the war in Iraq was looming on the horizon. “I’ll see you in a couple years,” Rose told his parents. He’d be on active duty, a rifleman, and probably see service overseas. At least that’s what the recruiter told him. “It turned out, I was actually a communications guy in the Marine Corps Reserves,” Rose recalled. “So I came home 13 weeks later.”

    A few years would pass before Rose shipped out for his first deployment, arriving in October 2005 at Camp Lemonnier in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. His unit had been cobbled together from Marines based, like him, in Massachusetts. The rest hailed from California and Kansas. One of those Midwestern Marines was Jase Derek Stanton.

    As part of the Third Provisional Security Company, Rose and his fellow Marines manned the guard towers and entry control points for the largest American outpost on the African continent. They had only been in-country for about a month when one of the Marine reservists from Kansas got drunk, vomited several times, and passed out on the ground outside his quarters. The next thing that Marine recalled, according to a summary in court documents, was waking up to find his pants pulled down and Stanton on top of him, touching his penis. The Marine shoved Stanton away and returned to his own quarters, but didn’t report the assault. A few weeks later, he would wake up to find Stanton assaulting him again. This time, he reported it. But that didn’t stop Stanton, who was acquitted at court martial. And neither did the Marines.

    On New Year’s Eve 2005, Justin Rose headed to Camp Lemonnier’s cantina for celebratory $2.50 beers with his fellow Marines before heading back to his “hooch” around 1:30 a.m. Sometime after daybreak, Rose woke up to find someone stroking his penis. Disoriented for a moment, he lept down from his raised bunk and gave chase as a man dressed in red dashed out of his quarters and into another tent. He found Stanton, dressed in red, feigning sleep in his bed; Rose was certain Stanton was the attacker. So Rose did what he had been trained to do. He went to his team leader, a young corporal, and reported the assault. The first question he heard was: “Are you sure you’re not making this up?”

    U.S. Marines with Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island stand at attention for morning colors before a sexual assault awareness and prevention 5k race held aboard Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., April 25, 2012. The Marines, sailors and civilians of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island participated in a 5k race in observance of sexual assault awareness and prevention month.

    U.S. Marines stand at attention before a sexual assault awareness and prevention 5k race held aboard the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, S.C., on April 25, 2012.

    Photo: U.S. Marines

    Stigma and Shame

    Serving in the U.S. armed forces is dangerous, especially for women. Despite being a minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the military, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted — a rate far higher than that of men. Years of analysis of the issue, handwringing, and incremental reforms have failed to stem what has been called an “ epidemic .”

    But sexual assault of men in the military is also widespread and vastly underreported . Each day, on average, more than 45 men in the armed forces are sexually assaulted, according to the latest Pentagon estimates . For women, it is 53 per day, according to a September 2022 Pentagon report that uses a new euphemism “unwanted sexual contact” as a “proxy measure for sexual assault.” Nearly 40 percent of veterans who report to the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, that they have experienced military sexual trauma, or MST — sexual assault or sexual harassment — are men.

    Men, civilian or military, are less likely to report sexual assault, to identify experiences they have had as abusive, and to seek formal treatment for such harms. A 2018 study of active-duty, reserve, and National Guard personnel noted an overall lack of awareness of sexual assault of men in the military, an inclination to blame or marginalize male victims, and substantial barriers to reporting sexual assault — including stigma, a lack of confidence in leadership, and feeling “trapped” by the physical confines of deployment. The 2022 Pentagon report found that about 90 percent of men in the military did not report a sexual assault they experienced in 2021; about 71 percent of women failed to report such an attack. “Underreporting of MST,” according to a 2019 study by researchers from the VA’s Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center in Colorado, “may derive from men’s concerns about stigma, shame, rape myths, lack of past empathic response to disclosures of MST, and the perceived implications of reporting MST for one’s masculinity and sexuality.” For these same reasons, they noted, male MST survivors are at “elevated risk for a vast array of adverse health outcomes.” The trauma of sexual assault can, for example, result in depression, anxiety, nightmares , flashbacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, anger management issues, self-blame, and low self-esteem, among other ill effects.

    A decade ago, most veterans who submitted compensation claims for sexual assaults during their military service were denied benefits by the VA. In the years since, the VA has granted claims for military sexual trauma at an increasing rate. More than 103,000 veterans, of all genders, are now formally recognized by the VA as having been sexually traumatized during their service.

    From 2011 to 2021, the total number of MST claims filed by men skyrocketed more than 119 percent, from 1,352 to 2,969, according to statistics provided to The Intercept by the VA. By the end of June, more than 2,550 male veterans had filed claims in 2022, almost double the number in 2011 and already 85 percent of last year’s total.

    Over the last decade, the number of claims granted by the VA has grown from just 27.8 percent of all claims submitted for compensation by men in 2011 to 68.5 percent last year. Despite the precipitous growth, male claims have consistently been rejected at a higher rate than those of women, and the grant rate has lagged an average of 13 percent below that of women. The VA had no answer for the disparity, telling The Intercept via email that “it would be speculative to provide an explanation as to any difference in the grant rate.”

    Triangle, Virginia -- Friday, November 18, 2022Justin Rose, a former Marine, holds a ‘challenge coin’ he received while deployed to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in 2005. During that deployment, Rose was sexually assaulted by another Marine.CREDIT: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

    Justin Rose holds a challenge coin he received while deployed to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in 2005.

    Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

    Trust Betrayed

    After being assaulted, Justin Rose was made to recount the details again and again, to his squad leader, his platoon sergeant, Jase Stanton’s squad leader, and a chaplain. The trust he placed in his noncommissioned officers to keep his story quiet was quickly betrayed as word spread across the camp. Rose was branded the Marine who had been groped and hadn’t done anything about it. He became the target of jokes and tried laughing along, but inside he was in agony and began questioning himself. Why hadn’t he done anything about it? Why hadn’t he kicked Stanton’s ass? He did the right thing, on paper at least, but it didn’t feel right. “A real Marine would have fought back,” he later wrote . He began to blame himself for his assault and his failure to react as others — and even he — expected. “My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it,” he recalled.

    Rose returned stateside, remained on active duty, and was promoted to corporal before being called to testify at Stanton’s court martial. But before the trial, he was contacted by Stanton’s military attorney who grilled him about his drinking at the cantina and how close a look he got of his fleeing assaulter. “When you’re in the Marines and an officer calls, you just answer the questions. In hindsight, now that I’ve been a company commander and have been involved with court martial hearings, I realize that was probably improper,” Rose told The Intercept.

    “My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it.”

    The defense dissected his testimony, twisted it around, and used it to attack his credibility. Rose recalled that the defense counsel said his drinking of three beers at the cantina, hours earlier, had clouded his mind; that he had failed to get a clear look at the man who assaulted him; and that his failure to confront Stanton called into doubt whether the assault even occurred. Rose and four fellow Marines who provided evidence against Stanton were instead accused of colluding to ruin his career.

    “The main consensus was that we were trying to conspire against Stanton for cultural and social differences,” Rose told The Intercept. “He was a Midwesterner from a religious background, and we were from the Northeast and not accustomed to his kind of Christian fundamentalism.” The military judge ruled in Stanton’s favor and he walked free.

    The Intercept requested a copy of the court martial record from the Navy, the legal authority for the case, but no records were ever found. (The Office of the Judge Advocate General only maintains records of trials in which the accused was awarded a punitive discharge or at least one year of confinement.) The Intercept was able to confirm Stanton’s acquittal through legal records from a subsequent trial he was involved in. For additional details, The Intercept relied on interviews with Rose as well as court documents that included a 2018 appellate brief from the Kansas Court of Appeals and a judge’s memorandum opinion from that same year.

    “By the time it was over,” Rose later wrote , “the Marine Corps had failed me three times: It had failed to take my claims seriously; then made my attacker out to be the victim and me the criminal; and finally failed to provide adequate support and resources in the aftermath of my assault — whether through access to sexual-assault counseling or something as simple as believing my story.”

    Rose had had enough. He found that he couldn’t wear the same uniform as the man who had assaulted him and the many others who allowed Stanton to get away with it. “The military justice system said that I was a liar for something that I had no reason to lie about. If I was going to lie about anything, it certainly wouldn’t be that I was sexually assaulted and didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “It ended up being the reason that I left the Marine Corps. It shook my confidence in myself. It was a point of self-doubt. It was a point of shame.”

    In 2007, the same year he left the Marines, Rose joined the Massachusetts National Guard. He would deploy to Afghanistan in 2011, where he saw combat and suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving as a Security Forces platoon leader for a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan Province.

    Stanton served in the Marines for several more years before leaving the corps and getting involved in Kansas politics. He worked as the campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate John Rysavy and as a field coordinator for the Republican senatorial campaign of Todd Tiahrt , a 16-year member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2010, Rysavy lost his primary, capturing just 2 percent of the Republican vote. In 2014, Tiahrt lost in the Republican primary, failing in a bid to reclaim his House seat from Mike Pompeo , who was later become U.S. Secretary of State.

    Politics was not, however, Stanton’s only pursuit.

    String of Assaults

    Over the next decade, Stanton would be implicated in a string of sexual assaults. In 2007, after he had been acquitted at court martial, Stanton’s reserve unit — based out of Kansas City, Missouri — took part in one of its monthly weekend trainings. One night, according to court records obtained by The Intercept, he and other Marines went out drinking and after the bar closed, headed back to their base to sleep. Stanton attempted, multiple times, to grope two of the men. One of them, after repeatedly telling Stanton to stop, threatened to hurt him and later reported the incident, according to court documents.

    In Johnson County, Kansas, in July 2008, Stanton attended a farewell party for a member of the military being deployed to the Middle East. One party-goer drank heavily and passed out, after which Stanton laid him out on a couch, pulled off his pants, and performed oral sex on him, according to the court records obtained by The Intercept. After a friend of the victim contacted the police, Stanton was charged with aggravated sodomy and aggravated sexual battery and resigned from Tiahrt’s campaign.

    During the investigation, the Johnson County prosecutor contacted Rose and interviewed him about his assault by Stanton, though Rose was never called to testify. In the end, Stanton was convicted but served no prison time. Instead, he was given probation and required to register as a sex offender — but failed to properly do so.

    While Rose and others had information about Stanton’s past that they shared with civilian authorities, the civilian world had no formal record of Stanton’s military legal proceedings. As the deputy attorney of nearby Riley County, Kansas, Bethany Fields prosecutes major crimes like murder, rape, and other forms of sexual assault, but she had no documentation on Stanton. “The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it,” she told The Intercept. She also failed to find any records of Stanton’s court martial for the assaults at Camp Lemonnier.

    Stanton’s probation meant that he was facing prison time if he was convicted again, but after failing to provide full information when registering as a sex offender, he disappeared from the radar of the criminal justice system until resurfacing a few years later in Fields’s Riley County.

    “The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it.”

    On June 7, 2015, two soldiers, one 19 years old and the other 22, from the Army post at Fort Riley, were drinking at Tubby’s, a sports bar in Manhattan, Kansas, where they met Stanton. At closing time, the men went back to Stanton’s home where he poured shots and fixed them mixed drinks. The teenager passed out and woke to find Stanton “was sitting on top of him and was sodomizing him,” according to court documents. He scrambled to his feet and fled to the bathroom. When he emerged, he saw his friend passed out with his pants and underwear pulled down to his knees. The 19-year-old soldier pulled his friend’s pants up and attempted to contact his superiors and then family members, but couldn’t reach either. He then called the Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention hotline and arranged to meet with a SHARP representative at a nearby Starbucks. The teenage soldier was unable to wake his friend and left him at Stanton’s home. Both victims went to the hospital separately and received sexual assault examinations that revealed “a foreign DNA profile that matched Stanton.”

    Stanton later texted a friend that he had a “three-way while that moron Boston kid [the 22-year-old] was asleep in the living room.” At trial, Stanton explained that he meant that he, according to summary documents, “messed around” with a friend and the teenage soldier, even though he had initially told a police detective that he had not had sexual intercourse with the teen. Arrested on June 9, 2015, Stanton was charged in Riley County with aggravated criminal sodomy.

    A decade after being assaulted by Stanton at Camp Lemonnier, a decade after being doubted by the Marine Corps and accused of lying at court martial, a decade after Stanton had walked free, a detective from Kansas — where testimony about prior acts of sexual misconduct is admissible in court — called Rose to say that he was building a case against Stanton.

    At trial, Stanton testified that he and the teenager had engaged in consensual oral and anal sex. The teenager countered that he had been unconscious. “At no point did I knowingly or intentionally hurt anyone,” Stanton maintained.

    The 22-year-old victim did not appear at the trial — but Rose did. Then an Army captain with a wife and 2-year-old child, he flew to Kansas to tell his story once more. It was his 34th birthday.

    This time, Rose’s testimony along with the victims of the 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2015 assaults was enough to sway the judge, who noted a distinct pattern. “They involved alcohol, they involved partying, usually asleep or perhaps passed out. … Most of them were in the military,” observed Judge Meryl D. Wilson.

    “It’s very troubling — this is not the first time you had taken advantage of someone,” said Wilson. “The sad things about these situations is it doesn’t just impact you.” Wilson found Stanton was guilty of one count of aggravated criminal sodomy for his assault of the teenage soldier and sentenced him to 49 years in prison. He was also sentenced to 18 years (to be served concurrently) for failing to properly register as a sex offender in Kansas.

    The National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., on Nov. 18, 2022.

    Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

    Pentagon Dysfunction

    Last July, an investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault of U.S. military personnel in Africa was far more common and widespread than the Pentagon reported to Congress.

    The Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office compiles annual reports that claim to include all allegations of sexual assault involving U.S. military personnel. Between 2010 and 2020, the Pentagon listed just 73 cases of sexual assault in the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, area of operations. Yet criminal investigation files, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, show that military criminal investigators logged at least 158 allegations of sexual offenses in Africa during that same period.

    The case files revealed that these charges of sexual misconduct involving U.S. military personnel occurred in at least 22 countries in Africa, including 13 nations that do not appear in the annual Department of Defense reports. Some of the allegations accuse members of the military, while others recount attacks on U.S. personnel by civilians on or near U.S. outposts. For 2006, the year that Justin Rose reported his assault by Jase Stanton, the Defense Department’s official annual report doesn’t even offer a breakdown of such attacks by country.

    A March 2020 report by a military advisory committee lamented the “ difficulty in obtaining, uniform, accurate, and complete information on sexual offense cases across the military .” Last November, The American Prospect reported that Pentagon officials were long aware that the military’s system for reporting sexual assaults was dysfunctional, leading to underestimates of the scale of the problem. This may help explain the wide discrepancy between the Pentagon’s annual figures and the AFRICOM files obtained by The Intercept . Earlier this year, in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Reps. Katie Porter, D-Calif., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., took the Pentagon to task for its failures in tracking sexual assault. “Poor data management makes it difficult for DoD leadership to understand the scope of the problem or respond effectively,” they wrote .

    The Pentagon notes that survivors of sexual assault are often reluctant to come forward for a variety of reasons, including a desire to move on, maintain privacy, and avoid feelings of shame. Yet troops say that even when they do speak out , they often face a military culture and command structure that doesn’t take their allegations seriously and a military justice system that provides little accountability. 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 statistics . That conviction rate represents 0.88 percent of the cases.

    This year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order making sexual harassment, for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.

    The effects of poor accountability and shame surrounding sexual assault while on active duty can continue far beyond one’s period of military service. “Despite successes in ensuring access to care for men who experienced MST, ongoing stigma related to experiencing sexual trauma in men also may be a barrier to seeking care,” Randal Noller, a VA spokesperson, told The Intercept. “We are looking at every avenue to help address this concern and inform men who experienced MST that VA believes them, that they are not alone, and we are here to help.”

    Last year, in the face of increasing congressional pressure, Austin recommended that decisions to prosecute cases of sexual assault be taken out of the chain of command. In December 2021, Congress passed significant military justice reform that did so, which may prevent retaliation and lead more survivors to report sexual offenses. This year, President Joe Biden also signed an executive order making sexual harassment , for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.

    Triangle, Virginia -- Friday, November 18, 2022Justin Rose, a former Marine, poses for a portrait outside of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia. While deployed to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in 2005, Rose was sexually assaulted by another Marine.CREDIT: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

    Justin Rose stands outside of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., on Nov. 18, 2022.

    Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

    “Changes Will Happen”

    Today, Jase Stanton is incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. Barring parole board intervention or credit for “good time,” his earliest release date is January 1, 2059 — 53 years to the day that he assaulted Justin Rose.

    Stanton did not reply to text messages sent via an app that allows communications with inmates or to a letter sent to him by The Intercept.

    “In the years since then, I came to realize that it wasn’t the assault that had the most enduring effect on me,” Rose said. “It was people’s refusal to believe that one man would assault another man. It was the mockery from leaders that I had trusted and the implication that, if it had happened, I must have done something to invite it.”

    Rose, now a major in the Army Reserve, still grapples with feelings that, somehow, he remains at fault. “There is guilt on my behalf. I didn’t present a convincing enough case,” he said of his testimony at Stanton’s 2006 court martial. “And these two soldiers down at Fort Riley paid for it. What he did to them was substantially worse than what he did to me, and that’s a shitty feeling — that I didn’t do anything to help them.”

    But Bethany Fields, the Riley County prosecutor, credits Rose’s willingness to testify in 2015 as having a major influence on Stanton’s conviction and lengthy prison sentence. “The case got delayed a couple times, so we had to call and tell the earlier victims that the dates had changed, but Justin stuck with me. That was huge,” she said. “In this case, the issue was consent. We had DNA, so there was no question that the act happened. The issue was whether or not the victim consented. Because we had Justin and others come in and say, ‘This happened to me and I didn’t consent,’ ‘I saw him do this and that person didn’t consent’; because we had all these other people who said they had been sleeping or drinking or passed out and didn’t consent, it made for a much stronger case.”

    Fields believes that testifying about these traumas will help to hasten change. “The more the word gets out about this type of assault, the more that people are willing to talk about this, the more people speak out,” she said, “the more changes will happen and the less victims we will have in the future.”

    Rose said that he’s seen a shift in military culture since his assault at Camp Lemonnier — and that it’s been driven by survivors.

    “There was a perception, as a male sexual assault victim, that you wanted it. And if you didn’t, you could have fought back harder. And that creates a culture of silence,” he said. “Today, you see a lot more people being open about their stories. People are willing to come forward. They’re not ashamed of what has happened to them. And because of that, things are changing.”

    The post In U.S. Military, Sexual Assault Against Men Is Vastly Underreported appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Democratic and Republican Senators Demand Transfer of Gray Eagle Drone to Ukraine

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Monday, 28 November, 2022 - 16:23 · 2 minutes

    A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to give Ukraine a top-tier U.S. drone capable of firing four Hellfire missiles or eight Stinger munitions. The 16 senators, led by Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst and West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, called the Gray Eagle MQ-1C “the Ukrainian government’s highest-priority military equipment transfer request” of unmanned aerial systems and said it would have “the potential to drive the strategic course of the war in Ukraine’s favor.”

    Despite aggressive lobbying from the drone industry, the Gray Eagle’s manufacturer General Atomics, the Ukrainian government, and a slew of U.S. lawmakers, the Biden administration and Pentagon have so far declined to approve the transfer of the drones. They have cited concerns about exporting sensitive components on the drone, including a Raytheon-manufactured targeting and surveillance system. While the U.S. has exported previous generations of weaponized drones to its allies, it has never approved a foreign sale of the Gray Eagle.

    In their November 22 letter , the senators — including Republicans Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley as well as Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Mark Kelly — wrote, “Most importantly, armed [drones] could find and attack Russian warships in the Black Sea, breaking its coercive blockade and alleviate dual pressures on the Ukrainian economy and global food prices.” The senators asserted, “A Russian victory over Ukraine would significantly damage American security and prosperity.”

    As The Intercept noted on November 18, the proliferation of drone warfare in Ukraine has been fueled by both sides — with Russia utilizing Iranian-made Shahed drones in swarm attacks against Ukrainian targets, including civilian infrastructure. The U.S. and other NATO countries have given Kyiv some 2,500 Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost “suicide” drones, which effectively function as small, remote-controlled cruise missiles. Ukraine has also been using larger Turkish-manufactured Bayraktar TB-2 drones, which are a cheaper and less powerful version of the premiere U.S. drones used widely in “counterterrorism” operations in the Middle East and Africa.

    President Joe Biden has repeatedly indicated that he does not want to unnecessarily increase U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, and the White House has sought to calibrate its actions in support of Ukraine in part based on how Russian President Vladimir Putin will perceive them. Already, Russian officials routinely state that they are not just fighting Kyiv’s forces, but also U.S. and NATO infrastructure. On November 9, the Wall Street Journal reported that Biden was concerned the transfer of the Gray Eagles “could escalate the conflict and signal to Moscow that the U.S. was providing weapons that could target positions inside Russia.”

    There are indications that the U.S. is considering modifying some of the components on the Gray Eagle and swapping them out for less sensitive technologies in order to move forward with supplying the drones to Ukraine. In their letter, the senators noted that AGM-114 Hellfire missiles “have been reviewed and exported to over twenty-five U.S. partners.” Last week, a Pentagon spokesperson said that “nothing has been ruled out.” The senators asked the White House to respond to their letter no later than November 30.

    The post Democratic and Republican Senators Demand Transfer of Gray Eagle Drone to Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept .

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      I Experienced Jack Smith's Zeal Firsthand. Will Trump Get the Same Treatment?

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 23 November, 2022 - 16:15 · 6 minutes

    Jack Smith, the prosecutor named as special counsel to oversee investigations related to former President Donald Trump, at The Hague, Nov. 10, 2020.

    Jack Smith, the prosecutor named as special counsel to oversee investigations related to former President Donald Trump, at The Hague on Nov. 10, 2020.

    Photo: Peter Dejong/AP

    Jack Smith came after me. If he goes after Donald Trump with the same unrelenting ferocity, Trump will be in trouble.

    On Friday, Smith was appointed special counsel to handle two ongoing criminal investigations of Trump: the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Attorney General Merrick Garland chose Smith to oversee both cases to avoid accusations of political bias, following Trump’s announcement last week that he plans to run for president in 2024. Trump’s early announcement was clearly an effort to insulate himself from criminal prosecution, and Garland’s countermove seems designed to frustrate the ex-president’s attempt to use the political system for his personal legal benefit.

    Most recently a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, Smith is a longtime federal prosecutor known for his aggressiveness . “I was described by Steve Bannon (and, sigh, many others) as a pit bull,” former Justice Department lawyer Andrew Weissmann, who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump and Russia, tweeted . “Jack Smith makes me look like a golden retriever puppy.”

    Unfortunately, I have firsthand experience with Smith’s aggressiveness. He was part of the Justice Department team that turned my life upside down by trying, for seven years, to force me to reveal confidential sources that I’d used to report on a botched CIA operation.

    The Justice Department first subpoenaed me in January 2008 to try to get me to reveal my sources and continued to target me until January 2015. The Justice Department kept coming at me, even though the federal judge in my case repeatedly ruled against them and sided with me. Each time the judge quashed one of their subpoenas, I thought I was finally done — but then the prosecutors would issue another one. It was excruciating.

    Still, I refused to reveal my sources, and the Justice Department finally gave in. I won the battle in 2015, but only after the case went to the Supreme Court, and only after then-Attorney General Eric Holder ordered the prosecutors to back off because he was getting so much bad press for seeking to jail a reporter for refusing to disclose his confidential sources.

    I know that the prosecution team was angered by Holder’s order to give up; they wanted to keep coming after me.

    Smith was involved in the leak prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling , a former CIA officer, who was accused of being a source about the ill-fated CIA operation. Justice Department prosecutors have repeatedly targeted low-level officials, like former NSA contractor Reality Winner , in leak investigations and have sought draconian sentences against them. By contrast, they have shown extraordinary leniency toward high-ranking officials, like former CIA Director David Petraeus , caught up in similar investigations, many of whom have been let off with the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

    With the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation, Smith must decide whether to prosecute Trump on the same kind of criminal charges that have been widely used in previous cases involving alleged leaks of classified information.

    Will Jack Smith give Trump the kid-glove treatment that other high-ranking officials have so long enjoyed?

    The question for Smith is whether he will seek heavy charges against Trump, like he and the Justice Department sought in the Sterling case and against many other low-level officials in the past. Or will he give Trump the kid-glove treatment that other high-ranking officials have so long enjoyed?

    His decision on the Mar-a-Lago case will show whether Smith really is an aggressive prosecutor — or just aggressive against the powerless.

    Of course, Smith could decide not to prosecute Trump in the documents case because he has come to believe that the laws governing the handling of classified information are too strict, and that no one, including low-ranking whistleblowers, should face serious penalties in such cases. But such a massive change of heart by a career prosecutor is highly unlikely.

    Smith will have a major advantage over Robert Mueller , the special counsel in the long-running Trump-Russia case, in that he is stepping into investigations that are already well underway and staffed with teams of career Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents. It should be much easier for him to quickly make decisions than it was for Mueller.

    The documents case is a straightforward matter involving the theft and mishandling of classified documents, as well as efforts to obstruct the federal investigation into their disappearance. The evidence appears conclusive that Trump illegally stole classified documents after his presidency, and then tried to block the investigation into the documents by hiding them, lying about them, and getting others to lie on his behalf as well.

    The biggest obstacle to a quick resolution of the documents case is Trump’s ongoing campaign to claim that he has a special legal status as a former president that precludes his prosecution in the case. He and his lawyers have, at various times, claimed both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege to try to block the government’s access to documents seized at Mar-a-Lago during a court-authorized FBI raid in August. He has also said that he owns the documents outright, and that he has the right to keep documents from his time as president.

    But while Trump has won some favorable rulings from a federal district judge he appointed, prosecutors have already been able to reverse some of the lower court’s rulings. On Tuesday, prosecutors sought a ruling from a federal appeals court that would end the role of a “special master” appointed by the district judge to review documents in the case. Thus it may not be long before the legal maneuverings sputter out, and Smith will have to make a decision on whether to prosecute.

    The case involving Trump’s efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election, culminating with the January 6 insurrection, is more complex than the documents case — yet it is still far less complicated than the Trump-Russia investigation.

    The Trump-Russia case was about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win — and whether Trump or anyone in his circle collaborated with Moscow in its meddling. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation also became a major focus for Mueller. But such a sprawling probe, involving a foreign country, was too much for Mueller; he never moved aggressively to get information out of Russia. Ultimately, he pulled his punches, and was unwilling to indict a sitting president.

    By contrast, Smith won’t have to get information out of a foreign adversary to prove his case in connection with the 2020 election — and he won’t have to worry about indicting a president who is still in office.

    The main question for Smith in the case will be how to narrow the investigation’s focus to bring an indictment of Trump under one or more specific criminal laws. Until now, prosecutors have focused on the role Trump and others played in arranging to have fake presidential electors put forward from key states, thus overturning Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College.

    But Smith could broaden the investigation to include Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection. Already, the Justice Department has brought seditious conspiracy cases against right-wing militia leaders involved in the insurrection; jury deliberations have begun in the sedition case against Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four others.

    If he is truly aggressive, Smith could seek similar charges against Donald Trump.

    The post I Experienced Jack Smith’s Zeal Firsthand. Will Trump Get the Same Treatment? appeared first on The Intercept .

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      The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Sunday, 20 November, 2022 - 11:00 · 26 minutes

    O n a rainy Saturday morning in May, Hayanuddin Afghan, a former member of a CIA-backed militia that was once his country’s most brutal and effective anti-Taliban force, welcomed me to his new home in a hilly neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

    He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child, was baking traditional Afghan bread with flour from Aldi’s. The trip downtown to buy groceries was among the greatest challenges of Hayanuddin’s new life in Pittsburgh. It involved hauling heavy bags back home on foot and in multiple city buses, whose schedules were unknowable since he didn’t speak English and had not downloaded the relevant app.

    “It is difficult to descend from a very strong position to a very weak position,” Hayanuddin told me. In Afghanistan, “we had value. It was our country, and we were making sense for that country. But now, even our generals and commanders, everyone is in the same position.”

    In Afghanistan, it was impossible to talk at any length to members of the secretive commando forces known as the Zero Units. They hunted the Taliban in night raids and were widely accused of killing civilians , including children . But last September, Hayanuddin and his Zero Unit comrades were the beneficiaries of the most successful aspect of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: the CIA’s rescue of its allied militias . Their arrival in the U.S. over the last year has cracked open one of the war’s blackest boxes.

    My conversations with Hayanuddin and several other militia members yielded new details about the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA. Their fighters hold clues to many of the war’s mysteries, including how U.S. intelligence engineered and oversaw years of deadly night raids that contributed to the Taliban’s ultimate victory, and how a secret deal between longtime enemies may have hastened the lightning collapse of the Afghan security forces last August.

    Celebrated as heroes by their American handlers and some Afghans who oppose the Taliban, militiamen like Hayanuddin were feared and detested by many rural Afghans, who bore the brunt of their harrowing raids. While hundreds of Zero Unit members and their closest relatives made it to the U.S., they left behind extended families who have suffered abuse, imprisonment, and death threats under the new government.

    The CIA did not respond to detailed questions about its role in overseeing, evacuating, and resettling Zero Unit members and whether the agency would do more to help militiamen and their families left behind in Afghanistan. “The United States made a commitment to the people who worked for us that we would create a concrete pathway to U.S. citizenship for those who gave so much to assist us over the years,” an agency spokesperson told me in an email. “It will take time, but we never forget [our] partners and are committed to helping those who assisted us. We are continuing to work closely with the State Department and other US government agencies on this effort.”

    “With regard to allegations of human rights abuses,” the email continued, “the U.S. takes these claims very seriously, and we take extraordinary measures, beyond the minimum legal requirements to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict and strengthen accountability for the actions of partners. A false narrative [exists] about these forces that has persisted over the years due to a systematic propaganda campaign by the Taliban.”

    Hayanuddin said that he and his comrades took care to avoid harming bystanders during their raids, even using loudspeakers to warn women to stay inside or shelter in basements before the fighting began. “For me, it was like a holy war,” he said. “I was there to target bad guys.” But he also described lingering feelings of rage, guilt, and remorse, and connected his struggle in Pittsburgh to his past. At one point, he wondered aloud if he was being punished.

    “Sometimes I can’t control my anger and my anxiety,” he told me. “My heart is so sad, like someone is squeezing it very hard. I don’t know why. Maybe because of what happened back home or what is happening here.”

    Reversal of Fortune

    I met Hayanuddin last spring, at an Afghan New Year’s celebration in a park in Pittsburgh, where we had both recently settled as refugees. I had worked for the New York Times in Kabul for five years and made many trips to the front lines to report on the Afghan security forces, including in the days before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital last August. I was evacuated with other Times staffers to Houston, where I lived in a hotel for several months before getting a job as a visual journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and moving north.

    At first, Hayanuddin didn’t want to talk to me. But after several attempts, he grew more comfortable, in part because he thought he was talking about an episode of the war that was closed, and in part because we were both exiles from the same place, trying to start new lives in Pittsburgh while still longing for home.

    Hayanuddin had served six years with a unit known as 03, fighting the Taliban across Afghanistan’s southern deserts from his base in a compound previously occupied by the one-eyed former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. U.S. special operators had commandeered the property when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001 and turned it into a redoubt for American and Afghan intelligence forces. With hundreds of other Zero Unit fighters, Hayanuddin crossed shifting front lines in the final days of the war to get to Kabul’s CIA-controlled Eagle Base . From there, he was airlifted to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he briefly worked security before being handed $8,000 in cash — half a year’s salary — and flown with his wife and three young children to Fort Dix.

    At 37, with a seventh-grade education, Hayanuddin, along with his comrades, is facing a reversal of fortune that is humiliating, infuriating, and utterly intractable. After almost two decades as an American proxy — from guarding U.S. bases to killing Afghans in partnership with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency — he has landed, as a poor and vulnerable refugee, in a three-bedroom apartment with flowered curtains he had to harangue the resettlement agency to install in keeping with Pashtun culture, which dictates that a woman must be shielded from the eyes of passing strangers.

    The Zero Units, also known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were born soon after the first U.S. military and intelligence operatives arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Formed in 2002, they operated entirely under U.S. control until 2012, Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, told me in August from London, where he leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. “The government of Afghanistan had no interference in these units,” said Zia, who spent many years in senior roles in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including as deputy director of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which nominally oversaw the units in recent years.

    The first of what would become the Zero Units operated in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and other militants often sought refuge between attacks on U.S., NATO, and Afghan government forces. That militia, known as the Khost Protection Force, or KPF, covered the southeastern region of the country. Later, the CIA created and trained at least three more units: 01, which operated in Kabul, Logar, and Wardak provinces in central Afghanistan; 02, based in Jalalabad, which fought in the east; and Hayanuddin’s unit, 03, based in Kandahar and fighting across the south.

    In 2010, under pressure from then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. officials agreed to transfer oversight of the Zero Units to NDS “physically, but not technically,” Zia said. “We had the names and ranks of members of Zero Units,” he told me. “But their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

    “Their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

    As the Obama administration transitioned from combat operations to a counterterrorism and advisory mission in Afghanistan after 2011, the U.S. handed control of several Zero Units over to the Karzai government, Zia said. But the CIA retained control of other key units, including the Kabul-based 01; the KPF; and Hayanuddin’s 03.

    The units targeted the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Al Qaeda, but they were not accountable to the Afghan government — not even to the president. In 2019, Afghanistan’s then-national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, responded to allegations of extrajudicial killings by 01 — including massacres of children in madrassas — by noting that the unit operated “in partnership with the CIA.”

    Hayanuddin had a front-row seat to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now he can describe what he saw and heard in the war’s final months. The Zero Units were built to work in tandem with U.S. air support, but in August 2020, a year before the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, U.S. forces began to radically scale back their air support for his unit, Hayanuddin said.

    “Our American advisers left our bases for Kabul, and the choppers that would wait in our base on the edge of Kandahar City left with them,” he recalled. “Our commanders would only report to Americans about our operations, and the Americans would just say, ‘Go ahead.’ We were not working as closely as we used to.”

    When the Americans took away their planes, the Afghans’ missions grew much more treacherous. “The American surveillance aircraft would tell us how many people were inside a building and how many of them were armed, and what weapons they have,” Hayanuddin said. “But those details were not there anymore.”

    With U.S. air support gone and the fledgling Afghan Air Force unable to provide comparable intelligence , more Zero Unit members got hurt. The planes that had once ferried them to field hospitals in minutes were gone too. In February 2020, when U.S. drones and other aircraft circled over their operations, one of Hayanuddin’s comrades, Akmal, was blown up by a roadside bomb. The Americans airlifted him to a military hospital and he survived, Hayanuddin said, though he lost both his legs. But eight months later, another unit member, Shahidullah, was shot twice in the abdomen. This time, there was no airlift, and Hayanuddin’s unit was stuck in enemy territory. Shahidullah died on the spot.

    After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the CIA gave the NDS a year’s budget for the Zero Units and said the agency would no longer support them, Zia told The Intercept from London. But the final Zero Units were not transferred to Afghan control, he said, until after Biden announced the full U.S. withdrawal in April 2021 and the last American forces and intelligence operatives began to leave.

    A member of the Taliban Badri 313 military unit stands besides damaged vehicles kept near the destroyed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) base in Deh Sabz district northeast of Kabul on September 6, 2021 after the US pulled all its troops out of the country. -  (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP) (Photo by AAMIR QURESHI/AFP via Getty Images)

    Members of the Taliban give a tour of the destroyed CIA-operated Eagle Base in Deh Sabz district, northeast of Kabul, on Sept. 6, 2021.

    Photo: Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images

    “Like Committing Suicide”

    The Zero Units were designed to capture and kill in targeted raids, not to fight on battlefields. They were widely known as among the most effective elite units in the Afghan security forces, and last summer, as the U.S. military pulled out and the Taliban advanced, many in the Ghani government and the Afghan military looked to them for salvation.

    “I am not sure if our commanders got some money in bribes from provincial officials or the government in Kabul,” Hayanuddin said. “But they started turning a blind eye to our standards and sending us to several missions a day and making us suffer heavy casualties.”

    Sometimes seven or eight unit members were killed each month, he said, an unprecedented rate for the elite unit. “Once, I remember that all our unit members started crying and protesting because of being overused. Our commanders never listened to that. They would still force us to go to operations all over the south.”

    As casualties rose and the war intensified, the morale of Zero Unit members cratered, an Afghan doctor who fought for 02 told me. Like Hayanuddin, the doctor was evacuated last summer; he asked me not to use his name for fear of repercussions now that he and his family are in the United States.

    When his commander would ask militia members to go on operations, the doctor told me, some would faint. They would say that “going to an operation is like committing suicide,” he recalled, “as there is no air support and not enough weapons and equipment.”

    Rumors that U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar had yielded an agreement to essentially give Afghanistan to the Taliban didn’t help. “The Taliban would send tribal elders to different security forces and tell them that it was decided in Doha that the province where they are stationed should be handed over to the Taliban, so better you don’t fight and avoid the casualties,” the doctor said. “The security forces would accept that and give up fighting.”

    The Afghan security forces couldn’t keep up with the losses. In May 2021 alone, more than 400 pro-government forces were killed . Afghans were no longer willing to join the security forces because the job had become too dangerous.

    “We had very smart people in our unit,” Hayanuddin said. “I remember that on a single day, one of our guys, without proper equipment, cleared nearly 30 roadside bombs” in Maiwand District, a Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar. Fighters with 03 repeatedly forced the Taliban out of Kandahar’s Arghandab District in the spring of 2021, he said, but when the regular Afghan army and police took over, the Taliban surged back.

    Both Hayanuddin and the doctor from 02 suspect that the Afghan security forces largely surrendered the south not because they were defeated on the battlefield but as part of a political deal. They were not alone in thinking this. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took control of dozens of Afghan police outposts in the districts surrounding Kandahar.

    “It was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

    “The leadership of the Afghan security forces asked ground forces in many provinces across the country to stop fighting. We have seen videos on social media that soldiers were crying when they were told to leave their outposts and drop their weapons,” Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former Afghan deputy interior minister and military analyst, told me. “This means that it was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

    Soldiers who insisted on fighting found their supply lines cut and didn’t get the support they needed, Yarmand said, adding that when Afghan forces in the northern province of Takhar wanted to stand their ground, they were given a choice: surrender to the Taliban or drive to the mountains of Panjshir, where the last forces resisting the Taliban were holed up.

    Near Kandahar, Hayanuddin’s unit ran into police officers trying to flee. “They said their outpost was captured by the Taliban,” he recalled. “We took them with us, and there was no Taliban in their outpost. When we asked why, they said their tribal elder told them to leave the outpost to the Taliban. This is only one example, but it happened many times.”

    In June 2021, 03 was deployed from one front line to another as district after district fell to the insurgents. By the end of that month, nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts were under Taliban control.

    As the fighting intensified, other Afghan security forces pinned their hopes on the Zero Units. On August 4, 2021, I was with the Afghan National Police Counter Resistance Unit outside Sarposa Prison, one of the main front lines in Kandahar. The fighting picked up on one edge of the city just as the police machine gun stopped working. I asked Shafiqullah Kaliwal, a unit commander, what they were going to do.

    “The 03 will come,” he told me, “and they will push back the Taliban to their original outposts.”

    The next day, Kaliwal told me that 03 had indeed come to their rescue and forced the Taliban to retreat. But when the Zero Unit moved on, the Taliban quickly recaptured the territory.

    Zia confirmed that the pressure on Zero Units was unsustainable. In the last four months of the war in Kandahar, Zia said, “the casualties of Zero Units were very high. It was not comparable to the past 20 years of war. The reason for that was that they were not used professionally.”

    A Taliban flag flies at a square in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, after fighting between Taliban and Afghan security forces Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. The Taliban captured the provincial capital near Kabul on Thursday, the 10th the insurgents have taken over a weeklong blitz across Afghanistan as the U.S. and NATO prepare to withdraw entirely from the country after decades of war. (AP Photo/Gulabuddin Amiri)

    A Taliban flag flies at a square in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, after the Taliban captured the provincial capital, on Aug. 12, 2021.

    Photo: Gulabuddin Amiri/AP

    A Secret Deal

    One of the many mysteries of the war’s final days was how the Zero Units managed to make their way through Taliban-held territory to Kabul, where they were evacuated to the United States and other countries. An apparent agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. helps explain their unlikely escape.

    On August 11, 2021, one of the main government lines of defense in Kandahar City collapsed to the Taliban . Hayanuddin was on leave at the time, but the next day, he said, his comrades in 03 and other security forces drove to Kandahar Air Field, which by then was in Taliban territory. There, they spent two days waiting to be flown to Kabul.

    On August 14, the Taliban captured Jalalabad City, the provincial capital of Nangarhar Province, where Hayanuddin was spending his leave with his family. Terrified, he and his younger brother, who had also served in 03, stayed up all night, trying to contact Hayanuddin’s commander for orders. When they finally reached the commander, he told them to get to Kabul. The next morning, they climbed into a taxi and set off on an anxious two-hour journey through territory now controlled by their enemies. If anyone identified them, they thought, they would be killed.

    But the trip was far easier than they’d expected as, one after another, the Taliban fighters manning checkpoints let them pass. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Hayanuddin told me. “They were our enemy. We were intensively fighting just a day before the collapse, but now we were staying in their territory or driving through it. We thought we were taking a big risk, but now as I think about it, it seems the Taliban didn’t want to attack us as part of their deal with the U.S.”

    It wasn’t just a few guys in taxis who managed to cross Taliban checkpoints with ease. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, the doctor from 02 told me that he drove from Jalalabad to Kabul with his fellow unit members in a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles packed with weapons and equipment. The doctor thought they would have to fight their way through the checkpoints, but each time, the Taliban soldiers called their commanders and waved him and the other Afghan militiamen through.

    The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so.

    The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so, according to the doctor from 02 and two former Afghan intelligence officials, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from the Taliban for speaking to a journalist. The U.S. evacuation plan depended on Zero Unit members working security at the Kabul airport, and the Americans had told those fighters to get passports shortly before the republic collapsed, Zia, the former senior security official, said.

    The CIA declined to comment. The Taliban did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

    Hayanuddin and his brother made it safely to Eagle Base, the Kabul headquarters of the CIA and 01, where they spent three nights. One by one, the Zero Units boarded Chinook helicopters and left the base for the Kabul airport: first 01, then 02, and then Hayanuddin’s unit, 03.

    Hayanuddin spent five nights in the airport, providing security for the evacuation of thousands of desperate Afghans . In those days and later, Zero Unit members were accused of firing over the heads of crowds and beating Afghan civilians who were trying to leave. Hayanuddin denied mistreating people at the airport, but my own encounter with a Zero Unit fighter on August 19 suggests there is truth to the charges. As I made my way through crowds in front of the airport terminal, trying to reach my American colleague and the U.S. Marines, a member of the Zero Units stopped me. I explained who I was and where I was going, but the fighter ordered me to sit down. If I didn’t, he said, he would shoot me with dozens of bullets, and no one would question him.

    At last, it was Hayanuddin’s turn to call his family to join him on a flight to the U.S., via Abu Dhabi and Germany. Like many Afghans, Hayanuddin was married to two women. He had moved one of his wives, who he asked me not to name, to Nangarhar with their three kids several months before the collapse, and one of his brothers managed to escort them to Kabul to meet Hayanuddin at the airport. But Hayanuddin’s other wife was still in his home province of Kunar with their four children when the republic fell.

    “My first wife, who was in Kunar, couldn’t make it to Kabul,” he told me, “because there was no one to accompany her.”

    Hayanuddin also left his parents and siblings behind, including the brother who had served alongside him in 03. The Americans refused to evacuate him, Hayanuddin said, because he had left the unit a year before the Taliban took control.

    Thankful, but Angry

    In Pittsburgh, Hayanuddin and several other Zero Unit members found work at a halal grocery. One of them was Khan Wali Momand, a former school principal who started working for 02 in Jalalabad as a security guard in 2017. Momand now lives with his wife and children in Section 8 housing in Duquesne, a Pittsburgh suburb. When I met him, he was unloading boxes; he has since gotten a different job at another local grocery store, which he prefers because it doesn’t involve as much heavy lifting.

    Momand started working with 02 through his brother, Inayatullah, who he says served 16 years with the unit but left just days before the government collapsed because his wife was ill. Like Hayanuddin’s brother, Inayatullah was left behind when the Taliban took over, and he and Momand’s other relatives immediately became targets for retribution. Inayatullah went into hiding, and when I spoke to Momand this spring, he was consumed by grief and worry. “Every time I receive a call from home,” Momand told me, “I think it will be bad news.”

    This spring, members of the Taliban kidnapped two of Momand’s teenage nephews and held them for five days in an attempt to force the family to hand over Inayatullah. The nephews were released after tribal elders in the area promised to help the Taliban find Inayatullah. He has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa to come to the United States, Momand said, but has not heard back.

    “We were so loyal to Americans that we wouldn’t leave their bags behind in the battlefield, but now they are leaving behind my brother, who helped them for 16 years,” Momand told me. “It happened many times during missions with 02 that an American adviser or soldier would get shot, and we would risk our life to take them out of the battlefield. Look at our level of loyalty and their level of loyalty.”

    Momand is deeply conflicted over his role in the war. When he began working with the Americans five years ago, he drew the enmity of the Taliban and many acquaintances. In his conservative village, he had a hard time defending his decision and explaining how helping the Americans would benefit his country. Now he wonders whether he made the right choice — whether it was worth it, given the price he and his family have paid. He’s an outsider in Duquesne and may never be able to go back to Afghanistan. Did he join 02 for the wrong reasons, he wonders, or was he used? Did he betray his country, his people, after all?

    Momand said he is grateful to Biden. “He hasn’t left us to the Taliban. If I had been left behind in Afghanistan, my whole family and I would have been killed by now,” he said. “But there is no one in the U.S. to rescue me from the tough situation here.”

    As our conversation drew to a close, Momand’s anger flared. He had told his story many times, he said, to workers from resettlement agencies and other relief organizations. “Everyone comes here and asks about my problems and the problems of my family, but I don’t see any outcome of telling these stories,” he said. “Do you enjoy hearing my painful life story?”

    MFA_7333-es_2

    Hayanuddin reviews a document he received through the U.S. Postal Service, a new concept for him, as his son looks on in their home in Pittsburgh.

    Photo: Fahim Abed for The Intercept

    Only in the Darkness

    At Hayanuddin’s house that rainy May morning, an oilcloth was spread over the living room carpet, and we sat around it while his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Simina, brought out loaves of hot fresh bread, eggs, warm yogurt, and a giant thermos of sweet, milky black tea.

    As we ate, Hayanuddin kept an eye on his phone. At 9 a.m., an alarm sounded, and Simina brought him a pair of white athletic socks, a jacket, and an umbrella. Back in Afghanistan, his American advisers had stressed the need for punctuality, often arriving 15 minutes early for meetings with their Afghan counterparts. He feared that if he were late to work, he’d get fired. And he needed this job.

    He took home about $1,600 a month after taxes, he told me. The resettlement agency was covering the first three months of rent on his apartment in Pittsburgh; after that, he’d have to spend $1,500 a month, nearly his entire paycheck, on rent and utilities. He was getting food stamps, but the family budget was tight.

    His house was about five miles from the halal grocery, an easy 15-minute drive. But the bus ride, including a transfer downtown, could take more than an hour. On this day, he would work for nine hours, arriving home between 9 and 10 p.m. The family, including the children, would eat a late dinner together. After that, they’d call Afghanistan, so Hayanuddin and his wife could talk to their parents, and the parents could speak to their grandchildren.

    It was his father, Hayanuddin says, who had convinced him to go to the U.S. last year. “If the Taliban come and they behead you in front of us or shoot you in the head in front of us, that would be a very big trauma for us for our whole life,” his father told him last August. “So if you want to spare us that pain, you should leave.”

    He sometimes regrets it. “We didn’t voluntarily come here, and it is not easy here,” he told me. “That’s the everyday struggle. And then you have a family that is staring at you and hoping that you will fix everything.”

    At 9:20 a.m., Hayanuddin pulled on a black jacket and headed out to the bus stop, a wooden pole with a metal sign at the edge of a busy road. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and took a drag on his Marlboro Red. The resettlement agency gave him transit cards, but when they ran out, he’d have to spend his own money on bus fare.

    Back in Afghanistan, he drove heavy military vehicles over mountainous terrain wearing night vision goggles. But in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. The test was offered in Urdu and Arabic, but not Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and at the time, translators were not allowed. (Several months later, after the local Afghan community complained, the DMV added a test in Persian.)

    “If I would stand in a bus stop in Afghanistan, I would just wave to a taxi and they would stop and take me to where I wanted to go,” he said. “There is no country as good as Afghanistan around the world, if only it were safe enough to live in.”

    After 15 minutes, the bus arrived. Hayanuddin, thoroughly soaked, donned a surgical mask, climbed the steps, and settled into an empty seat. As the bus heaved along the twisting roads, heading downtown, he surveyed the other passengers.

    “Only poor people like me are using the bus,” he noted.

    Back at his apartment, he’d shown me a stack of military ID cards and commendations from the Americans he’d worked with, each signed by a different soldier or officer, praising his service and making promises they couldn’t keep.

    “Your exemplary actions demonstrate your overall commitment to not only safeguard your Village, your District, and Province from those who inflict harm upon the innocent, but also to ensure a better future for all current and future Afghan citizens,” read one certificate, signed by “Master Sergeant Scott” and “Commander Josh” of Special Forces unit ODA 3115.

    “His expertise, unfaltering dedication to duty and work ethic have far exceeded my expectations and he is an inspiration for all who work with him,” said another, marked QSF — for Qandahar Strike Force — National Security Unit 03 and dated March 2021. “Over the past 6 years, He has demonstrated his total loyalty to his unit. His service to the country is a shining example for all his fellows’ unit around him and he demonstrates an unfailing commitment to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.” It was signed by “Mac,” a U.S. adviser.

    “Mr. Ayanudin will be a great asset to the SRF-03,” read a commendation from 2015, “and will make a significant contribution to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.”

    What to make, now, of those papers, those words?

    More than an hour after leaving his house, Hayanuddin disembarked on a desolate street corner and walked a block to the halal grocery, a sprawling brick warehouse complex with murals paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

    Inside, he traded his jacket for a white apron and reappeared behind the meat counter, where he used a mechanized blade to slice chicken breasts.

    The post The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes appeared first on The Intercept .

    • chevron_right

      Midterms Will Determine Republicans' Stance on Ukraine — and America

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Monday, 7 November, 2022 - 15:57 · 6 minutes

    The U.S. Capitol building can be seen past American and Ukrainian flags that were hung on the light posts lining Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden's first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on March 1, 2022 in Washington, DC. According to Administration officials, President Biden spoke on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier today about assisting with the country's defense against Russia and how to hold Russia accountable. President Biden is set to give his first official State of the Union Address at the United States Capitol later tonight where he will speak on his domestic agenda. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

    The U.S. Capitol can be seen past American and Ukrainian flags, in Washington, D.C., on March 1, 2022.

    Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images


    The central question looming over the 2022 midterm elections is whether the Republican Party is morphing into a fascistic organization that wants to end the messy business of elections, voting, and democracy and create a right-wing autocracy instead. Ever since Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection and followed by Republican efforts to downplay the coup attempt, it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the Republican mainstream and the party’s extremist fringe.

    If the Republicans prevail and gain control of Congress, one of the first tests of their true intentions will come when they must decide whether to support continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine in its defense against this year’s brutal Russian invasion.

    In a Republican-controlled Congress, votes on aid to Ukraine are likely to reveal a sharp divide between traditional, hawkish Republicans who oppose the Russian invasion and have supported the Biden administration’s military aid to Ukraine, and the new and growing faction of the Christian evangelical movement known as Christian nationalists, many of whom admire Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and want to cut off American support for Ukraine. Votes on Ukraine will serve as a barometer of whether traditional Republicans still have any influence, and whether they have the will to stand up to the rise of extremism within their ranks.

    Christian nationalists represent a frightening dynamic within the Republican Party. They are theocrats who don’t believe in the separation of church and state and who argue that the United States was founded as a “Christian” nation and needs to return to those origins. They despise Western secularist culture; fear white demographic decline; and deeply resent feminism, homosexuality, abortion rights, and even individualism, which they see as a modern concept at odds with a more traditional, hierarchal society.

    Christian nationalists now dominate the extreme right of the Republican Party, and they have come to believe that Putin is a warrior for Christian fundamentalism and that his invasion of Ukraine is one step in his campaign to crush the global woke left.

    The intra-party fight over aid to Ukraine could be the first battle in a long war for control over the Republican Party’s foreign policy.

    Christian nationalists see Putin as the leader in a powerful right-wing counterattack against liberal secularism and as a protector of their Christian faith. Putin has encouraged this support from Christian nationalists in the United States and other Western nations by co-opting the Russian Orthodox Church and waging a culture war inside Russia, notably with anti-gay and other supposedly “pro-family” measures.

    Now, many in the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party openly want Putin to crush Ukraine’s pro-Western government and win the war. They willingly accept Russian disinformation and often parrot Moscow’s lies about Ukraine.

    Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the loudest voices of Christian nationalism in Congress, and one of the few who doesn’t shy away from the term in public. Earlier this year, she spoke at an event held by a white nationalist group where many in the crowd chanted, “Putin! Putin!”

    Last week, Greene told a rally in Iowa that Congress would cut off funding for Ukraine if Republicans gain control. “Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine.”

    Meanwhile, Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator, tweeted in February that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a “globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.”


    Throughout this year’s campaign, a number of Republican congressional candidates have expressed opposition to continued military support for Ukraine as a kind of political dog whistle to Christian nationalists, signaling that they are on their side without openly advocating for Putin’s victory in Ukraine.

    “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, said earlier this year. (He later dialed that back , saying, “Vladimir Putin is the bad guy in this situation,” while claiming that “we cannot fund a long-term military conflict that I think ultimately has diminishing returns for our own country.”)

    Former President Donald Trump now recognizes the growing power of the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party and has been using pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine rhetoric at his rallies and elsewhere. He’s claimed that Putin has been “smart” in his invasion of Ukraine.

    “So Putin is now saying it’s independent, a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force,” Trump said .

    Along with Trump, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson has also been using pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine talking points, providing a platform for Russian disinformation during the U.S. election campaign. A feedback loop has developed between Carlson and Putin: Carlson will parrot Russian propaganda on Fox News, and then government-controlled Russian television will show that Carlson has repeated those lies.

    Republican congressional leaders, trying to hold together their fragile coalition of traditional Republicans and Christian evangelicals, have not been forthcoming about why so many of their candidates now oppose aid to Ukraine. They don’t want to talk about the rising power of Christian nationalism within the Republican Party.

    Instead, they suggest that the opposition to continued aid for Ukraine stems from growing American isolationism, budgetary constraints, and the possibility of a recession next year.

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has argued that aid to Ukraine will be slashed in a Republican-controlled House because the government can’t afford to spend billions of dollars on it when there are so many economic problems at home. He said in a recent interview that “I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check. And then there’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically. Not doing the border and people begin to weigh that.”

    Representing the hawkish, traditional wing of the Republican Party, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly sought to counter McCarthy’s warning about cutting off aid to Ukraine by insisting that a Republican-controlled Senate would actually demand even more military support for Ukraine than the Biden administration has provided. He said a Republican Senate would seek to ensure the “timely delivery of needed weapons and greater allied assistance to Ukraine.”

    The debate over Ukraine between McCarthy and McConnell will likely lead to a series of bitter fights in the House and Senate, with the White House caught between them.

    The intra-party fight over aid to Ukraine could be the first battle in a long war for control over the Republican Party’s foreign policy. It could also help determine whether anything will stop the Republican Party’s descent into fascism.

    It is clear which side Moscow is supporting. In a recent tweet , Julia Davis, who runs the Russian Media Monitor, linked to a video of Russian state television explaining why “they’re rooting for MAGA Republicans in the midterms.”

    The post Midterms Will Determine Republicans’ Stance on Ukraine — and America appeared first on The Intercept .