The United States has fought more than a dozen “secret wars” over the last two decades, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. Through a combination of ground combat, airstrikes, and operations by U.S. proxy forces, these conflicts have raged from Africa to the Middle East to Asia, often completely unknown to the American people and with minimal congressional oversight.

“This proliferation of secret war is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is undemocratic and dangerous,” wrote Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “The conduct of undisclosed hostilities in unreported countries contravenes our constitutional design. It invites military escalation that is unforeseeable to the public, to Congress, and even to the diplomats charged with managing U.S. foreign relations.”

These clandestine conflicts have been enabled by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, as well as the covert action statute, which allows secret, unattributed operations, primarily conducted by the CIA. The United States has also relied on a set of obscure security cooperation authorities that The Intercept has previously investigated , including in an exposé earlier this year that revealed the existence of unreported U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen . Ebright documents so-called 127e programs, known by their legal designation, in those countries and 12 others: Afghanistan, Cameroon, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, and Tunisia, as well as a country in the Asia-Pacific region that has not yet been publicly identified.

The 127e authority, which allows U.S. commandos to employ local surrogates on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims, is just one of three low-profile efforts analyzed in the Brennan Center report. Another, 10 U.S. Code § 333, often referred to as the “global train-and-equip authority,” allows the Pentagon to provide training and gear to foreign forces anywhere in the world.  The far murkier 1202 authority allows the Defense Department to offer support to foreign surrogates taking part in irregular warfare aimed at near-peer competitors like China and Russia.

The report, released Thursday, offers the most complete analysis yet of the legal underpinnings, congressional confusion, and Pentagon obfuscation surrounding these efforts and explains how and why the Defense Department has been able to conduct under-the-table conflicts for the last 20 years.

“The Brennan Center’s report underscores the need to shine a light on our defense activities that have been cloaked in secrecy for too long. At the bare minimum, the public and Congress need to know where and why we’re sending our service members into harm’s way,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told The Intercept. “I hope this report strengthens the urgency of Congress taking back its war powers, eliminating existing loopholes in security cooperation programs, and ensuring our strategies match our values, goals, and commitment to our service members.”

“Congress’s understanding of U.S. war-making is often no better than the public record,” writes Ebright. “The Department of Defense’s diplomatic counterparts in the Department of State also struggle to understand and gain insight into the reach of U.S. hostilities. Where congressional oversight falters, so too does oversight within the executive branch.”

Ebright’s analysis is particularly illuminating in the case of Somalia, where the United States developed two key proxy forces, the Danab Brigade and the Puntland Security Force. The CIA began building the Puntland Security Force in 2002 to battle the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab and later the Islamic State in Somalia, or ISS. The force was transferred to U.S. military control around 2012 and went on to fight alongside U.S. Special Operations forces for a decade. “In Puntland, we built that capability, training them at the tactical level and in how to support themselves and follow a good counterinsurgency strategy against al-Shabab,” Don Bolduc, the former chief of Special Operations Command Africa and now the Republican candidate for Senate in New Hampshire, told The Intercept in a 2019 interview.

Ebright notes that the proxy fighters were “largely independent of the Somali government, despite being an elite armed brigade and one of Somalia’s most capable special operations units. And their relationship with U.S. forces was long kept secret, with U.S. officials disavowing the presence of military advisers in Somalia until 2014.”

More troubling, her analysis suggests that for a significant period of time, there was no clear legal basis for the U.S. military to fight alongside and direct these forces. The Obama administration designated al-Shabab an associated force of Al Qaeda and thus, a legitimate target under the 2001 AUMF in 2016. That administration did the same for the Islamic State in 2014, but ISS has never been publicly identified as an ISIS-associated force by any administration. This means that the Pentagon developed and fought alongside the Puntland Security Force from 2012 and the Danab Brigade from 2011 — under the 127e and 333 security cooperation authorities — before the AUMF was judged to authorize hostilities against al-Shabab and ISIS, much less ISS.

“The Department of Defense is unequivocal that it does not treat § 333 and 127e as authorizations for use of military force. The reality is not so clear,” writes Ebright. “After all, U.S. forces have used these authorities to create, control, and at times engage in combat alongside groups like the Puntland Security Force and Danab Brigade.”

Over the last 20 years, presidents have consistently claimed broad rights to act in self-defense, not only of U.S. forces but also for partners like the Puntland Security Force and Danab Brigade, which, Ebright notes, potentially allows the U.S. to fight remote adversaries in the absence of any congressional authorization.

Rep. Jacobs said it was difficult to assure the military community in her San Diego district “that we’re doing everything we can to keep them safe when Congress has such little information, let alone oversight over when, where, and how we’re using military force. Attempts to avoid scrutiny from Congress – and Congress’s own abdication of our war powers – is central to how we ended up in forever wars, the spike in civilian casualties, and failed strategies that waste taxpayer dollars and fuel the very conflicts we’re trying to solve.”

Expansive definitions of collective self-defense of proxies are also especially worrisome in regard to the 1202 authority , which requires even less oversight than 333 and 127e and is “used to provide support to foreign forces, irregular forces , groups, or individuals” taking part in irregular warfare. While patterned after 127e, 1202 is aimed not at regional terrorist groups like al-Shabab and ISS but at “rogue states,” such as Iran or North Korea, or near-peer adversaries like Russia and China. “The executive branch’s broad interpretation of its use of force authorities, when combined with 1202, can lead to combat, which Congress hasn’t approved, against powerful states,” Ebright told The Intercept. “For the 1202 authority to have so little oversight when the risks it carries — when you’re running proxy forces against powerful, even nuclear-armed states — is a major mistake.”

The report offers suggestions for improving congressional and public oversight, enforcing the balance of war powers within the government, and preventing hostilities unauthorized by Congress. “Repealing §§ 333, 127e, and 1202 would return the balance of power to where it stood before the war on terror,” Ebright writes, forcing the Pentagon to convince Congress that building foreign proxies abroad is in the United States’s national security interest. This is critical given that working by, with, and through foreign surrogates and allies is key to the Pentagon’s global vision, according to the Biden administration’s recently released National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy .

“Both of those documents underscore that the DOD views security cooperation as the future of its approach,” Ebright told The Intercept. “Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill and in the broader public, we don’t have conversations about what this means, to the detriment of voters understanding where we’re at war and how this is going to affect military involvement and entrenchment abroad.”

The post New Report Sheds Light on America’s Secret Wars appeared first on The Intercept .

T he children were running around the yard playing games next to the family car, when Ashwaq Abdel Kareem heard the roar of a jet plane that foretold an airstrike.

It was near midnight on June 1, 2015. Ashwaq, her husband, and five children were in the backyard of their half-built house in the northern Iraqi town of Hawija. The night sweltered with an oven-like dry heat during an Iraqi summer in which temperatures could soar to 120 degrees in the daytime. Hawija was under ISIS occupation, which meant the entire town had been cut off from electricity, in addition to the general brutality of political rule by the radical group. There was no escape from the temperature except to go outside where a breeze might cool the air.

Far above Ashwaq and her family, a Dutch F-16 fighter jet released a bomb that whistled down to hit a car-bomb factory in the center of Hawija’s industrial district. The F-16’s mission was coordinated by the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS and was planned by the U.S. military. From 2014 to the present day, between 8,000 and 13,000 civilians have died as a result of bombing by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, according to the monitoring organization Airwars; the coalition only acknowledges the deaths of 1,417 civilians. At the height of the bombing in 2017, as the coalition bombed tightly packed urban areas like Mosul, at least 9,000 civilians died, according to The Associated Press . Yet only one civilian received compensation , although the U.S. military did distribute a limited number of condolence or “ex gratia” payments — which are voluntary payments and not an admission of legal liability — reportedly to the families of around 14 victims.

ISIS had stored an estimated 18,000 kilograms of explosives in the factory, which stood in the midst of a crowded neighborhood. Even though the strike targeted a bomb-making factory, Pentagon planners did not factor in the casualties that could be caused by the secondary detonations. When the bomb hit the factory, night turned into day. Residents of Hawija likened it to a nuclear explosion. The earth rippled and waves of shrapnel flew through the air, tearing into people’s flesh. Buildings collapsed into rubble. The air turned yellow from the fire and chemicals, and the midnight sky lit up as though it were the middle of the afternoon. Fifty kilometers away, in the city of Kirkuk, people said they felt the ground shake, according to a report on the bombing by the Dutch monitoring organization PAX.

Ashwaq’s home shuddered, the windows shattered, and bricks and masonry crashed to the ground. The pressure and the heat caused the gasoline in the family car to catch fire, and the vehicle exploded just as Ashwaq’s children ran past. The flaming gas from the car struck her 4-year-old son Omar across the face and lit his head on fire like the tip of a match. Omar’s father, Ahmed Abdallah al-Jamili, says he has the image of his son running, his head aflame, engraved in his mind. He and Ashwaq both thought that Omar would die. The couple rushed the child to the nearest hospital in a neighbor’s car. They could barely see as they drove streets fogged with acrid chemical smoke from still-raging fires.

The explosion killed at least 85 people, but the actual number is likely much higher, though impossible to verify. ISIS controlled the hospital and often refused to treat people who were not ISIS sympathizers, let alone issue death certificates. Additionally, Hawija was a way station for people who had been displaced by the war took as they fled ISIS territory to Kurdistan. Many internally displaced families had gathered in the industrial area, and uncounted people were killed when the factory was hit. Their deaths were not recorded because there was no one to identify them. PAX — which has done extensive research into the bombing — recently uncovered the existence of two mass graves, but they were unable to visit the sites and verify the number of bodies.

Even as it slowly became clear that the U.S. coalition was responsible for what happened, the needs of the victims and survivors were placed last because, for the countries responsible for the carnage, the most important priority was avoiding accountability. Families were forced to hear vague mentions of aid without ever being consulted about what they actually wanted and needed. Now, seven years later, a visit to Hawija shows how the crumbs of help that were eventually promised have apparently not been delivered to any useful extent for the victims.

A “Voluntary” Contribution

Two weeks after the bombing, then-Dutch Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis Plasschaert received a classified report from U.S. Central Command that assessed early casualty estimates of 70 civilians as “credible.” A few weeks after that, Plasschaert told the Dutch Parliament that “as far as known at the moment, the Netherlands had not been involved in any instances of civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in Iraq.”

For more than four years, the Dutch government obfuscated its involvement in the bombing until finally Dutch journalists brought the issue to light. The resulting scandal almost toppled the government and forced Plasschaert to resign, although she quickly recovered; she is currently the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. (A spokesperson for UNAMI told The Intercept that Plasschaert was not available to speak on the bombing.)

Facing pressure from Parliament and growing public anger, the Dutch Ministry of Defense agreed to provide a fund of 4.4 million euros to Hawija as a “voluntary contribution.” The words were chosen carefully. The Dutch government refuses to use the term “compensation.” Sascha Louwhoff, a coordinating spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, explained that if they had issued direct payments to survivors, the Dutch would be opening themselves up to legal responsibility for the bombing. She stated that the Ministry of Defense had no intention of issuing an apology. As she put it, “We are not accountable.”

The Dutch government divided the fund between the United Nations Development Fund and the International Organization for Migration to invest in “‘electricity supplies, economic activities, job opportunities, and water supplies.” UNDP received $1,757,546 and IOM received $3,604,730. Even though the Dutch government had avoided providing compensation to individual people, its fund turned Hawija into one of the few cases where a coalition member offered compensation to a town that had been damaged.

But this money does not seem to have reached the survivors who need it the most — and has riven Hawija as accusations of corruption divide the community.

Following the Money

Not long ago, I drove to Hawija with Tawfan al-Harbi, the head of al-Ghad: a local NGO that partnered with PAX, the Dutch group, to produce a comprehensive report on the aftermath of the strike, based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. Driving from al-Ghad’s Kirkuk office to Hawija, al-Harbi spoke in a steady stream, with regular interruptions from his constantly ringing mobile phone. He is a bouncy middle-aged man who, despite the 110-degree heat, wore a dapper navy and amber pinstriped suit with a matching amber ring and watch. He pointed to different areas that had been under ISIS control, some of which still suffer periodic small-scale attacks from the remnants of the organization. Al-Harbi was deeply unimpressed with the UNDP and IOM projects, which he said had produced minimal results for the budget they were given.

“The international organizations are like a big box. Money goes to guards, hotels, and a very small part goes to the people affected,” he said.

The outskirts of Hawija burst with rich green crops and low tangled brush. The town neighbors a river, and prior to the ISIS occupation, it was a center for agricultural production. Much of its economy also focused on its industrial neighborhood, which was home to factories, car repair shops, and local businesses. The PAX report estimates that the loss of privately owned businesses, possessions, and houses as a result of the bombing comes to around $11 million.

“The international organizations are like a big box. Money goes to guards, hotels, and a very small part goes to the people affected.”

Despite the UNDP and IOM projects, all it takes is driving around the town to understand that after seven years, Hawija is still deeply scarred by the bombing. Entering the town, a stretch of road is unpaved dirt, while another stretch is freshly laid asphalt, a half-finished lopsidedness that repeats throughout much of the town. A freshly built shop stands next to an empty lot filled with rubble remaining from when the neighborhood was obliterated by bombings during the war.

UNDP and IOM told The Intercept in a joint statement in August that the UNDP project had excavated and installed electricity poles and transformers. They added that they anticipated installing an electrical substation in October. IOM’s project consists of clearing rubble, creating jobs through cash-for-work programs, and rehabilitating shops; IOM said in a separate statement to The Intercept that 259 shops had been rehabilitated, six agricultural projects had gone ahead with clearance from local authorities, and 400 individuals had participated in cash-for-work activities . Both organizations stated they had operated in consultation with the community, but none of the survivors who spoke with The Intercept said they had been consulted. This is consistent with PAX’s report, which sampled a much larger group of survivors who said they had never been consulted on how the funds should be distributed.

The remains of the industrial neighborhood are a mix of activity and vast stretches of lots filled with jagged concrete debris. Workers in yellow hard hats hide from the sun in the shade of one building. They are working on the IOM project, although only a few of them are from the areas affected by the bombing; the salaries paid by IOM are not going to the families who were bombed.

The salaries paid by IOM are not going to the families who were bombed.

Another group of men slap mortar onto gray bricks as they build a fresh wall of a shop; they were commissioned by the shop owner but think he got some of his funding from an NGO, though they are not sure which one. This mixture of funding sources seemed to be common in the industrial zone where some shops had been rebuilt on private funds, some appeared to be using IOM’s money, and some appeared to be halfway in between.

An engineer working at what appeared to be UNDP’s electrical project complained that UNDP and the governorate were fighting, and as a result work was slow. He pointed to a building on the site, a low concrete rectangle, and complained that UNDP had vastly overpaid for its construction. These types of claims are hard to verify but are frequently heard in Hawija, where accusations that the NGOs are misappropriating funds flew swiftly from most of the people I interviewed.

Hawija’s mayor is Sabhan Khalaf al-Jubory, a neat man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. In an interview at his office, he said he had only one demand of the Dutch government: that they discontinue working through UNDP or IOM. He accused UNDP of being party to a corruption scandal and IOM of never informing local authorities about their projects. (In an emailed statement, Zena Ali-Ahmad, the UNDP’s resident representative in Iraq, said, “UNDP Iraq is not aware of any instances of corruption associated with this project.”) Airing his grievances, al-Jubory spoke in a resigned tone that evoked the frustration of knowing that this meeting with an international reporter, hardly his first, would most likely not result in any tangible change for the victims of the bombing. He explained that he understands the Dutch government does not want to take legal responsibility for the bombing, but at the same time, he asked that their funding go directly to the survivors.

“Do a project for the families of the people who were killed without taking responsibility,” he said. He agrees with survivors who say cancer cases soared following the bombing, which they suspect is due to the chemicals released by the explosives. “Many people have cancer,” he noted. “Many people need to leave Iraq to get treatments.”

Saba Azeem, a project leader at PAX and lead researcher on the group’s Hawija report, noted that over the course of PAX’s investigation, they had not observed tangible benefits from the UNDP and IOM projects for the survivors of the bombing. But the Dutch, she realizes, are not willing to consider direct support to the survivors. “If they do take on the responsibility or say they are sorry, that could be admitting guilt, and therefore, I think that would lead to a bigger legal issue,” Azeem noted.

U.S. Intelligence

The strike was planned by the United States military and depended on U.S. intelligence. The targeting of the factory was even approved by Lt. Gen. James Terry, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, according to an Army investigation in 2015. A key problem, however, is that prior to the strike, the U.S. military conducted a “collateral damage estimate,” or CDE, that did not account for damage that might be caused by a secondary explosion.

Late last year, the New York Times published a tranche of military records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act that included a detailed military appraisal of the Hawija strike after it had taken place. An article by The Intercept’s Nick Turse revealed that an intelligence official wrote in the appraisal that CDE methodology “ does not account for secondary explosions .” That was the case with the CDE for Hawija — even though, according to Airwars, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had estimated, before the coalition’s attack, that the bomb factory contained around 18,060 kilograms of explosives. As The Intercept reported , when the U.S. Navy detonated a similar amount of explosives in a military test, they registered a 3.9 magnitude equivalent to a small earthquake.

“I do not think that anyone could have predicted the magnitude of the explosion and its effects in the surrounding neighborhood,” a coalition official wrote in the military documents. “Secondary effects are impossible to estimate with any level of accuracy, especially without knowing the quantity and type (s) of explosive material present at the site.”

Despite its involvement, the United States has not offered an apology or individual compensation. This is consistent with U.S. policy that has made compensation for civilians extremely rare. The only legal way for civilians to pursue compensation in the U.S. has been through the Foreign Claims Act, but that excludes compensation for death or injury during combat, making victims of the Hawija bombing ineligible. The only other option would be for civilians to receive voluntary ex gratia payments, but the Pentagon has viewed those payments as a strategic tactic to improve relations between U.S. troops and local communities. As the number of ground troops in Iraq have decreased, so have the ex gratia statements. In 2020, the Pentagon did not issue a single ex gratia payment. The ex gratia policy is now changing to allow for broader payments, but the changes do not apply to harm caused in the past.

This leaves civilians who suffered long-term injuries that require expensive treatment they cannot receive in Iraq with no legal route to pursue compensation from the U.S.

Escaping Hawija

When Ashwaq and her husband arrived at the hospital with their son, the halls were crowded with the injured and the dead. In some ways, they were lucky: Omar’s injuries were so severe that even though the hospital was under ISIS control, it agreed to treat him. Many others were turned away at the door because they had not sworn allegiance to the organization; they were forced to sew up wounds at home or to seek treatment from local pharmacists who were far out of their depth.

The doctors at the hospital did not have the ability or resources to treat Omar properly. Ashwaq and Ahmed begged permission from the ISIS occupiers to leave Hawija so they could get Omar’s injuries treated at a better hospital. They were refused. Twice before, Ashwaq had attempted to escape the town with the children, and each time she had been forced back. (Ahmed stayed behind because men were executed if they were discovered leaving). Fear for Omar’s life forced the family to take desperate measures. They paid a smuggler to get them out of the town. They walked through until they managed to cross into government-controlled territory.

But by the time they got to the hospital in Kirkuk, doctors told them it was too late; Omar should have been treated immediately after the burn to avoid permanent damage and scarring. Omar is now 11, and his face is a mask that twists with white swirling scars. Other children bully him. At school, they called him Abu Tashwy , which translates roughly to the “disfigured guy.” He has stopped going to school to avoid the humiliation.

Ashwaq and Ahmed cannot afford the many operations Omar would need to treat his burns. “I see him and I also become sad,” Ashwaq told me. “I see him and say God willing there will come a day where his face is normal.”

I met Ashwaq and Ahmed in their home, where they served us water and sweet black tea. It quickly became clear that they were accustomed to reciting their story to a parade of foreigners; they had spoken to NGO researchers, Dutch journalists, and Dutch officials. We talked in their home’s yellow-tiled entrance hall, only a few minutes away from the industrial zone by car. The family sat on thin cushions placed around the edges of the mostly bare room, and the other children came in and out, playing with each other as their parents spoke. Omar sat next to his mother, not saying a word.

Ashwaq wore a pale blue dress scattered with pink cherry blossoms. She has thick eyebrows, a heavy gaze, and an air of exhausted resignation mixed with a dogged desire to help Omar. She recounted her story readily, but she also made clear that she has no expectations that her telling of it will result in any benefit to her or to Omar.

“In the beginning, I believed,” she said, “They said to go to this place, and I believed them.” The “they” she refers to appears to be an amorphous combination of NGOs that promised they could help. “But I lost hope, I don’t have any hope remaining. They said they would give me support. Lies. It was lies.”

Ahmed said he has not seen a single benefit from the Dutch fund and neither have any of the families he knows who were affected by the bombing. He said he was never consulted about the fund by any representatives of the Dutch government. A thin, bespectacled man in a light white robe who speaks in a quiet, careful voice, Ahmed attended a conference in Erbil hosted by al-Ghad where he said he met representatives from the Dutch government and spoke to them about how he desperately needed treatment for his son. Referring to the fund of 4 million euros, the Dutch representatives told him that they had already compensated Hawija.

Chemical Injuries

I met with other families in Hawija. All had the same complaint. Foreigners had come and recorded their names and stories, but they had not benefited from the money reportedly flowing into their town. No one had consulted them about how the money would be used, and they believed that it must be disappearing into corrupt pockets.

Yusra Khalaf, 20, was only 12 when the bomb struck. She was sleeping in her family’s entrance hall near the window, and when it shattered, it sent a sharp piece of shrapnel straight into her arm. She tried to go to the hospital but was turned away at the door; her mother had to sew her wound at home. As it healed, her arm began to swell and turn a purpled blue; she does not know what caused the aftereffects, but she suspects chemicals from the bombing.

Her father, Yasser Khalaf Hamed, 47, wore a gray dishdasha and smoked steadily. Yusra wore pink robe and spoke in a soft voice. Her injured arm is swollen and mottled with blue veins; she said that it is heavy and she can barely move it. Like Omar, she suffers from bullying at her school. Even while talking about her injury, she tries to hide her arm within her sleeve until she is directly asked about it. Her father worries this is causing a delay in her studies. “If only they would stop talking about her,” he says. “Her younger sister graduated, and she’s still in school.”

They still live in the house where the bomb struck. Yusra speaks to me feet from where she was sleeping when she was injured. She says she did not want to return to this house.

Ashwaq and Ahmed did receive a small benefit from the coverage their case has received, but not from the Dutch government. Citizens crowdfunded Omar’s treatment and gathered around 7,000 euros. It’s not enough for the estimated cost of his operations, but it’s a start. Yet in order to get the treatment, they need a visa to the Netherlands, and although they applied months ago, they have heard nothing. They wait in limbo, holding on to the slimmest hope that even if they cannot get compensation, the Dutch government will at least grant them a visa. Their expectations are low.

In the meantime, the long-term effects of the bombing stay with them. It’s not just the physical injuries. Ashwaq says she still shakes with fear when she hears planes flying overhead. On the way to her house, I passed an old man standing in the road, apparently lost. It was Omar’s grandfather, who has never recovered.

The post How a Rare Effort to Compensate Iraqi Airstrike Victims Failed appeared first on The Intercept .

For three years, John Durham has essentially been the Justice Department’s Special Counsel in Charge of Owning the Libs.

His long-running inquiry into the government’s performance during the Trump-Russia investigation has often seemed designed to get shoutouts from Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and to go viral on right-wing social media.

John Durham has used the criminal justice system to try to score political points. What he has not done is search for the truth.

Durham has developed and launched just two prosecutions in connection with his probe of the Justice Department and FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia case. Remarkably, neither targeted officials from the Justice Department or the FBI. He still lost both cases.

It is rare for a federal prosecutor to go 0-2, but Durham never really seemed to care about making his cases stick. He targeted people outside the government to stage trials that seemed designed to help prove his pro-Trump bona fides. He chose targets affiliated with what Trump and his supporters have claimed were the evil forces behind the Mueller investigation: the Hillary Clinton campaign and the so-called Steele dossier. Durham prosecuted a lawyer associated with Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a Russian-born informant for Christopher Steele, the retired British intelligence officer who authored the dossier.

In the process, Durham tried to treat a federal courtroom like a cable news studio , where he could verbally attack the Justice Department and the FBI without actually prosecuting any government officials.

During his most recent case, he harshly criticized two FBI officials on the stand — both his own witnesses and ostensibly friendly to the prosecution. Durham called them to testify and then turned on them, to the detriment of his own case.

Durham is a Trump administration holdover, a federal prosecutor appointed in 2019 by former Attorney General William Barr to investigate how the Trump-Russia inquiry originated and was conducted. Barr appointed Durham to satisfy the former president, who has constantly complained that he was the victim of a witch hunt by the so-called deep state. In 2020, Barr gave Durham special counsel status, meaning the Biden administration couldn’t fire him.

Durham’s investigation has now lasted about twice as long as the original Trump-Russia inquiry conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. Like Trump and many pro-Trump pundits, Durham has focused mainly on the Steele dossier, an inflammatory collection of unsubstantiated tips and leads about possible ties between Trump and Russia that was written in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and Durham have tried to shift public attention to the Steele dossier because it was a mess.

But that is a red herring. The Steele dossier was not behind the FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia investigation, nor was it the basis for any allegations included in Mueller’s final report.

While he was collecting information about Trump and Russia, Steele worked with Fusion GPS, a Washington-based private investigation firm, which in turn had been hired by a law firm working with Clinton’s presidential campaign. Steele also had a long-standing relationship with the FBI; years earlier, he had given the bureau information during its criminal investigation of FIFA, the world soccer organization.

Steele shared the information he was collecting on Trump and Russia with both Fusion GPS and the FBI. But Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in a 2019 report that the FBI officials involved in the decision to open the original Trump-Russia investigation “did not become aware of Steele’s election reporting until weeks later and we therefore determined that Steele’s reports played no role” in the decision to launch the investigation. The inspector general also found no evidence of political bias in the way in which the FBI conducted the Trump-Russia investigation.

In May 2016, an Australian diplomat met in London with George Papadopoulos, a junior foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign; Papadopoulos told him that the Russians had derogatory information on Clinton, including thousands of emails from Clinton and the Democrats. After the emails were published by WikiLeaks and the press, Australian officials told their U.S. counterparts what Papadopoulos had said to the diplomat. That — along with the prior discovery by U.S. intelligence that Russia was seeking to interfere in the campaign — prompted the FBI to open its Trump-Russia investigation in July 2016.

Nevertheless, by focusing on the flawed dossier, Trump and Durham hoped to muddy the waters and discredit the Justice Department’s probe.

There are several facts that have made it easier for Trump and Durham to conflate the Steele dossier and the Trump-Russia investigation. The FBI used information from Steele in its October 2016 application to a court to obtain a secret warrant to wiretap Carter Page, a Trump adviser. (That was discovered by Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, not Durham.)

In addition, FBI Director James Comey privately briefed Trump on the salacious Steele dossier after the election, angering Trump and offering a compelling lure to the U.S. press. BuzzFeed News published the dossier in January 2017. Such intense focus on the dossier aided Trump and his supporters in their efforts to link Steele’s work with the Mueller investigation.

In his first prosecution, Durham charged Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who was working for Clinton’s presidential campaign, with lying to the FBI when he shared leads with the bureau about Trump and Russia in September 2016. The lie, according to Durham, involved Sussman telling the FBI that he had come on his own. Durham argued that by concealing his ties to the Clinton campaign, Sussmann was hiding a political agenda.

But a jury acquitted Sussmann, unanimously, and seemed to agree that Durham had badly overreached by bringing the case in the first place.

Durham’s second prosecution targeted Igor Danchenko, a researcher on Russian issues who was a key source for the Steele dossier, and who had also been an informant for the FBI. Durham also charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI about whether he had talked to a Democratic lobbyist and the former head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. But Durham’s case was undercut when two FBI officials called to testify; both said that Danchenko had been a valuable informant. A jury acquitted Danchenko last week. Again, the jury seemed to agree that Durham had overreached.

Durham’s only other accomplishment in three years came in 2020, when he cut a plea deal with an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith , who acknowledged that he had altered an email used in an application to surveil Carter Page. But Horowitz, the inspector general, had discovered that problem when he conducted his own investigation, and he made the criminal referral.

With no further prosecutions lined up, Durham’s courtroom antics are likely over. But his final report will doubtless offer Trump loyalists plenty of red meat.

Considering that it has taken Durham three years to lose two cases, however, it is not clear how long he will take to write and publish his final report. He may want to wait until Donald Trump is back in the White House.

The post John Durham Was Trump’s Answer to Robert Mueller. His Investigation Went Nowhere. appeared first on The Intercept .

The documentary “Jihad Rehab” opens with a series of testimonies from former Guantánamo Bay prisoners. One former detainee, wearing a red headdress and seated on a living room sofa, says, “The American government did bad, bad, bad things against us, and at least I am honest with what I did.” He goes on to describe explosives training he says he received at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. The film then introduces a small group of other former Guantánamo detainees, all Yemeni, who are now part of a government rehabilitation program for accused former terrorists in Saudi Arabia. They, too, appear to discuss frankly to their past involvement in militancy.

The controversy around “Jihad Rehab” began before many people would have a chance to see those opening minutes of the film. The announcement that it would be screened at Sundance Film Festival this year triggered objections among some Muslim American filmmakers, who expressed concerns about its content and how it was produced. Sundance would eventually apologize for screening the film, leading other prestigious film festivals to rescind their invitations.

The fallout at Sundance and the rescinded invitations kicked off a fierce debate that was, initially, limited to a small community of documentary filmmakers and Guantánamo Bay activists. But it has since exploded to national attention.

A recent front-page New York Times article about the subject framed the controversy as a culture war issue centered around the identity of the filmmaker, Meg Smaker, and whether she, as a white American woman, had the perspective necessary to produce a film about the lives of Arab Muslim former prisoners. A recent segment on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” about the film echoed this characterization of the controversy, introducing it to viewers as a battle over race and free speech in the United States. The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism , a free-speech advocacy organization focused on the culture war over what some refer to as “wokeness,” has also spoken out in support of the film and organized a screening for it this summer in Los Angeles.

If the dispute about “Jihad Rehab” were just a case of “white lady bad,” it could be seen as “woke” excess, left-wing identity politics run amok. The full story is a bit more complex. While Smaker’s identity and the notion of authorship have been part of the debate over the film, particularly on social media, they were not the entirety of the public and private discussions over “Jihad Rehab.” Nor were they the focus of the early questions raised to Sundance Film Festival.

Those questions initially came in the form of an email sent to Sundance last December by a group of six Muslim American filmmakers, including Assia Boundaoui, creator of the award-winning documentary “ The Feeling of Being Watched ,” after the film was announced in the lineup for the January festival. Boundaoui shared the email — sent after some signatories had viewed excerpts of the film, but not its entirety — with The Intercept. It raised three broad concerns, none of them having to do with identity politics. The authors questioned the movie’s title, the scope of Saudi government involvement in its production, and possible bias in the framing of its subjects.

The email asked Sundance to provide a private viewing of the film for the signatories, before concluding on a note of dismay that the festival would screen “Jihad Rehab” at all.

“We are thoroughly disappointed by Sundance’s decision to include this film in the program and to further amplify it by inclusion in the Documentary competition,” the letter says. “We expect that if the film is screened and platformed by Sundance as planned, there will be a much larger public outcry.”

Beginning to End

“Jihad Rehab” is a hard film to watch, emotionally, due to its subject matter, but also literally since it has now been pulled from circulation after the controversy. Part of the difficulty assessing the debate about the film is that it has gone through a few small but important changes since its original release at Sundance. The Intercept viewed both the original theatrical cut of the movie and its current form.

Most obviously, the film now has a more sensitive title: “The Unredacted.” But other smaller modifications were made that correspond with objections raised to the original production. The original theatrical release included a sequence that introduced the prisoners along with a stylized “rap sheet” of allegations from the U.S. government. These allegations, which were used to justify the men’s detentions at Guantánamo, appeared to be presented as plain fact in this critical scene. Yet, as years of legal proceedings at the prison have made clear, such allegations were frequently overblown or even fabricated.

Following the Sundance premiere, and private screenings where the filmmakers received feedback, asterisks were added to the lists of allegations stating that the former prisoners had never been charged or convicted of any crimes during their years in custody.

The portrayal of the men in the film is complex. The opening scenes, with their sinister characterization of the former detainees, gradually give way to a more compassionate narrative. Smaker has said this narrative arc reflected the evolution of her own relationship with the former prisoners, which she says became more mutually sympathetic over the course of three years of filming.

The film shows the former prisoners before and after their release from the Saudi-run rehabilitation program, as they attempt to rebuild ordinary lives. Some get married and raise children, while others struggle with financial problems, loneliness, and ostracism over their pasts. The testimonies and snapshots of former prisoners’ lives are interspersed with captivating street scenes of Saudi Arabia and artistic renditions of the detainees’ experience in custody, as they narrate their hopes and fears for the future.

Some of the men profiled appear to speak frankly about past involvement in militancy. They describe things that they feel guilty about, such as training with Al Qaeda, or that they maintain was morally justified, such as fighting against Serbian ethnonationalists during the Bosnian genocide. One can understand from listening to these stories that joining a militant group over the past few decades was intended, for some, as means of fighting injustice rather than perpetrating it. The viewer is left with a sense of moral complexity.

Over two hours of runtime, the subjects appear to warm to the filmmaker and speak more freely about their lives. Yet it’s hard to ever know with certainty what’s going on in the minds of former terrorism detainees, who, as critics have pointed out, live in an authoritarian country under intense surveillance, as they share their accounts with the camera.

Under Saudi’s Thumb

“Jihad Rehab” deals with a sensitive subject — the plight of former Guantánamo Bay prisoners ­— and, rather than the identity of the filmmaker, that is what seems to have touched a nerve with most critics. In March, an open letter about the movie from a larger group of filmmakers again raised questions about the issue of informed consent when making a film about former Guantánamo prisoners, even adding specifically that their concern about the movie was not primarily about authorship.

Smaker did take steps to be sensitive to the communities at hand: The film had input from a religious scholar for sensitivity and was screened prior to release with Yemeni and Muslim American community organizations. She told The Intercept that she intended to make the film to “understand the men that I had heard so much about for so many years, but never heard directly from. They had been labeled the worst of the worst by our government and popular media, but that is where the story seemed to end. I wanted to understand these men on a more nuanced and human level — their motivations, their personalities, their backgrounds.”

“I lived with these men for years; they live in fear in Saudi Arabia every day.”

Yet “Jihad Rehab” found critics among perhaps the most relevant constituency: former detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In July, the U.K.-based activist group CAGE, which advocates on behalf of terrorism detainees, and which has been at the center of controversy over some of its past advocacy, issued a public letter about the film. The signatories, former Guantánamo prisoners involved in CAGE, raised issues about “power asymmetries and possible coercion” in its production.

Mansoor Adayfi, an activist with the group, was one of those who signed. Adayfi, who spent 14 years at Guantánamo and suffered torture at the hands of guards, pointed to the cooperation of the Saudi government in making the film as a major concern. “I lived with these men for years, they live in fear in Saudi Arabia every day,” Adayfi said on a call from Serbia, where he now resides. “She was talking to people who spent years being tortured and given no chance to clear their names. But when you look at how the film is made, it seems to give some kind of legitimacy to Guantánamo.”

Adayfi, who wrote a memoir of his time in Guantánamo, said that the film appears to accept the framing of former detainees as admitted terrorists, a characterization that he and others dispute. He fears that the film will contribute to stigmatization that has prevented many former Guantánamo detainees from regaining normal lives upon release.

“The U.S. government treated us as the worst of the worst, then we came out of Guantánamo and didn’t even have time to process our trauma from that experience,” he said. “We thought maybe we had left it behind us, but it seems like people are going to be punishing us for the rest of our lives.”

“Jihad Rehab” contains some scenes that critics have said could potentially cause problems for subjects of the film in conservative Saudi Arabia, including one where a subject smokes shisha in an apartment with sexualized images on the walls and later appears to be on his way to buy drugs. Another detainee changes their mind about participation and withdraws partway through the film. A subject revoking consent to participate midway through often means that the footage taken before then can still be used. When dealing with people in a uniquely vulnerable position, however, the ethics become harder to gauge.

Part of the difficulty with evaluating aspects of the film is the unique legal gray zone that former prisoners inhabit after release from Guantánamo Bay — unlike almost any other prisoners in the world, and certainly distinct from people released from custody for crimes in United States. Previous reports, including in The Intercept, have documented former Guantánamo detainees who have simply disappeared upon saying or doing something to unexpectedly displease their host countries. Many others have suffered at the hands of their hosts. Adayfi experiences ongoing abuse and harassment from Serbian authorities since being placed there in 2016.

Dealing with former Guantánamo Bay prisoners living in Saudi Arabia presents a particular challenge, since they lack any semblance of political or due process rights in the kingdom. The former detainees’ stays at the “rehab” facility were a condition imposed for their release from Guantánamo, which also required them to make admissions of past alleged wrongdoing. CAGE has claimed, based on communications with two of the film’s subjects, that they “were denied the power to share anything other than what comported with the Saudi state’s official narrative.”

Smaker denied reports in the press and from CAGE that former detainees have asked to be removed from the film following its release out of concerns for their safety. She said she went through a rigorous process of obtaining consent during filming and has been in communication with former detainees since the film premiered at Sundance. After the controversy over the film took hold, Smaker completed an ethics review at the request of Sundance, which concluded that the film met standards of safety for their protection.

The voices of the former detainees themselves are notably absent in the public fight over the documentary; it’s not even clear whether they have seen the film at all. Their absence itself seems emblematic of the political and ethical challenge of producing a documentary like “Jihad Rehab.” As another condition of their release in Saudi Arabia, former Guantánamo prisoners have strict controls on their ability to communicate publicly, which, save for representations of their views from CAGE, has rendered them unable to weigh in on the debate raging over a film in which they are the stars.

War on Terror Legacy

After the September 11 attacks, Guantánamo Bay became a global symbol of the U.S. government’s draconian retaliation, including the use of extrajudicial detention and torture. Although it was promoted to the American people as a place to hold hardened terrorists, U.S. government officials later admitted that many, if not most, of the people held at the prison over the years were innocent of involvement in terrorism .

Several dozen prisoners continue to live in a state of legal purgatory inside the facility, while many others, released after being picked up in a wave of mass detentions based on flimsy accusations, have been denied the chance to rebuild normal lives or mend their reputations. Though it discusses the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay, including sexual violence, the film does not engage with this broader legacy of abuses.

“Believe me, no one cares if Meg is Black or white, or a man or a woman. I don’t even understand how this is being made out as a debate about a person’s race.”

The response to the film has differed depending on the audience. In her appearance on “Morning Joe,” Smaker said that she has received positive responses from U.S. military veterans, for whom the film depicted people they had considered enemies in a more sympathetic light. She told The Intercept that she was seeking to challenge the “simplistic narrative” that terrorism could be understood purely through reference to the perpetrator’s religion, as was widely assumed in the years after 9/11.

A documentary about former terrorism detainees in Saudi Arabia raises inevitable hard questions about research ethics, consent, and security. It also offers interesting insights into the human condition, including the inner lives of men who have been cast simplistically as enemies in the eyes of many Americans. Those important discussions about the film, which kicked off nearly a year ago, have now been effectively sidelined to slot it into an ongoing debate in the U.S. over identity politics.

Regardless of what happens with the film, whose future is still in question, the reductive depiction of the controversy in the press as merely another episode in an ongoing U.S. culture war has mystified some critics, including former detainees for whom Guantánamo Bay remains a personal issue.

“Believe me, no one cares if Meg is Black or white, or a man or a woman,” said Adayfi, the former Guantánamo prisoner. “I don’t even understand how this is being made out as a debate about a person’s race. It’s just childish.”

The post Did a Woke Mob Cancel the “Jihad Rehab” Doc? Here’s the Real Story. appeared first on The Intercept .

Weeks like last week explain why Donald Trump is so eager to regain power. He wants to avoid accountability for his dangerous actions, which still threaten to turn America into a right-wing autocracy.

Last week was a particularly trying one for Trump. He faced a blizzard of bad news, on multiple fronts, underscoring his exposure now that he is just a regular citizen and not president.

The highlight came on Thursday, when the House January 6 committee held its last public hearing before the midterm elections in November. Committee members made the case that Trump himself brought on the January 6 insurrection aimed at stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president. The committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., called Trump the “central player” of January 6.

During the hearing, the committee revealed evidence that Trump incited the insurrection, even though he had privately acknowledged that he knew he’d lost. The committee aired testimony from a former Trump White House aide who recalled going into the Oval Office a week after the November, 2020 election, and finding Trump watching television. “ Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy? ” Trump asked the aide, referring to Biden.

The panel voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to testify. But that was just the beginning of Trump’s very bad week.

While the House hearing was underway on Thursday, the Supreme Court, which Trump had packed with three ultraconservative justices, and which he might thus have expected to be sympathetic to his cause, ruled against him. The court rejected a key Trump appeal of a lower-court ruling, part of his broader legal strategy to stop the Justice Department and the FBI from using the classified documents found during a court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago home in August. Trump wants the government to be forced to return the documents to him, which he apparently thinks would stop the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation in connection with the documents; the Supreme Court’s terse order effectively rejected that notion.

The ruling followed press reports Wednesday that a Trump employee has told the FBI that, as government officials sought to retrieve thousands of documents that Trump was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump personally ordered the employee to move the boxes containing the documents to his residence. Security camera footage of the employee moving the boxes appears to corroborate his story. Such testimony could be damning evidence in an obstruction of justice case against Trump.

Other legal problems for Trump surfaced elsewhere last week. Marc Short, the chief of staff for former Vice President Mike Pence, testified Thursday before a federal grand jury in Washington in connection with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump had sought to block Short’s testimony, invoking executive privilege, but a judge rejected that claim . The ruling could ultimately make it easier for federal prosecutors to get other former top Trump administration officials to testify before the grand jury.

The former president’s legal problems continued in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge on Thursday to prevent Trump’s company from selling or moving assets without court approval. James wants to stop Trump from trying to shield his money from the possible penalties he may face as a result of the lawsuit she filed in September against Trump, three of his children, and their family business. In that suit, James accused them of engaging in a prolonged fraud by falsifying the value of company assets. Her office has also referred the evidence gathered in her civil lawsuit to federal prosecutors for a criminal investigation.

Finally, in yet another courtroom back in Washington, Trump’s long-standing efforts to discredit the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin took another damaging hit this week. While Trump was still president, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr appointed John Durham as special prosecutor to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. The appointment was Barr’s gift to Trump; Durham’s mission was to search for wrongdoing in the way the investigation was opened and conducted.

But while Durham has stayed on as a special prosecutor long after the end of the Trump administration, his attempts to prove that the Trump-Russia case was a politicized bad faith effort to undermine Trump have largely failed. He has had only two cases that have led to charges, and the first one fell apart in May, when Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on charges of lying to the FBI for sharing a tip about Trump and Russia.

This week, his last remaining case, against FBI informant Igor Danchenko, has taken a series of damaging hits. Durham charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI about issues related to the Trump-Russia investigation, particularly the so-called Steele dossier, a collection of rumors and tips about possible ties between Trump and Russia compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Danchenko was a source for Steele, while also serving as an FBI informant.

But the FBI agents who Durham brought in to testify have undermined Durham’s case and defended Danchenko. They have said that he was a valuable informant, and one testified that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. On Friday, the judge in the case dismissed one of the charges brought against Danchenko, damaging Durham’s prosecution even further.

A few more weeks like this one might bankrupt Trump or land him in prison — or he might just officially announce that he’s running for president in 2024.

The post Trump’s Bad Week May Hasten His Ruin — or Simply Stoke His Hubris appeared first on The Intercept .

In late July , Tahir Ashraf Bhatti, an Indian police official with a checkered history of alleged human rights abuses, tweeted a photo of himself in the U.S. He had come to Houston, according to the tweet, to attend an FBI training.

Back home, Bhatti, a top cop for criminal investigations in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, ran a detention site where civilians have reportedly been interrogated and tortured for what they’ve posted on social media. Now he was sharing on Twitter a photo of himself standing in front of an unclassified FBI slide presentation titled “Operation Catch Me If You Can.”

“Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field,” he wrote in the tweet. A few days later, he posted a photo holding a souvenir FBI badge and wrote: “Appreciation is for now, gratitude is forever. Thank you @FBI.”

Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field. pic.twitter.com/fmb3AVmMQA

— Tahir Ashraf (@Tahir_A) July 30, 2022

Until last year, Bhatti oversaw the regional police’s anti-terror unit, which has been accused of torture and extrajudicial killings , including while he was chief . Bhatti was also the top official at the cyber unit, which critics have alleged uses intimidation and violence against Kashmiris in custody in retribution for social media posts critical of the Indian government.

Bhatti himself has been accused of assaulting a social media user, according to past reporting by The Intercept, who said he was taken to Cargo, a notorious detention facility in Kashmir, after posting a tweet mocking Bhatti. Bhatti, in response to queries at the time, denied the allegations against him, as well as claims that people were abused by him or forces under his command for expressing their political views online.

The FBI’s provision of training to Bhatti raises tough questions around the U.S.’s security relationship with India. In particular, the move to train Bhatti may run afoul of two statutory provisions known as the “Leahy laws” that prevent the U.S. government from providing assistance to foreign security forces known to commit human rights abuses.

“The U.S. government claims that this partnership is founded on shared values, including commitments to democracy, global institutions, and multilateral organizations,” said Haley Duschinski, a professor of anthropology at Ohio University whose research specializes in militarization and impunity in South Asia, with a focus on Kashmir, “but these words ring completely hollow in light of India’s refusal to fulfill its obligations under international human rights law.”

The Houston division of the FBI declined to comment for this story. Bhatti did not respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. considers India a major partner in its military and national security operations, grounded in a “shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific,” according to a State Department website. The two countries established a defense relationship after the end of the Cold War and grew closer under the George W. Bush administration on the basis of combating the shared threat of jihadist terrorism.

Over the past decade, the United States has sold over $4 billion in arms to the Indian government. The U.S. and India have also cooperated on counterterrorism , including to target Pakistan-based terrorist organizations that have carried out attacks in India. The U.S. also increasingly sees India as an important security partner in confronting China.

Because of this close relationship, political will in the United States to raise human rights issues with an ally like India has often been lacking, said Ria Chakrabarty, the policy director at Hindus for Human Rights. Chakrabarty advocated for conditioning U.S. aid to India on human rights grounds in a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine.

“There is always a narrative in D.C. that you have to walk a thin line between having a closer relationship with India and raising human rights concerns there. It is based on a fear that going too hard on India over human rights might anger the government such that they may not cooperate with the U.S. against China,” she said. “The U.S. cannot be afraid to raise human rights issues with India out of fear of China, because India will calculate that it has an interest in containing China regardless.”

Chakrabarty said that a Leahy law review of cooperation with Indian security forces is warranted in light of ongoing reports of human rights abuses. In a statement, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who has been vocal in Congress about India’s rights violations in Kashmir, called on the FBI to provide transparency about its engagement with Bhatti, as well as Kashmir police forces more broadly.

“This individual is credibly accused of some of the worst human rights abuses in Kashmir, including alleged torture of journalists and citizen dissidents. It is my sincere hope that U.S. agencies are in no way cooperating or training serious human rights violations and suppression in Kashmir,” Omar said. “The FBI owes Congress — and the public — an explanation as to what if any involvement they have with Ashraf and the Jammu & Kashmir Police.”

The FBI conducts training for foreign law enforcement through several partnership programs . Indian police and commandos have received FBI training in the U.S. during the post-9/11 global war on terrorism.

A Kashmiri journalist living in exile in the West said that any support Bhatti or his unit receive from the U.S. today would inevitably be used to further suppress free speech in the region.

“The FBI has the capacity to safely carry out advanced investigations in the United States,” said the journalist, who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation against family members in Kashmir. “But when they train Kashmiri police in the same tactics, there is no doubt that those powers will end up being used against Kashmiri civilians.”

Appreciation is for now, gratitude is forever. Thank you @FBI pic.twitter.com/9eq3p6YMvw

— Tahir Ashraf (@Tahir_A) August 3, 2022

The crackdown against journalists, activists, and civil society in India and Kashmir has been justified as a counterterrorism measure, but human rights activists say it has become a catch-all term used by the Indian government to target dissenters. The justification has been routinely deployed to support policies enacted in Kashmir.

A recent report by Amnesty International documents “drastically intensified” repression in Kashmir since the 2019 abrogation of the region’s special status , including the use of anti-terrorism laws to target academics , journalists , activists , and lawyers seen as critical of the Indian government.

“There is an environment now where there is no space for protest.”

“There is an environment now where there is no space for protest. If there are abuses which any journalists choose to report, a series of things can happen: Their homes can be raided, they can be taken in for questioning, they can be blocked from traveling, or then they can be arrested,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Counterterrorism and sedition laws are now deployed routinely against activists, even though there is not much evidence for the charges produced.”

There is also a documented history of human rights violations by Indian security forces in Kashmir, including torture , mass killings, and widespread use of sexual violence as a “counterinsurgency tactic,” according to Human Rights Watch . Since Kashmir’s local autonomy was revoked in 2019 , repression has increased and local reporting has been all but snuffed out by security forces, turning the region into what Duschinski, the Kashmir expert, described as an “information black hole.”

Bhatti himself has taken a hands-on approach to suppressing Kashmiris’ speech. As head of the cyber unit, he reportedly surveilled local media outlets and, on numerous occasions, has been accused of abusing members of the press during interrogations.

In 2020, the same year The Intercept reported on Bhatti and the cyber unit, a Kashmiri journalist named Auqib Javeed was brought to the Cargo detention facility after publishing a story about police intimidation of Kashmiri social media users. Javeed was assaulted by a police officer and then taken to Bhatti’s office where he was “berated and verbally abused” over his reporting, he said. Bhatti was also involved with the detention of a photojournalist, Masrat Zahra, that year over her posts that were critical of the Indian government — an incident that generated media attention due to parallels with some of Bhatti’s own past online criticism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Kashmiri journalist living in the West told The Intercept they were also held at Cargo by security forces under Bhatti’s command. They described Bhatti as a notorious figure among local journalists, known for threats, abuse, and intimidation.

“As head of the police cyber force unit, Ashraf has gone hard against people in Kashmir who have publicly criticized the government. The police have sought to teach people a lesson and put fear down their spines so that they won’t speak out in future,” the journalist said. “Ashraf is someone who has been willing to go all the way to please his bosses, and that means targeting anyone who voices an opinion against the Indian state.”

Another Kashmiri journalist who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation from Bhatti and forces under his command expressed disappointment that the FBI would host Bhatti despite the well-known public allegations against him.

“We hoped that with the Biden administration there would be more focus on human rights, but that hasn’t been the case,” the journalist said. “We don’t have any expectation of justice from India, but we are surprised that institutions in the United States like the FBI that talk about defending journalists and human rights would host someone like Tahir Ashraf for training.”

The post FBI Held Training With Indian Cop Who Oversaw Unit Accused of Torture and Murder appeared first on The Intercept .

In a cheerfully animated promotional video , a woman narrates Cubic Transportation Systems’ vision for the future. Travelers will pay fares using a ticket-free mobile account. Real-time data will be aggregated, linked, and shared. Deals — such as 50 percent off at a partner coffee shop — may even incentivize users to select certain transit routes at certain times.

“The more information that is gathered, the more powerful the system becomes,” the narrator tells us. “The piece of the puzzle missing … is you.”

This is “NextCity,” Cubic Transportation Systems’ idea of a smart city: an urban area that uses technology and networked data to optimize functioning and mobility.

Over the past decade, Cubic has taken the first steps toward actualizing its vision by snapping up contracts for the development of mobile-based, contactless fare collection systems in eight of America’s 10 largest public transit networks. Gone are the days of cumbersome tokens and flimsy farecards ; now, millions of bus and subway riders can pay their fare directly by hovering a smartphone or credit card over a reader.

Transit authorities have embraced tap-to-pay technology for its convenience and speed, but privacy advocates are worried that the new fare collection systems pose serious surveillance and security risks. The concerns came to the fore as New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, rolled out OMNY, a fare payment system backed by Cubic that’s slated to fully replace MetroCards by the end of 2023. Nevertheless, Cubic’s widespread use of touchless, mobile-based reader technology is sprouting up everywhere — including places like San Francisco and Miami, where public transit riders would need to dig deep into city documents to find Cubic’s roles.

Cubic is a privately held corporation with broad and varied interests. In addition to its transit operation, Cubic is a vast military contractor doing hundreds of millions of dollars in business with the U.S. military and sales to foreign militaries. The company supplies surveillance technologies, training simulators, satellite communications equipment, computing and networking platforms, and other military hardware and software. Most of the headlines Cubic garners, though, stem from its increasingly indispensable role in public transit systems across the world.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it.”

As Cubic’s quiet grip on fare collection takes hold in more cities, the company’s ability to process rider data grows with it, creating a sprawling corporate apparatus that has the extraordinary potential to gather up reams of information on the very people it is supposed to serve. In some cases, its access to that information is explicit in the transit systems’ privacy policies.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it to police, ICE, and other agencies,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Right now, our data is a huge part of the product, with almost no safeguards against these sorts of abuse.”

Cubic did not respond to a request for comment.

Turnstiles and Military Systems

The privacy concerns around Cubic would be acute even if its interests were limited to transit, but the company wears dual hats as ubiquitous public service provider and defense contractor.

Cubic Transportation Systems is but one division of Cubic Corporation. The company’s other concerns revolve around providing technologies to U.S. and other security forces. The defense contractor, Cubic Mission and Performance Solutions, handles Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance — or C5ISR — capabilities for the U.S. military. And Cubic also owns a variety of subsidiaries, including Abraxas Corporation, which supplies counterintelligence and cybersecurity software to agencies working in national security.

Since 1992, U.S. government agencies have awarded Cubic’s defense wing and its subsidiaries billions of dollars in contracts, including more than $42.1 million from the Department of Defense this year alone. One of Cubic’s largest contracts came in 2020, when the Pentagon awarded the company $193.3 million for work on training systems, with over half of the money allocated to foreign military sales in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Singapore, Australia, and the U.K.

Cubic has also provided key support for U.S. drone operations. The company received $1.4 million from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 for Predator/Reaper training software, and in 2020, it signed a cooperative agreement with U.S. Special Operations for the research and development of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies related to drones. Cubic also sells surveillance technologies; a subsidiary that sells video enhancement software has clients including the New York Police Department, U.S. Secret Service, and military criminal investigators.

The defense contracting business runs in parallel to the transit work — where Cubic’s reach is also international. The company has implemented contactless payment technology in other major cities globally, including London, Sydney, and Vancouver. It controls about 70 percent of the market for public transit fare collection across the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

In 2013, when the Chicago Reporter flagged that the company responsible for Chicago’s Ventra system — cards for public transit — had national security ties, a Cubic Corporation spokesperson insisted that the transportation and defense wings were “entirely separate entities and not connected through anything but ownership.”

In annual reports, however, the company emphasized the benefits of its “Living One Cubic” ethos. The reports describe the touchless reader at the center of Cubic’s transit business as “an innovation developed through engineering collaboration” across both divisions of the company. The 2019 annual report also cites the launch of a new internal product management system that will facilitate the sharing of “technical information and data amongst our engineering teams and the overall company.”

The notion of “One Cubic” is also on display in lobbying disclosures . While Cubic has spent massive sums on more than two decades of defense-industry lobbying, Cubic Corporation has put lesser, though still significant funding into lobbying on transit issues; in 2015, the company started directing its resources into “promot[ing] Cubic transportation technology solutions.” In 2019, the company pushed for the “adoption of integrated fare payment and mobility as a service solutions” — corporate jargon for its mobile-based fare collection systems and public-private transit partnerships.

Often, Cubic Corporation’s defense and transportation lobbying is targeted at the same lawmaker or handled by the same firm, with disclosures listing House and Senate defense authorizations alongside federal transportation appropriations.

For Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the soft wall between Cubic’s transportation and military businesses raises questions that have yet to be addressed by transit authorities about the risks that personal data could move between the two sides of the company.

“I think it depends on the overlap, and whether the technologies employed are bleeding over to the other side of the company,” said Budington. “And whether the typical concerns, when it comes to the privacy and security of data that’s being handled for the public, are lessened by the fact that you’re part of the intelligence community that is looking for targets and employing military technologies overseas.”

He added, “That is something that should be raised to the public, and there should be a public debate about it. And I don’t think that there has been.”

Vague Privacy Policy

The Cubic Corporation’s privacy policy outlines the notably lenient guidelines governing the use of data provided both through Cubic’s own website and its contracts with clients. The sharing of personal information is permitted among recipients, including Cubic’s family of companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries; external auditors; police, regulators, government agencies, and judicial or administrative authorities; and third parties connected with mergers and acquisitions.

The company also says it may share information “where disclosure is both legally permissible and necessary to protect or defend our rights” and in “matters of national security.” Personal data may be stored for up to 10 years.

Cubic’s privacy policy allows data sharing between corporate divisions only if it’s for the product being delivered, not for ancillary business practices. However, Cahn said that it’s difficult to know what corporate firewalls are truly in place when dealing with private companies.

“I think this highlights one of the broader design tensions with smart cities infrastructure,” Cahn said. “Oftentimes, we have a misalignment of incentives, where companies have every reason to look for ways to monetize our most intimate data, or as a government tracking tool, rather than having incentives to truly keep that information protected.”

The guidelines for the MTA’s touchless system OMNY have been criticized for their weakness. The Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project found in a 2019 report that the policy permits the MTA and Cubic to store users’ personal data indefinitely, allowing law enforcement and other government agencies access to that and other information. The touchless system’s predecessor, the MetroCard, which Cubic designed and implemented in 1992, already enables enforcement agencies to track users’ whereabouts.

“There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

Recent media reports noted that, because OMNY links credit card information to a user profile by design, location tracking could be connected to names, payment cards, and any other information web tracking and data scraping could tie to the account. According to TransitCenter , a group focused on improving public transportation in cities, OMNY would elevate tracking capabilities to a “near-instantaneous” level.

The MTA’s OMNY privacy policy stipulates that Cubic and other vendors must adhere to privacy practices “at least as stringent” as those in the OMNY policy. Other Cubic-designed systems, though, do not disclose such restrictive rules. The Chicago Ventra program policy simply authorizes the sharing of personal information with Cubic, provided it “maintain[s] the confidentiality of the information” and uses it only as necessary for administering the program.

Budington, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that phrases such as “necessary to provide services” or “as permitted by law” raise red flags. This vague language cannily obscures any specifics of what the company is doing with the provided data.

“This is why we at EFF are big advocates for city council ordinances when surveillance technologies are employed on a population,” he said. “There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

Public Service, Private Equity

Cubic Corporation had been publicly traded since it was founded in 1959, but in May 2021, Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital paid roughly $3 billion to take the company private . Veritas also owns the Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics database and has acquired business units of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other defense contractors. One critic has suggested that Cubic’s recent acquisition by the private equity firms could exacerbate the company’s lack of interest in safeguarding users’ data.

Cubic’s defense industry ties highlight a stark paradox: Public transit is widely viewed as an essential public service, but the private contractors that enable the systems may have corporate incentives that don’t align with the goal of a common good. For instance, though the MTA has pushed back against privacy advocates’ concerns, Cubic’s own documents emphasize that it has broad ambitions for the use of rider data.

A brochure for the back-end analytics tool that Cubic offers to transit agencies boasts that the technology can enable transit authorities to search and visualize large datasets to “make discoveries” and “identify trends.” The software can also aggregate and anonymize personally identifiable information, turning that information into “an analytics-ready dataset that can be securely consumed for research, monetization schemes, and other internal and external purposes.” Experts have noted that even purportedly anonymized data holds privacy risks, as it is often possible to re-identify users with their personal information.

The company’s vision for NextCity would join data collected by Cubic with other smart-city infrastructure to “build a model for real-time data gathered across a transportation network.” Cubic Corporation’s annual reports outline how it aims to expand its portfolio beyond fare collection to include ride and bike sharing, tolls and parking, and traffic congestion reduction. Toward these ends, Cubic Corporation has acquired multiple companies in recent years that are focused on smart city technologies, including GRIDSMART, which supplies cameras to enable real-time traffic monitoring, and Delerrok, an electronic fare-collection system.

For now, cities with Cubic’s mobile-based payment systems also offer the option to purchase fare cards with cash, albeit for an additional $5 , at select retailers. Individual people concerned with their privacy might opt for this method despite the convenience of OMNY and similar systems.

Despite the workarounds, transit authorities in major metropolitan areas are increasingly letting any notion of privacy fall by the wayside. As an increasing number of metropolitan areas embrace the concept of smart cities , the privacy risks associated with the technology are poised to grow — until, eventually, everyone’s choice between convenience and privacy might be made for them .

The post Meet the Military Contractor Running Fare Collection in New York Subways — and Around the World appeared first on The Intercept .

In early 2018, former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander worked out a deal with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the cyber institute led by one of his closest aides, Saud al-Qahtani, to help the Saudi ruler train the next generation of Saudi hackers to take on the kingdom’s enemies.

While the agreement between IronNet, founded by Alexander, and the cyber school was widely reported in intelligence industry outlets and the Saudi press at the time, it faced no scrutiny for its association with Qahtani, after the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi he reportedly orchestrated just a few months later.

Alexander officially inked the deal with the Prince Mohammed bin Salman College of Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Advanced Technologies — a school set up to train Saudi cyber intelligence agents — at a signing ceremony in Washington, D.C., according to an announcement in early July.

Qahtani’s proxy at the signing noted in a statement that “the strategic agreement will ensure [Saudi Arabia is] benefiting from the experience of an advisory team comprising senior officers who had held senior positions in the Cyber Command of the US Department of Defense.” Alexander’s for-profit cyber security firm IronNet would work closely with the Saudi Federation of Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones, an affiliate of the college devoted to offensive cyber operations and at the time overseen by Qahtani.

Saudi Arabia’s agreement with IronNet was part of a host of moves to step up its cyber capabilities, coinciding with a campaign against the kingdom’s critics abroad. Khashoggi, then a Washington Post columnist and prominent Salman critic, received a series of threatening messages, including one from Qahtani, warning him to remain silent. Khashoggi, whose family and close associates discovered listening malware electronically implanted on their smartphones, was then lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul.

It was there that a team dispatched by Qahtani detained and tortured the Saudi government critic. Qahtani, according to reports, beamed in through Skype to insult Khashoggi during the ordeal, allegedly instructing his team to “bring me the head of the dog.” Khashoggi was then dismembered with a bone saw.

IronNet’s agreement tied to the alleged mastermind behind the killing of Khashoggi is not listed on the IronNet website, and it is not known if the business relationship still stands — or what the extent of it ever was. IronNet and representatives of the Saudi government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Saudi Arabia relationship, according to former IronNet employees, has largely been shrouded in secrecy, even within the firm.

Qahtani’s role of enforcer on behalf of bin Salman, well known prior to the Khashoggi slaying, has closely followed the young prince’s meteoric rise as the effective leader of Saudi Arabia.

In 2017, Qahtani played a pivotal role in the abduction and interrogation of hundreds of Saudi elites, who were held captive at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, at which they were forced to pledge loyalty and money to Salman. Qahtani personally led the questioning efforts, according to reports.

Later that year, he reportedly participated in the interrogation of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who was beaten and forced to resign. The following year, according to the brother of Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, Qahtani also directly participated in the torture of al-Hathloul , where he mocked her and threatened to have her raped.

On behalf of the kingdom, Qahtani has made it his personal quest to acquire and expand Saudi cyberwarfare tools. Beyond the deal with IronNet and other top-flight American cyber experts, he has spent over a decade directly negotiating the accumulation of computer and phone infiltration technology.

Qahtani took the helm of official state-backed efforts to expand Saudi Arabia’s cyber offensive capabilities in October 2017, when he was named president of a committee called the Electronic Security and Software Alliance, later renamed the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones.

Earlier this year, SAFCSP signed an agreement with Spire Solutions, a consulting firm that partners with a wide range of cyber intelligence contractors. Haboob, another cyber venture promoted by Qahtani, is a private venture that recruits hackers on behalf of the Saudi government. Haboob’s chair, Naif bin Lubdah, is on SAFCSP’s board of directors .

In 2018, Chiron Technology Services, another American cyber consulting firm, also inked a memorandum of understanding to provide training to the same Saudi hacker school advised by IronNet. Chiron’s team includes top talent recruited from the U.S. Air Force, Army, and NSA, including Michael Tessler, who previously worked at the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations command, which handles high-profile computer infiltration missions of foreign governments.

Jeff Weaver, the chief executive of Chiron, said in an email that his company signed a memorandum of understanding “with the college to develop a cybersecurity curriculum in support of their technical degree programs. However, no collaboration ever occurred, and they never called on us to contribute. We haven’t heard from them since 2018.”

Online cyber sleuths identified Qahtani’s multiple handles on online hacking forums, where he was an active member seeking to purchase hacking tools. A screen name used by Qahtani, for instance, appeared to have purchased a remote access trojan known as Blackshades, which can infect targeted computers to modify and seize files, activate the webcam, and record keystrokes and passwords.

Cybersecurity researchers have identified powerful hacking technology implanted on the phones of Khashoggi’s family , likely by agents of the United Arab Emirates, a close Saudi ally. Several received malicious texts that infected their phones with Pegasus, a tool created by the NSO Group to remotely access a target’s microphone, text messages, and location .

Qahtani, who briefly faced house arrest, was swiftly cleared of wrongdoing in Khashoggi’s death by the Saudi government. Five of the hitmen in the squad sent to kill Khashoggi were sentenced to death, including Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, an intelligence officer who worked under Qahtani. Qahtani’s current relationship with the institute is unknown.

Following Khashoggi’s killing, many U.S. firms faced pressure to exit business deals with Saudi Arabian entities. Yet, in the years following Khashoggi’s murder, the Saudi cyberwarfare institute central to the plot has continued to do business with Western defense industry leaders.

In 2019, BAE Systems, a major defense contractor based in the U.S. and the U.K., entered into a training agreement with the MBS College of Cyber Security. Last year, Cisco unveiled a training relationship with the Saudi Federation of Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones.

BAE, reached for comment, distanced itself from the deal. “BAE Systems works with a number of partner companies based in Saudi Arabia,” said a spokesperson for the company. “ISE, one of our Saudi partner companies, was awarded a contract in 2019 by the MBS College for Cyber Security to provide support services to establish the college, such as general staffing and facilities management but this contract wasn’t activated and is still on hold.”

Alexander has continued to do work in the region as a member of Amazon’s board. Intelligence Online, a trade outlet for intelligence contractors, reported , “As a partner of Amazon, for which it offers native surveillance of its AWS’ cloud traffic, IronNet helps the company win public contracts, especially since CEO Keith Alexander has sat on Amazon’s board.”

IronNet, however, has faltered in recent months, with two waves of layoffs this year and a lawsuit from investors . The company has touted skyrocketing growth, like many defense-related contractors, by promising to harness growing security threats. Much of the American traditional defense industry has long sought lucrative foreign relationships, particularly with the Saudi Arabian government, a path IronNet appears to have attempted to follow.

And President Joe Biden, who promised during his election campaign to make the Saudi state a “pariah” over the slaying, has since appeared to move on from the scandal. In June, he traveled to Riyadh to shore up the U.S.-Saudi alliance and request an increase in oil production. The four-year anniversary of Khashoggi’s slaying is on October 2.

The post Former NSA Chief Signed Deal to Train Saudi Hackers Months Before Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder appeared first on The Intercept .

On a normal morning , Asadullah Akbari, a colonel in the Afghan National Army, would arrive at his office in Kabul to coordinate online meetings between Afghan officials and their U.S. advisers based in Qatar. After years of fighting across Afghanistan, Akbari had helped set up his country’s special forces training program and risen through the ranks. He now worked near the highest levels of the military, side by side with Afghanistan’s political leaders. Morning teleconferences with Western partners were part of his daily routine.

He had grown accustomed to this relatively quiet life. But as the U.S.-backed Afghan government imploded last summer, a thick cloud of fear descended on the Afghan capital. Rumors spread that Taliban fighters were going house to house, hunting down Afghan military officials. Akbari stayed home, texting anxiously with his military and defense ministry colleagues, all of them trying to make sense of the sudden changes. Akbari’s future had seemed relatively predictable; now it was difficult to see even a few days ahead.

On August 20, 2021 — five days after Kabul fell to the Taliban — Akbari headed to a well-known mall with his kids. Walking the streets of Kabul, where he’d spent most of his life, he had the distinct feeling that these could be his last days on earth. When his children begged him for candy and ice cream from the vendors on the street, he bought everything they wanted.

Akbari knew in his heart that he and his colleagues had been left to their fate. Many of the senior Afghan officials they’d served under had already made their own arrangements and fled the city. People who had supervised Akbari for years suddenly stopped responding to his messages. It was the last betrayal, after years of corruption and double-dealing that he had personally witnessed from his perch in the Ministry of Defense. The Afghan government they’d spent two decades helping to build had collapsed. Now, its ruins were raining down on top of millions of ordinary Afghans like him.

The fall of the Afghan government triggered a tidal wave of anguish and soul searching among Afghans and Americans who had invested years of their lives in the U.S. mission there. It was also personal for me as an Afghan journalist. For seven years, I worked at Etilaatroz, one of Afghanistan’s leading investigative news outlets. I reported and wrote scores of articles on politics and security in Afghanistan, including more than a dozen major investigations. Across all this reporting one theme stood out above all the rest: corruption. The greed, self-interest, and amorality of Afghan elites was like an acid that ate away at the institutions ordinary Afghans had sacrificed so much to build. In the end, that corruption would prove fatal to our hopes for building a free and independent nation.

I was among tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated by the U.S. government when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last summer. Since then, during the nearly 10 months I spent with other refugees in a hotel in Albania and now in the United States, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to my country and why. Like everyone, I watched in horror as my Etilaatroz colleagues still in Kabul were beaten by the Taliban for the crime of covering a protest. How could the gains of the last 20 years have evaporated so quickly?

This remains an agonizing question for both Afghans and Americans. In April, the Senate Armed Services Committee announced the creation of an Afghanistan War Commission aimed at establishing why the U.S.-backed Afghan government and its security forces dissolved so spectacularly. The commission plans to provide a “comprehensive review of key decisions related to U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan” and to deliver a final report to Congress within three years, around the time President Joe Biden will complete his term in office.

Eight months ago, I began calling Akbari and other sources in the former Afghan security forces. There were many questions about why the army did not fight that continued to bother me and other Afghans. Why, after years of grueling struggle, did soldiers in many parts of the country put down their guns in the face of the enemy? To find the answers, I started interviewing former military officers and government officials.

They told me that corrupt, inexperienced commanders as well as leaders who valued loyalty above capability had weakened the chain of command. Tens of thousands of Afghans had given their lives for their country. In the end, ordinary soldiers were betrayed by leaders who failed to give them the tools they needed to succeed against a brutal insurgency.

On August 20, the day Akbari walked to the mall, the Taliban were rushing to establish themselves across Kabul, flush with excitement over their victory. They had fought for years, suffering terrible losses themselves, and were now almost certain to take revenge on their enemies. Their knock on his door seemed inevitable. As Akbari walked into his home, he received an unexpected text message on his phone from a U.S. military adviser based in Qatar with whom he had regularly teleconferenced from Kabul.

“Asadullah, where are you?”

Within a few days, Akbari and his family were packed into the cargo hold of a plane with other Afghans who had been lucky or connected enough to make it out. The flight took him from Kabul to Qatar and then on to Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his family are the only Afghan residents in a rundown apartment complex. The speed with which his life had transformed gave it all an air of unreality.

Akbari had spent decades at war, lost many friends, and suffered scars that he will carry for the rest of his life. Looking at Afghanistan today, he cannot escape the feeling that it was all for nothing.

The Fall of the Three-Man Republic

The U.S. is believed to have spent upwards of $2 trillion in Afghanistan — money that was, in many cases, eaten up by graft or funneled back to politically connected U.S. government contractors. Afghan military officers like Akbari saw the rot up close. In the final years of his government, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and a close circle of advisers were widely criticized for monopolizing decision-making and personnel appointments and gradually losing touch with the people they governed. Akbari regularly briefed Ghani, his senior advisers, and the Afghan defense minister; their constant changes to military leadership and their obsession with personal loyalty overshadowed efforts to prevent a Taliban takeover, he says.

“I was 18 years old when I joined the army. I never saw happy days in Afghanistan, only war, blood, fighting, and clashes. And in the end, our leaders betrayed the country,” he told me. “I saw myself that we had no honest leaders and no one who was thinking of the national interest. They were only thinking of their own benefit and appointing those who were loyal to them.”

“I never saw happy days in Afghanistan, only war, blood, fighting, and clashes. And in the end, our leaders betrayed the country.”

Top former Afghan officials painted a picture of increasing paranoia on the part of Ghani and his aides, who feared not just disloyalty, but even a possible coup by officers of the Afghan military. Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat, the last commander of the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command, described Ghani to investigators for the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR , as a “paranoid president … afraid of his own countrymen,” adding that Ghani was “changing commanders constantly [to] bring back some of the old-school Communist generals who [he] saw as loyal to him, instead of these American-trained young officers who he [mostly] feared.”

During the last two years of the Ghani government, power was held by a triumvirate: the Afghan president; his national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib; and his chief of administrative office of the president, Fazel Mahmood Fazly. Many Afghans referred derisively to this group of power brokers as the “three-man republic.” Neither Mohib nor Fazly had experience in security or national defense. Mohib had been the Afghan ambassador to the United States, and Fazly was a surgeon who had previously been a political adviser to Ghani. Both men played a critical role in the catastrophic decision-making that led to the collapse of the army, Akbari said.

“What I witnessed was that Hamdullah Mohib was given the widest authority in appointments. All the corps commanders were personally appointed by him and were doing whatever Mohib commanded,” Akbari said. “All orders were issued by Mohib and a group of officials in the presidential palace.” Mohib , meanwhile, has blamed Western countries for leaving their Afghan partners too abruptly, claiming that the sudden departure of American troops and contractors sapped the Afghan military’s morale and deprived it of the material support it needed to fight.

When reached to comment for this story, Mohib referred me to an interview from earlier this year, in which he attributed the collapse of the Afghan government to U.S. political concessions made to the Taliban and Biden’s decision, in the summer of 2021, to announce a final withdrawal. While denying that he had enriched himself with Afghan government funds, Mohib pointed to the corrupting impact on Afghan institutions of “exorbitant amounts of unmonitored money” dumped into the country by the international community since 2001.

The final Taliban offensive that toppled the government laid bare this corruption, which my colleagues and I had documented for years at Etilaatroz. At the moment of their country’s greatest crisis, many top officials and commanders simply abandoned Afghan soldiers and civilians, focusing instead on their own safety and grabbing whatever resources they could as they fled the country.

By the end, the people in charge had given up on other factors and were making personnel appointments based entirely on what they thought would be their own interests, said Saleh Jahesh, a former head of the strategic planning office within Afghanistan’s National Security Council. “The major corps commanders were all known to have luxury houses in Dubai,” Jahesh told me.

A Great Crime

Accusations from Biden and others that Afghans failed to fight the Taliban stung Akbari, whose job for years involved maintaining accurate statistics on Afghan security force casualties. The numbers of dead and wounded were sobering. Many of the elite commando units he’d worked with took heavy casualties in the last days of the war; in total, at least 66,000 Afghan police and military service members are estimated to have been killed since 2001.

The U.S. had built an Afghan security infrastructure that was almost entirely dependent on foreign military and contractor support for its own maintenance and logistics. When the U.S. withdrawal began, Afghan soldiers found that they were suddenly unable to call in airstrikes or receive resupply by air, although their U.S.-led combat training had included these as critical components of their style of fighting.

By the end, many Afghan soldiers were stuck holding positions that were impossible to defend and lacked even basic logistical support. The U.S. withdrawal only highlighted the unsustainable nature of the giant Afghan military apparatus that had been built over 20 years.

“It was a myth that the Afghan security forces didn’t fight in the weeks before the collapse of the government. A lot of them stood and fought, and they died in huge numbers,” said Jonathan Schroden, an Afghanistan expert with the Center for Naval Analyses , a nonprofit military research and analysis center in Virginia. “But once word started getting around that if you stood and fought the Taliban there would be no cavalry to come save you, defections and surrenders began. The Taliban were then able to highlight these instances of security forces surrendering as part of a very successful psychological warfare campaign.”

Long before the final collapse of the government, the Afghan security forces had already been struggling under the weight of high casualty rates, corrupt leadership, and low morale.

“The number of new recruits became very low because people were not ready to send their sons to the Afghan National Army. They were aware of the situation and knew that if they send their sons, then they won’t go back home alive,” Akbari said. “Some soldiers were not able to go to their homes and see their families for more than a year.”

Those Afghan soldiers and police who stayed in the fight had to deal with chronic shortages of food, fuel, warm clothing, and ammunition. Corruption in the procurement process steadily ate away at the military’s capacity, a systemic problem that SIGAR documented in real time throughout the war but which was never fixed. A 2017 SIGAR report on efforts to reform the procurement process said that the creation of a National Procurement Authority, which centralized contracts under Ghani’s office, was “one bright spot” in a system otherwise rife with corruption and graft. But according to Jahesh, the centralized authority slowed resupply missions, reducing transparency and creating more opportunities for corruption.

Contracts sometimes took more than six months to be approved, Jahesh said, and prices were wildly inflated. In one instance, he recalled that the procurement authority approved a contract to buy watermelon for the Afghan army at 70 Afghanis per kilogram, while watermelons in the market cost about 1.4 Afghanis per kilogram, meaning the army paid 50 times more than the going rate.

“The soldiers did not receive anything on time and they had no energy to fight simply because they had no vegetables, fruit, or meat to eat to meet their basic needs for calories,” Jahesh told me. “Commanders were being forced to sell military equipment from bases because they were receiving nothing from the government on time. Despite these shortages, on paper senior officials were making it look like everything was being provided for the soldiers.”

“Once word started getting around that if you stood and fought the Taliban there would be no cavalry to come save you, defections and surrenders began.”

I had witnessed supply shortages and other problems for years in my own reporting on the Afghan military. In October 2018, I visited a military base in a suburb of the city of Ghazni, which had recently been the site of fierce clashes between the Afghan military and the Taliban. Instead of training to fight, the Afghan soldiers I met were forced to spend their time gathering firewood to cook their meals as the government had failed to deliver propane and other vital supplies. A 2020 video shared on social media showed a group of wounded Afghan soldiers surrounded by the Taliban in Wardak Province, just south of Kabul. “We don’t have water, we don’t have food,” one of the soldiers said, addressing Ghani. “We have morals to fight if we receive support.”

On top of the brazen economic inequality between themselves and top officials in the Afghan government, the sense of abandonment that many soldiers felt made it seem logical to return to their families rather than die for leaders who they expected would flee to safety in Dubai or Turkey in case of a Taliban victory. Afghan soldiers had been fighting and dying pointlessly for years. Those who perished in what had become a futile effort to stop the Taliban received little dignity, even in death.

“We had many wounded personnel on our bases with wounds that became infected and who later died as a result,” Akbari said. “Some of these soldiers were temporarily buried inside the bases and dug up again when transport planes arrived to take them.”

In some cases, the bodies of Afghans who died on the battlefield were even returned to the wrong families. “The family held a funeral ceremony for them,” Akbari recalled. “But after a while they were found to be alive and returned home.”

While some families were mistakenly told that their sons, brothers, and cousins were dead, the bodies of others who had actually died were sometimes simply lost. Akbari says this ate at his conscience, even as he continued serving a government that he saw as the only hope of saving his country from the Taliban. “It was a great crime committed against them and their families,” Akbari told me.

Haunted by the Past

Though we came from different walks of life and served Afghanistan in different ways, Akbari and I are now both refugees in the United States. His days are spent looking for work and running through the bureaucratic gauntlet necessary to build a new life for his family. Like many other refugees, he spends his free time on WhatsApp, trying to learn about developments back in Afghanistan. Many nights he can’t sleep for thinking about the war.

“Many of my colleagues from special forces units have been persecuted, tortured, and martyred by the Taliban. Their families have been tortured. A number of them are alive in Afghanistan and cannot leave the country; neither can they work nor can they stay in their homes,” Akbari told me. “They have a lot of financial and security problems. None of the defense ministry authorities worked for their evacuation to a safe place. These authorities are thinking about how and where to buy a house or car, and they do not think about soldiers, lieutenants, and officers who were on the front lines.”

In Akbari’s mind, the failure of the war was not due primarily to the Americans, who could have withdrawn in any year since 2001 and seen the Afghan government collapse just as quickly. Instead, it was a product of a corrupt Afghan political class that has still not been held accountable for its failures. Recent news reports of former Afghan officials driving expensive luxury cars and living lavishly in Gulf Arab countries, Turkey, and the West do not surprise him. They are only the crowning insult to the efforts of ordinary Afghans who gave their lives in a tragic two-decade attempt to rebuild their country with international support.

The corruption and mismanagement of Afghanistan by its own elites, enabled, in many cases, by their U.S. partners, has plunged the country into a new era of suffering under the Taliban. One day, Akbari and I both dream of returning. For now, we can only try to learn from what went wrong.

“If I say that Afghanistan was a country during the Ashraf Ghani government, it would not be fair,” Akbari said. “Afghanistan was like a joint stock business company, in that every partner exercised as much authority as their share.”

The post I Watched the Afghan Government Collapse Under the Weight of Its Own Greed appeared first on The Intercept .