Sen. Bernie Sanders , I-Vt., may bring a vote on conditioning aid to Israel in the coming weeks, he told The Intercept.

Sanders spoke to The Intercept minutes before a Senate Democratic caucus luncheon, where the question of placing conditions on $14 billion in aid to Israel is on the agenda. “Yes,” he replied gruffly when asked if there was a chance he would push for a floor vote.

Sanders’s comment comes as the death toll in Gaza is around 15,000 — with some estimating it to have exceeded 20,000 — and amid a temporary pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Vermont senator has thus far refrained from calling for a permanent ceasefire, a key demand of activist groups that has broad support among the American public and has gained traction among members of Congress. He has instead only gone as far as calling for humanitarian pauses in fighting.

The Department of Defense has already sent a variety of heavy weapons and ammunition to Israel to support its continuing war in Gaza, according to a leaked list obtained by Bloomberg . Congress is now seeking to approve another $14 billion, requested by President Joe Biden, to provide advanced weapons systems, support for artillery and ammunition production, and more projectiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has also called for restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel.

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law,” Murphy said on Sunday . “I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws.”

One way the U.S. could place conditions on the aid is through what is known as the Leahy law, named after Sanders’s longtime colleague and former senator from Vermont Patrick Leahy. The Leahy law prohibits U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights violations.

While the idea faces opposition within the Democratic caucus, and the U.S. has never before placed conditions on its billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Biden seems to be considering the proposition. He told reporters the day after Thanksgiving — at the start of the temporary truce — that conditioning aid is a “worthwhile thought,” adding that “I don’t think, if I started off with that, we’d [have] ever gotten to where we are today”

When pressed on whether he might use his position on the Senate Budget Committee to push for reigning in the Israeli military’s onslaught, Sanders said, “there are ways we can approach it and that is what we are exploring right now.”

The post Bernie Sanders May Push Vote on Conditioning Aid to Israel in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Intercept .

Palestinians in Gaza displaced due to Israeli attacks move toward the southern Gaza Strip on Nov. 28, 2023.
Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images

Israel has been widely condemned for its brutal response to the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas. With the coming expiration of the ceasefire, this will only become more vociferous. But many U.S. supporters of Israel have responded to the criticism with a question: What else is the beleaguered country supposed to do?

The answer is simple. Israel should do what it has never done before: agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, based on international law.

This straightforward statement is scarce in mainstream U.S. political culture. In the speeches of politicians and in newspaper op-eds, it’s a matter of faith that Israel has always yearned for peace but has been constantly rebuffed by the Palestinians. The Palestinians, according to this narrative , prefer holding onto a dream of destroying Israel.

This is not quite 180 degrees the opposite of reality, but close. In the actual world outside of high-level American political rhetoric, Israel could have had peace at many times in the past 75 years. However, such a peace would have required Israel giving up most of the Palestinian land — specifically, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — it conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel has always preferred conflict with stateless Palestinians to that.

Amos Malka, one-time head of Israeli military intelligence, explained it straightforwardly in 2004. “It is possible to reach an agreement,” he said , “under the following conditions: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty on the Temple Mount; 97 percent of the West Bank plus exchanges of territory in the ratio of 1:1 with respect to the remaining territory; some kind of formula that includes the acknowledgement of Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem and a willingness to accept 20,000-30,000 refugees.”

In polite circles of U.S. power, these facts are considered preposterous. Anyone describing them exiles themselves from serious discussion of the issue. It’s similar to the situation before the invasion of Iraq , when there was uniform agreement across the political spectrum that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction . Any claims to the contrary were seen as self-evidently ludicrous, as ludicrous as now saying that Israel is a huge obstacle to peace.

From the Beginning

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The British Peel Commission was tasked with investigating violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine. It proposed in 1937 that the historic area of Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, making up about 17 percent of the area, and an Arab state, granted 75 percent. The remainder, including Jerusalem, would be under intentional supervision.

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations approved another partition plan. This gave Israel-to-be 56 percent of the area, and a Palestinian nation 43 percent.

In the standard U.S. story, the Zionist movement accepted both two-state solutions, and the Arab world rejected both. In fact, neither side accepted either.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The Arab side formally rejected the plans. The Zionist movement rejected the specifics of the Peel proposal and accepted the U.N. plan — but only in public. The founders of Israel privately agreed that once the country came into being, they would consolidate their power and then take over as much additional land as possible. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, put it this way in a famous 1937 letter to his son : “A Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning. … The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.”

In any case, the U.N. adoption of the partition plan in November 1947 led to a moderate civil war between the Jewish and Arab populations. Then during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 following Israel’s declaration of independence, the new country conquered 78 percent of Palestine, leaving 22 percent in Arab hands. Egypt controlled Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians experienced the Nakba , meaning “catastrophe,” in which 700,000 people were expelled or fled, and 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Subsequent history shows Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders meant what they said. In 1956, Israel joined with France and the U.K. to invade Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, though it was ultimately forced to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration. In the 1967 war, Israel took over Sinai and Gaza again, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Israel would eventually be forced to return the Sinai Peninsula following the 1973 Arab–Israeli War but has held onto everything else since.

Israeli forces attack the Arab village of Sassa in Galilee during the Arab–Israeli War on Oct. 1, 1948.
Photo: Pictures from History/Universal

The Early Years

It’s generally believed in the U.S. and Europe that after Israel’s founding, the Arab world spent decades devoted to destroying it. This is not so. There were absolutely factions in Arab politics who wished to reverse the establishment of Israel, and a great detail of blood-curdling Arab rhetoric on this subject. But various leaders of the relevant countries at various times — including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — showed they understood the balance of forces and were willing to consider a compromise.

However, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in 1949 that Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., “sees no need to run after peace. The armistice is sufficient for us; if we run after peace, the Arabs will demand a price of us: borders or refugees or both. Let us wait a few years.” That year Ben-Gurion also told his cabinet, as paraphrased by British–Israeli historian Avi Shlaim: “With the passage of time, the world would get used to Israel’s existing borders, and forget about U.N. borders and the U.N. idea of an independent Palestinian state.”

The U.S. pushed Israel to participate in a peace conference in Switzerland during the middle of 1949. The Arab position was that Israel’s borders should be not the armistice lines giving it 78 percent of Palestine, but the partition plan’s borders granting it 56 percent. The Arab participants also demanded that refugees from areas designated for an Arab state be able to return to their homes. Israel rejected both concepts. One of the Israeli delegates privately noted that his country’s government “think they can achieve peace without paying any price, maximal or minimal.” A cable from a U.S. State Department delegate asserted, “There never has been a time [during negotiations] when a generous and far-sighted attitude on the part of the Jews would not have unlocked peace. … As an advocate of the new state I hope they come to it eventually. Otherwise there will be no peace in the Middle East.”

The Emergence of the PLO

The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 and represented the increasing coherence of Palestinian national consciousness.

Following the 1967 war, the international consensus gradually came to be that peace would require the creation of a Palestinian state. At the same time, the PLO accepted internally that the overall war was over, and they had lost: They were therefore willing to make peace in return for a state on the 22 percent of Palestine constituting Gaza and the West Bank. A 1976 draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council called for this and stated that Israel should “withdraw from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967.” The PLO supported the resolution . Every country on the Security Council except the U.S. — including the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden — voted for it. But Israel had no interest in it, and the U.S. vetoed it . Instead of encouraging further moderation from the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with — according to Zeev Maoz, an Israeli historian who served in the military during three of the country’s wars — several goals. The first was to destroy the PLO and hence Palestinian nationalism.

Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Nov. 14, 1974.
Photo: Bettmann Archive

Bill Clinton’s Catastrophic Failure

In 1981, the PLO formally endorsed a Soviet proposal calling for a Palestinian state and “the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel.” In 1988, the PLO officially recognized Israel and accepted its right to exist in peace and security.

Israel still had no interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. And by the beginning of the Clinton administration in 1993, the PLO was not what it once had been. It was headquartered in Tunis, and little respected by younger Palestinians who had led the first intifada of the late 1980s. Then the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat, made the unfortunate decision to back Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War.

The PLO’s weakness made Arafat eager to accept a terrible deal in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While they were greeted with rapture in the U.S. media, there was nothing in them that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Palestinian state and peace. Indeed, one of the signatories, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, soon explicitly explained , “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.”

What happened then was exactly what anyone paying attention would anticipate : The PLO essentially took over security for Israel in some 18 percent of occupied territories — Israel solely controlled about 60 percent and shared responsibility for the remainder — and enriched itself, while the occupation and Palestinian misery continued unabated. But by the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term in the summer of 2000, he was eager to leave a legacy other than his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He cajoled Arafat to come to Camp David to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in hopes of conjuring a conflict-ending agreement.

The Palestinian attitude was that they had already made a gigantic compromise by accepting just the 22 percent of historic Palestine for their state. They were willing to compromise still more — but not much more.

Barak had no understanding of this. At Camp David, he offered the Palestinians what were essentially three disconnected bantustans — i.e., the equivalent of the separate black “homelands” in apartheid South Africa — in the West Bank, with Israel occupying and controlling the border with Jordan for some long period of time. Clinton tried to pressure Arafat to accept this; he did not. Long afterward, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a key Israeli negotiator at the talks, said , “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well.”

Clinton had promised Arafat that he would not blame him if the talks failed. He then reneged after the summit ended. Nonetheless, the Israelis and Palestinians continued to negotiate through the fall and narrowed their differences.

Clinton came up with what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. Several weeks afterward, Clinton proclaimed , “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

In the 22 years since, Bill Clinton has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement.

The Israelis and the Palestinians kept talking in late January 2001 in Taba, Egypt. It was not the Palestinians but Barak who terminated the discussions on January 27, a few weeks before Israeli elections. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

This was in fact true: The records of the Taba talks show the Israelis and Palestinians had come agonizingly close to specific solutions to what the territory of a Palestinian state would be and whether and how any Palestinian refugees could return to Israel, with less progress on who would control which parts of Jerusalem.

But Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who did not want a Palestinian state and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Clinton then made a fateful, disastrous decision. In the 22 years since, he has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. This has convinced both Israelis and Americans that Clinton made every effort to give Palestinians a state. But it was impossible, because — in what became a standard formulation — there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton, who was elected to the Senate in 2000 later became secretary of state, also joined in this key deception.

The Arab Peace Plan

In 2002, Saudi Arabia proposed a solution to the conflict known as the Arab Peace Initiative . The API called for a settlement along the standard lines that had been known for decades: an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with some small adjustments, a fair division of Jerusalem, and “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” The 22 members of the Arab League endorsed it, as did the 57-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Israel, with Sharon leading the country, simply ignored it.

The Olmert Offer

The two sides again came close after Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke and Arafat died. Ehud Olmert became the Israeli prime minister. Olmert was right-wing but had become convinced that Israel had to settle the conflict with Palestinians for its own safety.

In the standard U.S. narrative, Olmert made a wonderful offer to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and Abbas either rejected it or never responded. In reality, Olmert and Abbas held 36 secret meetings between 2006 and 2008.

However, Olmert, under investigation for accepting bribes, resigned from his position in 2008. He later said , “If I had remained prime minister for another four to six months, I believe it would have been possible to reach an agreement. The gaps were small.”

Olmert was succeeded as prime minister by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has consistently opposed a Palestinian state throughout his career and had no interest in continuing the talks with Abbas.

Lost Opportunities With Hamas

In the U.S., Hamas is considered anathema, for understandable reasons. Its original 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the obliteration of Israel. (A new Hamas charter was issued in 2017 and states that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”)

However, there have long been clear signs that factions within Hamas were moderating and open to long-term agreements with Israel. In 1997, Khaled Mashal, then the top Hamas leader, offered a 30-year ceasefire to Israel. Israel did not respond — but did immediately try to assassinate Mashal in Jordan.

In 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s chief religious leader, called for a 10-year truce with Israel if it returned to its pre-1967 borders. Israel assassinated him two months later.

In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian elections over the PLO-affiliated Fatah. The new Palestinian prime minister, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, wrote secretly to President George W. Bush. Haniyeh told Bush , “We are so concerned about stability and security in the area that we don’t mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 border and offering a truce for many years.” Haniyeh also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which he said Palestinians priorities “included resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks.” The Bush administration did not respond.

Around the same time, Mashal said Hamas would not oppose the Arab Peace Initiative. An Israeli spokesman responded that this was irrelevant “verbal gymnastics.”

In 2009, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, wrote that Hamas has recognized “its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” but “Israel, for reasons of its own,” was not interested in such a discussion.

The same year, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, reported that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

There are many more examples of this, along with Israeli disinterest demonstrated in the most extreme ways possible. In 2012, according to an Israeli peace activist, the head of Hamas’s military wing had become convinced that Palestinians should negotiate a long-term truce with Israel. On the same day Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief, was reviewing a draft proposal for such a truce, Israel assassinated him .

It is, of course, possible that this has all been a PR operation by Hamas, and that it has been making the same calculation as the Zionist movement originally did — i.e., that it could accept a partition of Palestine and then later expand to take the whole thing. But given the relative power of the two sides , this seems unlikely — and even if true, largely irrelevant.

Hamas rockets are intercepted by the Iron Dome over the skies of Ashkelon, Israel, on Oct. 10, 2023.
Photo: Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

Where Things Stand Now

It’s true that it may now be, from a political standpoint, impossible for Israel to make peace. Thanks to decades of nationalist propaganda , most left-of-center Israelis believed even before October 7 that there was no way to make peace with Palestinians. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists and religious conservatives simply want to keep the West Bank and so wouldn’t make peace even if they thought it were possible.

Now, after last month’s shocking Hamas assault, the situation appears insoluble. Any Israeli leader who tried to do what’s necessary for a two-state solution, especially withdrawing settlers from the West Bank , would face the possibility of a revolt from a faction of the Israeli military and would personally be in great physical danger .

Nevertheless, we are where we are. What hope there is lies in the fact that the world — at least, the world minus the U.S., Israel, and the tiny island of Nauru — recognizes the incredible urgency of peace. The appalling suffering of Palestinians remains what it has been for 75 years: a sanguineous wound, both literally and metaphorically, at the center of the Middle East. If it is never healed, we will continually face the possibility of regional or even larger wars. Long ago, James Baldwin observed that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We don’t know if this horrendous tragedy can be ended, but if it can be, the first thing Americans and everyone else have to do is face reality.

The post All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept .

S hortly after October 7 , after Hamas entered Israel, murdered over a thousand people, and took more than 200 others hostage, the Israeli artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid quickly formatted “kidnapped” flyers with the photographs and names of some of the captives. They said their motivation wasn’t political, that they were looking to work through their “ fear in a dark time ” by keeping public attention on the captives. Soon, Mintz and Bandaid made the flyers available online, translated into 22 languages, and now the images can be found in cities and on college and university campuses around the world, any place that has a stake in the great game of Middle East politics. Even as some Israeli hostages begin to come home, the posters remain flashpoints of global polarization.

Some opposed to Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza think the flyers are propaganda, a crass manipulation of suffering designed to cement a bond between the United States and Israel and ensure that Washington continues to give Israel both a free hand and what it wants in weapons to continue its assault on Gaza, exempt from the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits supplying weapons to states involved in wide-scale human rights violations. As we approach the two-month mark since the hostage-taking, the posters have become rallying points in what is shaping up to be a global war for hearts and minds. Videos of people ripping down the flyers have gone viral , providing evidence that those who claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians are heartless and inhumane. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently said of the posters being ripped down. Some Americans, Tapper said, “are actually rooting for the hostage takers.”

As a New Yorker and historian who has worked on political terror in Latin America, I think there is another way to tell the story of the controversy these posters are causing, why some see them as a plea for help and others a call for war. They exist in a loop. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say it’s an endless return, a vortex of shared, unending trauma, starting with the Holocaust, continuing through death-squad terror in Latin America, onward to 9/11, and now to Gaza and back to the Shoah.

Relatives of missing people hold portraits of presidential candidates with the question “Where Are They?” covering their eyes during a demonstration demanding their loved ones return alive in Guadalajara, Mexico, on April 10, 2018.
Photo: Ulises Ruiz/AFP via Getty Images

Night and Fog

In Latin America, the repressive tactic of “disappearing” enemies of the state came into widespread use in the early 1960s, as Washington mobilized its allies to ensure the containment of the Cuban Revolution. The tactic itself emulated Adolf Hitler’s famous 1941 Nacht und Nebel , or Night and Fog, decree, which directed security forces operating in occupied territories, mainly France, to capture dissidents and hold them incommunicado. Most were executed. The Nazis coined a neologism for these victims, vernebelt , which loosely translates as transformed into mist . Latin Americans called their missing los desaparecidos , the disappeared. It was an especially cruel method of repression. Family members and friends exhausted their energies dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies trying to find some hint of where their loved ones might have been taken, only to be met with indifference by government officials. “To disappear” is normally an intransitive verb, meaning the object of the sentence is doing the action. “My keys disappeared.” “That book disappeared.” Latin Americans turned it into a transitive verb, used often in what linguists call the adversative passive voice, to indicate an unfortunate occurrence: “She was disappeared.”

By whom? Everyone knew. The sentence’s subject noun was left unstated, underscoring the covert nature of the death squads: Fue desaparecido . Into the mist.

People prepare pictures of missing people on International Day of the Disappeared in Mexico on Aug. 30, 2023.
Photo: Jair Cabrera Torres/picture alliance via Getty Images

As violence intensified in Guatemala in the early 1980s, relatives and comrades of those taken by security forces would, within days, put up flyers on city walls with their faces, names, and dates of disappearance, along with, often, the unions or political organizations to which they belonged. The walls of union halls were filling with photographs of the missing, yet this was still a moment when it was possible to believe that the Left was in ascendence. Deborah Levenson, a historian who documented the 1985 siege of Guatemala City’s Coca-Cola plant during this period, says that images of the missing were not meant to convey defeat, nor to preserve what later would be called “historical memory.” Levenson, in response to a query for this essay, recalls that the bottling plant’s cafeteria was adorned with large photographs of the vanished staring down on surviving militant unionists as they ate. The missing and the dead alike were understood to be something like Christian martyrs, who had sacrificed their lives for those fighting for a better life. The subtext was clear, she said: “The loss of this person will not stop us but make us stronger.”

But the Left in Guatemala, as throughout Latin America, was defeated, brutally so, and the meaning of the public photographs of the missing changed. They evolved from inspiration to accusation, evidence of crimes against humanity, proof that this person once lived and now is gone. By the end of the 1980s, death squads, police units, and military detachments had, in addition to committing run-of-the-mill extrajudicial assassinations and massacres, disappeared thousands in Chile; tens of thousands in Argentina; around 10,000 in El Salvador; and 45,000 in Guatemala. As Gabriel García Márquez told his Swedish audience in his 1982 Nobel acceptance lecture, it’s “ as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala .” This form of repression has outlived the Cold War; more than 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared over the last two decades, victims of a never-ending war on drugs.

Defeat brought forth the need to find an appropriate way to render the disappeared, a way to fully represent both the specific individual who had been taken and the magnitude of what had been lost. In Argentina, the junta had been disappearing people since 1976, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s, in increasingly bold actions taken by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo , that people began to openly come out into the street with photographs of their missing. Elías was last seen in the clandestine concentration camp El Vesubio on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978. His son, a friend of mine, remembers his mother making their placard with a heavy black marker. The family had little money, so a human rights organization paid to have the photograph from Elías’s citizenship card enlarged.

In late 1983, a collective of Argentine artists working with relatives of the disappeared decided it was time to defy the generals and stage a large demonstration, and they searched for an artistic medium that could convey the enormity of the suffering, some way to represent both humanity and its loss. One of the organizers landed on panel series titled “ Each Day at Auschwitz ” by the Polish artist Jerzy Skapski . Skapski had crammed each poster with thousands of silhouettes, meant to represent the people who were killed daily at the death camp.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

It made sense for this group of activists to look to the Holocaust for ideas on how to represent loved ones taken. The Argentine junta was viciously antisemitic, and Latin America was indispensable in the creation of Israel, casting more than a third of the total United Nations votes in 1947 in favor of partition and voting unanimously, all 18 Latin American nations, for Israel’s admission into the U.N. The horror of Hitlerism resonated in Latin America. Pablo Neruda made anti-Nazism a topic in his writings, and Jorge Luis Borges addressed the Holocaust in his short stories. For decades, the Latin American Left understood itself as struggling against local variants of fascism, as if World War II hadn’t ended but merely shifted venues.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

On September 21, 1983, as Buenos Aires’s city center, the Plaza de Mayo, filled with protesters, organizers asked those who had lost family members to lie down on sheets of white paper and let an artist draw outlines of their bodies. The name of the disappeared, along with the date they went missing, was then painted on the silhouette . By the end of the day, thousands — some say 30,000 — silhouettes were plastered on the walls of government buildings surrounding the plaza and adjacent streets. Later, the sheets were turned into stencils and the images spray-painted on walls, making it look as if ghostly shadows were walking the streets of Buenos Aires.

The event was called the siluetazo , which might best be translated as silhouette-a-thon, and it was the largest protest against disappearances in Latin America of its time. Soon, similar silhouettes began to appear in other Latin American cities. Most recently, the silhouette image was used to represent the 43 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who, in 2014, were brutally executed and disappeared by Mexican security forces.

I’ve walked by untold numbers of desaparecido posters. One still sees them today, decades after the worst of Central America’s terror, plastering walls in the center of Guatemala City; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. “ Where are they? ” they ask.

Memorials and photos of missing loved ones after the September 11 World Trade Center attack in New York City in 2001.
Photo: Joan Slatkin/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The 9/11 Missing

In New York after 9/11, the spontaneous display of “ missing ” posters seemed familiar. The flyers reportedly started in response to rumors that the city’s hospital beds were filled with thousands of unconscious, unidentified victims and that some people were found walking the streets with amnesia. The first set was done in a rush, with hastily compiled information about a missing person , including their height and weight and the color of their hair and eyes, along with where they worked and on what floor, in either the north or south tower. As the days went by and the rumors of unidentified survivors proved untrue, the posting continued, with physical details giving way to more personal information , including details about their children, their partners, and their hobbies.

Within a week, they were everywhere in the city, taped to chain-link fences, pasted on walls and lamp posts and on subway entrances. The walls of St. Vincent’s — since closed and sold to developers, like so many of New York’s community hospitals in the early 21st century — were covered with them. Many of the victims and left-behind family members were of a different status than the Latin Americans who were disappeared. They lived in the most powerful nation in the world, in history, and presumably most weren’t especially politically active, unlike the majority of Latin America’s disappeared. The World Trade Center, though, employed hundreds of migrant workers , many undocumented, from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. The union UNITE HERE counted 43 immigrant workers at Windows on the World among the dead.

“The whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.”

Class and status mattered nothing in the dust and rubble. All shared a disorientation that was recognized by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer who has devoted himself to considering the problem of Latin America’s “disappeared.” “Suddenly,” he wrote in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times just after the towers fell, “the whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.” Such pain was routine for much of the world, leading Dorfman to hope for a kind of reconciliation, a way to end the “famous exceptionalism” that had kept the United States sequestered from much of the world. “Their suffering is neither unique nor exclusive,” he wrote, but rather connects them “with so many other human beings who have suffered unanticipated and often protracted injury and fury.”

Dorfman was wrong on that score. George W. Bush’s advisers were already determined to “move swiftly” — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the sun set that first day, according to the notes of an aide — to “go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” Liberal and neocon hawks were quick to lay out the case for an expansive war, not just to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice, but also to remake the Middle East in a way that would ensure U.S. global dominance. On September 14, George W. Bush, standing atop a crushed fire truck with a bullhorn in hand and a firefighter by his side, let the world know it would soon hear from the United States.

The “missing” flyers, though, were like flowers pushing up through cracks in cement. Some displays had American flags, but they were small and had nothing of vengeance about them. They conveyed a range of feelings, none of them warlike. It took your breath away, coming upon a wall or a chain-link fence papered with them. The photographs showed victims as their relatives wanted to remember them: holding pets, hugging partners, or playing with their children, or just a close-up portrait. Some had hearts and flowers drawn in yellow, blue, red, and green, perhaps by the victims’ children. They were intimate portraits, handmade by people who knew the missing, and, like their Latin American counterparts, they were affirmations of humanity.

For a few brief weeks, as the country was being prepped for what we were told would be a prolonged campaign, these flyers continued to affirm life’s fragility, as brittle as the tape holding them in place. No doubt many families of the World Trade Center dead did want revenge and were roused by Bush’s rallying cry. Yet judging from the composition of most flyers, the people who made them weren’t thinking about geopolitics or civilizational wars. They weren’t trying to crystalize an us-versus-them absolutism. I don’t remember any of them mentioning Al Qaeda. They were the closest atheist New Yorkers would come to the sacred.

Protesters hold posters with pictures of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas during a demonstration in London on Nov. 5, 2023.
Photo: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Pointless Provocations

The posters made on behalf of the October 7 Hamas victims are different. Mintz, one of the artists who came up with idea, describes herself as a “ visual poet ,” but there’s no poetry in this particular work. Moral values are inescapably artistic in nature, as E.L. Doctorow wrote in his 1977 essay “False Documents,” and these flyers convey a martial aesthetic. They are starkly uniform in arrangement, all topped with an uppercase “KIDNAPPED” headline running in block letters. Under the header to the left is a picture of a victim or victims, and to the right, their details. The information, though, is sparse. Sometimes the flyers don’t even give names, but simply say “entire Israeli family” or “young Israeli couple.”

It’s the generic sameness of the posters , complete with QR codes, not the individuality of the missing, that is most striking. Sen. John Fetterman has wallpapered his entire outer office with these flyers, a strident brick-like array of red, black, and white. Fetterman says they are staying up until all the hostages come home. Over 200,000 Arab Muslims, including many Palestinians, live in Pennsylvania; were they to enter that antechamber, would they feel welcomed or excluded by what they saw there?

The critic Roland Barthes used the word “ punctum ” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “ Israeli ,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall , they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

Over the last few days, after a blessed but limited ceasefire went into effect, Hamas and Israel have exchanged scores of captives. Among those released by Hamas were a number of migrant Thai workers , while both sides have freed children and elderly people. For a moment at least, the joy of family reunions, smiles, tears, and hugs among both Israelis and Palestinians raised hopes that out of shared pain and vulnerability, a common humanity could emerge, a reprieve from the bellicosity of the “kidnapped” posters. As I write this, I can almost hope that the peace will hold. But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has made it clear that “the respite will be short.” Once the ceasefire is over, the Israel Defense Forces will resume its assault on Gaza “with intensity” in a war that may last months more.

Meanwhile, the “kidnapped” posters have been transformed into antagonistic performance art. Supporters of Israel put them up, at times in places intentionally meant to provoke , such as near Palestinian restaurants. And then advocates for Palestinians pull them down, with the video of the act posted online, taken as evidence that what really moves those who claim to care about Palestinians is antisemitism, that they are so coldhearted they can’t bear to leave a memento of a stolen child on the wall. A report in Miami’s New Times found cases in which individuals had put the poster up with a clear intention of videoing someone tearing it down, in a bid to have them fired from their place of employment. Viral videos posted by defenders of Israel show defaced posters, some with feces .

We live in a precarious time of heightened sensitivity. Contretemps over slogans, placards, and posters can deepen schisms, charging routine acts with malicious meaning, transforming every utterance into an insult. We should tread carefully and avoid, at all costs, pointless provocations.

War does radicalize, so it is useful to keep in mind that even the most obscene slurs and outrages — including painting synagogues with antisemitic graffiti, or Israel’s supporters telling anti-Zionist Jews that Hitler should have gassed them — are byproducts of the main thing: killing and kidnapping; siege; occupation; dispossession; the bombing of hospitals, bakeries, and refugee camps; the denial of water and electricity to civilians; and the massacre and maiming of children.

The post How to Read the Israeli “Kidnapped” Posters appeared first on The Intercept .

Palestinians reunite with their relatives as they are released from Israel’s Ofer prison as a part of a prisoner swap, in Al Bireh, West Bank, on Nov. 26, 2023.
Photo: Issam Rimawi/Anadolu via Getty Images

The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child , these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel.

Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse . Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions .

If, as Israel alleges, these people have committed violent crimes, particularly against civilians, then Israel should give them full rights to due process, to see the alleged evidenced against them, and they should be tried in civilian courts with the same rights afforded Israeli defendants. That would also mean allowing Palestinians who do commit acts of political violence, particularly against the military forces of a violent occupation, to raise the context and legality of the Israeli occupation as part of their defense. Israel is asking the world to believe that these 300 people are all dangerous terrorists, yet it has built a kangaroo military court system for Palestinians that magically churns out a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. All of this from a country that constantly promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

To pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust.

Palestinians on this list are from the occupied West Bank and have lived their entire lives under an apartheid regime . Palestinians taken by Israel, including some on the list of prisoners proposed for release, have certainly committed violent acts. But to pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust given the appalling conditions Palestinians have lived under for decades. Contrast this to the widespread impunity that governs the actions of violent Israeli settlers who mercilessly target Palestinians in an effort to expel them from their homes.

All nations should be judged by how they treat the least powerful, not the most powerful or only those from a certain religion or ethnicity. This is why many leading civil liberties lawyers in the U.S. opposed the use of Guantánamo Bay prison and military tribunals and continue to oppose U.S. laws or rules that deny the accused a fundamental right to a proper defense.

The post Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept .

U.S. military outposts in Iraq and Syria are plagued by thefts of weapons and equipment, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept that show militias and criminal gangs are systematically targeting U.S. forces.

Military investigations launched earlier this year found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems as well as drones — have been stolen in Iraq. This follows hundreds of thousands of dollars in military gear that were purloined from U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, as reported earlier this year by The Intercept .

America’s bases in Iraq and Syria ostensibly exist to conduct “ counter-ISIS missions ,” but experts say they are used primarily as a check against Iran. Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, these bases have come under regular rocket and drone attacks as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

The U.S. has increasingly responded to those attacks. In Syria, the U.S. launched “precision strikes” on a “training facility and a safe house” allegedly used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S. has since employed an AC-130 gunship against an “Iranian-backed militia vehicle and a number of Iranian-backed militia personnel” at an undisclosed location, following a ballistic missile attack on Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, justifying U.S. strikes.

But the criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept demonstrate that the U.S. cannot even secure its equipment, much less protect its troops.

“We don’t tend to think nearly critically enough about the ripple effects of such an expansive U.S. military footprint,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, told The Intercept. “The so-called war on terror isn’t over — it’s just morphed. And we can understand these weapons thefts as just one of the many political costs of that ongoing campaign.”

Details about the thefts in Iraq, which were never made public by the military, are found in criminal investigations files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones, valued at about $162,500, were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq, sometime last year. The agents identified no suspects, and no leads are mentioned in the file.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq.

A separate investigation discovered that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” including targeting sight and launcher units for Javelin missiles — a shoulder-fired guided missile that locks on its targets — were stolen at or en route to Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss to the U.S. government was estimated at almost $480,000.

Investigators did not believe the thefts were an inside job. “No known U.S. personnel were involved,” according to a criminal investigations file. The investigators instead refer to locals as the likely suspects. “Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment,” the document stated. “Further there have been systemic issues with U.S. containers being pilfered by these groups and local nationals outside of Union III, due to the lack of security.”

Earlier this year, The Intercept revealed at least four significant thefts and one loss of U.S. weapons and equipment in Iraq and Syria from 2020 to 2022, including 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, specialized field artillery tools and equipment, and unspecified “weapons systems.” Two of the incidents took place at bases in Syria, and three were in Iraq. None of those thefts occurred at Forward Operating Base Union III.

Just how many thefts have occurred is unknown — perhaps even to the Pentagon. After more than two months, both Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, and its parent organization, U.S. Central Command, failed to respond to any of The Intercept’s questions about weapons thefts in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this year, the task force admitted that it does not know the extent of the problem: A spokesperson said the task force has no record of any thefts from U.S. forces. “[W]e do not have the requested information,” Capt. Kevin T. Livingston, then CJTF-OIR’s director of public affairs, told The Intercept when asked if any weapons, ammunition, or equipment were stolen in the last five years.

The thefts and losses uncovered by The Intercept are just the latest weapons accountability woes to afflict the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria. A 2017 investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found $20 million of weapons in Kuwait and Iraq were “vulnerable to loss or theft.” A 2020 audit discovered that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that works with America’s Syrian allies, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for those local surrogates.

Groups like Amnesty International and Conflict Armament Research also found that a substantial portion of the Islamic State group’s arsenal was composed of U.S.-made or U.S.- purchased weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or otherwise obtained from the Iraqi Army and Syrian fighters.

Losses of weapons and ammunition are significant — and the military has taken pains to prevent them in the past. When the U.S. withdrew forces from an outpost near Kobani, Syria, in 2019, it conducted airstrikes on ammunition that was left behind . The military also destroyed equipment and ammunition during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Still, within weeks of the U.S. defeat, American-made pistols, rifles, grenades, binoculars, and night-vision goggles flooded weapons shops there. Others were exported to Pakistan.

Since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s become ever more apparent that U.S. bases in the Middle East serve as magnets for attack, although far-flung outposts have been periodically targeted in other conflict zones. In 2019, for example, the terrorist group al-Shabab assaulted a U.S. base in Baledogle, Somalia . The next year, the same group raided a longtime American outpost in Kenya , killing three Americans and wounding two others.

In recent weeks, America’s bases in Iraq and Syria have sometimes come under persistent attack, including as many as four strikes by drones and rockets in a 24-hour period. U.S. forces have been attacked more than 70 times — 36 times in Iraq, 37 in Syria — since October 17. More than 60 U.S. personnel have been wounded, according to Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.

The investigation files obtained by The Intercept offer evidence that U.S. military bases also provide tempting targets for criminals. Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on a daring daylight armed robbery of military contractors less than a mile from the entrance of Air Base 201, a large U.S. drone outpost in Niger. In 2013, a U.S. Special Operations compound in Libya was looted of hundreds of weapons along with armored vehicles. And a 2021 Associated Press investigation found that at least 1,900 military weapons were lost or stolen during the 2010s — from bases stretching from Afghanistan to North Carolina — and that some were then used in violent crimes.

The post Missiles and Drones Among Weapons Stolen From U.S. in Iraq and Syria appeared first on The Intercept .

The White House has requested the removal of restrictions on all categories of weapons and ammunition Israel is allowed to access from U.S. weapons stockpiles stored in Israel itself.

The move to lift restrictions was included in the White House’s supplemental budget request , sent to the Senate on October 20. “This request would,” the proposed budget says, “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles.”

The request pertains to little-known weapons stockpiles in Israel that the Pentagon established for use in regional conflicts, but which Israel has been permitted to access in limited circumstances — the very limits President Joe Biden is seeking to remove.

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.”

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel,” said John Ramming Chappell, a legal fellow with the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Created in the 1980s to supply the U.S. in case of a regional war, the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I, is the largest node in a network of what are effectively foreign U.S. weapons caches. Highly regulated for security, the stockpiles are governed by a set of strict requirements. Under circumstances laid out in these requirements, Israel has been able to draw on the stockpile, purchasing the weapons at little cost if it uses the effective subsidy of U.S. military aid .

With the WRSA-I, Biden is looking to lift virtually all the meaningful restrictions on the stockpile and the transfer of its arms to Israel, with plans to remove limitations to obsolete or surplus weapons, waive an annual spending cap on replenishing the stockpile, remove weapon-specific restrictions, and curtail congressional oversight. All of the changes in the Biden budget plan would be permanent, except for lifting the spending cap, which is limited to the 2024 fiscal year.

The changes would come in an arms-trade relationship that is already shrouded in secrecy, as The Intercept recently reported . Whereas the administration has provided pages of detailed lists of weapons provided to Ukraine, for instance, its disclosure about arms provided to Israel could fit in a single, short sentence. Last week, Bloomberg obtained a leaked list of weapons provided to Israel, revealing that they include thousands of Hellfire missiles — the same kind being used extensively by Israel in Gaza.

The effect of lifting the restrictions on transfers to Israel — such as eliminating the requirement that the weapons be part of a surplus — could harm U.S. interests by diminishing American preparedness for its own conflicts in the region, said Josh Paul, a former official who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Paul, who resigned over U.S. arms assistance to Israel , told The Intercept, “By dropping the requirement that such articles be declared excess, it would also increase the existing strain on U.S. military readiness in order to provide more arms to Israel.”

“Undermine Oversight and Accountability”

The U.S. government is only supposed to spend $200 million per fiscal year restocking the WRSA-I — about half the total cap for all U.S. stockpiles round the globe. The White House request, however, would waive the limit on U.S. contributions to the stockpile in Israel. That would allow the stockpile to be continuously replenished.

“The President’s emergency supplemental funding request,” Paul said, “would essentially create a free-flowing pipeline to provide any defense articles to Israel by the simple act of placing them in the WRSA-I stockpile, or other stockpiles intended for Israel.”

The U.S. currently requires that Israel grant certain concessions in exchange for certain types of arms assistance from the Pentagon, but the White House request would remove this condition as well.

Finally, the White House request would also reduce congressional oversight of U.S. arms transfers by reducing the length of advance notice made to Congress before a weapons transfers. Under current law, there must be 30 days prior notice, but the Biden budget request would allow this to be shortened in “extraordinary” circumstances.

“It will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel.”

“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children,” said Chappell, of Center for Civilians in Conflict.

The House has already passed legislation reflecting the White House’s request last month, and it now stands before the Senate.

“Taken as a package,” said William Hartung, an arms expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it is extraordinary, and it will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel, even as the Israeli government has engaged in massive attacks on civilians, some of which constitute war crimes.”

The post Joe Biden Moves to Lift Nearly Every Restriction on Israel’s Access to U.S. Weapons Stockpile appeared first on The Intercept .

Secret Pakistani arms sales to the U.S. helped to facilitate a controversial bailout from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year, according to two sources with knowledge of the arrangement, with confirmation from internal Pakistani and American government documents. The arms sales were made for the purpose of supplying the Ukrainian military — marking Pakistani involvement in a conflict it had faced U.S. pressure to take sides on.

The revelation is a window into the kind of behind-the-scenes maneuvering between financial and political elites that rarely is exposed to the public, even as the public pays the price. Harsh structural policy reforms demanded by the IMF as terms for its recent bailout kicked off an ongoing round of protests in the country. Major strikes have taken place throughout Pakistan in recent weeks in response to the measures.

The protests are the latest chapter in a year-and-a-half-long political crisis roiling the country. In April 2022, the Pakistani military, with the encouragement of the U.S., helped organize a no-confidence vote to remove Prime Minister Imran Khan. Ahead of the ouster, State Department diplomats privately expressed anger to their Pakistani counterparts over what they called Pakistan’s “aggressively neutral” stance on the Ukraine war under Khan. They warned of dire consequences if Khan remained in power and promised “all would be forgiven” if he were removed.

“Pakistani democracy may ultimately be a casualty of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.”

Since Khan’s ouster, Pakistan has emerged as a useful supporter of the U.S. and its allies in the war, assistance that has now been repaid with an IMF loan. The emergency loan allowed the new Pakistani government to put off a looming economic catastrophe and indefinitely postpone elections — time it used to launch a nationwide crackdown on civil society and jail Khan .

“Pakistani democracy may ultimately be a casualty of Ukraine’s counteroffensive,” Arif Rafiq, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan, told The Intercept.

Pakistan is known as a production hub for the types of basic munitions needed for grinding warfare. As Ukraine grappled with chronic shortages of munitions and hardware, the presence of Pakistani-produced shells and other ordinances by the Ukrainian military has surfaced in open-source news reports about the conflict, though neither the U.S. nor the Pakistanis have acknowledged the arrangement.

Records detailing the arms transactions were leaked to The Intercept earlier this year by a source within the Pakistani military. The documents describe munitions sales agreed to between the U.S. and Pakistan from the summer of 2022 to the spring of 2023. Some of the documents were authenticated by matching the signature of an American brigadier general with his signature on publicly available mortgage records in the United States; by matching the Pakistani documents with corresponding American documents; and by reviewing publicly available but previously unreported Pakistani disclosures of arms sales to the U.S. posted by the State Bank of Pakistan.

The weapons deals were brokered, according to the documents, by Global Military Products, a subsidiary of Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer whose entanglements with less-than-reputable figures in Ukraine were the subject of a recent New York Times article.

Documents outlining the money trail and talks with U.S. officials include American and Pakistani contracts, licensing, and requisition documents related to U.S.-brokered deals to buy Pakistani military weapons for Ukraine.

The economic capital and political goodwill from the arms sales played a key role in helping secure the bailout from the IMF, with the State Department agreeing to take the IMF into confidence regarding the undisclosed weapons deal, according to sources with knowledge of the arrangement, and confirmed by a related document.

To win the loan, Pakistan had been told by the IMF it had to meet certain financing and refinancing targets related to its debt and foreign investment — targets that the country was struggling to meet. The weapons sales came to the rescue, with the funds garnered from the sale of munitions for Ukraine going a long way to cover the gap.

Securing the loan eased economic pressure, enabling the military government to delay elections — a potential reckoning in the long aftermath of Khan’s removal — and deepen the crackdown against Khan’s supporters and other dissenters. The U.S. remained largely silent about the extraordinary scale of the human rights violations that pushed the future of Pakistan’s embattled democracy into doubt.

“The premise is that we have to save Ukraine, we have to save this frontier of democracy on the eastern perimeter of Europe,” said Rafiq. “And then this brown Asian country has to pay the price. So they can be a dictatorship, their people can be denied the freedoms that every other celebrity in this country is saying we need to support Ukraine for — the ability to choose our leaders, ability to have civic freedoms, the rule of law, all these sorts of things that may differentiate many European countries and consolidated democracies from Russia.”

Masood Khan attends the 9th International Maritime Conference in Karachi, Pakistan on Feb. 13, 2021.

Photo: Muhammed Semih Ugurlu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Bombs for Bailouts

On May 23, 2023, according to The Intercept’s investigation, Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Masood Khan sat down with Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu at the State Department in Washington, D.C., for a meeting about how Pakistani arms sales to Ukraine could shore up its financial position in the eyes of the IMF. The goal of the sit-down, held on a Tuesday, was to hash out details of the arrangement ahead of an upcoming meeting in Islamabad the following Friday between U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Donald Blome and then-Finance Minister Ishaq Dar.

Lu told Khan at the May 23 meeting that the U.S. had cleared payment for the Pakistani munitions production and would tell the IMF confidentially about the program. Lu acknowledged the Pakistanis believed the arms contributions to be worth $900 million, which would help to cover a remaining gap in the financing required by the IMF, pegged at roughly $2 billion. What precise figure the U.S. would relay to the IMF remained to be negotiated, he told Khan.

At the meeting on Friday, Dar brought up the IMF question with Blome, according to a report in Pakistan Today , which said that “the meeting highlighted the significance of addressing the stalled IMF deal and finding effective solutions to Pakistan’s economic challenges.”

A spokesperson at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington declined to comment, referring questions to the State Department. A spokesperson for the State Department denied the U.S. played any role in helping procure the loan. “Negotiations over the IMF review were a matter for discussion between Pakistan and IMF officials,” the spokesperson said. “The United States was not party to those discussions, though we continue to encourage Pakistan to engage constructively with the IMF on its reform program.”

An IMF spokesperson denied the institution was pressured but did not comment on whether it was taken into confidence about the weapons program. “We categorically deny the allegation that there was any external pressure on the IMF in one way or another while discussing support to Pakistan,” said IMF spokesperson Randa Elnagar. (Global Ordnance, the firm involved in the arms deal, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“My understanding, based on conversations with folks in the administration, has been that we supported the IMF loan package given the desperate economic situation in Pakistan.”

The State Department’s denial was contradicted by Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a leading voice in Washington on foreign affairs. Earlier this month, Van Hollen told a group of Pakistani journalists, “The United States has been very instrumental in making sure that the IMF came forward with its emergency economic relief.” Van Hollen, whose parents were both stationed in Pakistan as State Department officials, was born in Karachi and is known to be the closest observer of Pakistan in Congress.

In an interview with The Intercept at the Capitol on Tuesday, Van Hollen said that his knowledge of the U.S. role in facilitating the IMF loan came directly from the Biden administration. “My understanding, based on conversations with folks in the administration, has been that we supported the IMF loan package given the desperate economic situation in Pakistan,” he said.

Eleventh-Hour IMF Deal

The diplomatic discussion about the loan came a month before a June 30 deadline for the IMF’s review of a planned billion-dollar payment, part of a $6 billion agreement made in 2019. A failed review would mean no cash infusion, but, in the months and weeks ahead of the deadline, Pakistani officials publicly denied that they faced serious challenges in financing the new loan.

In early 2023, Dar, the finance minister, said that external financing assurance — in other words, financial commitments from places like China, the Gulf states, or the U.S. — were not a condition the IMF was insisting Pakistan meet. In March 2023, however, the IMF representative in charge of dealing with Pakistan publicly contradicted Dar’s rosy assessment. IMF’s Esther Perez Ruiz said in an email to Reuters that all borrowers need to be able to demonstrate that they can finance repayments. “Pakistan is no exception,” Perez said.

The IMF statement sent Pakistani officials scrambling for a solution. The required financing, according to public reporting and confirmed by sources with knowledge of the arrangement, was set at $6 billion. To reach that goal, the Pakistani government claimed it had secured roughly $4 billion in commitments from Gulf countries. The secret arms deal for Ukraine would allow Pakistan to add nearly another billion dollars to its balance sheet — if the U.S. would let the IMF in on the secret.

“It was at an impasse because of the remaining $2 billion,” said Rafiq, the Middle East Institute scholar. “So if that figure is accurate, the $900 million, that’s almost half of that. That’s pretty substantial in terms of that gap that had to be bridged.”

On June 29, a day before the original program was set to expire, the IMF made a surprise announcement that instead of extending the previous series of loans and releasing the next $1.1 billion installment, the bank would instead be entering an agreement — “called a Stand-By Arrangement” — with fewer strings attached, more favorable terms, and valued at $3 billion.

“Had that not happened, there would have been a full-blown economic meltdown in the country. So it was a make-or-break moment.”

The agreement included the conditions that the currency would be allowed to float freely and energy subsidies would be withdrawn. The deal was finalized in July after Parliament approved the conditions, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the cost of energy.

Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, said that the IMF deal was critical to Pakistan’s short-term economic survival. “Had that not happened, there would have been a full-blown economic meltdown in the country,” Younus said. “So it was a make-or-break moment.”

The question of how Pakistan overcame its financing obstacles, has remained a mystery even to those following the situation professionally. The IMF issues public accounting of its reviews, Rafiq noted, but doing so if the financing relates to secret military projects presents an unusual challenge. “Pakistan is very strange, in many ways,” he said, “but I don’t know how a secret, covert, clandestine military program would figure into their calculations, because everything’s supposed to be open and by the books and all that.”

Police fire tear gas to disperse supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan protesting against the arrest of their leader in Peshawar, Pakistan, on May 9, 2023.

Photo: Hussain Ali/Pacific Press/Sipa via AP

Imran Khan, Ukraine, and Pakistan’s Future

At the start of the Ukraine war, Pakistan was in a markedly different geopolitical and economic position. When the conflict began, Khan, at the time the prime minister, was in the air on the way to Moscow for a long-planned bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The visit outraged American officials.

As The Intercept previously reported , Lu, the senior State Department official, said in a meeting with then-Pakistani Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan two weeks after the invasion that it was the belief of the U.S. that Pakistan had taken a neutral position solely at Khan’s direction, adding that “all would be forgiven” if Khan was removed in the no-confidence vote. Since his ouster, Pakistan has firmly taken the side of the U.S. and Ukraine in the war.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to deny that it put its thumbs on the scale of Pakistani democracy — for Ukraine or any other reason. At an off-the-record, virtual town hall with members of the Pakistani diaspora at the end of August, Lu’s deputy, Elizabeth Horst, responded to questions about The Intercept’s reporting on Lu’s meeting with the Pakistani ambassador.

“I want to take a moment to address disinformation about the United States’s role in Pakistani politics,” Horst said at the top of the call, audio of which was provided to The Intercept by an attendee. “We do not let propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation get in the way of any bilateral relationship, including our valued relationship with Pakistan. The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or one party versus another. Any claims to the contrary, including reports on the alleged cypher are false, and senior Pakistani officials themselves have acknowledged this isn’t true.”

Senior Pakistani officials, including former Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, have confirmed the authenticity of the cable, known internally as a cypher, published by The Intercept.

Van Hollen, in his press briefing with Pakistani journalists, took the same line as the State Department, saying that he had been assured by the administration that the U.S. did not interfere in Pakistani politics. In his interview with The Intercept, he clarified that he meant the U.S. did not engineer Khan’s ouster. “I’m not disputing the accuracy of the cable,” Van Hollen said. “Look, I have no idea where the administration is on what their view is on the final result, but I do not read that [cable] to mean that the United States engineered his removal.”

After orchestrating Khan’s removal, the military embarked on a campaign to eradicate his political party through a wave of killings and mass detentions. Khan himself is currently imprisoned on charges of mishandling a classified document and facing some 150 additional charges — allegations widely viewed as a pretext to stop him from contesting future elections.

Horst, at the town hall, was also pressed as to why the U.S. has been so muted in response to the crackdown. She argued the U.S. had, in fact, spoken up on behalf of democracy. “Look, I know many of you feel strongly and are very concerned about the situation in Pakistan. I’ve heard from you. Trust me when I say I see you, I hear from you. And I want to be responsive,” she said. “We do continue to speak up publicly and privately for Pakistan’s democracy.”

While Pakistan reels from the impact of IMF-directed austerity policies and the political dysfunction that followed Khan’s removal, its new military leaders have made lofty promises that foreign economic support will rescue the country. According to reports in the Pakistani publication Dawn, Army Chief Gen. Asim Munir recently told a gathering of Pakistani businessmen that the country could expect as much as $100 billion in new investment from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, hinting that there would be no more appeals to the IMF.

There is little evidence, however, that the Gulf nations are willing to come to Pakistan’s rescue. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, recently announced major investments and economic partnerships with India during a visit there for the G20 summit. Despite reports in the Pakistani press expressing hope that MBS would pay Pakistan a visit, none materialized, let alone any major new investment announcements.

The absence of other foreign support left Pakistan’s embattled military regime further dependent on the IMF, the U.S., and the production of munitions for the war in Ukraine to sustain itself through a crisis that shows no sign of resolution.

The post U.S. Helped Pakistan Get IMF Bailout With Secret Arms Deal for Ukraine, Leaked Documents Reveal appeared first on The Intercept .

In the past , Vice has documented the history of censorship on YouTube. More recently, since the company’s near implosion, it became an active participant in making things disappear.

In June, six months after announcing a partnership deal with a Saudi Arabian government-owned media company, Vice uploaded but then quickly removed a documentary critical of the Persian Gulf monarchy’s notorious dictator, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS.

The nearly nine-minute film, titled “Inside Saudi Crown Prince’s Ruthless Quest for Power,” was uploaded to the Vice News YouTube channel on June 19, 2023. It garnered more than three-quarters of a million views before being set to “private” within four days of being posted. It can no longer be seen at its original link on Vice’s YouTube channel; visitors see a message that says “video unavailable.” Vice did not respond to a request for comment on why the video was published and then made private or if there are any plans to make the video public again.

The Guardian first reported that a “film in the Vice world news Investigators series about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was deleted from the internet after being uploaded.” Though Vice did remove the film from its public YouTube channel, it is, in fact, not “deleted from the internet” and presently remains publicly accessible via web archival services.

Vice’s description of the video, now also unavailable on YouTube, previously stated that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed “orchestrates The Ritz Purge, kidnaps Saudi’s elites and royal relatives with allegations of torture inside, and his own men linked to the brutal hacking of Journalist Khashoggi – a murder that stunned the world.” The description goes on to state that Wall Street Journal reporters Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck “attempt to unfold the motivations of the prince’s most reckless decision-making.” Hope and Scheck are the co-authors of the 2020 book “Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power.”

A screenshot from the documentary “Inside Saudi Crown Prince’s Ruthless Quest for Power,” which Vice News deleted from its YouTube channel.

Image: The Intercept; Source: Vice News

In the documentary, Hope states that Crown Prince Mohammed is “disgraced internationally” owing to the Jamal Khashoggi murder, a topic which Vice critically covered at length in the past. More recently, however, Vice has shifted its coverage of Saudi Arabia, apparently due to the growth of its commercial relationship with the kingdom. The relationship appears to have begun in 2017 , owing to MBS’s younger brother, Khalid bin Salman, being infatuated with the brand; bin Salman reportedly set up a meeting between Vice co-founder Shane Smith and MBS.

By the end of 2018, Vice had worked with the Saudi Research and Media Group to produce promotional videos for Saudi Arabia . A few days after the Guardian piece detailing the deal came out, an “industry source” told Variety (whose parent company, Penske Media Corporation, received $200 million from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund earlier that year) that Vice was “reviewing” its contract with SRMG.

A subsequent Guardian investigation revealed that in 2020, Vice helped organize a Saudi music festival subsidized by the Saudi government. Vice’s name was not listed on publicity materials for the event, and contractors working on the event were presented with nondisclosure agreements.

In 2021, Vice opened an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The media company has gone from being “ banned from filming in Riyadh ” in 2018 to now actively recruiting for a producer “responsible for developing and assisting the producing of video content from short form content to long-form for our new media brand, headquartered in Riyadh.” The company lists 11 other Riyadh-based openings .

Commenting on the opening of the Riyadh office, a Vice spokesperson told the Guardian that “our editorial voice has and always will report with complete autonomy and independence.” In response to the Guardian recently asking about the rationale for the removal of the film, a Vice source stated that this was partially owing to concerns about the safety of Saudi-based staff.

In September 2022, the New York Times reported that Vice was considering engaging in a deal with the Saudi media company MBC. The deal was officially announced at the start of 2023. Most recently, the Guardian reported that Vice shelved a story which stated that the “Saudi state is helping families to harass and threaten transgender Saudis based overseas.” In response to this latest instance of apparent capitulation to advancing Saudi interests, the Vice Union issued a statement saying that it was “horrified but not shocked.” It added, “We know the company is financially bankrupt, but it shouldn’t be morally bankrupt too.”

Meanwhile, a map of Saudi Arabia reportedly hangs on a wall in Vice’s London office.

The post Vice Pulled a Documentary Critical of Saudi Arabia. But Here It Is. appeared first on The Intercept .

Since a cadre of U.S.-trained officers joined a junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president in late July, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been largely confined to their Nigerien outposts, including America’s largest drone base in the region, Air Base 201 in Agadez.

The base, which has cost the U.S. a total of $250 million since construction began in 2016, is the key U.S. surveillance hub in West Africa. But in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of U.S. Africa Command described Air Base 201 as “minimal” and “low cost.”

Gen. Michael Langley, the AFRICOM chief, told Congress about just two “enduring” U.S. forward operating sites in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and a longtime logistics hub on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. “The Command also operates out of 12 other posture locations throughout Africa,” he said in his prepared testimony. “These locations have minimal permanent U.S. presence and have low-cost facilities and limited supplies for these dedicated Americans to perform critical missions and quickly respond to emergencies.”

Experts say that Langley misled Congress, downplaying the size and scope of the U.S. footprint in Africa. AFRICOM’s “posture” on the continent actually consists of no fewer than 18 outposts, in addition to Camp Lemonnier and Ascension Island, according to information from AFRICOM’s secret 2022 theater posture plan, which was seen by The Intercept. A U.S. official with knowledge of AFRICOM’s current footprint on the continent confirmed that the same 20 bases are still in operation. Another two locations in Somalia and Ghana were also, according to the 2022 document, “under evaluation.”

Of the 20, Langley apparently failed to mention six so-called contingency locations in Africa, including a longtime drone base in Tunisia and other outposts used to wage U.S. shadow wars in Niger and Somalia . The U.S. military has often claimed that contingency locations are little more than spartan staging areas, but according to the joint chiefs of staff, such bases are critical to sustaining operations and may even be “ semi-permanent .”

“This is a case of the U.S. military showing a marked lack of transparency by using technicalities to avoid conveying an accurate understanding of the extent of U.S. bases in Africa.”

“This is a case of the U.S. military showing a marked lack of transparency by using technicalities to avoid conveying an accurate understanding of the extent of U.S. bases in Africa,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, told The Intercept. “I’ve done field research near the sites of some of the ‘contingency locations’ that don’t seem to be part of the general’s official count, and in practice, if not in name, they serve as significant hubs of U.S. military operations. To not include them in an official count is to pull wool over the eyes of Congress and the U.S. public.”

Last week, a coalition of 20 progressive, humanitarian, and antiwar organizations called on the leadership of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to keep New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s cost of war amendment, which would require “more transparency around the price of our military presence overseas and public information about our military footprint” in the final version of the 2024 defense spending bill.

Annee Lorentzen of the Washington-based Just Foreign Policy, who helped lead advocacy efforts around the amendment, sees it as critical for Pentagon accountability. “It is nearly impossible for U.S. taxpayers and even members of Congress to keep track of the vast U.S. military presence in the world. Without basic transparency about the location and costs of U.S. military engagement abroad, including information on the cost of our hundreds of bases and countless partnerships with foreign militaries, legislators cannot have an informed debate about national security priorities,” she told The Intercept. “In a democratic system, voters and their elected representatives should not be in the dark about where their money and military are sent.”

AFRICOM refused to clarify Langley’s testimony. “AFRICOM has no statement in response to your questions,” Timothy Pietrack, the deputy chief of AFRICOM Public Affairs, told The Intercept.

A staff sergeant fuels a plane at Air Base 101 in Niamey, Niger, on June, 30, 2021.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

AFRICOM claims that Air Base 201 in Agadez is not an “enduring” forward operating site but, according to the command’s 2022 posture plan, a “cooperative security location,” presumably one of the 12 “minimal permanent U.S. presence” and “low-cost” facilities mentioned by Langley.

Observations by this reporter, who scrutinized Air Base 201 from its perimeter and overhead earlier this year, put the lie to Langley’s characterizations. The linchpin of the U.S. military’s archipelago of bases in North and West Africa, Air Base 201 consists of a 6,200-foot runway (composed of 1.1 million square feet of asphalt ), aprons, taxiways, massive aircraft hangars , multistory living quarters , roads, utilities, munitions storage, and an aircraft rescue and firefighting station, all within a 25-kilometer “ base security zone .” U.S. troops eat in a 13,000-square-foot dining facility , work out in a gym , play on basketball and volleyball courts , and spend leisure time at a recreation center with “bookcases full of movies and games, Wi-Fi, snacks ,” according to the Air Force, all of it protected by fences, barriers, and upgraded air-conditioned guard towers with custom-made firing ports . Only the Pentagon could call Air Base 201, the largest “ airman-built ” project in Air Force history, a “low-cost” facility, since it cost $110 million to build and is maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million U.S. taxpayer dollars each year.

“When I went to Agadez on a research trip, I saw a large U.S. drone base that was the opposite of transitory,” said Savell, who has mapped U.S. counterterrorism efforts around the world, noting large-scale infrastructure like drone hangars and conspicuous operations that included a burn pit belching black smoke into the air. “None of the base’s neighbors — who see drones flying above their houses every day, and who have seen foreign contracting companies, rather than themselves, reap the profits of servicing a multimillion-dollar facility — would even remotely consider this a minor outpost.”

Officially, so-called cooperative security locations, known as CSLs, have “ little or no permanent U.S. presence ,” but Air Base 201 can currently accommodate about 1,000 U.S. military personnel, according to a spokesperson for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa. The access agreement governing the base has been in effect for nearly a decade, cannot be terminated with less than a year’s notice, and has no end date. “The agreement continues in force automatically after its initial ten-year term,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept.

In the wake of the July coup, the Pentagon looks to be doing everything it can to hold on to that access. On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that “out of an abundance of caution,” a small number of “non-essential personnel” would depart Niger and other troops would be repositioned but that the overall effects were minor. “This does not change our overall force posture in Niger,” a Defense Department spokesperson told The Intercept.

“[T]he goal is to stay,” said Air Force Gen. James Hecker , the commander of U.S. air forces in Europe and Africa, when asked last month if the U.S. was planning to evacuate troops from Niger. “Preparing to stay might be a better way to say it because that’s what we’re hoping we’re going to do.”

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh voiced similar sentiments. “Niger is a partner, and we don’t want to see that partnership go,” she said . “We’ve invested, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into bases there, trained with the military there.”

In addition to Air Base 201, the U.S. military operates another CSL — a second drone facility known as Air Base 101 — at the main commercial airport in Niger’s capital, Niamey. A Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept that they were now “repositioning some U.S. personnel and equipment in Niger from Air Base 101 in Niamey to Air Base 201 in Agadez” but did not respond to questions about how many personnel would be moved. The CIA also operates a drone base in the far north of the country near the town of Dirkou.

Niger’s servicemembers stand guard as supporters of Niger’s National Council for the Safeguarding of the Fatherland gather outside the Nigerien and French airbase in Niamey, Niger, on Sept. 3, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion outpost in sun-bleached Djibouti, is the crown jewel of U.S. bases on the east side of the African continent. A longtime home for Special Operations forces and counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia, it hosts around 4,000 U.S. and allied personnel . Since 2002, the base has expanded from 88 acres to nearly 600 and spun off a satellite outpost 10 kilometers to the southwest, where drone operations in the country were relocated in 2013. Chabelley Airfield has gone on to serve as an integral base for missions in Somalia and Yemen , as well as the drone war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria .

In 2020, a CSL at Manda Bay , Kenya, was attacked by members of the terrorist group al-Shabab, killing three Americans, wounding two others, and damaging or destroying six aircraft. In neighboring Somalia, a similar base at Baledogle Airfield is a key node in the U.S. drone war that has seen 30 declared strikes under President Joe Biden. The U.S. also has a CSL in the capital, Mogadishu. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., recently scoffed at Langley’s characterizations of these as “minimal” outposts. “Look at Somalia. We’re pretty enduring there,” he told The Intercept during a recent interview. “We’ve become the block captain of Mogadishu.”

Among the contingency locations listed in the 2022 posture plan that Langley failed to mention is a drone base located at Sidi Ahmed Air Base in Bizerte, Tunisia. As early as 2016, almost 70 Air Force personnel and more than 20 civilian contractors were deployed to “Camp Sidi,” according to documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act. “You know, flying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones out of Tunisia has been taking place for quite some time,” said Gen. Thomas Waldhauser , the then-chief of AFRICOM, in 2017. “[W]e fly there, it’s not a secret, but we are very respectful to the Tunisians’ desires in terms of, you know, how we support them and the fact that we have [a] low profile.”

The other contingency locations that Langley apparently failed to mention to members of Congress this spring include facilities located in Misrata, Libya; Thebephatshwa, Botswana; Kismayo, Somalia ; as well as in Ouallam and Diffa, Niger.

While AFRICOM prefers to gloss over the existence of these officially “ non-enduring ” outposts, contingency locations play a long-term and consequential role in U.S. operations. The Intercept first reported on a contingency location in Ouallam six years ago . After an October 2017 ambush in which ISIS fighters near the village of Tongo Tongo killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded two, AFRICOM announced that the ambushed troops — based in Ouallam — were providing “ advice and assistance ” to Nigerien forces. In truth, “Team Ouallam” was conducting operations with a larger Nigerien force under Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging regional counterterrorism effort . Until bad weather intervened, that group was slated to support another team of American and Nigerien commandos based at a then-contingency location near the town of Arlit who were trying to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, a so-called 127e program that allows U.S. forces to use local troops as proxies.

“The framers of our Constitution didn’t intend for Congress and the American people to learn about U.S. military missions once servicemembers had already lost their lives,” said Lorentzen of Just Foreign Policy. “We need transparency both for our troops’ sake and to permit debate about this military-first approach that scatters hundreds of U.S. military outposts across Africa and the world.”

The post Pentagon Misled Congress About U.S. Bases in Africa appeared first on The Intercept .