The Intercept

Saudi Arabia’s Huge U.S. Investments Lose Money — but Buy Influence

Ken Klippenstein — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 15:10:01 +0000

Congress’s investigation into Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of the PGA Tour golf league hints at the extent of Saudi government penetration into the U.S. economy, extending far beyond simply golf.

On Monday, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 276-page report detailing the PGA’s merger with LIV Golf, the entity bankrolled by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The merger has been widely criticized as an attempt to “sportswash” Saudi Arabia’s sordid human rights record.

The report, however, also listed the Public Investment Fund’s other public equities, including considerable stakes in many of the U.S.’s largest corporations.

“What company will dare to cut ties with Saudi the next time its sociopathic leader goes on a wild killing spree?”

Experts interviewed by The Intercept warned that this growing Saudi role in the U.S. economy constitutes a new avenue for foreign influence in U.S. affairs.

“U.S. officials are deliberately keeping their heads in the sand about the national security implications of such massively expanded Saudi investments in every sector of our country’s economic, social, and cultural assets,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the nonprofit human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now, told The Intercept. “What company will dare to cut ties with Saudi the next time its sociopathic leader goes on a wild killing spree?”

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund boasts $700 billion in assets, making it the sixth largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute. The Public Investment Fund dramatically expanded its staff — from 50 in 2015 to almost 500 in 2018 — shortly after Mohammed bin Salman became crown prince, consolidating his role as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.

“I think he does have quite a bit of involvement,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Ellen Wald told The Intercept of the crown prince’s role in the sovereign wealth fund.

Wald pointed to the relationship between Yasir Al-Rumayyan, a Saudi businessman who serves as governor of the Public Investment Fund, and the crown prince, who is commonly known by his initials MBS. “Yasir Rumayyan used to be MBS’s personal banker,” she said.

Al-Rumayyan was directly involved in a 2017 purge orchestrated by MBS to consolidate his grip on power. In the purge, some 20 Saudi companies were seized and transferred to the sovereign wealth fund.

One of the firms was a charter jet company used in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence concluded was ordered by MBS himself.

Al-Rumayyan sits on the board of directors of Uber, in which the Senate report notes that the Saudi fund has invested $2.3 billion.

Other Public Investment Fund investments include shares of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, as well as gaming companies like Activision and Electronic Arts.

MBS, reportedly an avid gamer himself, has overseen an unprecedented investment in gaming. Last year, Saudi Arabia invested $38 billion in gaming through its Public Investment Fund-backed conglomerate, the Savvy Games Group. Savvy CEO Brian Ward has said that the group enjoys the largest startup capital ever provided by the Saudi fund.

Technology firms are particularly well represented in the fund’s list of investments, with billions of dollars invested in Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Adobe, PayPal, and Pinterest.

Despite its vast holdings, the Public Investment Fund reported an $11 billion loss last year. “Berkshire Hathaway they are not,” Wald cracked.

For experts on Saudi’s influence campaigns, the losses raised questions about whether profit is the fund’s primary motive.

“I think it’s a good argument that their goal is influence and control as much if not more than profit,” Whitson said. “They have endless cash to burn — they don’t need money, they need influence and power.”

The Saudi fund invested $2 billion in a U.S investment fund run by former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; the cash infusion came just six months after Trump left the White House, where Kushner was both a top aide and conduit for MBS’s interests. Saudi bureaucrats objected to the investment in Kushner’s firm, citing the “inexperience” of the fund’s management as well as “risk,” but they were overruled.

The New York Times reported at the time that the investment “creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.”

Similar concerns have been raised about LIV Golf, which has hosted golf events at Trump golf clubs. Earlier this week, LIV announced that it was relocating its championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump’s Doral golf course in Miami.

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Russian Militia Has Links to American Neo-Nazi and Anti-Trans Figures

Ben Makuch — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In late May, an alliance of anti-Putin partisans used Ukrainian territory to launch a stunning incursion into western Russia. Spearheaded by the Russian Volunteer Corps, or RVC, and its leader Denis Kapustin, a wanted neo-Nazi and ex-soccer hooligan, the assault exposed just how vulnerable Russia had become to attacks since its invasion of Ukraine.

For years, Kapustin has maintained public links with two notorious American neo-Nazis: Robert Rundo, the founder of the street fighting gang Rise Above Movement, and Christopher Pohlhaus, an ex-Marine and leader of a group that terrorizes drag events in the U.S.

While Kapustin has been a regular fixture for years among European extremists, he gained minor popularity among American neo-Nazis when he started co-hosting a podcast in January 2021 with Rundo, a Charlottesville riot defendant now facing extradition to the U.S. from Romania. On the multiepisode show, the two men — avid mixed martial artists — discussed the benefits of “active clubs,” which are essentially fascist fight clubs that have sprouted up all over the U.S.

But Kapustin, who also goes by his call sign “White Rex” (his personal MMA brand) or uses the last name “Nikitin,” has contacts that go further into stateside neo-Nazism.

In July 2021, he also appeared in another two-and-a-half hour podcast with Pohlhaus, a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps who only months ago, with a revolver strapped to his hip, led his so-called Blood Tribe in a protest of a drag event outside Akron, Ohio. The relationship appears ongoing: Pohlhaus has told his followers on the Telegram app in recent weeks that he wants to help his friend “Denis” in Ukraine and plans to travel there to establish a neo-Nazi pipeline of volunteer soldiers to the cause.

In the wake of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s regime weeks ago, Kapustin illustrates just how radical some of the faces of armed opposition to Putin really are. Following RVC’s cross-border operations, which featured American-supplied Humvees and other armored vehicles, reports rightly pointed out that the RVC and its politics could provide a boost for Russian propagandists who frequently accuse Kyiv of being a kind of Fourth Reich.

Mostly composed of Russian ultranationalists with the stated goal of overthrowing the Russian Federation, the RVC is undeniably affiliated with the far right, with members often seen wearing patches with neo-Nazi symbols. Kapustin is also a known figure to German authorities, who allegedly had him banned from the European Union’s Schengen area for his violent neo-Nazism and connections to the extremist MMA scene. The Ukrainian government, for its part, has repeatedly maintained that the RVC isn’t officially part of its war effort or under its control, though the government admitted that it cooperates with and feeds intelligence to the controversial Russian partisans.

Pohlhaus, known to his followers as “The Hammer,” has recently emerged as one of the more public and militant figures in the world of online American neo-Nazism. With confirmed links to Riley June Williams, the January 6 attacker who allegedly stole a laptop from Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office, Pohlhaus moved to Maine last year and began building a property for an all-white community where his Blood Tribe could “train.”

This year, Pohlhaus and his group made headlines for twice showing up to drag events in Ohio and allying with NSC-131, another underground neo-Nazi group based in New England that recently threatened a New Hampshire drag story hour. At his last Ohio protest in April at a fundraiser for LGBTQ+ youth in Columbus, Pohlhaus, who never saw combat as a Marine, paced with his masked followers as they waved a swastika flag and did the “Sieg Heil” salute to eventgoers.

Members of the Russian Volunteer Corps pose for photos during a blood donation event for the Ukrainian army in downtown Kyiv on June 3, 2023.

Photo: Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

Anti-Putin Fighters

Though he previously showed little interest in the war in Ukraine, Pohlhaus told his followers this week, in both an interview on an underground neo-Nazi podcast and in a lengthy message on Telegram, that now was the time to join the war and help neo-Nazis like Kapustin.

“I will be going personally with a squad of mostly vets who have committed to the task,” Pohlhaus wrote in a message viewed thousands of times on Telegram, explaining that “if everything goes correctly,” he would become the “[neo-Nazi] liaison for the anglosphere in Ukraine.”

In almost daily statements, Kapustin and the RVC publicly ask for recruits with military experience to “join the corps” and provide forms for direct contact to their recruiters through Telegram. (The RVC press account on Telegram has not replied to The Intercept’s requests for comment about links with Pohlhaus and the Blood Tribe.)

“We see the glorious opportunity in this conflict,” said Pohlhaus. “Because the American military is staying out of it, we get the chance to participate [under] OUR banner.”

Though Pohlhaus has been known for grandstanding online, he is an extremist who translates his words into activism: He once organized a national counterprotest on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and explained how to hypothetically use sniper attacks on the food supply chain in a streamed video.

He told The Intercept that his pledge to join the fighting in Ukraine is serious.

“I love Denis and I want to do everything I can to help him succeed,” Pohlhaus wrote in a text message. “It’s going to probably take us a couple years to be there equipped.”

He claimed that he will visit Ukraine to assess the situation firsthand.

“Of course,” he said. “A vacation.”

Whether Pohlhaus would be allowed entry into Ukraine is another question. With an ongoing civilian flight ban in Ukraine, Pohlhaus would have to enter the country through bordering nations like Poland, the usual border of entry for foreign volunteers, or Romania, a country that has recently shown a willingness to arrest extremists from abroad. Both countries are in the NATO alliance, with policing and intelligence apparatuses that cooperate with U.S. authorities.

The Ukrainians, for their part, have shown very little interest in allowing neo-Nazis like Pohlhaus to join their war effort. As far back as October 2020, Ukrainian intelligence made a public show of deporting two American members of neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division. Both men (one of whom was a Marine dropout) were attempting to join elements of the country’s military efforts in the eastern Donbas region, which at the time was the site of trench warfare with pro-Russian forces.

Kacper Rekawek, an expert on the flow of foreign fighters to the war in Ukraine and a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project, says that while there are neo-Nazis from abroad in Ukraine, the problem shouldn’t be overblown.

“It’s certainly not as bad as the Russian propaganda wants us to believe,” said Rekawek. “The caution is warranted, and what I see is there is excitement amongst those far-right types, online and offline.”

According to Rekawek, there are very few neo-Nazi foreigners fighting on the front lines, while groups like CasaPound in Italy, another fascist and nationalist political organization, have sent “observation” missions to Ukraine.

“Some of them take some supplies, they’re usually medical, or some tactical gear, but of course, not weapons,” Rekawek said, who added that “talk of a pipeline” of neo-Nazis into the war is exaggerated. While groups like the RVC have called for new recruits, non-Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking foreigners who once joined the war in droves, regardless of political ideology, don’t typically last on the front lines, nor can they be trained as effectively for combat.

“The capacity of these guys to offer meaningful change on the front lines is limited,” said Rekawek, referring to far-right travelers operating within the Ukrainian war effort. “These organizations are no charity, they’re not there to train you.”

There were initial fears among counterterrorism experts that the war in Ukraine could potentially attract a global movement of neo-Nazis, leading to the formation of an Islamic State-like network. But a year and half into the war, most authorities acknowledge that Ukraine hasn’t yet become a destination for the far-right movement.

Nonetheless, American law enforcement officials have voiced serious concerns about people like Pohlhaus traveling to Ukraine, fighting in the war, and then coming home. At the outset of the invasion in March 2022, an internal Customs and Border Protection report warned that American extremists interrogated at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York before their departure flights were on their way to “join the conflict.” The bulletin openly wondered what kinds of skills those types of “foreign fighters” could learn in Ukraine that could then “proliferate” in “U.S.-based militia and white nationalist groups” once they returned home.

Whatever the outcome of his latest call to volunteer for the conflict, or if it’s simply a bluff to attract more funding to his personal cause, Pohlhaus acknowledged it could be a while before the Blood Tribe appears in Ukraine. He told his followers that it would take time to pool resources and even vehicles in order to be autonomous on the front lines.

“At the end of the day, this is very much Ukraine’s issue,” said Rekawek, who thinks that far-right elements within the Ukrainian military structure could be a problem when it comes to European Union or NATO membership for the country. “It’s up to Ukraine to call the shots. And it will certainly be an issue, but further down the line.”

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With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 03:00:00 +0000

On the morning of July 22 last year, a Ukrainian woman living in the town of Izium, then occupied by invading Russian troops, was killed in shelling launched by the Ukrainian military. The bomb that killed her was no ordinary weapon.

According to investigators from Human Rights Watch, who visited the scene of the attack, her death was caused by a cluster munition, a weapon much of the world has moved to ban due to the indiscriminate harm that they cause to civilians. The salvo was allegedly fired from the Ukrainian side, according to witnesses, and detonated near the woman’s home, killing her and her dog.

“The attack was very scary. Very loud. I was outside and there were a lot of explosions. The wife of my ex-husband came and told me to hurry to get inside,” one witness told Human Rights Watch, according to a report released late Wednesday night. Another witness, who viewed the victim’s body in the aftermath and helped bury her in a local cemetery, said that her “face and body were severely mutilated by the explosion.”

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more.”

As the Ukraine war drags on, the Biden administration is now reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to send more of the bombs to the Ukrainian military. The decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine would likely be seen as a setback to nonproliferation efforts aimed at stopping use of the weapon.

The report by Human Rights Watch analyzing the impact of previous cluster munition attacks carried out last summer by the Ukrainian military found numerous dead and wounded civilians in Izium who were hit by exploding cluster bomblets.

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more,” the report said, adding that the true number of casualties was likely greater, as many wounded people had been taken to Russia for medical care and not returned.

Although investigators found forensic evidence pointing to Ukrainian culpability, the Ukrainian defense ministry said in a written letter to Human Rights Watch that “cluster munitions were not used within or around the city of Izium in 2022 when it was under Russian occupation.” The town was liberated by Ukrainian forces in the fall of that year.

The Ukrainian military is currently engaged in a much larger counteroffensive aimed at reclaiming other territories captured by Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country in early 2022.

According to the Washington Post, the administration has recently been taking the temperature of members of Congress on the forthcoming decision. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said he was open to giving Ukraine the weapons. When asked by The Intercept, a number of House Democrats declined to say whether they were for or against the move.

The move to transfer cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military comes on the heels of other U.S. initiatives to train Ukrainians on advanced fighter aircraft, and possibly provide them long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russian-held territory. The transfer of cluster bombs to the Ukrainians would be much more ethically fraught.

A Ukrainian civilian removes a Russian cluster munition rocket from a field near the villages of Smolyanka and Olyshivka on April 3, 2022.

Photo: Justin Yau/Sipa via AP Images

Banned Cluster Munitions

Cluster munitions are controversial due to the manner in which “bomblets” are scattered around a targeted area, creating secondary explosions that can cause death and injury even long after a conflict has ceased.

The use of cluster attacks during the 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon killed and wounded hundreds of civilians. A decade later, swaths of southern Lebanon are still dangerous for civilians who are periodically killed or maimed by stray bomblets.

The bombs are currently at the center of an international campaign to ban their use in armed conflict. More than 100 states have signed an international convention on cluster munitions vowing not to employ them in war, produce them domestically, or encourage their use in foreign conflicts. Despite public pressure to join, the U.S. has not become a signatory to the convention.

The Russian military has also extensively used cluster munitions during its invasion of Ukraine, including in attacks on populated areas that were said to have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in the early months of the war.

The Ukrainian military was reported to have requested significant transfers of the munitions late last year, though the Biden administration did not render a decision on the request at the time.

If the decision is taken to approve the transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine now, it may reflect frustration with the pace of the Ukrainian offensive, which has so far failed to make significant gains against Russian forces in the country.

In their report analyzing the impact of Ukrainian cluster bomb attacks on civilians in the occupied town of Izium, investigators from Human Rights Watch noted the potential long-term impacts of untargeted, explosive bomblets left around the region and called on both sides to refrain from their use — lest they kill and injure many more in the years to come. As the conflict grinds on, a legacy of unexploded cluster munitions could keep the suffering of the war going long after the guns go silent.

“Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are killing civilians now and will continue to do so for many years,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, in the report. “Both sides should immediately stop using them, and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons.”

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Prigozhin Told the Truth About Putin's War in Ukraine

James Risen — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin addresses his units withdrawing from Bakhmut, the city captured from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. May 25, 2023, Bakhmut, Ukraine.

Credit: UPI/Alamy

One of the most subversive things that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin did during his brief rebellion last weekend was to tell the truth.

Prigozhin is a pathological liar, a professional disinformation artist who was indicted in the United States in connection with the internet troll farm he ran, which was at the forefront of Russian efforts to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump win.

But as the mercenary boss began his mutiny in late June, he experienced a brief and surprising bout of honesty when he launched into an online tirade against what he said were the lies used by Moscow to justify the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. His comments were so candid and off-message for a Russian leader that it seemed as if someone had mistakenly handed him a speech meant for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The invasion was nothing more than a massive land grab by the Russian oligarchy, Prigozhin charged, designed to enrich the country’s powerful elites while poor Russians served as cannon fodder. Russian claims that a Nazi regime in Ukraine, backed by NATO, was about to attack Russia were lies, Prigozhin said. The war was started by the Russian oligarchy to benefit themselves and gain power. In his rant, Prigozhin did not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, focusing instead on the broader Russian elite, and specifically on his personal enemy Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

“The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO bloc,” Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel on June 23. The truth, he said, was that “there was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” the day last year when Russian invaded. Ukraine was not planning any kind of attack against Russia, he added.

Russia’s invasion “was started for a completely different reason,” Prigozhin said. “What was the war for? The war was needed for Shoigu to receive a hero star. … The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” he said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.’”

“Shoigu killed thousands of the most combat-ready Russian soldiers in the first days of the war,” Prigozhin said, adding that the invasion began even as Zelenskyy and Ukraine were eager for peace. The Ukrainian leader “was ready for agreements. All that needed to be done was to get off Mount Olympus and negotiate with him.”

Prigozhin thus punctured the main argument used by Russian propagandists and their Western lackeys: that NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War caused the war in Ukraine. Putin has constantly railed against NATO, and his misleading narrative that the U.S. caused the war in Ukraine by pushing for alliance’s expansion has resonated widely among pro-Putin right-wing extremists in the West.

Prigozhin quickly followed up his criticism of the war by leading his Wagner mercenaries in an armed rebellion. They left Ukraine, seized the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and marched north toward Moscow. By June 24, just as Prigozhin and his troops were closing in on Moscow, he lost his nerve and cut a deal with Putin. The deal was brokered by Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a close Putin ally. Prigozhin is apparently going into exile in Belarus while the status of Wagner forces in Ukraine and elsewhere remains in flux.

But even as Prigozhin exits the scene, his rare bout of honesty could have a delayed impact. If Prigozhin’s comments become widely known in Russia despite the regime’s strict censorship, they could lead to a further erosion of Russian support for the war. Putin’s hold on power, meanwhile, has already been seriously weakened by Prigozhin’s rebellion.

It is still unclear whether Prigozhin’s candor will have any impact on right-wing extremists in the U.S. who support Putin and have defended his invasion of Ukraine. Right-wing pundits like former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson have been cheerleaders for Putin’s war, disseminating pro-Russian conspiracy theories like the false claim that the U.S. funded bio-weapons labs in Ukraine. The right-wing support for Putin and his invasion is strongest among Christian nationalists, a segment of pro-Trump evangelical Christians who have come to hate Western liberalism and yearn for an autocrat like Putin who would wipe away wokeness. They have been joined by members of other fringe groups, like those who claim to be anti-imperialists while supporting Putin’s imperial ambitions.

Prigozhin is a terrible messenger of the truth. He certainly had his own selfish reasons for stating that Russia’s war is built on lies. Yet his truth-telling may ultimately help rip off the façade Putin erected to conceal the reality of his war in Ukraine.

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Israel Ramps Up Drone Sales to Morocco for Its Colonial War in Western Sahara

Pesha Magid — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

When Abdelahi Emhamed first caught sight of the two drones overhead, he thought it was normal. A 24-year-old fighter in the Polisario Front, he had become accustomed to Moroccan surveillance drones and had learned to shrug off the occasional sighting as a matter of course.

A young man with a tired smile, Emhamed joined the army in 2020 when a 29-year ceasefire between the Polisario Front and Morocco came to an abrupt end. The Front has fought for nationhood for Western Sahara’s indigenous Sahrawi population for 50 years; Morocco occupied Western Sahara in 1975, and Emhamed grew up on stories of a lost land while living in refugee camps near Tindouf, a town in an inhospitable desert corner of southwestern Algeria. When the ceasefire ended, Emhamed jumped at the opportunity to join the armed forces

He became part of a small unit of mobile fighters sleeping in the open between a smattering of thorny acacia trees amidst a ceaseless repetition of flat, brown, and black-pebbled plains. On a November morning in 2022, he saw the drones far in the sky. It was a beautiful and quiet time of day, and his team sat down to make tea while they waited for orders. Sahrawis prepare tea by pouring it boiling hot in and out of cups in a practiced waterfall until each small glass is filled with a thick topping of foam. By the time the chink of the glasses was interrupted by the buzz of the returning drone, it was already over. Emhamed started to run as the rocket reached ear-piercing levels. He was just feet away when the blast bowled him over. When he got up, the little metal tea kettle and the glasses were gone; only a smoking hole remained. Around him, bodies were scattered. Four men from his unit of 10 were dead.

In December 2020, a month after the end of the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario, then-President Donald Trump declared U.S. support for Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. The recognition contravened the United Nations’ position, which considers Western Sahara a “non-self governing territory,” a euphemism for a colony. In return for U.S. support on Western Sahara, Morocco joined the Abraham Accords, a series of diplomatic deals brokered by Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that resulted in the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco normalizing relations with Israel. Since then, Rabat has gone from having covert ties with Tel Aviv to becoming its open ally, and Israel has sold at least 150 drones to Morocco.

Children chant independence slogans at a military parade for the 50th anniversary of the Polisario Front in Awserd refugee camp, Algeria, on May 20, 2023.

Photo: Pesha Magid, Andrea Prada Bianchi

The proliferation of drones in Morocco makes an already unequal war between Morocco and the Polisario completely asymmetrical. The Polisario fight with mortars, drive in repurposed sand-brown Toyotas and old Land Rovers, and rely on traditional guerrilla tactics to try and melt back into the desert. Meanwhile, Morocco has purchased drones from Israel, Turkey, and China, enabling them to carry out attacks deep in Sahrawi territory. Chinese and, especially, Turkish drones appear to be carrying out the majority of strikes, but the Israeli ones are more sophisticated when it comes to surveillance technology.

“Sahrawi people feel that every day, we become similar to Palestinians,” said Mohamed Sidati, the foreign affairs minister of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the name Sahrawis have given their state. Morocco controls an estimated 80 percent of Western Sahara, including the areas rich in phosphate and other valuable resources. To control that territory, Morocco built a 2,700 km sand wall, known as a berm, that snakes through Western Sahara and divides the land in two. On the Moroccan-controlled side of the berm, in what Sahrawis call the “occupied territories,” Sahrawis live under surveillance and face harassment, detention, and torture if they lobby for independence, according to human rights organizations. On the Polisario-controlled side of the wall, Sahrawis have been largely ignored by the international community, while the Abraham Accords have enabled Morocco to heighten its attacks with the help of the latest in drone technology, fresh from Israel.

Map: The Intercept

Heron Drones

While Morocco’s purchase of Israeli drones has been reported since 2014, their use in Western Sahara is less well documented. A local journalist shared photos with The Intercept that had circulated on social media and show an Israeli Heron drone at Dakhla airport, a city on the Moroccan-controlled side of Western Sahara; the photos were dated from late 2020 and early 2021. Details from the hangar in the photos match images of Dakhla airport. Additionally, commercial satellite images show what strongly resembles a Heron drone outside the hangar in October 2021.

Israel first sold three Heron drones to Morocco in a one-time French-brokered deal six years before the official rapprochement between the two states. But after the Abraham Accords, the military deals were ramped up. In November 2021, then-Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited Rabat to sign the first defense memorandum of understanding between the two countries. Days later, Haaretz reported a $22 million sale of exploding Harop drones to Morocco. In September 2022, Morocco purchased 150 more Israeli drones.

Federico Borsari, a researcher specializing in unmanned technologies at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said that Morocco owns or has bought 150 WanderB and ThunderB vertical takeoff and landing drones produced by BlueBird Aero Systems, three Heron TPs and Harop loitering munitions produced by Israel Aerospace Industries (decommissioned by France and transferred to Morocco), and four Hermes 900s produced by Elbit Systems. Borsari used publicly available information to make this assessment. Morocco also owns Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and Chinese Wing Loong drones, both of which are used for combat.

A satellite image from October 20th, 2021 shows what appears to be a Heron drone in Dakhla airport in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara.

Photo: Maxar Technologies via Google Earth

It is unclear whether Israeli drones that are apparently being used in Western Sahara solely provide surveillance and target recognition, or if they also directly attack targets. Sidi Owgal, a senior military official within the Polisario who currently serves as the head of presidential security, told The Intercept that Israeli drones do both. Abwa Ali, a commander within the Polisario who regularly leads attacks against Moroccan bases along the berm, said that he had personally seen missile fragments with Hebrew lettering on them. Some of Morocco’s Israeli drone arsenal could indeed be used as attack drones: The Heron TP and the Hermes 900 can be used for both surveillance and attacks, while the Harop is only for strikes. “The Harop are what we call ‘loitering munitions’; they are expensive and they can hit only once because they destroy at the impact,” said Borsari. “They would most likely be used against high-value targets.”

While it’s unclear whether Israeli drones are being used to launch missiles, Morocco has acquired drones from other countries that appear to be used for that purpose. For instance, Turkey sold 13 Bayraktar TB2 attack drones to Morocco in 2021. In the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, The Intercept examined missile scraps that indicate the TB2s are being used to attack targets in Western Sahara. Some fragments bear the label “MAM-L,” while one piece had the word “Roketsan” written on it. “MAM-L” is the name of a laser-guided bomb manufactured by the Turkish defense ministry contractor Roketsan, and the bomb is typically launched from the Bayraktar TB2. “The sensors on Israeli drones are very sophisticated,” said Borsari. “It is possible that Morocco uses Israeli drones for target recognition followed by an attack with other drones, like the Turkish ones.” He added that “in general, the performances of the Turkish and Chinese sensors are currently absent or lower.”

Owgal and Sidati, the foreign affairs minister, claim that Israeli advisers are on the ground on the Moroccan side of the berm counseling the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces on their use of drone technology. “They are there … not far from the berm,” said Sidati, though he declined to share any evidence, saying it was secret. Borsari believes “it is not only possible but very likely that Israel sent advisers on the ground in Morocco to train the Royal Armed Forces in the use of drones.” Moroccan media has also stated that Rabat plans to manufacture “kamikaze” drones in partnership with Tel Aviv, and Israeli company Elbit Systems recently announced the opening of the two factories in Morocco to produce “defense systems.”

Officials from Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces refused to comment on any of these allegations.

Gaici Nah, the operations manager of Polisario-linked Sahrawi Mine Action Coordination, claims that between 80 and 100 civilians have been killed and injured since the end of the ceasefire in 2020, but did not say how many of each. Nah claims to have documented over 60 drone strikes using a combination of witness statements, news reports, and Polisario military statements. (No Polisario official would comment to The Intercept on the number of military casualties.) Not only Sahrawi citizens have been targeted.

In November 2021, Algeria claimed Morocco used “sophisticated weaponry” to strike three Algerian truckers as they were reportedly passing through Polisario-controlled Western Sahara. In 2022, two Mauritanian citizens were reportedly killed by Moroccan drone strikes. Sidati also alleged that there were many civilian casualties. “The Moroccans have a scorched-earth policy,” he said.

The U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara — or MINURSO, a peacekeeping mission established at the start of the ceasefire to monitor the conflict and carry out an independence referendum (that never happened) — stated in their most recent report, in October 2022, that they were only able to independently confirm casualties in one drone strike and observed traces of human remains at four other sites. They additionally documented 18 drone strikes and confirmed aerial strikes in eight instances. However, U.N. officials said they have limited access to the ground. “Because of the military operations and restrictions on the east side of the berm, patrolling does not account for all of the incidents,” said Yusef Jedian, the head of MINURSO’s Liaison Office in Tindouf.

Two kids fencing between goat pens in Awserd refugee camp, Algeria, on May 20, 2023.

Photo: Pesha Magid, Andrea Prada Bianchi

While reporting in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, The Intercept spoke to a witness of a strike against civilians. Abd Jaleel, a goat and camel farmer, fled his home in November 2021 as the war with Morocco made living in Polisario-controlled Western Sahara too dangerous. Near the Mauritanian border, he saw his neighbor, 29-year-old Salih Mohamed Lamis, another goat trader who had also fled their town as the war heated up. Lamis was about 6 km ahead of him, driving a Land Rover carrying water supplies. As they approached the border, around 11 in the morning, he heard a muffled explosion. At first, he did not realize it was a drone strike, but in the evening, others retrieved Lamis’s body and brought it to Jaleel. Lamis’s face was mangled so badly that it resembled ground meat; his body was completely burned; and when Jaleel attempted to move him, his skin stuck to his own hand. Since the strike, Jaleel has lived in fear of hearing the sound of a drone again. He grows anxious when he is outside in the open, thinking he could be hit at any time. “You can’t hide from the sky,” he said.

In a comment to MINURSO, Morocco had denied targeting civilians in Western Sahara, while also stating that no civilians should live there. “There is no reason to justify the presence of civilians or Algerian nationals, or of other nationalities, in this area,” wrote the permanent representative of Morocco to the United Nations to MINURSO in November 2021. This type of statement is rare, as Morocco generally does not publicly acknowledge the war. During The Intercept’s visit to the Sahrawi camps at the end of May, news spread of a new drone strike against Polisario soldiers; six reportedly died.

“Morocco says they don’t have a war. But why do they have drones attacking on the other side of the berm then?”

“Morocco says they don’t have a war,” a U.N. official told The Intercept, asking that their name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue. “But why do they have drones attacking on the other side of the berm then? They say they don’t have a war. So, this is how they are enjoying peace.”

A series of missile fragments from an alleged Moroccan drone strike collected by SMACO, on May 21, 2023.

Photo: Pesha Magid, Andrea Prada Bianchi

Camp David Host

Contacts between Morocco and Israel have always been quite friendly compared to the average Israel-Arab world relationship. Jewish communities have historically been present (and well accepted) in Moroccan cities. Last December, Israeli President Isaac Herzog wrote a letter to King Mohammed VI of Morocco to thank him for the shelter the kingdom gave to Jews during the Holocaust. After World War II, most Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel, but the bonds remained strong.

Morocco hosted some of the Israel-Egypt secret talks that would lead to the Camp David Accords in 1978, and King Hassan II was a firm sustainer of the détente between Tel Aviv and Cairo. Israel and Morocco established low-level diplomatic relations in 1994 when Tel Aviv opened a liaison office in Rabat. The office closed after the Second Intifada in 2000, but informal relations never stopped. In 2021, the Israeli representation office in Rabat reopened.

The Abraham Accords opened the way to official relations, and it seems that Morocco and Israel were just waiting for an opportunity to start doing business together. Since 2020, the two countries have implemented a long series of economic and military agreements beyond the sale of drones. For the first time, Israeli troops from the elite Golani unit participated in Africa Lion, an 18-country joint military drill in Morocco, which completed on June 18. In 2021 and 2022, respectively, Gantz, Israel’s then-minister of defense, and then-Head of Israel Defense Forces Aviv Kochavi visited Morocco and signed several military deals, including a $500 million contract for the delivery of the Barak MX missile defense system to Rabat. Early this year, one of the Pentagon Discord leaks allegedly revealed that the system was scheduled to arrive in Morocco in mid-2023. Morocco is reportedly also in advanced negotiations to receive Israeli Merkava tanks. Rabat and Tel Aviv are also cooperating at an intelligence level. Morocco has widely been reported (and accused by other countries) as one of the most eager users of the Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli NSO Group.

Meanwhile, economic cooperation is booming. According to U.N. data analyzed by The Intercept, in pre-Abraham 2019, trade between Israel and Morocco was at $70.7 million. In 2022, the figure reached $178.7 million, and Tel Aviv has declared it is targeting $500 million. From 2019 to 2022, exports from Israel to Morocco increased tenfold, from $3.8 million to $38.5 million. Western Sahara plays an important role in the love story between the two countries. In 2021 and 2022, two Israeli companies, Ratio Petroleum and NewMed Energy, obtained from Morocco rights to research and potentially exploit two separate offshore blocks in the Atlantic Ocean just off Western Sahara’s coastline. Moroccan local news also announced Israel’s Selina group would soon open a hotel in Dakhla. For Morocco, foreign investments in what it considers its “southern province” mean external recognition of its claims on the territory.

Israeli businesses, like other foreign actors, don’t seem concerned about international law when investing in Western Sahara. A 2002 U.N. legal opinion deemed illegal the exploration and exploitation of mineral resources in a “non-self governing territory” like Western Sahara without the authorization of the people of that territory. In three following rulings, the European Union Court of Justice has, in various forms, condemned trading in Western Sahara without the consent of the Sahrawi people. At the end of 2022, Western Sahara Resource Watch, a pressure group that monitors resource exploitation in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, asked NewMed Energy about the legitimacy of the deal. The company replied that “all our actions in the past and in the present are done in accordance with and subject to international law and Israeli law and the laws in force.” When WSRW asked three times “which country’s laws” are applicable to Western Sahara, NewMed Energy stopped replying.

In March last year, WSRW reported the first shipment of phosphate rock from Western Sahara to Israel. Erik Hagen, board member of WSRW, told The Intercept that the cargo was very small, and it is the only one they observed toward Israel. OCP, the Moroccan company extracting and exporting phosphate rock in Morocco and Western Sahara, hasn’t replied to a request for comment about the episode.

Morocco’s drone attacks do not appear to have sapped any energy from the Polisario’s long war; if anything they are adding fuel to the fire. Emhamed, the drone strike survivor, had to get treatment for a shrapnel injury, but he has already returned to the camps to participate in a military parade for the Polisario’s 50th anniversary. He remains haunted by the people he lost in the strike. A quiet man who wears his military fatigues even when at home, Emhamed seems perennially exhausted. He stays up late at night and chain-smokes L&M reds. A few hours after drawing lines in the sand outside his home to show The Intercept where the strike scattered the bodies of his unit, he took a drag off a cigarette. “No one can understand the front unless they’ve seen it with their eyes,” he said. Despite the drones, he is planning to go back to the front line, attacking the Moroccans on the other side of the berm.

The post Israel Ramps Up Drone Sales to Morocco for Its Colonial War in Western Sahara appeared first on The Intercept.

Progressives Use Pentagon Budget to Protest Outrageous Anti-LGBTQ+ Law

Nick Turse — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 15:57:06 +0000

Last month, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed off on one of the most draconian pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the world.

Homosexuality has been illegal in Uganda, a conservative East African nation, since 1950, but Ugandans now face life imprisonment for gay sex. Anyone attempting to have same-sex relations could be sentenced to 10 years in prison. Advocates for the rights of LGBTQ+ people, including human rights campaigners or those funding advocacy organizations, could face up to 20 years’ imprisonment for the “promotion of homosexuality.”

“The enactment of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act is a tragic violation of universal human rights — one that is not worthy of the Ugandan people,” President Joe Biden announced last month. “This shameful Act is the latest development in an alarming trend of human rights abuses and corruption in Uganda.”

Nonetheless, the United States is slated to give Uganda close to $20 million in security assistance this year, according to Donovan Satchell, a spokesperson with the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs.

“The situation for LGBTQI+ people in Uganda is a matter of life or death. As attacks against the LGBTQI+ community continue to spread around the world, it’s clear we have an obligation to stand up against the targeted violence toward the Ugandan LGBTQI+ community,” Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., told The Intercept. “The United States cannot continue to support countries that actively persecute and criminalize LGBTQI+ people.” Balint is currently working on an amendment to next year’s defense authorization bill that would restrict or cut off security assistance to Uganda due to the anti-gay law.

Balint is just one of several members of Congress who have expressed alarm at the continued flow of military aid to the increasingly repressive country the State Department calls a “reliable partner for the United States in promoting stability in the Horn and East/Central Africa and in combatting terror.”

“Congressman McGovern condemns Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act in the strongest of terms,“ Matthew Bonaccorsi, a spokesperson for Rep. James P. McGovern of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Rules Committee, told The Intercept. “He believes that the United States government should respond not only by imposing individual sanctions on those responsible for this violation of human rights, but also by suspending military and security assistance until this law is repealed and the rights of innocent LGTBQI+ Ugandans are restored.”

The Defense Department has spent more than $280 million on equipment and training for Uganda since 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service. That does not include about $18 million in funds for international military education and training and peacekeeping operations scheduled to be doled out this year. Uganda has also been the largest recipient of U.S. funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, which has cost the U.S. roughly $2.5 billion overall. That includes “train and equip” funding, of which Uganda has been among the largest recipients on the African continent.

A Ugandan gay man packs his bags to vacate the city in Kampala, Uganda, on May 30, 2023.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

“The law has been widely condemned in the U.S. press, but few have noted the critical role the U.S. has played in bolstering this regime’s military capacity.”

“Uganda’s horrific new law targeting LGBTQ people is just the latest reminder of how unchecked funneling of weapons and training to brutal regimes abroad can inadvertently enable crimes against humanity,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “The law has been widely condemned in the U.S. press, but few have noted the critical role the U.S. has played in bolstering this regime’s military capacity. It’s too late to rescind the hundreds of millions in weapons and training already provided to Ugandan forces, but any future aid should be suspended indefinitely.”

U.S. Africa Command provided boilerplate responses that did not address the substance of The Intercept’s questions. “U.S. Africa Command focuses on building African partner nation capabilities primarily through security force assistance programs, exercises, military-to-military and key leader engagements, and operations,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept by email.

Research by The Intercept turned up copious evidence of significant and enduring assistance to the East African nation.

The United States has employed Ugandan commandos as U.S. proxies — dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims — in Somalia under the shadowy 127e authority as part of a counterterrorism program code-named Ultimate Hunter.

U.S. Special Operations forces have also repeatedly traveled to Uganda to train alongside members of the Uganda People’s Defense Force, or UPDF, and other security forces as part of the Joint Combined Exchange Training program. As recently as April, U.S. troops conducted a JCET there.

The United States also has a long-standing base in Entebbe, Uganda. Over many years, it has served as a staging area for “essential” airlift and evacuation missions; a sometime home away from home for Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, Crisis Response, or SPMAGTF-CR; and the headquarters for a Special Operations unit that spearheaded the failed mission to capture or kill warlord Joseph Kony.

In 2017, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, AFRICOM launched an investigation into “allegations of rape, sexual assault, and abuse … allegedly committed by Ugandan military forces” in the Central African Republic during the hunt for Kony. The results of the inquiry have never been made public.

U.S. training exercises are regularly held in Uganda and Ugandan forces also travel overseas for U.S. schooling and other activities. Since 2007, according to data from the State Department and the Security Assistance Monitor, a program of the nonprofit Center for International Policy, the U.S. has provided more than 62,000 trainings for Uganda’s security forces. That includes more than 5,000 in 2020, the last year for which we have comprehensive figures.

In 2019, for example, U.S. Marines and sailors with SPMAGTF-CR advised local forces at the Uganda Rapid Deployment Capability Center in Jinja, Uganda, and Peace Operations Training Center in Singo, Uganda. “We started training alongside the UPDF members by covering weapons handling and safety rules, land navigation, and reaction of enemy contact, to lead us to the main focus of this iteration which is patrolling tactics,” explained U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Wade, a team leader with SPMAGTF-CR at the time.

In 2020, U.S. soldiers conducted a training course on leadership skills with Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers. In 2022, Bob Paciesky Ogiki, the chief of staff of the Ugandan military’s land forces, traveled to the U.S.-run African Land Forces Colloquium in Grafenwöhr, Germany, where top leaders discussed security challenges and, according to U.S. military press releases, “ways to ‘Train to Fight.’” Earlier this year, portions of AFRICOM’s Justified Accord 23, a long-running multinational exercise involving more than 20 countries, were held in Uganda.

Uganda has been an especially important U.S. partner, according to a 2020 inspector general’s report, because it is the only one of five troop-contributing countries to the AMISOM mission to have “engaged in joint combat operations with [Somali] troops.” The largest African Union contingent in Somalia force for many years, Uganda has suffered grave losses there. Last month, fighters from the terror group al-Shabab attacked Ugandan troops at a base for the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia. Uganda put its death toll at 54; al-Shabab said the coordinated assault killed 137.

According to the 2020 inspector general’s report, “Uganda sent two UH-1 ‘Huey’ helicopters, purchased by the U.S. Government, and two Bell-412 helicopters to … [Somalia’s] Baledogle Military Airfield to provide airlift and reconnaissance capabilities to AMISOM operations.” That year, the State Department also awarded a $14.7 million grant to Bancroft Global Development, a private military contractor, “to mentor and train both [Somalia’s] Danab Brigade and Ugandan forces.” In addition to all the military support, the United States also provides significant humanitarian and economic assistance to Uganda, with the total amount approaching $1 billion per year.

“This draconian new legislation deprives LGBTQ+ Ugandans of their basic human rights. It is shocking and shameful,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told The Intercept by email. “I hope that the Ugandan courts will act to protect the basic human rights of all Ugandans, regardless of their sexual identity.”

AFRICOM did not respond to questions about whether cutting military aid to Uganda would affect its mission or if its reluctance to answer questions about Uganda was linked to its anti-LGBTQ+ law.

The post Progressives Use Pentagon Budget to Protest Outrageous Anti-LGBTQ+ Law appeared first on The Intercept.

Fishing for Secrets in the Nord Stream Abyss

Jeremy Scahill — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 09:58:07 +0000

The skies over the Baltic Sea are a clear blue with just faint ribbons of clouds. It’s May 24 and Erik Andersson eats a bowl of yogurt for breakfast on the deck of the Swedish diving vessel Baltic Explorer. Between bites, the 62-year-old retired engineer and entrepreneur discusses the previous day’s work on his investigation into one of the most significant international crimes in recent history: the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.

“Well, we arrived at the site, it was the southern site, you know, the first bomb that exploded at 2:03 in the morning local time 26th of September, and we started by making sonar scans with the sonar sensors that are attached to the boat,” he says to the camera held by his daughter Agnes, who has joined him on the expedition to document his journey. “We’re scanning back and forth over the explosion site and by doing that, we got a three-dimensional depth profile. And we could map out, we could see immediately that that was the trench, 100 by 60 meters and 10-meter-deep trench, which was quite an interesting discovery. That’s what we were looking for. It’s almost like a photo of the crime scene. I think it’s the first time we have an accurate three-dimensional model of the crime scene.”

That evening, just after 5 p.m., Andersson stands inside the cabin of the Baltic Explorer behind the captain, watching a video monitor as the ship slowly maneuvers back and forth over a section of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off Sweden’s coast. On the screen, sonar imaging comes into focus and reveals a hole in a pipeline on the seabed. Andersson jokingly calls this section of the pipeline the “holy grail” of his investigation because it is the only section of the three strands of the Nord Stream pipeline that was bombed but did not cause a massive gas rupture. That’s because it was no longer pressurized when the explosives detonated. This is significant, Andersson says, because on the other two bombed lines, the explosion caused the pipeline to break apart, making it impossible to see what the initial puncture wound from the bombs looked like.

Before the expedition, Andersson believed that if he could find the hole, then it would be the first time anyone outside of a government authority or the Nord Stream company had examined a bomb puncture in the pipeline from the sabotage. “What we want to see is really the primary impact of the explosives. And this site is the only site I think now where we have any hope to see that because all the other sites, there had been this enormous outflow of gas: natural gas that’s just blown away all the mud and all the traces that were of the original explosion,” Andersson explained. “It’s not so easy to find. We didn’t see it on the boat-mounted sonar, so we have to send down the fish,” the nickname given by the captain to the submersible sonar device. Eventually, using the “fish,” they managed to find their target.

“It’s on the seam,” says the captain in a matter-of-fact tone as Andersson stares at the sonar monitor.

“It’s right on the seam?” Andersson asks.

“Yeah,” the captain responds.

“Whoa,” exclaims Andersson. “It’s on the seam! It’s right on the seam! Yeah. So, this is the first evidence that they actually put the explosives on the seam. They knew about the seam. That must be the weak point.”

Andersson is not a professional investigator or a journalist, and his voyage was not sponsored by a government. By training, he is an engineer with a master’s degree in engineering physics. He had a successful career at Volvo and Boeing and worked on advanced programs used by commercial and military aircraft, including U.S. military aircraft. He had followed the developments of the Nord Stream bombing carefully, but it was not until journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell story alleging that President Joe Biden had personally ordered the destruction of the pipelines that he became obsessed with the mystery. The expedition to the bombing site grew out of that passion. Andersson freely admits that he was motivated by a desire to prove that Hersh’s narrative was correct. What he found was quite different.

A handout photo provided by the Swedish Coast Guard shows the release of gas emanating from a leak on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea on Sept. 27, 2022.

Photo: Swedish Coast Guard via Getty Images

A Forensic Investigation

On September 26, 2022, when a series of explosions rocked the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea waters off the coasts of Sweden and Denmark, Andersson followed the news like everyone else. He says he didn’t see it as a massive geopolitical mystery or an event of much consequence beyond the potential environmental impact in the water. “It wasn’t like a big thing when it happened,” he recalls. “I found the media coverage fishy,” he said. “It was like they were downplaying it.” Initial news reports showed a pool of bubbling water caused by the discharge of gas in the sea. The possibility that the gas release was the result of a leak or other accident was quickly ruled out once the Danish and Swedish authorities did an initial survey of the site. And once the other bombs went off 17 hours later in multiple sites, there was no doubt. Government authorities swiftly concluded that an intentional act of sabotage had been carried out against a high-profile, profitable, and controversial international project controlled by Russia.

Andersson saw video clips circulating on Twitter that showed Biden and other U.S. officials appearing to threaten to take out the pipeline in the months before the attacks. “With all the history of the Nord Stream 2 and the motivation, I suspected that this was somehow a U.S.-sponsored action, I guess, but I wasn’t thinking much about that,” he said. Andersson had spent years working on jet fuel calculations for major airline corporations, and he was curious, on a scientific level, to hear details of how the pipelines exploded.

He was frustrated that very few technical details had filtered into the media. There were aerial images of the bubbling pools, but nothing showing the aftermath of the immediate impact. The first explosion had happened on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm at 2:03 a.m., so it is not surprising there was no active surveillance of the event itself.

“It was annoying me tremendously that the first footage was like 12 hours after. While in the immediate event, the gas plume must have been enormous and just the thought of what could have happened,” said Andersson.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines each had two lines that stretched from northwestern Russia and under the Baltic Sea to northern Germany. On Sept. 26, 2022, three of the four lines were severely damaged in an act of sabotage. The first explosion occurred on Line A of Nord Stream 2 at 2:03 a.m. off the coast of the Danish island Bornholm. Seventeen hours later, off the coast of Sweden, three more explosions occurred, damaging both of the Nord Stream 1 Lines and a second section of Nord Stream 2 Line A. Line B of Nord Stream 2, the one closest to Russian territory, was the only line left undamaged.

Map: The Intercept

Sweden, Denmark, and Germany all launched investigations with the support of the United States. Divers filled shipping containers with underwater evidence and conducted marine video surveys and forensic analysis. Publicly, insinuations and accusations proliferated. The U.S. all but accused Russia of blowing up its own pipeline. Ukraine directly accused Vladimir Putin of responsibility. Open-source analysts began monitoring ship movement data and speculating about how Moscow might have done it. Putin charged that “Anglo-Saxon powers” were behind the attack. Some analysts speculated that Poland, the most aggressive supporter of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, may be the culprit. Given the larger context of the Russian invasion, Ukraine clearly had the strongest motive, but Kyiv steadfastly denied it had anything to do with the bombing.

Andersson tweeted some criticism of the government investigations of the incident, mostly focused on the lack of transparency. He also criticized media outlets for not uncovering more forensic evidence, despite the official pronouncements that the explosions were a deliberate act of terrorism and the possibility the sabotage was conducted or sponsored by a major world power. He found the secrecy disturbing. “There was no real information being shared with the public about the evidence that had been gathered or just sort of what exactly happened down there on a scientific or forensic level,” he said. “I think that when the government is so secretive, they’re feeding speculation and conspiracy theories.”

On February 8, Hersh published his story on Substack, charging that Biden had personally authorized the bombing of the pipelines and that U.S. navy divers had planted the bombs on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines during NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercises in the Baltic Sea three months before they detonated. Russia publicly embraced Hersh’s story and introduced it as evidence of the need for an independent United Nations investigation into the attacks. The White House called Hersh’s report “utterly false and complete fiction.”

“When the government is so secretive, they’re feeding speculation and conspiracy theories.”

Andersson had never heard of Hersh, but when he saw journalists and commentators he admired on Twitter defending the 85-year-old reporter from the almost immediate deluge of attacks on his credibility by prominent media and political figures, as well as the denials from the White House, his gut instinct was that the right people were attacking Hersh. “I saw he had a lot of respect. I mean, this is a very experienced journalist, and he knows how to deal with sources, to evaluate his sources.” Andersson’s sense was that Hersh’s story was “probably true,” but he was mostly interested in the voluminous details contained in his report.

Soon, Andersson was spending his days and nights poring over every news story on the bombing that he could find, watching hours of news footage, and exchanging analyses with a wide cross section of people on Twitter, mainly accounts scouring the internet for open-source data that might shed light on who perpetrated the attacks and how. Andersson would engage both critics and supporters of Hersh and argue his case, ask questions, or share information. He eventually helped assemble an informal online war room with a handful of other amateur sleuths, and they publicly and privately compared notes and built on one another’s research. He also watched countless interviews Hersh did about his story, hanging on to every new detail that had not been in his original article, including an assertion that some of the bombs planted by the saboteurs did not detonate, leading to a scramble by the U.S. to remove the evidence.

At the beginning of his full-time obsession with the Nord Stream attacks, Andersson worked exclusively online. He began tinkering around with MarineTraffic, a service for monitoring the movement of ships and vessels and began reviewing all the data from the Baltic Sea to search for corroboration of various aspects of Hersh’s report. He also argued with open-source analysts aligned with the research group Bellingcat, whose network emerged as a leading force in trying to debunk (and mock) virtually every detail of Hersh’s story. Andersson often appeared in the Twitter feed of Oliver Alexander, a Danish researcher who has been particularly vicious in his denunciations of Hersh (he refers to him as “Senile Hersh”) to argue with him about his conclusions. He also discreetly joined Bellingcat’s Discord forum on the Nord Stream bombing and said it appeared to him to largely be a groupthink operation aimed at proving that Russia was behind the attack.

Andersson also began corresponding with some prominent scientists and researchers in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, sharing his theories and analysis. Several leading researchers working to document the seismic activity caused by the Nord Stream blasts engaged in extended email exchanges with him, and some thanked Andersson for his insights and for pointing out discrepancies or errors in their data presentations.

On March 7, the New York Times and a consortium of German media outlets led by Die Zeit and ARD reported that U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement sources were investigating what they characterized as a “pro-Ukrainian” group suspected of being involved in the attacks. Neither story directly accused the Ukrainian government of involvement. The German reports identified a 50-foot sailboat, the Andromeda, rented in the Baltic Sea port town of Warnemünde by a company registered in Poland and owned by two Ukrainians. According to the reports, a team of six people, at least some of whom allegedly used fake passports, left a slew of evidence onboard, including explosive residue. Ukraine vehemently denied it had any involvement in the attacks. For his part, Hersh suggested that the Andromeda evidence had been concocted as part of a cover story to counter his exposé and draw attention away from the actual perpetrator, the U.S. government.

In this aerial view, the Andromeda, a 50-foot Bavaria 50 Cruiser recreational sailing yacht, stands in a dry dock on the headland of Bug on Rügen island on March 17, 2023, near Dranske, Germany.

Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Andersson grew tired of the online information wars and speculation based on publicly available data that he believed was subject to manipulation or biased interpretations. He had watched scores of documentaries and news reports about the Nord Stream attacks, including the handful of films featuring underwater footage of the damaged pipelines. He says he got the sense the journalists filming under the waters of the Baltic “were not guided by some forensic interest to figure out what was going on” and only filmed superficial footage of the crime scene. “There was no primary damage from the explosion anywhere, so there was nothing that could narrow down the number of possible narratives.”

In March, Andersson began looking for a captain with a ship willing to take him on his own expedition. Within days, he had contracted a vessel with Patrik Juhlin, a captain Andersson jovially described as a “cowboy.” Juhlin was an experienced and knowledgeable Baltic skipper willing to push the bounds of rules and regulations and cruise around in the international waters where multiple bombs had exploded. Andersson’s mission, he said, centered around “very simple objectives: the type, size, and placement of the bombs.”

Andersson spent $10,000 on the boat charter and another $10,000 on an underwater drone with a high-resolution camera and other equipment. He taught himself how to use the remotely piloted marine surveillance vessel, beginning in his backyard swimming pool and then eventually conducting tests off the coast of Gothenburg. He also wanted the ability to take sediment samples from the seabed, so he improvised a valve that looked like a high school science project. He used plastic cylinders and bicycle inner tubes to collect samples that might contain traces of explosives.

Andersson applied for permission from the Swedish and Danish authorities and was pleasantly surprised when they approved his request to conduct a survey. “It was perfectly legal and allowed to go there, but it was still prohibited by some sort of insinuation that we’re not supposed to do it,” he said.

Although Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the U.S., and Russia are all currently investigating the sabotage of the pipelines and are doing so with vastly superior equipment, resources, and access, Andersson was skeptical there would be any meaningful transparency from the national investigations — certainly not anytime soon. He had no hope that new organizations would do serious forensic investigations of the blast sites. “I think that there must be some competition if they are just sweeping the things under the carpet.”

Aboard the Baltic Explorer, Erik Andersson and his daughter Agnes monitor the video feed from an underwater drone over Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on May 24, 2023.

Screenshot: The Intercept, Video: Agnes Andersson

The Engineer

If you look at Erik Andersson’s CV, it paints an impressive picture of a successful entrepreneur and inventor. Early in his career he worked for Volvo, before his work caught the eye of major airline corporations and he negotiated the buyout of a program he had developed. He helped start a new company where, as chief technology officer, he oversaw the development of software for major airlines. Eventually, the firm was acquired by Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen in 2006 for $100 million. Andersson wanted to continue working for Boeing, so he stayed on as an engineer. “I worked on trajectory optimization and aircraft performance modeling. I learned a lot about flight physics and forces generated by accelerating gas masses,” he said. “Some of this general knowledge has been useful to me in the Nord Stream investigation.”

In 2016, he left Boeing and retired, though he continues to work on a variety of projects, including a teak wood harvesting plantation on a rainforest he manages in Brazil. How he came to own a majority share of that business is a story unto itself, but it centers around Andersson allegedly getting swindled out of $1 million by a Swedish politician and businessman. He aggressively fought back against the fraud, a battle that was covered by Swedish media. The politician denied any wrongdoing, but Andersson emerged from the battle with a majority stake in the business.

When you talk to Andersson or look at his social media feeds, you quickly encounter two major strands of his personality. Clearly, he has a sharp scientific and analytical mind. He researches his hypotheses extensively and tries to use solid scientific and mathematical approaches to proving or disproving them. He readily admits when he is wrong, though he first stubbornly exhausts all possibilities that he might be right. He engages in lengthy and detailed email exchanges and conversations with scientists and government officials in Sweden and elsewhere.

“I think it’s a healthy thinking process to create narratives and then look for confirmation as long as you are aware that’s what you are doing, and you’re ready to say you were wrong if the evidence says so,” he argues. “If you pretend to be ‘objective,’ you are much more likely to be fooled by your biases, I think. It’s also much easier to change your mind if you go all in for some narrative until you are exhausted and done with it.”

But there is another aspect to Andersson that would seem to contradict his scientific disposition, and that is his enthusiasm for a mishmash of fringe theories about Covid-19, the 2020 presidential election in the U.S., and other dubious narratives popular in MAGA world. He admires Donald Trump; disparages climate crisis activists; and retweets dubious theories about Anthony Fauci, Covid, and China. Andersson said he liked many of Trump’s campaign pledges, including on immigration, deregulation, and pulling back from foreign wars. He also supported Trump’s posture toward Putin and Russia.

Andersson didn’t just watch the Trump campaign. He logged onto a betting marketplace in October 2015 and saw that oddsmakers were offering 18 to 1 odds, so he placed an initial bet of 100,000 Swedish krona, a bit more than $12,000 at the time, that Trump would win in 2016. When he woke up the morning after the election, he was 2.5 million Swedish krona — or $300,000 — richer. “I should have put up a third of my fortune, the optimal bet, which should have been bigger. So, it was a small bet. I was very conservative.”

Andersson was elated when Trump won and said he wished Sweden could have a leader like Trump. Mostly, though, he was excited that a bombastic outsider might shake up the system in the world’s most powerful nation. “I was interested to see what would happen. You know, it’s like a big sledgehammer coming in.”

Perhaps it was his fascination with such counter-narratives that led him to believe so fervently in Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream bombing. But unlike many social media warriors, when confronted with empirical evidence that refuted his hypothesis, he changed his position.

Andersson retrieves soil samples taken near Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to test for explosive residue on May 24, 2023.

Screenshot: The Intercept, Video: Agnes Andersson

Popular Oversight

Andersson began his investigation onboard the Baltic Explorer on May 22 and declared his mission an act of “popular oversight.” If governments, especially those whose allies may be responsible for the attacks, “can control all the evidence and then tell a story and expect us to take it at face value, that’s not how the system should work.” He said he wanted to prove that private investigations of major world incidents could serve as a guardrail against media outlets spinning false narratives or governments covering up crimes. “This is no criticism of [lead prosecutor] Mats Ljungqvist and the Swedish investigation. I see signs that they might actually do a good job,” he said. “It’s more a general observation from similar cases that a certain amount of citizen oversight is good to help authorities to not abuse their control of information.”

For three days, Andersson’s vessel traversed the crime scene in the Baltic Sea, and he created extensive sonar maps of each of the blast sites. He filmed the damage from the explosions and the sites where sections of pipelines ruptured. In the case of one section of Nord Stream 2, which was punctured by a blast but did not explode because it had been depressurized, he captured what appears to be the only private footage of primary damage from an explosive device used in the bombing. He discovered craters from gas explosions and found evidence suggesting that the bombs had been dug into the mud, indicating that divers, not drones, likely placed explosives under or along the lines. “I felt that the Swedish investigator sounded very credible when he said that this could only be done by big state actor. And I don’t really see that now,” Andersson said. He also believes his research shows that it is unlikely a marine drone or other underwater vessel was used to plant the bombs, as has been suggested by analysts who believe Russia carried out the attack. “I think it would be very difficult to place the bomb under the seams with a remote-operated vehicle and do the variety of tasks of digging a hole and putting it in in there. It was a slab that you dig down next to the pipeline. I think a diver could have done it in a very short period of time.”

Hersh has been adamant that the bombs were placed by American divers and that it was a highly complex task necessitating not only U.S. Navy specialists, but also the support of Norwegian maritime forces. Some analysts, including Hersh, have also suggested that the 80-meter dive could not have been accomplished from a sailboat, such as the Andromeda, which has been connected by German law enforcement to the operation.

“Totally false,” says Peter Andersson, an executive at Poseidon Diving Systems, a Swedish company that provides advanced diving equipment to militaries around the globe, including the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. A world-class diver who travels the globe teaching military and civilian diving instructors to use Poseidon’s equipment, Peter (no relation to Erik) says he personally knows at least 30 divers in Sweden alone who are capable of such a dive. “It’s very common in Germany, very common in the U.S. and so on around the world doing these kinds of dives. I could easily do this, no problem,” he said. “You don’t need to be super experienced, but for a military diver or a paramilitary diver, it is no problem at all.”

Peter Andersson, who estimates that he has personally done several hundred dives in the Baltic Sea, said that if the divers dispensed with traditional safety precautions and backup equipment and used underwater propulsion devices to descend to the pipelines, the entire sabotage mission would be achievable in a matter of hours with two divers and a support crew. “In the case of doing this, bending all the rules, don’t care about security, don’t care about having bailout tanks that we normally have, if you’re in a war mode, you can easily go down with the machine,” he said. “Of course, if something happens, they will never find you. But I think that in this case, putting some explosives there has nothing to do with the rules and regulations and backup plans.”

While a sailboat would not typically be a sound choice for most deep-sea diving operations, in the case of a clandestine military or paramilitary operation, Peter Andersson says it would be a brilliant cover. “When you see a sailboat, the last thing you think of is diving,” he said. “That is a perfect disguise. If you take all the ships and the vessels that you can figure out to take — like a freight boat, canal boat, or whatever — the sailboat is the best way to disguise the diving operation because nobody would think that’s what you’re doing.” He said that if you had three or four strong individuals onboard, they could use ropes and other tools to retrieve the divers and equipment.

The divers, he said, would not have to be tethered to the boat. They could be dropped in the water and later use a marker buoy to identify themselves once they ascend. The boat could then cruise around in wait for the mission to be accomplished. Transporting the explosives to the bottom of the sea, even if they weighed hundreds of kilograms, he added, would be possible if the saboteurs used buoyancy bags. “And then you can work down there and even if you want to stay down there for one hour, it will only take like 3 hours to get to the surface in total,” he said.

Just because it would be possible to conduct such a dive operation from a sailboat does not mean that is what happened. Jens Greinert, a marine geologist who chairs the Deep Sea Monitoring Group at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, said he believes it would have been easier for the saboteurs to use remotely piloted devices rather than human divers to plant the explosives. “Personally I think it was either a small submersible, which doesn’t have to be big, or it was something along the lines of a robot,” he said in an interview with our reporting partner ARD. “You don’t need a diver to put anything in the sediment. I would even say machines can do it better.”

A former German military diver, however, was skeptical a submersible or robotic device was used to plant the explosives. Noting that the Baltic Sea is heavily surveilled, he said that using such equipment capable of planting bombs would have drawn far more attention and potentially necessitated a much larger vessel than a sailboat. “Both are possible, but it would have been a very sophisticated and very expensive robotic,” he told our reporting parter Die Zeit. “If it was a sailing yacht, it would have been complicated to deploy a robotic, because of the weight but also for the steering mechanism. You would need a calm sea and no wind.” He estimated that if humans planted the bombs, each dive would take between 30 minutes to two and a half hours depending on the equipment used and how much time was spent on the sea floor identifying the lines and planting the explosives.

When the Andromeda story first emerged in March, German officials cautioned that the ship could be a “false flag” to conceal the true identity of the saboteurs or that other ships may have been involved. The amount of evidence left on the boat and the trail of digital clues leading to Ukrainian individuals appeared to be either deliberate or the work of sloppy amateurs.

The kitchen area and table stand inside the Andromeda on March 17, 2023.

Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

German investigators appear to be intensifying their probe of possible Polish connections to the attacks, something Warsaw has consistently denied. The Andromeda is known to have made at least one 12-hour stop at a port in Poland during its voyage in the Baltic, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the Andromeda suspects “used Poland as a logistical and financial hub.” The Polish government said that allegation was “completely false and is not supported by the evidence of the investigation.”

Along with Ukraine, the Polish government was the most vehement opponent of the Nord Stream pipeline. Poland has direct access to the sea and held its own exercises, code-named REKIN-22, in the Baltic in late September, just days before the pipelines were sabotaged. The day after the blasts, Poland cut the ribbon on a new pipeline that was established as a direct competitor to the Moscow-led initiative. The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Ukrainians who rented the Andromeda were Polish residents and used local bank accounts and paralegals for their business. “There is no evidence whatsoever that would indicate the involvement of Polish citizens in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline,” Polish investigators said in a carefully worded statement June 21.

“Russia, the United States, and any number of other state or independent actors have the infrastructure and ability to have carried this off at a reasonable cost,” said a former U.S. Navy underwater demolition specialist who reviewed Erik Andersson’s footage and other images. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he now works in the private sector and is not authorized to speak to the media. “It doesn’t have to necessarily be a James Bond-esque operation.”

Click here to watch the video.

Erik Andersson, at his home in Gothenburg, Sweden, explains why he decided to launch his own investigation into the Nord Stream pipeline bombings and the route he took on his expedition to the Baltic Sea.

Credit: Video footage courtesy of our reporting partner ARD.

Seismic Readings

Andersson’s data suggests that the seismic readings registered after the explosions were not caused exclusively from the detonation of the bombs, but were also the result of the sudden and immensely powerful release of the pressurized gas from inside the pipelines. Andersson reached that conclusion after he and his son, a computational engineer who works on seismic surveys in the oil industry, ran a series of advanced mathematical equations. First, they solved Euler’s equations in the geometry of the pipelines, which created a basis for them to make calculations about what happened inside the lines after they were punctured by bombs. This data allowed them to utilize seismic air gun simulation software developed at Stanford University to understand the dynamics of the massive gas bubbles caused by the puncturing of the lines. They also ran the rocket equation to calculate the propulsive force of the gas. “The signature of the gas explosion is much bigger than the signature from the bombs,” Andersson said.

If their calculations are correct, various speculations that the explosions would have required 500-900 kilograms of explosives may be erroneous. The New York Times cited a European lawmaker briefed by his country’s foreign intelligence service late last year as saying more than 1,000 pounds, or 453 kg, of “military grade” explosives were used in the operation. “I am saying with high confidence that I don’t think the bombs were that big,” Andersson said. “The size of the bomb cannot be determined by the seismic data currently available.”

Andersson used side scan sonar imaging to create underwater maps depicting the condition of all four Nord Stream pipeline strands in May 2023. The images were captured by Captain Patrik Juhlin of the Baltic Explorer. The first explosion of the Nord Stream sabotage occurred on a section of Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm at 2:03 am on September 26, 2022. The puncturing of the pipeline caused a massive release of gas, resulting in high thrusts that severed sections of the pipeline and left large craters on the seabed.

Graphic: The Intercept / Sonar images by Patrik Juhlin of the Baltic Explorer and Erik Andersson

But Andersson is not just relying on calculating seismic and hydroacoustic levels to determine the size or placement of the bombs. His footage of a blast hole and other detonation sites suggest that the sabotage could have been accomplished with a smaller quantity of explosives: 50 kg or less for each line. “Fifty kilograms placed at intersections with concrete supports would probably do the trick,” said the former Navy demolition specialist who reviewed the footage. “At given pipeline pressures? Wow.” He and a German military explosive expert who also reviewed Andersson’s images agreed the bombs could potentially have been as small as 10 kg each depending on the specific type of explosives used.

Andersson’s video footage of the pipelines has convinced him that the saboteurs used slabs of explosives, rather than shaped charges, to puncture the lines. “It’s sloppily put there. It’s not professionally applied to surgically cut a hole in the pipeline or anything like that. That’s not what we’re seeing. It was crudely dug in a little bit in the mud next to the pipeline,” he said. “I think it tells a story of a diver who was in a hurry, perhaps diving without the possibility of surface decompression and thus only having 10-15 minutes to spend on the bottom.”

The former German military diver, who reviewed Andersson’s footage, agreed with his assessment that slabs of explosives rather than shaped charges were likely used at the site of the second explosion on Line A of Nord Stream 2. “With a shaped charge, we would see markers, cuts, the impact of the charge,” he said. “We would recognize it clearly. We don’t see that here. Everything speaks to a slab charge.”

With the images and footage currently available to the public, it is difficult to determine the nature of all of the bombs and whether they were identical at each site. The former U.S. Navy specialist said he would not entirely rule out that the saboteurs used cutting or shaped charges at some point in the operation because of their ability to forcefully and quickly pierce through metal and concrete. “I don’t think ‘cutting charges’ are mandatory given hydraulic pressures at depth and placement of charges,” he said. “Deformation of the pipe at a welded junction to the point of failure doesn’t require a cutting charge, in my opinion. But cutting charges make sense and are within the realm of plausibility for sure.”

Andersson also believes that his footage indicates that only one bomb was intended for each line, not two as Hersh has at times suggested. “I gave up the theory of double bombs after the expedition,” Andersson said. “I think there were just four.” All of this in turn could make it more plausible that a small team of divers could have pulled off the operation and not necessarily one sponsored or deployed by a major nation state like the U.S. or Russia. This would not exonerate any particular suspect, but it does suggest a wider circle of actors, nation states, or private groups could have pulled it off.

Andersson may also have solved one of the several sub-mysteries of the Nord Stream saga: Why were only three of the four pipelines attacked? Proponents of the theory that Moscow did the bombing have pointed to the fact that the line closest to Russian territory was not damaged. This, they say, may be evidence Russia wanted to preserve a line in order to swiftly resume gas delivery should political winds shift on support for Ukraine or if Germany had faced a fuel or heating crisis last winter, as many analysts had predicted. Hersh, meanwhile, claimed that the bomb planted on the line closest to Russia simply failed to detonate and that the U.S. military clandestinely removed the evidence. “We were there within a day or two and picked it up and took it away so nobody else could see what kind of evidence there might be with the weapons used,” Hersh said.

Andersson believes that the saboteurs accidentally placed a second bomb on a northern section of Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That explosion did not result in the type of massive damage as the other three bombs because it had been depressurized following the initial blast 17 hours earlier. Line B of Nord Stream 2 was the only line to escape damage from the sabotage. Andersson believes the saboteurs experienced magnetic interference with their compasses when trying to place a bomb on Line B and accidentally rigged a second bomb to the A line, which was just 50 meters away.

Graphic: The Intercept / Sonar images by Patrik Juhlin of the Baltic Explorer and Erik Andersson

On June 20, Der Spiegel reported that German investigators believe the fourth line was actually rigged with a bomb, but that it was a much smaller device than the others. But an official from Nord Stream 2 AG, the company that owns the pipeline, said that line is functional and remains filled with gas, though the company intentionally reduced its pressure to half the level it functioned at prior to the blasts. “Our concern is to safeguard the integrity of the line and safeguard any risk to the environment, to understand how we could stop any further gas seepage from the lines,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

On his expedition, Andersson filmed the aftermath of the destruction caused by the first bomb of the sabotage action, the one that blew up Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at 2:03 a.m. About 70 kilometers northeast of that blast site, Andersson shot video of a puncture wound he believes was caused by a second bomb on that line. This was the discovery he described as the “holy grail” of his mission. He was able to film it because the line had depressurized after the initial blast, so it did not break the pipeline apart, and the hole from the bomb remained intact. That hole is just 50 meters away from the other strand of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the one closest to Russia.

Andersson suspects that the saboteurs encountered magnetic anomalies on their compasses when they were under water causing them to accidentally place two bombs on Line A of Nord Stream 2. “I would have made the same mistake with my drone if the captain hadn’t told me to make small moves and always return to the starting point,” Andersson said. “The compass pointed in the exact opposite direction of what it should, and before [the captain] advised me to turn back, I was heading full speed towards the wrong pipe. They are only 50 meters apart in that location. Maybe the compass failure was because of stray electrical currents in the pipeline itself, and if that situation appeared when the perpetrators executed their mission their compasses would have led them to the wrong string. It is possible that they accidentally blew up the A-string of Nord Stream 2 twice.”

Click here to watch the video.

On May 24, 2023, Erik Andersson filmed a northern section of Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Andersson believes this footage contains the only known images of primary damage from the sabotage bombings. He believes the saboteurs mistakenly placed a second bomb on this line instead of strapping one to Line B of Nord Stream 2. This site may offer clues as to the size, nature, and placement of the bombs. It may also explain why Line B was apparently not directly attacked.

Credit: Footage copyright Erik Andersson.

A group of journalists who filmed a documentary for the BBC and Sweden’s Expressen newspaper encountered a compass malfunction similar to the one Andersson experienced when they filmed over the site late last year, according to a source who participated in the expedition.

Poseidon’s Peter Andersson made clear he has no decisive theory on what happened but said he believes the erratic compass theory is technically plausible. “When you’re trying to put the bombs under the pipe, you need to dig a little bit with your hands. It’s not rock-solid clay or something, it’s more like silt. It’s very loose, but you need to dig a little bit. And when you do this, the visibility becomes totally zero. It’s like in a mud cloud,” he said. In this case, he said, the saboteurs would have needed to rely exclusively on the compass readings. If those were inverted, as was the case with Erik’s readings during his survey of the Nord Stream 2 lines, it is possible they mistakenly placed a bomb on the wrong line. “If you’re doing this, you’re a little bit stressed. You have no clue. It’s not like walking in the forest. You have no clue when you look up which direction you are going or which direction you came from, because you just have to look at the compass.”

The former German military diver agreed that such compass interference can happen, including near pipelines like the Nord Stream, but he said professional divers should know how to calibrate them and adjust to such anomalies.

Andreas Köhler is the senior research seismologist at Norwegian Seismic Array, a joint initiative established in 1968 between the U.S. and Norway to aid in the detection of earthquakes and nuclear explosions. He co-authored an academic research study with colleagues from Germany, Sweden, and Denmark on the Nord Stream blasts, which was presented at a geosciences conference in Vienna in April, and is working on another report with an international team. “We observe seismic signals from four explosions,” he said via email. “One in the early morning at NS2 Southeast of the island of Bornholm, and three in the afternoon Northeast of Bornholm. Our data suggests that at least two occurred at NS1, possibly all three.” Based on their modeling and available data, the scientists determined they could not rule out a second explosion on Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Andersson suspects that the possible second bomb on that line was not detected by seismologists because it occurred at the same time as much more massive explosions were taking place. Köhler, who was aware of Andersson’s expedition, declined to comment. “We can’t comment on any public or private investigation as we’re only focused on analyzing the seismological data, which is our expertise,” he said.

Another scientist involved with the international academic study did not want to be identified for fear of irritating their government. That person said that multiple nations operating in the Baltic, including the U.S., have access to a far greater array of data, including from seismic readings and hydrophones, than the scientists possess and would likely be able to determine exactly where bombs were detonated and how large they were. Those governments have not made any of that data available.

“It goes way back to at least the ’60s — where we had this program of planting underwater microphones, hydrophones, under the water, in various chokepoints around the world, under the different oceans and sea,” said James Bamford, an expert on U.S. surveillance systems who has written several books about the NSA and CIA. “So, working secretly with the Swedish government, the U.S. planted a lot of these undersea hydrophones under the Baltic Sea, and those are sitting down there. And what they do is they listen, and they’re listening constantly.”

Eric Dunham, a geophysics professor at Stanford University, has been studying the Nord Stream blasts and is trying to determine which underwater events were a result of bombs and which were caused by gas release or other aftereffects of the puncturing of the pipelines. There are many challenges involved in answering these questions — or to definitively test Andersson’s theories. “Larger explosives produce higher amplitude blast waves as well as create larger gas bubbles that oscillate more slowly. Both the blast wave and bubble oscillations create hydroacoustic and seismic waves,” Dunham said. “However, a likely complication in the case of the Nord Stream events is gas discharge from the pipes. If the gas discharge is large enough, it can alter the hydroacoustic and seismic waves that are generated.”

Andersson said the image painted by Hersh of a state of alarm among planners of the U.S. operation when one of the bombs did not explode was, to him, one of the most interesting parts of the story. “It seemed to have some account of what happened after the blast, that it was panic,” Andersson said. “Hersh referred to some panic when everything didn’t explode and that eventually they were racing with American ships to the site and picked up those bombs. And I’ve been really trying to get the actual time when this happened.” He spent months reviewing marine traffic data and satellite images for any evidence of a U.S. ship in the area to conduct the sort of crime scene cleanup that Hersh reported. “If it turns out that there actually were no unexploded bombs, then of course this is something that’s just a major hoax,” he said. When pressed, Andersson finally says, “I just don’t think it happened.”

Andersson’s current hypothesis is that a small team of divers placed a single bomb under both lines of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and mistakenly placed two bombs on Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. For yet unexplainable reasons, the first bomb on that line exploded at 2:03 a.m. and then all the other bombs exploded 17 hours later.

Erik Andersson on the Swedish island of Lyr on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Agnes Andersson

Unresolved Questions

After Andersson’s expedition, reports emerged that German investigators had determined the type of explosives used in the operation, including octogen, which is insoluble in water and not difficult to obtain, particularly for a government. The Germans have reportedly matched samples taken from the blast site with the explosive traces left on the Andromeda. Andersson said he would like to verify those reports with his own evidence. “We took some sediment samples at the place where the bomb exploded on a depressurized pipeline,” he said. “It never hurts to double check.”

Two weeks after Andersson’s expedition, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. had intelligence three months before the attack that the Ukrainian military was planning an operation to sabotage the Nord Stream 1 pipeline using a small team of six divers. The paper asserted that European intelligence reports “made clear they were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wouldn’t know about the operation.” Die Zeit then reported that last summer the CIA directly warned Ukraine not to carry out such an attack.

Though it was not his aim, Andersson’s research directly challenges Hersh’s details, as well as the narrative preferred by analysts who believe Russia carried out the bombing. In short, his findings bolster the case that Ukraine — or private actors — could be responsible for the attack. As for his confirmation bias in favor of Hersh’s narrative, the expedition changed his mind. “It’s not the main hypothesis anymore in my mind. In my main story, they were fairly primitive divers going in with a big slab of explosives. They dug in next to the pipelines and they placed them. There were four separate dives, but there was simplified logistics. It could have been a small boat, and they made a big mistake, and they ended up putting one bomb on the wrong pipe. That’s the story that is in my mind.”

Andersson’s mission did not solve the mystery of the Nord Stream bombing — he never thought it would — but the data he collected does contribute to the public understanding of what occurred.

During his expedition, Andersson also discovered a single diver’s boot near the site of the string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was bombed but did not explode. A freelance journalist who accompanied Andersson published an article speculating about the boot’s origins, but Andersson acknowledges that the boot could have belonged to any number of actors in the highly trafficked sea and may not be connected to the bombing. He admits that experts he consulted “didn’t make much of it.” But, he says, he cannot rule out that it was lost by one of the perpetrators and may contain forensic evidence linking it to the crime. “We never expected to find any traces of the perpetrators, but nevertheless we ran across a diver’s boot,” he said. “I have talked to Captain Patrik about retrieving the boot. We can do it, if someone pays for it. That would also be a good demonstration of what it means to dive at this site.”

Greinert, the German marine geologist, cautioned that Andersson’s expedition took place eight months after the Nord Stream bombings. During that time, multiple governments have examined the crime scene and retrieved evidence. “What was looked at here in May is no longer the original,” he said. “You have to take that into account.” He added, “From what you see, you can only draw conclusions about what happened, not who. Unless someone has left his credit card there.”

Andersson said he is keeping an open mind about all possible culprits and is eager for his data to be reviewed by more experts who can fact-check his own calculations and hypotheses. “I want to put everything in open source for people to look at,” he says. “I think if a person is doing something, you should assume innocence until they’re proven guilty. But when big governments do things, they shouldn’t have that protection.” The Baltic Sea, he adds, is a heavily surveilled and trafficked body of water. It is populated by swarms of advanced underwater monitoring devices, with the skies above and the water below patrolled by multiple nations’ naval vessels and aircraft. Andersson refuses to accept that the U.S. and its allies do not know exactly what happened last September 26, and he questions the motives behind their secrecy. “I don’t think the nationality of the divers is the huge thing,” said Andersson. “The Hersh story and Andromeda story are very similar in terms of how the bombs were placed and the size of the bombs.”

While Andersson now doubts the veracity of many details in Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream bombings, he is not yet prepared to exonerate the Biden administration. “Even if Ukraine planned and executed the operation, I can’t stop thinking that the U.S. was in on it in a way that makes them responsible,” he said. “At a minimum, Ukraine must have been certain that the U.S. would celebrate a successful sabotage of Nord Stream. And that’s what happened. Antony Blinken said it was a ‘great opportunity’ and Victoria Nuland cheered that the pipes had been turned into scrap metal. So, if Ukraine did it, they did it for the team, and if they didn’t inform their team leader, the USA, about all details, it was because that’s what was expected of them.”

The post Fishing for Secrets in the Nord Stream Abyss appeared first on The Intercept.

Released Guantánamo Detainees Are Still Being Denied Human Rights, U.N. Report Warns

Elise Swain — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 17:05:16 +0000

The United Nations special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, published an exhaustive investigation this week into human rights abuses at Guantánamo Bay. Following a historic visit to the detention center and interviews with current and former detainees, victims of the 9/11 attacks, and human rights lawyers, the report details delayed justice for the victims of terrorist attacks and ongoing injustice for the victims of torture.

At the core of the report is the problem of inexplicable indefinite detention. “Arbitrariness pervades the entirety of the Guantánamo detention infrastructure — rendering detainees vulnerable to human rights abuse and contributing to conditions, practices, or circumstances that lead to arbitrary detention,” the report says. Life beyond Guantánamo, for some men, is just another Guantánamo. Those who cannot be repatriated are instead sent to a “third” country like Kazakhstan, where former detainees have been met with more arbitrary detention, Ní Aoláin found.

The special rapporteur highlighted Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates as two countries of “egregious” concern where men have been sent to another form of prison. “In Kazakhstan former detainees effectively remain under house arrest and are unable to live a normal and dignified life due to the secondary security measures put in place post transfer,” she wrote. In the UAE, Ní Aoláin found “multiple former detainees were subject to arbitrary detention and torture, and one remains detained in incommunicado detention.”

The U.N. investigation found that the men released from Guantánamo in resettlement deals have not been given proper legal status by their host countries in 30 percent of documented cases. This lack of asylum risks “precluding them and their families from access to certain public benefits, health care, education, as well as foreign travel, or a path to citizenship, all of which are fundamental entitlements under international human rights law.”

Early this year, an investigation by The Intercept revealed that former Guantánamo prisoner Sabri al-Qurashi had been left without legal status since his relocation from Guantánamo to Kazakhstan in late 2014. Over nearly a decade in Kazakhstan, his treatment has only gotten worse, and he has become increasingly desperate. “I have no official status, no ID card, no right to work or education, and no right to see my family,” al-Qurashi said. Without a basic ID, he is unable to send or receive money, packages, or mail. When he wants to leave his apartment, he must call the Red Crescent office and ask for his assigned chaperone to accompany him. Since being freed, he has not been allowed to reunite with his family or his wife in Yemen, in conflict with the State Department’s negotiated resettlement deal, which was supposed to provide stability and possible family reunification.

“You have no rights,” al-Qurashi said he was told by Kazakh authorities. He was not allowed to press charges against a man who attacked him in the street, leaving him with permanent facial paralysis.

Now Muhammad Ali Husayn Khanayna, the only other former Guantánamo prisoner in Kazakhstan who is still alive, has come forward about his living conditions. “Soon, I will complete 10 years under the arbitrariness of the Kazakh government in a remote city for no reason,” he told The Intercept. He confirmed that he, too, has never been given documentation of residence, an ID, or his passport. “They treat us as if we were criminals who entered the country without their choice,” Khanayna said. Both al-Qurashi and Khanayna told The Intercept that Kazakh officials threatened to send them back to Yemen. “We were handed over by the American government to the militias of Kazakhstan,” Khanayna said. “Not a government that has international law or a law that protects the citizens.”

The U.N. report calls for the situation of the men “arbitrarily detained” in Kazakhstan, the UAE, and any other country with a “serious violation of human rights” to be “urgently addressed.” The U.S. should facilitate their resettlement again in a new host country, Ní Aoláin argues.

“There is a legal and moral obligation for the U.S. government to use all of its diplomatic and legal resources to facilitate (re)transfer of these men, with meaningful assurance and support to other countries,” she concludes.

A State Department representative previously told The Intercept that the U.S. government does not agree with the characterization that it has a “legal and moral” obligation to the resettled detainees. “Once security assurances have expired, and pending any specific renegotiation of assurances, it largely falls to the discretion of the host country to determine what security measures they continue to implement,” Vincent Picard said when asked for comment on the former detainees in Kazakhstan.

As al-Qurashi and Khanayna have been stuck in stateless purgatory for nearly a decade, some of the recommendations of the U.N. report come far too late. The report strongly recommends that for all resettlements and repatriations, “a formal and effective follow-up system be established as part of the remedial obligations owed by the U.S. government.” Had a system like that been in place when they were transferred, the Guantánamo detainees in Kazakhstan could have received some assistance. In 2015, they told VICE News that their mistreatment began as soon as they stepped off the plane in the former Soviet country.

“This was a mistake by the Americans in the beginning, and the Americans will not be able to change our situation inside this country,” Khanayna told The Intercept. “They only have to get us out of here.” He said he would prefer to be transferred to an Arab country like Qatar because it has a reputation of treating Guantánamo prisoners well.

“The Kazakh government is a criminal government. It has treated us like animals,” al-Qurashi said in response to the new U.N. findings. “I’m hurting from my heart.”

The post Released Guantánamo Detainees Are Still Being Denied Human Rights, U.N. Report Warns appeared first on The Intercept.

Information Warfare Was Key to Prigozhin's Mutiny Against Putin

Alice Speri — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 23:16:17 +0000

Long before he plunged Russia into its most significant political crisis in three decades, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin caterer turned mercenary warlord and then mutineer, had built a profitable empire interfering in the politics and crises of countries around the world.

Prigozhin’s sprawling businesses include not only the Wagner mercenary group that became a household name when it joined Russian forces in Ukraine — before launching an armed insurrection against Moscow last week — but also an online army that has fought wars over information from Sudan to the United States, where Prigozhin remains under federal indictment over his alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“The misinformation piece is a huge part of the narrative,” Raphael Parens, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program who has long researched Prigozhin and Wagner, told The Intercept. He added that influencing public discourse is one of Wagner’s “top tools.”

Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the government of his once close associate Vladimir Putin played out online as much as on the ground, as he successfully utilized the messaging service Telegram to communicate with the public. Social media’s prominent role in the rebellion echoed Prigozhin’s earlier online battles, where he often seized on a vacuum of reliable information to seek to control the narrative or actively worked to sow doubt and chaos around what was happening.

Over the weekend, as the world’s intelligence agencies and pundit classes scrambled to analyze rapidly shifting developments, Prigozhin himself was often the source of the little information around the attempted coup, which he said was not a coup but a “march for justice.”

Prigozhin launched his short-lived insurrection against the Russian government in a series of social media posts on Friday, in which he accused Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering deadly airstrikes on Wagner mercenaries. (Some analysts concluded that the video he posted purportedly showing evidence of such an attack was likely staged.) He also challenged Putin’s official narrative for launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year — a significant act of defiance in a conflict Prigozhin and his forces have actively participated in.

Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the Putin government played out online as much as on the ground.

“There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” Prigozhin said in a Telegram video on Friday. “The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block.”

For the next 36 hours, Prigozhin kept posting online. Telegram channels that often share Wagner-related content circulated videos of Wagner men who had seized control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub near the Ukrainian border. On Saturday, Prigozhin turned his men around 120 miles outside Moscow after reaching a deal with Putin brokered by Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko.

For an episode with the potential for monumental global repercussions, accurate, reliable information remained wildly elusive even days after Prigozhin’s forces retreated. That is in part due to the Russian government’s tight control of the media, with independent outlets forced to shut down or move abroad since last year’s invasion and foreign media still in the country operating in extremely difficult circumstances. Within hours of the uprising starting, Russian internet service providers began to block access to Google News, while observers outside Russia rushed to verify whether reports and videos emerging on social media were real.

Eventually, Russian officials spoke publicly, with Putin addressing the nation on Saturday and then again on Monday. But by that point, Prigozhin’s message had already spread through Russia, where people are increasingly turning to Telegram for alternative — if hardly more reliable — information than that coming from official state sources.

“He kind of hit this media space that has eroded in the last 10, 15 years,” said Parens, referring to a Russian media landscape that has shrunk under Putin’s rule, but also to a phenomenon — the rise of disinformation — hardly unique to Russia. “He and the organization managed to hit a gap in Russian society, and you could also say a gap in Western society and the way that we are able to deal with misinformation.”

Criminal to Chef, Warlord to Mutineer

Born in 1961 in Leningrad — today’s St. Petersburg — Prigozhin was once sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony following a conviction on charges ranging from armed robbery to fraud to “involving minors in criminal activity,” according to a leaked resume published by The Intercept earlier this year. Once released, he launched a fast-food chain that soon boomed into a sprawling catering business serving the Kremlin, which earned Prigozhin the nickname “Putin’s chef” and brought him face to face with dozens of heads of state.

As he grew closer to Putin following his 2012 reelection to the presidency, Prigozhin expanded his relationship with the Kremlin by financing the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” behind a series of online disinformation campaigns, including a bid to influence the 2016 U.S. election. And he built Wagner — a successor of the Slavonic Corps, a paramilitary group involved in the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine — into an infamous and brutal mercenary force that has been accused of widespread atrocities across multiple continents.

Until last year, Prigozhin denied any involvement in the more shadowy businesses he is today most known for, fiercely fighting U.S. and European Union sanctions against him and suing journalists who reported on his connections to Wagner. But he abruptly switched course last year, as the war in Ukraine raised his global profile and that of his mercenaries. Since then, he has embarked on an intensive media offensive: appearing in videos that showed him recruiting prisoners in Russian prisons, on the battlefield in Ukraine, and alongside dozens of corpses of Wagner fighters whose deaths he blamed on the incompetence of Russian military leadership.

The social media blitz around the weekend insurrection was a culmination of Prigozhin’s monthslong campaign to dominate the narrative about Wagner and its role in Ukraine. As his name became as recognizable as Putin’s over the last year, leading to speculation that he might be angling to replace him, Prigozhin issued dozens of often bombastic statements to journalists — including to The Intercept — through the PR arm of his catering business, while also increasingly turning to Telegram to launch screeds against his rivals in Russia and finally, to chronicle his rebellion against them in real time.

“He likes to be in the limelight. It does feel like he’s playing into the whole theater of the moment.”

“He’s certainly one of the people who is more plugged in than others with the Russian government and who has recognized the use of Telegram and social media and that actually uses that to get what he wants,” John Lechner, an independent researcher and author of an upcoming book about the Wagner Group, told The Intercept. “Prigozhin has been at the forefront of really effectively using Telegram and social media to advocate for his own objectives vis-à-vis other rivals in the Russian government who either don’t have the permission or the ability to pull that off.”

Prigozhin’s online persona — and his skill at commandeering attention to himself by frequently issuing over-the-top statements — is also a product of the time.

“He likes to be in the limelight,” said Parens. “It does feel like he’s playing into the whole theater of the moment. In order to get the attention, and in order to get retweets are reposting and all that, you have to kind of go to the extreme. It’s the social media effect of — the way the military and political spheres look to the public now is just completely different than the way it looked maybe 10 years ago; there’s just this need to dramatize things to show your point of view.”

Prigozhin’s Playbook

Prigozhin’s mastery of social media to serve his business and political goals goes at least as far back as the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. federal grand jury indicted him in 2018 in one of the highest-profile prosecutions to emerge from the two-year Mueller investigation. Prigozhin was accused of “conspiracy to defraud the United States” along with 12 other individuals, two companies he controls, and the Internet Research Agency. At a press conference announcing the charges, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein accused Prigozhin and his co-defendants of seeking to spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

Last year, Prigozhin boasted of having been involved in that interference. “We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012,” Prigozhin wrote through a representative in an email to The Intercept. “50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass. And we will continue to do so as many times as needed.” The charges against him remain active, though prosecutors dropped the charges against his companies in 2020.

In several African countries, too, where Wagner has worked with local governments to quash rebellions or political rivalries —committing widespread human rights abuses in the process — it has also engaged in information warfare. In Mali and the Central African Republic, Wagner has promoted social media pages as well as local radio stations advancing its clients’ interests, for instance by amplifying rhetoric against the French and United Nations presence in those countries. “They’re very media savvy,” said Lechner, noting that those efforts vary from country to country. “They’re turning out these narratives that are specifically crafted to the local environment.”

At times, Wagner’s media campaigns seemed aimed at bolstering its business, creating an opportunity for a formal relationship with various governments. In Mali, for instance, the Foundation for National Values Protection, a Russian think tank under U.S. sanctions over its role disseminating disinformation, released an opinion poll just before Wagner finalized a deal with the Malian government claiming to show widespread popular support among Malians for such an involvement. The think tank, headed by Maxim Shugaley, a close associate of Prigozhin, had run and promoted similar polls in the Central African Republic.

In Burkina Faso last year, hours after a military coup, crowds cheering the takeover waved Russian flags. Months later, Wagner forces were reported to be supporting the military junta in the country. (This year, Burkina Faso’s government denied contracting with Wagner, but said it would work with “Russian instructors” to train soldiers using equipment purchased from Russia, a phrase often used by Russian officials themselves to obliquely refer to the mercenaries). In Sudan, before the ousting of former President Omar al-Bashir, Wagner, which had business dealings in the country’s mining industry, was also involved in disinformation campaigns against regime rivals.

“They’re definitely experimenting with disinformation in these different contexts,” Parens said, “and trying to figure out how to influence populations.”

The post Information Warfare Was Key to Prigozhin’s Mutiny Against Putin appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin and Putin: Dead Men Walking

James Risen — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 21:23:30 +0000

Head of the Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves the Southern Military District headquarters on June 24, 2023, in Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a dead man walking. But so is Vladimir Putin.

In an insane series of events over the weekend, Russian mercenary leader Prigozhin launched what appeared to be a coup against Putin’s regime, marching his Wagner Group mercenaries from their positions in Ukraine, where they had been fighting alongside the Russian military, into Russia. They seized control of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub, before marching north to Moscow. Prigozhin and his troops met little resistance from the Russian military; he seemed poised to enter the capital and seize power. Nothing would stop him, he said, vowing that “we will go to the end.”

But his bravado didn’t last long. Just as Wagner forces were closing in on Moscow Saturday, Prigozhin suddenly reversed himself. He cut a deal with the Russian president, brokered by Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus’s autocratic leader and a close Putin ally — and announced that his troops would turn back. Prigozhin agreed to leave Russia and go into a sort of exile in Belarus, while Putin agreed to drop a charge of armed rebellion against Prigozhin and grant immunity to his men in connection with the rebellion. Some Wagner forces seem likely to be integrated into the Russian army.

It is still not certain what Saturday’s deal really means and whether it represents an end to the crisis or merely a short-term tactical shift in an ongoing duel between Prigozhin and Putin. But one thing is clear: Prigozhin lost his nerve on Saturday. He had a golden opportunity to seize power at a moment when Putin was surprised and vulnerable. The Russian military had many of its resources in Ukraine rather than Russia, and Wagner’s heavily armed forces had at least the potential to outgun the remaining Russian security services guarding Moscow.

But Prigozhin’s moment was fleeting. Now the odds are good that Putin will have his rival murdered. The Russian leader has had opponents thrown out of windows for far less. To think that Lukashenko, a Putin stooge, will protect Prigozhin in Belarus is madness. Moscow has a long reach; Putin has had plenty of opponents assassinated in the West, and Minsk, the capital of Belarus, might as well be a suburb of Moscow.

If Prigozhin believes Putin will abide by their deal, he isn’t thinking straight — which may be why he launched the coup attempt in the first place.

But Putin is a dead man walking, too, because his tenuous hold on power has now been exposed to the world. Prigozhin’s rebellion has revealed that Putin’s regime is a hollow shell and doesn’t really have a monopoly on violence in Russia.

On Saturday, Putin gave an angry national address, calling Prigozhin’s rebellion treasonous and “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” But just a few hours later, he negotiated the settlement with Prigozhin. Putin’s actions showed the Russian people and the rest of the world that when confronted by a powerful adversary, he will blink. That is certainly the lesson now being absorbed by leaders in Ukraine and at NATO.

Putin’s only play to remain in power may be to have Prigozhin murdered once he settles into exile in Belarus. Prigozhin, meanwhile, may be condemned to await his assassin, even as he wonders what might have been.

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Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Threatened Uprising Against Putin Echoes Russia’s History of Wars Gone Bad

Murtaza Hussain — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 20:17:33 +0000

Launching an aggressive war is perhaps the greatest gamble that a political leader can make. Over a year into Russia’s grueling invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now beginning to taste the consequences of betting poorly.

On Friday, armed paramilitaries under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin — a former caterer turned commander of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization —launched what looked like a coup against Putin’s regime. At the height of the action over the past 24 hours, troops under Prigozhin’s command captured the strategic city of Rostov-on-Don and barreled toward Moscow. Prigozhin reportedly turned his troops around late on Saturday following a negotiated settlement, but it was the first major crack in Putin’s armor. Putin, who has positioned himself as an inheritor of past Russian imperial glory, may ultimately suffer the fate of many czars before him: a military uprising against his own rule, fueled by the blowback of a failing war.

“It’s a stab in the back of our country and our people. Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in World War I, but its victory was stolen,” Putin said in an address Friday night, comparing the insurrection to the uprising that destroyed czarist Russia during the First World War. “Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe: destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.”

The extreme-right Wagner Group has little in common with the left-wing Bolsheviks who took power in the revolution that overthrew Czar Nicholas II and founded the Soviet Union. But the background circumstances of the insurrection that threatened Putin’s regime — particularly the unhappiness brought by a failing war — nonetheless resemble those that sparked the uprising more than a century ago.

Though the czar’s opponents were heavily motivated by the ideology of revolutionary communism, the revolution could not have occurred without the incredible carnage of World War I; the suffering during the war provided the fuel that fired the revolt.

Russians, tired of being thrown into the meat grinder of trench warfare for reasons that had little to do with their own lives or interests, eventually turned on the czar, backing whichever movement seemed most capable of putting a quick end to the conflict. The war ultimately fed mass disillusionment against czarist rule, breathing life into the mix of angry populist movements that eventually destroyed Nicholas II’s regime, while convincing ordinary Russians that they had little to gain from defending their last monarch.

“Russia was more unstable and had more serious internal dilemmas than many other great powers, and so the degree to which the shock of war resulted in chaos was correspondingly more intense,” Steven Miner, an expert on Russian history at Ohio University, observed in an analysis on the influence of World War I on Russian society — words that could easily describe contemporary Russia. “Collapse minus war was possible, but in my view not certain. Involvement in the cataclysm of war made it nearly inevitable.”

Putin’s dictatorship, too, is characterized by a mixture of incompetence, corruption, and indifference to the suffering of its own population. Russian society has been rapidly immiserated by the invasion of Ukraine, launched in early 2022. While well-off Russians have left the country for places like Turkey and Dubai, tens of thousands, and perhaps far more, have been sent to die on the bleak battlefields of war-torn eastern Ukraine, including thousands of former prison convicts recruited as fighters for the Wagner Group. Just as World War I was launched in the interest of monarchs with little concern for the lives of those fighting it, the purpose of these deaths in Ukraine remains unclear to many Russians, while an end to the conflict remains nowhere on the horizon.

Prigozhin, who claims to command at least 25,000 troops at present, emerged to capitalize on this unhappy situation. He has made no secret about the influence of the mismanaged war in Ukraine on his thinking. The catastrophic sacrifices of life over small scraps of territory that the past year has seen in Ukraine are eerily similar to the futile battles and trench warfare of World War I. In places like Bakhmut, cities have been reduced to rubble at the cost of thousands of dead on all sides. The Wagner Group leader has accused Russian military leadership of hiding the true toll of the war with false casualty numbers, as well as exaggerating the threat that Ukraine and NATO posed to Russia before the war began.

“Huge numbers of our fighters, of our combat comrades, have been killed,” Prigozhin said in an audio message posted to Telegram. “The evil that the military leadership of the country bears must be stopped. They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forget the word ‘justice.’”

Prigozhin described his insurrection as a “march of justice” rather than a coup, vowing to confront Russia’s military leadership. Though details are still unclear, some reports indicate that the Wagner chief won concessions in exchange for withdrawing his troops, including a change in military personnel leading the war. The mercenary commander has been a vocal critic of Russian military brass since the war began, particularly its Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The Russian military put up a limited resistance to his offensive, declining to fight the Wagner Group in Rostov-on-Don. The Russian government nonetheless treated his insurrection as a mortal threat, filing criminal charges against Prigozhin for “inciting an armed uprising,” and deploying military troops and police across Moscow in anticipation of the Wagner troops’ arrival.

Should he ever succeed in taking power, Prigozhin would not inaugurate a more liberal or progressive Russia. Given the hideous track record of his organization, the opposite is more likely. Nor is there any indication that he would end the war in Ukraine if given the chance. Yet the Wagner Group chief has now emerged as the most serious threat to Putin’s rule since he took power over two decades ago. For this opportunity, which likely won’t be the last, Prigozhin has a failing war and its impact on an autocratic ruling regime to thank.

“The war placed Russian society in a state of extreme tension,” Vladimir Lenin observed with satisfaction a century ago, reflecting on the impact of World War I on his czarist enemies. “The revolution drew its first breath from the war.”

The post Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Threatened Uprising Against Putin Echoes Russia’s History of Wars Gone Bad appeared first on The Intercept.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Coup Targets Putin and His “Oligarchic Clan”

James Risen — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 17:29:06 +0000

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, addresses his units withdrawing from Bakhmut, the city captured from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, on May 25, 2023.

Photo: UPI/Alamy Live News

Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a full-scale coup attempt against Russian President Vladimir Putin late Friday and early Saturday morning, as his mercenaries took control of the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, which serves as a key military hub for Russian combat operations for the war in Ukraine.

Forces from the Wagner Group, Prigozhin’s private army, moved east from Ukraine, where they had been fighting alongside the Russian Army, and took over Rostov. By Saturday, they were reported to be moving north toward Moscow. There were reports of fighting between Wagner and the Russian military near the Russian city of Voronezh, which is between Rostov and Moscow. By the time this article was published, Wagner forces were moving north into the area around Lipetsk, only some 250 miles from the capital. Russian security forces were deployed around Moscow on Saturday to block Prigozhin’s troops from entering the city.

British intelligence confirmed the moves, reporting on Twitter that “in an operation characterized by Prigozhin as a ‘march for freedom,’ Wagner Group forces crossed from occupied Ukraine into Russia in at least two locations. In Rostov-on-Don, Wagner has almost certainly occupied key security sites, including the HQ which runs Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. Further Wagner units are moving north through Vorenezh Oblast, almost certainly aiming to get to Moscow.”

Prigozhin’s bid for control is arguably the greatest threat to Moscow’s government since the 1991 coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In August of that year, Communist Party and KGB hard-liners, angered by Gorbachev’s reform efforts, sought to take over the government by sending troops into Moscow. But that coup quickly failed, and the Soviet Union rapidly broke apart, ending the Cold War.

I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that summer, and I was sent to Moscow to help cover the coup’s aftermath. For one story, I traveled to a rural area outside the Russian capital to interview troops who had been sent to Moscow by the coup-plotters but had left the city after the takeover failed.

The troops who had so recently threatened to bring down the government were by then picking cabbages because farmworkers had largely disappeared during the crisis. The soldiers were happy to be doing farm work because they were getting paid extra on top of their military salaries, a rare benefit that stemmed from the government’s concerns about an imminent food shortage. The impoverished conditions of those soldiers connects directly to what Prigozhin has been saying about the incompetence and corruption of the Russian government today and its casual waste of soldiers’ lives on the battlefield in Ukraine. A key part of his argument for staging a coup is that the war has been fought to enrich Russian elites.

Russian soldiers “came here as volunteers, and they died to let you lounge in your mahogany offices,” Prigozhin said in a May video directed at Russia’s military leaders. “You are sitting in your expensive clubs, your children are enjoying good living and filming videos on YouTube. Those who don’t give us ammunition will be eaten alive in hell!”

In a remarkable emergency national address on Saturday, Putin called for the support of the Russian Army and security services and demanded that Wagner end its rebellion. He called Prigozhin’s actions treasonous and appealed to “those who were deceptively pulled into the criminal adventure, pushed towards a serious crime of an armed mutiny.”

Putin compared the rebellion to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power; Russia was subsequently forced out of World War I, surrendered territory to Germany, and experienced a bloody civil war. “Everything that weakens us must be put to the side, any differences that may be used or are used by our enemies to disrupt us from within. Thus, the actions splitting our unity are a betrayal of our people, of our brothers in combat who fight now at the front line,” Putin said in his address. “It’s a stab in the back of our country and our people. Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in World War I, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” He added, “I believe that we will defend and preserve what’s sacred for us. And together with the motherland, we will overcome all challenges and become even stronger.”

Prigozhin responded to Putin’s speech with defiance, saying that Russia’s leader had “made the wrong decision. Too bad for him. We will have a new president soon.”

“No one is going to turn themselves in at the request of the president, the FSB, or anyone else. No one wants to go on living in corruption and deceit,” Prigozhin said, using an acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service. Any who oppose him, he added, “are those who have gathered around the scum.” He claimed on Saturday that Wagner would march on Moscow, saying, “We will go to the end.”

The Wagner paramilitary group has taken control of the headquarters of Russia’s southern military district in Rostov-on-Don on June 24, 2023.

Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The key question in the current crisis is whether Russian military and security forces will remain loyal to Putin or switch sides to back Prigozhin. Videos showed that Wagner forces had taken control of Rostov, including the Russian Army regional headquarters there, without any significant opposition from Russian forces. There were videos of Wagner tanks driving through the city’s streets unimpeded.

It is unclear how many Wagner fighters have left Ukraine, where they have been operating as a separate combat force alongside the Russian military, but the United States has estimated that the mercenary group had as many as 50,000 troops deployed there. If the bulk of those troops leave Ukraine to march on Russia, it could seriously weaken Putin’s combat power at a time when Ukraine has launched a major counteroffensive.

The high-stakes power struggle between Prigozhin and the Russian government began Friday, when the mercenary leader issued a blistering challenge to Russia’s military leadership.

Relations between Prigozhin and Russian military commanders have worsened over the last few months, as Prigozhin has become increasingly public and bitter in denouncing the Russian military’s poor handling of the war. He has frequently posted videos of himself attacking the incompetence and corruption of Russian military leaders, including a dramatic video last month in which he showed the bodies of dead Russian soldiers and attacked Russian military officials for failing to give Wagner the ammunition it needed to fight the Ukrainians.

On Friday, Prigozhin launched his most brutal online tirade yet, going far beyond anything he had said before, by broadly accusing Russian defense officials and military commanders of launching the war based on lies in order to enrich themselves and gain power. Russia’s public justifications for last year’s invasion — that Ukrainian forces were Nazis who were preparing to attack Russia along with NATO — were lies, he said.

“The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO bloc,” Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel. The truth, he said, was that “there was nothing extraordinary happening” on February 24, 2022, the day Russian invaded. Instead of launching a war, Prigozhin added, Russia should have negotiated with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy. “He was ready for agreements. All that needed to be done was to get off Mount Olympus and negotiate with him.”

In his angry video on Friday, Prigozhin did not blame Putin by name for launching the war. Instead, he focused on his longtime nemesis, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

“What was the war for?” Prigozhin asked. “The war was needed for Shoigu to receive a hero star. … The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” he said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.’”

But after Prigozhin posted the video, events began to spiral out of control. He followed up his criticism of the war by claiming that the Russian military had launched a rocket strike that killed Wagner troops in Ukraine, which the Russian military quickly denied. Prigozhin then angrily claimed that Wagner forces were going to cross the border back into Russia to take Rostov, and then move on to Moscow to go after Shoigu. By late Friday, Russian prosecutors and the FSB announced that a criminal case had been opened against Prigozhin, claiming that he was inciting an “armed rebellion.” By then, Russian military officials were openly alarmed. Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, put out a video of his own in which he told Wagner forces not to turn on the Russian military. “You need to stop your columns and return them to their positions,” he said.

But Prigozhin easily seized Rostov, and videos showed him meeting with two senior Russian military commanders early Saturday at the headquarters there. He told them that Wagner had just shot down three Russian military helicopters. “They shoot at us and we shoot them down,” Prigozhin said.

By Saturday, after focusing on Shoigu and the Russian military leadership, Prigozhin began to target Putin by name, and made it clear that he was now determined to topple Putin’s regime. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense issued a terse comment on Twitter: “We are watching.”

Western reporting on the unfolding crisis is being hampered by Putin’s crackdown on the Russian press, which began when Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Many independent Russian journalists have been forced to flee the country; most Western journalists have also left Russia in the wake of the crackdown and the arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on false spying charges. Russian state-run media has covered up the truth about the Ukraine war and now seems dazed about how to cover the Prigozhin coup.

Reporting on the 1991 coup in Moscow was much different; back then, the story was far more accessible to Western reporters. In speaking to the soldiers picking cabbages outside Moscow, as well as their commanders, I quickly learned that they had no idea why they had been sent to the capital. No one had told them they were part of a coup attempt, so when they had arrived in the city, they’d simply parked their tanks and waited for orders. The orders never came, because the coup-plotters lost their nerve.

A big question now is whether Prigozhin will also lose his nerve in the coming days.

Update: Saturday, June 24, 2023

Just as his forces were closing on Moscow, amid reports of a deal brokered by Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s autocratic leader and a close Putin ally, Prigozhin announced that his forces would turn around. It remains uncertain whether Prigozhin’s reversal represents an end to the crisis or merely a short-term tactical shift by the mercurial Wagner leader.

The post Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Coup Targets Putin and His “Oligarchic Clan” appeared first on The Intercept.

As D.C. Fêtes Narendra Modi, His Political Prisoners in India Are Forgotten

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 17:55:49 +0000

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on a visit to the United States this week that has included meetings with Elon Musk and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, among others, will meet with President Joe Biden on Thursday and be hosted at a state dinner in the evening. The trip is intended to solidify a future partnership between India and the United States against China, among other goals.

Yet while Modi’s visit has been touted as the blossoming of a friendship between two of the world’s largest democracies, the rosy optics have clouded out a darker story: the increasingly grim fate of Indian political prisoners, including many well known to Western nongovernmental organizations and media establishments, under the right-wing Modi government.

A long list of Indian civil society members are currently languishing in the country’s prisons.

Perhaps the most emblematic example is Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri human rights activist and chair of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances. Parvez, 45, has for years been at the forefront of documenting human rights violations in Kashmir, particularly torture, extrajudicial detention, and mass killings, during a long-running insurgency in the territory. He was arrested in November 2021 amid a broader Indian government crackdown and has been in prison ever since. His arrest has not gone entirely unnoticed: Time magazine in 2022 named Parvez on their list of the 100 most influential people in the world, calling him a “modern-day David who gave a voice to families that lost their children to enforced disappearances, allegedly by the Indian state.”

Despite his prominent status, the fate of Parvez and others like him, has not figured much into the celebratory pronouncements about the U.S.-India relationship. Although the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention recently criticized his detention and called for his release, no major U.S. human rights organization has issued a statement about Parvez timed to Modi’s high-profile U.S. visit. That silence has had a chilling effect with repercussions far beyond his own fate.

“If we can’t even get them to speak up about his case, who is going to speak about a 16-year-old with no connections in prison?”

“Over the past 20 years, Khurram has become the face of human rights work in Kashmir, as well as the person who was the most vocal and outgoing in making connections with the international community. He was someone that others assumed had implicit protections because of his notoriety,” said Imraan Mir, co-founder of the Kashmir Law and Justice Project. “His arrest has effectively meant the end of any human rights work in Kashmir. Famous people all over the world know Khurram and call him their friend. If we can’t even get them to speak up about his case, who is going to speak about a 16-year-old with no connections in prison?”

Parvez is only one of many prominent Indian activists and journalists who have disappeared into prison over the past several years under Modi’s government. A few of the other most famous names include Fahad Shah, a contributing writer for American left-wing magazine The Nation; Irfan Mehraj, a writer for Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera; activists Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid; and countless others who have had the misfortune of running afoul of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

India’s prisons have begun to fill with many of its own highly educated citizens, even as the BJP continues to grow in popularity, in part through flashy economic and infrastructure projects planned for completion across the country.

Modi is widely expected to win in elections scheduled for next year. The Indian leader, whose star has risen in the U.S. years after he was banned from the country for his alleged involvement in serious human rights abuses, is also set to give a speech to a joint session of Congress on Thursday.

A perception of democratic backsliding in India under his rule has led several progressive U.S. politicians to announce a boycott of the address, including members of the so-called Squad: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

“A joint address is among the most prestigious invitations and honors the United States Congress can extend. We should not do so for individuals with deeply troubling human rights records — particularly for individuals whom our own State Department has concluded are engaged in systematic human rights abuses of religious minorities and caste-oppressed communities,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement, calling on colleagues who support “pluralism, tolerance and freedom of speech” to join her in sitting out the address.

Despite the symbolic value of the boycott, these members of Congress are clear outliers in the U.S. establishment, which has shown minimal reservations about embracing Modi.

The strategic reasons for doing so — including tapping into what is believed to be a major market in the future for Western companies and shoring up military cooperation to contain China in case of a conflict — seem compelling on the surface. Letting human rights fall entirely by the wayside, however, risks making a mockery of the oft-repeated claim that India and the U.S. are bound by values as opposed to merely interests.

“Western countries have been very reluctant to criticize India on its human rights record.”

“Anyone who criticizes the government, whether human rights defenders, journalists, or climate change activists, is being harassed or, in the worst case, detained and charged under the country’s sedition laws,” said Juliette Rousselot, program officer for West and South Asia for the International Federation for Human Rights. “Khurram’s case is emblematic of Indian authorities’ systematic muzzling of civic space in India. Kashmiris bear the brunt of that policy, but he’s far from the only victim. His case has unfortunately not gotten as much attention as we would like for a number of reasons. But, generally speaking, it is because Western countries have been very reluctant to criticize India on its human rights record.”

Despite calls to prioritize human rights matters in the context of the U.S.-India bilateral relationship, there is little indication that the fate of political prisoners in India has figured into discussions between the two leaders at all, which have seemed more prominently focused on securing lucrative weapons deals for the future. In that context, human rights — and the fate of activists like Parvez, among others — has come to be seen by many as merely a distraction from more important matters.

“People in policy circles have a notion that if they speak about human rights issues, Indians will get very angry,” said Mir, the Kashmiri legal advocate. “So they don’t want to ruffle any feathers.”

The post As D.C. Fêtes Narendra Modi, His Political Prisoners in India Are Forgotten appeared first on The Intercept.

Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship

Alice Speri — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

After Ukrainian forces regained control of the port city of Kherson last November, following eight months of Russian occupation, some journalists entered the liberated city within hours. Without formal permission to be there, they documented the jubilant crowds welcoming soldiers with hugs and Ukrainian flags. Ukrainian officials, who tightly control press access to the front lines, responded by revoking the journalists’ press credentials, claiming that they had “ignored existing restrictions.”

In the months since then, as Ukraine has sought to liberate more territory occupied by Russia, the Ukrainian government has intensified its efforts to control the narrative of the war by tightening journalists’ access to the conflict. “After that, things started getting worse. … They have tried to place more control on journalists,” Katerina Sergatskova, editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, an independent Ukrainian publication, told The Intercept. “Now it’s really hard to make reports from Kherson, for example.”

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian authorities have threatened, revoked, or denied press credentials of journalists working for half a dozen Ukrainian and foreign news outlets because of their coverage, the news outlet Semafor reported earlier this month. In one recent example, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense did not renew the press credentials of a Ukraine-based photographer who accused the country’s security services of subjecting him to interrogations, a lie detector test, and accusations that he was working against Ukraine’s “national interest.” Government officials restored Anton Skyba’s accreditation last week, following a pressure campaign by colleagues and press freedom advocates, who have been denouncing tightening restrictions on media access to the front lines. But the episode put a spotlight on tensions between Ukrainian authorities and the journalists covering the conflict that have quietly escalated in recent months. Veteran war correspondents, for their part, are accusing Ukrainian officials of making reporting on the reality of the war, with rare exceptions, nearly impossible.

“The Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”

“I’ve covered four wars, and I’ve never seen such a chasm between the drama and intensity and historic import of the reality of the conflict on the one hand, and the superficiality and meagerness of its documentation by the press on the other,” Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer for the New Yorker, told The Intercept. “It’s wild how little of what’s happening is being chronicled. And the main reason, though not the only one, is that the Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”

Mogelson added that the restrictions come from military and political brass and run counter to rank-and-file soldiers’ desire to share their experiences. “The guys who are actually out doing the killing and dying and enduring the misery of the front are almost always thrilled to have journalists witness what they’re going through,” he added. “It’s not just politically or ethically problematic for Ukraine to prevent journalists from seeing the war. It’s also quite cruel to the Ukrainian men who are being forced to conduct it in total silence and obscurity.”

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, which issues press accreditation and controls journalists’ access to the front lines, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Some Ukrainian journalists have also warned that military handlers’ tight oversight of journalists is skewing coverage of the war. “If a soldier tells me, ‘I hate this war so much,’ the press officer asks him to reply, ‘Yes, the war is hard, but we are keeping our spirits up,’” Skyba, a freelancer who regularly works with Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

That is the narrative much of the Ukrainian public is getting. Following Russia’s invasion, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered a 24-hour, unified “news telethon” in which some of the country’s major broadcasters — two that are public and the rest owned by oligarchs — provide war coverage in alternating, six-hour blocks. Late last year, Zelenskyy also signed legislation giving the government vast powers over the media; the European Federation of Journalists had called an early draft of the bill “worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.”

Sergatskova said that it has become increasingly difficult for independent publications like hers to cover the war — at a time when Ukrainians are increasingly turning to the news seeking coverage of the war ravaging their country. A survey published earlier this year suggests that trust in media among the public is currently at 57 percent, up from 32 percent before the invasion. “This is good for journalism,” said Sergatskova. “But it’s a big responsibility.”

In a recent op-ed, Sergatskova accused authorities of manipulating an opaque accreditation system to limit coverage of the conflict and of favoring foreign media while overlooking local outlets. (Zelenskyy, for instance, has given plenty of interviews to international news organizations but none to Ukrainian ones, she noted.)

“Ukraine has been fighting two wars for a long time. One is against Russia and Russian colonialism. The second is the war for democracy,” she wrote. “Many people are sabotaging this war for democracy. This is particularly evident in the relationship between the government and the media.”

Residents crowd around to take basic medicine supplies at an aid hub after Ukrainian forces regained control of Kherson, Ukraine, on Nov. 21, 2022.

Photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

“Transparency Is Messy”

The clash between reporters and Ukrainian authorities burst into open view just as the Ukrainian military embarks on a much-anticipated counteroffensive, a phase of the conflict that some journalists warn risks only being told through official accounts and tightly controlled access. While lobbying for greater military assistance throughout the war, Ukrainian authorities have carefully managed what is disclosed about their performance on the field: for instance, keeping a tight lid on the number of casualties among their forces. Such effort to control the narrative is not comparable to Russia’s full-scale propaganda campaign or its crackdown on journalists, including the March arrest and ongoing detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Many Russian journalists have also been forced to flee the country.

But some journalists warn that the Ukrainian government’s approach to the press is growing increasingly authoritarian. The Ukrainian military doesn’t have a formal embed system — the process by which war journalists cover conflicts by tagging along troops in the field — and most press access consists of short, chaperoned visits to military positions further back than the actual front lines. As a result, stories about the front lines are often told by journalists visiting recently liberated areas or as secondhand accounts relayed by military leadership.

The war has largely been waged using long-range missiles, artillery, and airstrikes, and it’s true that the release of information from the field could pose serious operational risks for the Ukrainian military, some journalists who have reported from the country concede. But seasoned war reporters know how to navigate such complexities, and it would be easier for them to avoid careless exposure of sensitive information if they had better access to the military.

“If the Ukrainians had an embed system, that would actually give them much more supervision over operational security concerns,” Mogelson said. “But they don’t have anything like that. All they have are these press officers who aren’t really press officers, who are there not to facilitate, but to prevent journalists from seeing, writing about, and photographing what’s going on.”

Some exceptions, like Mogelson’s own vivid account of life in the trenches published by the New Yorker in May, were not authorized by officials with the Ministry of Defense, who threatened to revoke the credentials of both Mogelson and Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk after the story was published. (Natalie Raabe, a spokesperson for the New Yorker, wrote in a statement to The Intercept, “Our writer and photographer had permission from the battalion commander; their press credentials remain in place.”)

Those critical of the limitations imposed on journalists argue that they have less to do with operational security than with an effort to control the narrative. Authorities have retaliated against journalists who have offered a more honest, if unflattering, view of the impact of the war on troops, and against at least one military commander who shared a frank but pessimistic view of the war effort, even as some Ukrainian officials have argued that such authentic assessments are needed to pressure allies into providing the aid the country desperately needs.

“Their posture toward the press is very short-sighted, and ultimately, beyond whether or not it’s anti-democratic, I don’t think it’s in their interest,” said Mogelson. “Transparency is messy. Not every story is going to have immediate practical benefits for Ukraine or its armed forces, and that’s what they want. That’s why they’re so obsessed with controlling the narrative. But that control comes at a long-term cost of an erosion of trust in any news about the conflict, both among Ukrainians and, crucially, among the Americans and Europeans on whose continued support and solidarity the war effort depends.”

Journalists and residents stand as smoke rises after an attack by Russian army in Odessa, Ukraine, on April 3, 2022.

Photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images

Closing In on Journalists

Ukrainian military authorities rushed to accredit thousands of media workers covering the conflict in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. It was an especially dangerous assignment, with 17 journalists killed so far, the vast majority of them in the first few weeks of the war.

Within a couple months, Ukrainian authorities began to pull credentials from reporters whose coverage they didn’t like, including Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times, who was the lead reporter on an April 2022 story about Ukrainian forces using banned cluster munitions, and New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks. Yet the revocation of credentials really ramped up after Ukraine regained control of swaths of Russian-occupied territory late last year.

Many of the journalists whose credentials were revoked more recently had at some point worked in Russian-held territories, sometimes as far back as 2014, when Russia first invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities prohibit travel to occupied territory from Russia, even as it is virtually impossible to get there from Ukraine today.

That appears to have been the justification for authorities to revoke the accreditation of Italian journalists Andrea Sceresini and Alfredo Bosco in February, although officials never provided the two with an explanation. Instead, the freelancers, on assignment for the Italian broadcaster RAI, were traveling from Bakhmut to Kramatorsk when they received an email from the Ministry of Defense, warning them that their credentials had been suspended. The journalists, who had covered the conflict on and off since February 2022 and who had previously reported in Ukraine following the 2014 invasion, later learned from local colleagues that authorities had accused them of being collaborators and propagandists for the Russians. That day, a local journalist they had hired for an assignment canceled last minute, citing the same rumor.

Sceresini said he and Bosco were told by the Ministry of Defense to wait for an interview with the Security Service of Ukraine that never materialized. They barely left their apartment in Kramatorsk, wary of the risks of being labeled collaborators in an active war zone, until Italian Embassy officials told them to move to Kyiv for their safety. There, they contacted colleagues, lawyers, and diplomats to try to understand why their credentials had been suspended; informally, Italian authorities told them that Ukrainian officials had taken issue with trips the two had made to Russian-held territory after 2014. Sceresini reported from both sides of the conflict at the time. In particular, he worked on an investigative documentary about the 2014 killing of an Italian photojournalist by Ukrainian forces, and on a 2015 dispatch that highlighted the divide in communities split by their allegiances to Russia or Ukraine.

“They are running a check on all journalists. And one by one, those who are not perfectly dutiful to the directives and Kyiv’s political line are out.”

“At the time, you could go from Kyiv to Donetsk by bus,” Sceresini noted, but even though he had traveled there legally, Ukrainian authorities banned him from the country for five years in 2015, and he did not return until last year. After his and Bosco’s credentials were revoked this year, they learned of half a dozen Italian journalists and others dealing with revoked or denied credentials.

“They are running a check on all journalists,” Sceresini said. “And one by one, those who are not perfectly dutiful to the directives and Kyiv’s political line are out.”

In February, Ukrainian officials introduced additional restrictions on journalists: a controversial zone system divided the country into green, yellow, and red areas, with the latter accessible to civilians but off limits to journalists. Media advocates condemned the policy, warning that it unduly restricted access to relatively safe areas while also creating confusion about where it was actually dangerous for journalists to work. Two journalists were killed after the zone system was introduced; there had been no journalist deaths for nearly a year prior to that.

The authorities later quietly revised those restrictions, substituting them with a process that critics say is both arbitrary and confusing. Now regional commanders make decisions about press access on a case-by-case basis. In May, military authorities also canceled all existing credentials and made journalists apply for new ones; several journalists said their new credentials were denied.

“It’s chaos,” said Sergatskova, the editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, “and it’s getting more complicated.”

Journalists take photographs of the destroyed Ukrainian Antonov An-225 “Mriya” cargo aircraft at the Hostomel airport on April 8, 2022, in Hostomel, Ukraine.

Photo: Alexey Furman/Getty Images

A Narrative War

Until recently, local and foreign journalists alike have been reticent to openly discuss their conflict with authorities, for different reasons. Local journalists — many of whom have joined the military or left the country — have, at times, hesitated to criticize the government, split between allegiance to their profession and to their nation.

Ukrainian journalists “feel that they are part of this, part of the Ukrainian nation struggling for survival,” said Kyrylo Loukerenko, executive director of the independent Hromadske Radio, “so this is a very difficult situation for us.”

He stressed that some journalists are choosing to scale back their criticism rather than responding to top-down pressure to do so, out of concern that any criticism would feed into Russian propaganda efforts.

“It’s more about self-control,” he said. “When you are trying to be critical, people just ask, ‘Are you patriotic?’”

Karol Luczka, Eastern Europe monitoring and advocacy officer with the International Press Institute, said that, in addition to self-censorship stemming from a “moral obligation towards your country,” journalists are also aware that certain topics will earn them additional scrutiny from the authorities. “Ideas like, there’s a civil war, or there are people who are pro-Russian … these are very touchy issues,” he said. “If a reporter either knowingly or unknowingly starts using these kinds of talking points in their report, it’s going to be something that Ukrainian authorities look at.”

Sergatskova added that for Ukrainian journalists, the choice of stories is also a function of priorities. While she noted that there has been some investigative journalism by local outlets exposing corruption among military leaders, many Ukrainian journalists are consumed by documenting Russian crimes. “This is something that is really important for us,” she said.

The government’s restrictions put foreign journalists in a similarly delicate position, with some publications prioritizing access at the cost of pushing back against the rules imposed by officials. “Some of us are not guiltless in this either. Some are kind of going along with it,” said Mogelson. “There’s a general reluctance to alienate the Ukrainian government because what little access we do have is contingent on staying in its good graces.”

The post Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship appeared first on The Intercept.

How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot

Amy Westervelt — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Guyana’s high court handed down a historic ruling in May against both the country’s Environmental Protection Agency and Exxon Mobil’s subsidiary in the region. If it sounds strange that the EPA and Exxon were co-defendants in a case, yes, that’s precisely the point.

The case was brought on behalf of two Guyanese citizens, Frederick Collins and Godfrey Whyte. They accused the EPA of failing to enforce the requirements of its own permits by never securing a guarantee from Exxon or its subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, that the company would cover all costs related to a possible oil spill.

“Guyana taxpayers are currently exposed,” Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “The potential consequences for Guyana are catastrophic.”

That’s because Exxon’s drilling project in Guyana is the riskiest kind: deep-water offshore drilling, which involves intense pressure bearing down on complex equipment. The conditions are similar to those that preceded the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, which spewed oil and gas throughout the Gulf of Mexico, costing BP $69 billion.

Exxon’s own environmental impact assessments indicate that such a disaster in Guyana could send oil to the beaches of 14 different Caribbean islands, most of which depend on fishing and tourism — and all of which could hold Guyana liable for damages. The costs would be astronomical, which is why the permits for offshore drilling in Guyana require not only an independent liability insurance policy from Esso, but also an unlimited financial guarantee from its parent company to cover costs that exceed those covered by insurance.

Esso joined the case with the EPA, arguing that the plaintiffs were misinterpreting the law, that a deal had been worked out between the company and the agency, and that Guyanese citizens didn’t have standing to bring these sorts of cases anyway. Justice Sandil Kissoon ruled in favor of Collins and Whyte across the board, concluding that the insurance and guarantee requirements were clearly stated in Esso’s permit, the EPA failed to secure those assurances, and Guyanese citizens had every reason to question that failure.

“The EPA has relegated itself to a state of laxity of enforcement … putting this nation and its people in grave potential danger of calamitous disaster,” Kissoon wrote in a blistering 56-page ruling that called Esso “disingenuous and deceptive” and the EPA “derelict, pliant, and submissive.” Taking aim at the government and Exxon Mobil at the same time is a bold move that has some in the country worried for Kissoon’s safety, but advocates point to the ruling as confirmation that Guyana’s courts, at least, have not been captured by the oil business.

In Guyana, it’s become hard to distinguish where the oil company ends and the government begins. Exxon executives join the Guyanese president in his suite at cricket matches, and the vice president regularly hosts press conferences to defend the oil company. Vincent Adams, a Guyanese petroleum engineer and former head of the country’s EPA, has been one of the agency’s harshest critics.

“When I was working in the United States, we always had people at the offshore site 24/7 with the oil companies,” said Adams, who spent decades at the U.S. Department of Energy. “Because 99 percent of the time what they tell you is happening out there is not what is happening.” When Adams was tapped to run Guyana’s EPA, he planned to have monitors on board Exxon’s floating production vessels. “That’s all been canceled. Even Exxon’s files and permits, which used to be in the document center with everyone else’s, are under lock and key in the director’s office,” he said. “There’s no oversight happening because Exxon does not want oversight.”

“There’s no oversight happening because Exxon does not want oversight.”

“We have complied with all applicable laws at every step of the exploration, appraisal, development, and production stages,” said Meghan Macdonald, who handles media and communications for Exxon Mobil in Guyana. “We are committed to responsibly developing the resources offshore Guyana to maximize value for all stakeholders, including the government and people of Guyana.”

Nonetheless, Kissoon ordered the EPA to issue an immediate enforcement action against Esso, requiring that it provide an unlimited financial guarantee from ExxonMobil and proof of sufficient liability insurance, or its drilling permit would be suspended. The EPA appealed, and on June 8, an appeals court judge temporarily stayed the order until the appeal is heard but required Exxon to put up a $2 billion guarantee in the meantime. It’s a significant pumping of the brakes on Exxon’s operation in Guyana, which the company has projected could outpace the Texas Permian Basin, making Guyana Exxon’s top oil-producing region, responsible for more than a quarter of the company’s global output, within five years.

The local attorney on the case, Melinda Janki, has been working to stop oil drilling in her home country for more than a decade. For Janki, the ruling is significant no matter the outcome of the appeals process. “The top line is that two ordinary citizens in this little country, which most people can’t find on the map, have gone to court and they’ve beaten the EPA, but they’ve also beaten Exxon Mobil, and this is really a victory for the people, by the people.”

Janki said the ruling should send a message to people on the ground that they have the power to oppose projects like these. “Justice Kissoon put the rule of law above the interests of Exxon Mobil, and that’s massive,” Janki said. “That’s what every judge in every country should be doing, and I think this decision sets the standard for judges everywhere, not just in Guyana.”

What’s been happening over the past five years in Guyana is emblematic of a broader wave of extractive colonialism playing out in countries across the Global South. As Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, put it, “Countries that don’t have a history or any significant history of oil and gas development or oil and gas dependence are being pushed into that at the very moment when the world knows we need to be phasing out fossil fuels.”

The Exxon Mobil office in Georgetown, Guyana, on April 12, 2023.

Photo: Matias Delacroix/AP

Right to a Healthy Environment

In 2015, when Exxon Mobil announced it had found oil — lots of it — off the coast of Guyana, only a handful of people there knew what that news really meant. One of them was Janki. “My heart just sank,” she said. “Because I know oil is a disaster, and it’s the worst possible thing that could have happened to Guyana.”

Janki came to her conclusions about oil in a somewhat surprising way: working for BP in the U.K. Janki grew up in Guyana, but her family left when she was around 12 due to political turmoil kicked off by U.S. and U.K. concerns that Guyana was becoming a “new Cuba.” Infiltrating various political groups and stoking racial tensions, the CIA and its allies in Britain successfully destabilized the country and installed a leader who suited them. Janki’s family moved to Zambia and then Trinidad. Eventually, Janki made her way to the University of Oxford. She went to law school and, after a few years working at a corporate firm in London, started looking for a new challenge.

“At the time, it seemed like BP was a good place to go,” she said. Janki negotiated deals and traveled all over Europe for BP, learning some key lessons along the way. “I think sometimes people don’t realize that the purpose of an oil company is to make money, and they have no other purpose,” she said. “They’re not there to promote human rights. They’re not there to protect the environment. They’re there to put the share price up and to give big, fat dividends to their shareholders. … They’re very good at what they do, and they’re very good at telling people a story about how beneficial they are for the world.”

When the appeal of working for BP wore off and political tensions back home had cooled, Janki returned to Guyana, moving back to the capital, Georgetown. At the time, Guyana was just beginning to build an independent democracy. In 1992, the country had its first completely free elections, and Cheddi Jagan — the candidate the CIA had spent decades trying to defeat — was elected president. His government made two significant moves: It proposed major reforms to the constitution and passed a comprehensive Environmental Protection Act that established Guyana’s EPA. Although she was still working in the corporate sphere at the time, Janki had a keen interest in environmental law.

The government began drafting the Environmental Protection Act in 1994. “There was a meeting at the Pegasus Hotel, which is this big hotel in Georgetown,” Janki said. “I had no way to go because I was just this completely unimportant individual.” But a friend helped her score an invite.

“It was interminably boring, but in the break, I was able to talk to one of the government officials and say to him that I had looked at their draft environmental act and I thought that it was inadequate.”

It wasn’t the sort of thing that a “completely unimportant individual” would generally say, but the official didn’t brush her off. “He said, ‘Well, send me something about it,’ and maybe that was a brush-off, but I saw it as a really exciting opportunity,” Janki said. “So I wrote a paper explaining why I thought this act was inadequate.”

The official asked Janki if she’d like to work as a consultant on drafting the act, and she jumped at the chance. “I put in all the stuff on the environmental impact assessments,” she said. “I put in the impact on the climate, the impact on the atmosphere, and I put in principles of environmental management, so things like the polluter pays and the precautionary principle and principles of natural capital.”

Janki’s version of the act was ratified by Jagan’s government in 1996. Just a few years later, the country signed its first contract with an oil company: a partnership between Exxon Mobil and Shell. The contract granted the partnership the right to explore for oil in Guyana, but for several years, the companies didn’t do much with their permits. Oil was plentiful and easier to get in other South American countries, so Guyana wasn’t a priority.

Meanwhile, Janki began lobbying Guyana’s Constitutional Reform Commission to add an amendment protecting the human right to a healthy environment. “I looked at constitutions around the world that, at that time, had the right to a healthy environment written into them. And then I put forward the arguments for having it in Guyana’s constitution.”

Once again, it worked. The right to a healthy environment for current and future generations was ratified as part of Guyana’s constitution in 2003.

A ship creates an artificial island to serve as a port for offshore oil production at the mouth of the Demerara River in Georgetown, Guyana, on April 12, 2023.

Photo: Matias Delacroix/AP

The Boom

It wasn’t until 2008, a few months after Venezuela nationalized oil and booted out most of the foreign oil majors, that the companies began exploring the waters offshore Guyana in earnest. Still, they came up empty. Shell left the partnership in 2014, while Exxon brought on two new partners: Hess Corporation, an independent American oil company best known as an early mover in the fracking boom, and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. The very next year, Exxon announced it had found oil, more than 10 billion barrels of it. And not just any oil: It was light, sweet crude, the oil that’s easiest to refine, commanding the highest price on the global market.

“Suddenly, in 2015, Exxon announced that they had found oil, and people were going crazy talking about oil wealth,” Janki said.

It wasn’t just people talking about oil wealth. Exxon was pushing this idea, and so was the government. The company moved quickly to capture the hearts and minds not only of state officials, but also other members of civil society. One of Exxon’s first big public investments in Guyana was to sponsor the Caribbean Premier League, a popular regional cricket tournament, and the country’s cricket team, the Amazon Warriors. Players have Exxon Mobil emblazoned across the front of their uniforms. The company also helped get cricket games broadcast on TV.

“When you walked in the streets, you would hear every Guyanese saying, ‘Thank God for Exxon!’”

“When you walked in the streets, you would hear every Guyanese saying, ‘Thank God for Exxon! If it wasn’t for Exxon, we would’ve never been able to see cricket live on television,’” Glenn Lall, the publisher of a local newspaper, Kaieteur News, said. “You see how dangerous that is?”

The company and the government hired journalists working on the oil and gas beat away from the country’s papers and into corporate public relations and state-run newsrooms. One such journalist, who asked that their name be withheld to avoid retaliation, said the standard offer included a big pay bump, a lofty title, and a free car.

“I had some journalists that used to work with me, and the government tried to steal them with big pay. And it worked — they left,” Lall said. “A few of them after a while said, ‘No man, I can’t do what you want me to do,’ so they left there too, but none of them are doing journalism anymore.”

As a consequence, Lall said, there are few journalists left who report on oil drilling with a critical eye. Of the six reporters who once covered oil and gas for Kaieteur News, only one remains.

Since Exxon shipped its first barrel of oil in 2019, Janki has filed seven separate lawsuits against the Guyanese government asking it to do one thing: enforce the environmental laws she helped draft.

She had an early win in 2020 when the government reduced Exxon’s drilling permit from 23 years, as it was originally issued, to five years, the maximum allowed by law. And the recent insurance ruling, if it stands, will require the EPA to follow the country’s environmental and permitting laws. The rest of Janki’s cases are still making their way through the Guyanese courts. One argues that the offshore drilling project violates citizens’ constitutional right to a healthy environment. Others urge the government to do something about the constant burning of excess gas from Exxon’s offshore production platforms, a practice called flaring.

Janki said she’s struggled to find lawyers and clerks to work with her. Given how many firms Exxon and its partners, subsidiaries, and suppliers have contracted with in Guyana, it’s hard to find someone who’s not conflicted out. “I couldn’t get anybody to help with cases until a senior counsel who was based in Trinidad agreed to do it with me,” she said. “We had no clerk. I had to go and line up at the court registry with the documents and wait my turn.”

Exxon has also funded conservation organizations that might object to oil drilling in the country, including the Iwokrama International Center for Rain Forest Conservation and Development, Guyana’s crown jewel of conservation and a global leader on sustainable forestry.

“Yes, the obvious question is, you know, should we be taking money from the oil company?” Iwokrama CEO Dane Gobin said. “And my answer to that is, OK, oil will be there. We are not advocates. We run a rainforest. We don’t get involved in politics. But we have to take care of our people. And if somebody is saying, ‘Here’s a grant. You can do capacity building and training. You could improve the livelihoods of Guyanese. You could do all kinds of things, mangroves, all of that.’ Why should we say no?”

For Janki, the reason is simple: If you’re taking the oil companies’ money, you’re helping them deceive the public.

“I think it’s disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuel sector.”

“The oil industry always tells you how good it is for you,” Janki said. “And that has a way of removing every other narrative. … They say, ‘Well, we power the world. We are the energy that keeps the economy going. We heat your homes, we enable you to cook.’ And people say, ‘Oh yes, that’s wonderful.’ The companies don’t say, ‘We’re frying the planet so that we can make money, and we are going to make sure that renewable energy doesn’t get anywhere because that will put us out of business.’”

Whenever it can, Exxon reminds the public of its cricket sponsorship and conservation efforts. A marketing video the company released last year to address controversy around its contract with Guyana is a perfect example. Even the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, traditionally conservative and pro-oil, have described the deal as unfair to Guyana. So Exxon’s marketing team put together a Facebook video that starts — where else? — at the national cricket stadium. The first minute and a half focuses on the company’s investments in cricket before Exxon’s public relations lead takes to the streets, picking people “at random” to talk to about the contract. And then back to the cricket stadium for a recap.

It’s a master class in building social license. And the cricket sponsorship must be paying off because in March, Exxon increased its investment in Guyanese cricket in a big way, announcing funding for a new stadium in the easternmost part of the country, near the border of Suriname. The Greater Guyana Initiative, a local nonprofit funded by Exxon and its partners in Guyana, is paying $17.7 million to build the state-of-the-art facility, which will host sporting events and concerts in a region that will soon be home to a major oil and gas export port.

“If they didn’t give, they’d be knocked for not giving something back,” Gobin said. Since 2017, his organization has received $7 million from the Exxon Mobil Foundation.

“I think it’s disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuel sector,” Janki said.

But it’s an approach the government has taken as well. Guyana’s vice president, Bharrat Jagdeo, often talks about how the oil project will fund climate adaptation — and how the country needs to get the oil extracted and sold before anyone has to make good on their net-zero commitments. “We support the vision of a fast-paced development of the resources offshore, particularly in the context of net zero,” he told a crowd of oil executives at the annual CERAWeek conference. “We believe it’s a wise strategy to do as much exploration as possible now, prove the resources, and then have them removed and transferred into financial assets to transform the country.”

The trillion-dollar question is whether Guyana can get rich off oil before it suffers a catastrophic spill, the bottom falls out of the oil market, or the country’s coast — where 90 percent of the population lives — is swallowed by the sea, which is predicted to happen by 2030.

High school students walk past Exxon Mobil flags as they arrive to a job fair at the University of Guyana in Georgetown on April 21, 2023.

Photo: Matias Delacroix/AP

The Resource Curse

Throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, the fossil fuel industry is very busy telling the story of fossil fuels as the solution to poverty. As more and more Global North countries pass laws regulating emissions or incentivizing a shift away from fossil fuels, the race is on for the industry to sell as much oil and gas as possible before they have to strand assets. No one wants to be the company left with the most untapped, unmonetized oil and gas reserves dragging down their balance sheets.

In the Global South, the message is simple: Having your own fossil fuel industry means everyone will have access to energy and your country will get rich. Only that story hasn’t panned out for any Global South country in decades. Even when it comes to solving energy poverty — a term that describes inadequate access to energy for basic needs like cooking, lights, and temperature control — the industry has not delivered on its promises. Nigeria, which has been in the oil business for more than 50 years, has the lowest access to electricity globally; about 92 million of the country’s 200 million people lack access to power.

Janki knows that Guyana needs money to lift its people out of poverty. She just doesn’t think another cycle of what development economists call “the resource curse” — the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources winding up with less economic growth, democracy, or development — is going to do that. “Where is the money from the gold? Where is the money from the bauxite? Where is the money from the diamonds? Where is the money from the sugar? Where is the money from the agriculture? Where is the money from the fishing, etc.? The list is almost endless because we are so full of wealth,” she said. “And yet the people in this country are poor.”

She’s in favor of Guyana monetizing its value to the world as a carbon sink, although she doesn’t endorse the government’s recent move to sell $750 million worth of carbon credits to Exxon’s partner, Hess Corporation. Critics of carbon credits argue that they should only be used to offset the emissions of “difficult to abate” sectors — industries or processes for which there are no alternatives — not continued fossil fuel expansion.

Ultimately, Janki said she’d like to see those in the Global North take some responsibility for hundreds of years of colonialism and step up to prevent companies from leading yet another round of it.

“I think it’s really important that people stop thinking of Guyana as a developing country that needs to be helped and start looking at us and saying, ‘Wow, these guys are a carbon sink, and they are under threat because of Exxon Mobil and other oil companies,” Janki said. “And we have a responsibility to rein in those oil companies because those are oil companies coming from the Global North.”

Meanwhile, the outcome of her insurance case could set a precedent that changes the math entirely for drilling in Latin America and the Caribbean. If the ruling is overturned, the case could be taken up by the Caribbean Court of Justice, which sets legal precedents for the entire region. The industry will be watching to see whether bets placed not just in Guyana, but also in Suriname, Trinidad, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia will suddenly become a whole lot riskier. Whether the ruling sticks or not, the case is likely to inspire similar legal action, according to Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law.

“Lawyers from around the world who are fighting oil and gas — off the coasts of southern Africa, off the coast of Mozambique, and in other places in the Caribbean — are going to be looking at this decision,” he said, “paying close attention to whether the financial guarantees being provided in other oil and gas exploration and development permits are at an equivalent level.”

Additional reporting: Kiana Wilburg

The post How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot appeared first on The Intercept.

How Henry Kissinger Paved the Way for Orlando Letelier’s Assassination

James Risen — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:26:22 +0000

On the morning of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister of Chile living in exile in the United States, was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C., when a bomb planted in his car exploded, killing him and one passenger while wounding another.

Letelier was assassinated in the heart of Washington by the brutal regime of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, a far-right dictator who gained power in a 1973 coup backed by the Nixon administration and the CIA, overthrowing the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Letelier served as foreign minister for Allende, and later was arrested and tortured by Pinochet. After a year in prison, Letelier was released thanks to international diplomatic pressure and eventually settled in Washington, where he was a prominent opponent of the Pinochet regime.

Even in exile, Letelier still had a target on his back. The Pinochet regime, along with the right-wing governments of Argentina and Uruguay, launched a vicious international assassination program — code-named Operation Condor — to kill dissidents living abroad, and Letelier was one of Operation Condor’s most prominent victims.

Nearly 50 years later, the full story of Letelier’s assassination, one of the most brazen acts of state-sponsored terrorism ever conducted on American soil, is still coming into focus.

Now, the 100th birthday of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which has been marked in the press by both powerful investigations as well as puff pieces and hagiography, offers an opportunity to reexamine the Letelier assassination and the broader U.S. role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected government in order to impose a brutal dictatorship. It was one of the darkest chapters in Kissinger’s career and one of the most blatant abuses of power in the CIA’s long and ugly history.

Tanks arrive in front of La Moneda, Chile, in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état led by Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet.

Photo: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images

Making a Coup

The first steps in the covert campaign by President Richard Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA to stage a coup in Chile began even before Allende took office. Their actions were eerily similar to President Donald Trump’s coup attempt following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried to block the congressional certification of the election, culminating in the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

On September 4, 1970, Allende came in first in the Chilean presidential election, but since he did not gain an outright majority, Chile’s legislature had to choose the winner. Scheduled for late October, that legislative action was supposed to be a pro-forma certification of Allende, the first-place candidate, but Nixon, fueled by anti-communist paranoia that led him to oppose leftist governments all around the world, wanted to use that time to stop Allende from coming to power.

The Nixon administration pursued a two-track strategy. The first track included a campaign of propaganda and disinformation against Allende, as well as bribes to key players on Chile’s political scene and boycotts and economic pressure from American multinational corporations with operations in Chile.

The second track, which was far more secretive, called for a CIA-backed military coup.

On September 15, 1970, in a White House meeting, Nixon ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to secretly foment a military coup to stop Allende from becoming Chile’s president. Also attending the meeting was Kissinger, who was then Nixon’s national security adviser, and Attorney General John Mitchell. Helms later said that “if I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.”

Helms and the other CIA officials involved didn’t think they had much of a chance of mounting a successful coup — and they were right, at least in 1970. Their coup efforts failed that year, but a renewed coup attempt succeeded in 1973, during which Allende died and Pinochet came to power.

Pinochet’s Guardian

By 1976, three years after gaining power in the CIA-backed coup, Pinochet had created a bloody police state, torturing, imprisoning, and killing thousands. Despite its draconian practices, Pinochet’s intelligence service enjoyed close relations with the CIA, while Kissinger remained Pinochet’s guardian in Washington, fending off congressional efforts to punish Pinochet’s regime over its human rights record.

Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him.

By September 1976, when Letelier was killed, Pinochet had good reason to believe he could get away with murder in the heart of Washington. In fact, Letelier’s assassination may have been enabled by a secret meeting between Pinochet and Kissinger three months earlier.

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger — by then the secretary of state for President Gerald Ford — met with Pinochet at the presidential palace in Santiago, just as Pinochet’s vicious human rights record was becoming a major international issue. The Church Committee, the Senate’s first investigation of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, had just completed an inquiry into the CIA’s efforts to foment a coup in Chile, and had closely examined a CIA scheme in 1970 to kidnap a top Chilean general who had refused to go along with the CIA-backed anti-Allende plots. As part of its CIA-Chile investigation, the Church Committee secretly interviewed the exiled Letelier.

Former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier’s car, following his assassination by car bomb in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21, 1976.

Photo: Peter Bregg/AP

In the summer of 1975, Church Committee staffer Rick Inderfurth and another staffer quietly interviewed Letelier at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was living with his wife and four children. Inderfurth questioned Letelier about a wide range of issues, including how the overt and covert policies of the CIA and the Nixon administration in the years leading up to the 1973 coup had destabilized the Allende government. Letelier provided valuable insights for the Church Committee’s investigation, but he did not testify in public during its hearings on Chile. The fact that Letelier was interviewed by the Church Committee was reported for the first time in my new book, “The Last Honest Man.”

Even though he lived in Washington, Letelier wasn’t safe from Pinochet.

After the Church Committee’s investigation and other disclosures, Congress was seeking to punish Pinochet’s regime for its use of torture and other human rights abuses, and Letelier met with congressional leaders about how to hold Pinochet accountable. Kissinger, who held broad sway on foreign policy under Ford, was under mounting pressure to publicly reprimand Pinochet.

Kissinger agreed to travel to Chile in June 1976 to give a speech to publicly criticize Pinochet on human rights. But just before his address, Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him. Kissinger made it clear to Pinochet that his public criticism was all for show and part of an effort to placate the U.S. Congress. During their private talk, Kissinger made clear that he thought the complaints about Pinochet’s human rights record were just part of a left-wing campaign against his government. Kissinger emphasized that he and the Ford administration were firmly on Pinochet’s side.

“In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger told Pinochet, according to a declassified State Department memo recounting the conversation, published in “The Pinochet File,” by Peter Kornbluh. “I think that the previous government [Allende’s administration] was headed toward Communism. We wish your government well. … As you know, Congress is now debating further restraints on aid to Chile. We are opposed. … I’m going to speak about human rights this afternoon in the General Assembly. I delayed my statement until I could talk to you. I wanted you to understand my position.”

After getting Kissinger’s reassurances, Pinochet began to complain that the U.S. Congress was listening to his enemies — including Letelier.

“We are constantly being attacked” by political opponents in Washington, Pinochet told Kissinger. “They have a strong voice in Washington. Not the people in the Pentagon, but they do get through to Congress. Gabriel Valdez [a longtime Pinochet foe] has access. Also Letelier.” Pinochet bitterly added that “Letelier has access to the Congress. We know they are giving false information. … We are worried about our image.” It is not known whether Pinochet was aware that Letelier had been a secret witness for the Church Committee, or whether the dictator only knew about Letelier’s more public lobbying efforts to get Congress to take action against the Pinochet regime.

During the June 8 meeting, Kissinger did not respond to Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier. Instead, he told Pinochet, “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined [Allende] government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” Given the context of the meeting, during which Kissinger signaled to Pinochet that the Ford administration was not going to penalize him for his regime’s human rights record, Kissinger’s silence in the face of Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier must have been viewed by Pinochet as a green light to take brutal action against the dissident.

Kissinger took further action later in the year that gave Pinochet the freedom he needed to move against Letelier. After the U.S. found out about Operation Condor, State Department officials wanted to notify the Pinochet regime and the governments of Argentina and Uruguay not to conduct assassinations. But on September 16, 1976, Kissinger blocked the State Department’s plans. Kissinger ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter” by the State Department, effectively blocking any effort to curb Pinochet’s bloody plans. Letelier was assassinated in Washington five days later.

Letelier was one of three witnesses of the Church Committee who were murdered, either before or after they talked to the committee. (The other two were Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli, who were both involved in the CIA’s secret alliance with the Mafia in the early 1960s to try to kill Fidel Castro, a scheme that was the subject of a major investigation by the Church Committee.) Meanwhile, Pinochet remained president of Chile until 1990.

Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in connection with the human rights abuses he committed while in power, and was placed under house arrest in the United Kingdom until 2000, when he was released on medical grounds without facing trial in Britain. He returned to Chile and faced a complex series of investigations and indictments — but no actual trial in his homeland — until his death in 2006.

Henry Kissinger has never been held to account.

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House Democrats Refuse to Say Whether They Support Cluster Bomb Shipments to Ukraine

Daniel Boguslaw — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 16:46:33 +0000

Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said recently that he is keeping the door open to sending cluster munitions — widely banned around the world due to their track record of maiming and killing civilians — to Ukraine.

In a May interview with Politico, Smith said that the advantage of cluster munitions “is we have a lot of them. To the extent that we’re unable to provide sufficient ammo in other areas, they could certainly fill that gap.” He also framed the munitions as a potential way to end a conflict with no end in sight. “If our cluster munitions could bring the war to a conclusion sooner, it’s something I’m open to,” Smith said. This followed comments Smith made a week earlier at a Council on Foreign Relations event where he similarly described the pros and cons of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine.

Ukraine has asked the United States to provide it with cluster bombs, which Russian troops have deployed against Ukrainian civilians and which Ukraine has reportedly used as well. The Biden administration has expressed concerns about Ukraine’s requests, but it also hasn’t rejected them outright — and U.S. lawmakers continue to press the administration to provide the weapons. While most of those calls have come from Republicans, Smith’s openness to the idea, amid a general bipartisan consensus on sending arms to Ukraine, shows that congressional pressure is ramping up.

The administration seems unlikely to approve sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, but that the idea is even on the table has raised concerns among international security advocates about the disintegration of humanitarian law and the potential for the U.S. to further erode standing norms of civilian protection. “As long as the administration holds the line, keeping with the approach that so many of our NATO allies and others in the global community takes, that will be positive,” said Jeff Abramson, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association. “It’s frustrating that much of what you’re hearing from [Capitol Hill] is a call for sending cluster munitions. That Representative Smith did not fully cut off the possibility is also wrongheaded. These weapons have not been used by the United States in more than a decade.”

In order to gauge congressional support for the transfer of munitions banned by over 100 countries, The Intercept contacted the other 27 Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, which conducts oversight on U.S. military support to Ukraine, seeking comment on each member’s stance on the issue.

Only two representatives — Donald Norcross, D-N.J., and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif. — responded at all, asking for a deadline to provide comment.

Shortly afterward, Tracy Manzer, communications director for the House Armed Services Democrats, wrote to The Intercept to address its “outreach to other Members of the HASC.” In her email, Manzer provided quotes from Smith seeking to clarify his position.

“I am not open to sending cluster munitions right now. As I have said previously, for the United States to consider providing Ukraine with cluster munitions there are several critical questions that need to be answered. How would the weapons be used? What effect would such action have on the worldwide coalition in support of Ukraine? How might it affect support for Ukraine within the Democratic Caucus and Congress?”

“Russia is already using cluster munitions and has left unexploded ordnance all over Ukraine. Ukraine wants such weapons as a part of their efforts to take back their territory and force Putin to the negotiating table. To clarify a misconception, I am open to having the conversation about this issue with the understanding that crucially important questions be addressed.”

None of the other members responded with their own position on the issue. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

A rocket with cluster bomb is stuck in a building in the frontline city of Avdiivka as Russian-Ukrainian war continues, on March 23, 2023 in Ukraine.

Photo: Andre Luis Alves/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The United States has not used cluster munitions since 2009, when it used the weapons during a strike in Yemen, and cluster munitions have not been produced in the U.S. since the manufacturer Textron shut down production in 2016. Yet the U.S. military maintains massive stockpiles of them. Under a 2017 policy directive, the U.S. military is still authorized to use weapons containing submunitions, in sharp contrast to the dozens of countries that have banned them.

The international community has entrenched norms against the use of cluster munitions, said Cesar Jaramillo, executive director at Project Ploughshares, a peace research institute in Canada, namely because they cause indiscriminate harm to civilians and prolong the impacts of war by leaving unexploded munitions. Cluster munitions fracture before impact, sending out a cascade of small bombs that can impact well beyond their intended target.

Yet neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine is a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions.

In February, Ukrainian officials reportedly urged U.S. lawmakers to press the White House to approve sending cluster munitions to the country. The next month, GOP members atop powerful Senate and House committees pressed Biden on the issue.

In March, Sens. Roger Wicker and Jim Risch and Reps. Michael McCaul and Mike Rogers sent a letter to Biden, criticizing him for failing to waive the 2006 law banning the export of cluster munitions with a failure rate higher than 1 percent. Wicker and Risch are the ranking members on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, respectively, while McCaul and Rogers chair the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees.

“Providing [Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions] will allow Ukraine to compensate for Russia’s quantitative advantage in both personnel and artillery rounds, and will allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to concentrate their use of unitary warheads against higher-value Russian targets,” the four Republicans wrote.

While Smith’s comments indicate an openness among some Democrats to arm Ukraine with cluster munitions, other Democrats have been more cautious. On Friday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe introduced a bipartisan resolution calling on the Biden administration to provide army tactical missile systems, ATACMS, to Ukraine. Ranking Member Bill Keating, D-Mass., said he opposed providing cluster munitions or other “systems that cause indiscriminate harm to civilians” to Ukraine, but that the ATACMS would allow Ukraine to “strike high-value Russian military targets” that are currently inaccessible. Lauren McDermott, a spokesperson for Keating, did not respond to a question about whether the statement was in response to Smith’s comments raising the possibility of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, but she pointed to two letters Keating led in 2022 to Biden advocating against the use of cluster munitions.

Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions could set a dangerous precedent for war by normalizing the use of indiscriminate weapons and further militarizing and escalating the conflict on both sides, said Jaramillo of Project Ploughshares. “It by definition will serve to prolong the fighting and to create the conditions for further humanitarian suffering. Not to mention that in the background there is the specter of nuclear escalation, another category of indiscriminate weapons.”

“If the United States were to provide cluster munitions, it would lose a great deal of its moral credibility.”

The continued use of cluster munitions won’t make war less horrific for civilians, if that’s even possible, Abramson, of the Arms Control Association, said. “If the United States were to provide cluster munitions, it would lose a great deal of its moral credibility,” he said. The Biden administration has tried to emphasize the idea that the U.S. can lead on civilian protection in the face of autocratic rule, Abramson added. “If he were to send a weapon that historically has primarily, overwhelmingly harmed civilians into the battle in Ukraine, that would be undermining this idea that democracies are actually different than autocracies.”

The post House Democrats Refuse to Say Whether They Support Cluster Bomb Shipments to Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept.

Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest

Sam Biddle — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 15:42:46 +0000

A program spearheaded by the World Bank that uses algorithmic decision-making to means-test poverty relief money is failing the very people it’s intended to protect, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. The anti-poverty program in question, known as the Unified Cash Transfer Program, was put in place by the Jordanian government.

Having software systems make important choices is often billed as a means of making those choices more rational, fair, and effective. In the case of the poverty relief program, however, the Human Rights Watch investigation found the algorithm relies on stereotypes and faulty assumptions about poverty.

“Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking.”

“The problem is not merely that the algorithm relies on inaccurate and unreliable data about people’s finances,” the report found. “Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking that pits one household against another, fueling social tension and perceptions of unfairness.”

The program, known in Jordan as Takaful, is meant to solve a real problem: The World Bank provided the Jordanian state with a multibillion-dollar poverty relief loan, but it’s impossible for the loan to cover all of Jordan’s needs.

Without enough cash to cut every needy Jordanian a check, Takaful works by analyzing the household income and expenses of every applicant, along with nearly 60 socioeconomic factors like electricity use, car ownership, business licenses, employment history, illness, and gender. These responses are then ranked — using a secret algorithm — to automatically determine who are the poorest and most deserving of relief. The idea is that such a sorting algorithm would direct cash to the most vulnerable Jordanians who are in most dire need of it. According to Human Rights Watch, the algorithm is broken.

The rights group’s investigation found that car ownership seems to be a disqualifying factor for many Takaful applicants, even if they are too poor to buy gas to drive the car.

Similarly, applicants are penalized for using electricity and water based on the presumption that their ability to afford utility payments is evidence that they are not as destitute as those who can’t. The Human Rights Watch report, however, explains that sometimes electricity usage is high precisely for poverty-related reasons. “For example, a 2020 study of housing sustainability in Amman found that almost 75 percent of low-to-middle income households surveyed lived in apartments with poor thermal insulation, making them more expensive to heat.”

In other cases, one Jordanian household may be using more electricity than their neighbors because they are stuck with old, energy-inefficient home appliances.

Beyond the technical problems with Takaful itself are the knock-on effects of digital means-testing. The report notes that many people in dire need of relief money lack the internet access to even apply for it, requiring them to find, or pay for, a ride to an internet café, where they are subject to further fees and charges to get online.

“Who needs money?” asked one 29-year-old Jordanian Takaful recipient who spoke to Human Rights Watch. “The people who really don’t know how [to apply] or don’t have internet or computer access.”

Human Rights Watch also faulted Takaful’s insistence that applicants’ self-reported income match up exactly with their self-reported household expenses, which “fails to recognize how people struggle to make ends meet, or their reliance on credit, support from family, and other ad hoc measures to bridge the gap.”

The report found that the rigidity of this step forced people to simply fudge the numbers so that their applications would even be processed, undermining the algorithm’s illusion of objectivity. “Forcing people to mold their hardships to fit the algorithm’s calculus of need,” the report said, “undermines Takaful’s targeting accuracy, and claims by the government and the World Bank that this is the most effective way to maximize limited resources.”

The report, based on 70 interviews with Takaful applicants, Jordanian government workers, and World Bank personnel, emphasizes that the system is part of a broader trend by the World Bank to popularize algorithmically means-tested social benefits over universal programs throughout the developing economies in the so-called Global South.

Confounding the dysfunction of an algorithmic program like Takaful is the increasingly held naïve assumption that automated decision-making software is so sophisticated that its results are less likely to be faulty. Just as dazzled ChatGPT users often accept nonsense outputs from the chatbot because the concept of a convincing chatbot is so inherently impressive, artificial intelligence ethicists warn the veneer of automated intelligence surrounding automated welfare distribution leads to a similar myopia.

The Jordanian government’s official statement to Human Rights Watch defending Takaful’s underlying technology provides a perfect example: “The methodology categorizes poor households to 10 layers, starting from the poorest to the least poor, then each layer includes 100 sub-layers, using statistical analysis. Thus, resulting in 1,000 readings that differentiate amongst households’ unique welfare status and needs.”

“These are technical words that don’t make any sense together.”

When Human Rights Watch asked the Distributed AI Research Institute to review these remarks, Alex Hanna, the group’s director of research, concluded, “These are technical words that don’t make any sense together.” DAIR senior researcher Nyalleng Moorosi added, “I think they are using this language as technical obfuscation.”

As is the case with virtually all automated decision-making systems, while the people who designed Takaful insist on its fairness and functionality, they refuse to let anyone look under the hood. Though it’s known Takaful uses 57 different criteria to rank poorness, the report notes that the Jordanian National Aid Fund, which administers the system, “declined to disclose the full list of indicators and the specific weights assigned, saying that these were for internal purposes only and ‘constantly changing.’”

While fantastical visions of “Terminator”-like artificial intelligences have come to dominate public fears around automated decision-making, other technologists argue civil society ought to focus on real, current harms caused by systems like Takaful, not nightmare scenarios drawn from science fiction.

So long as the functionality of Takaful and its ilk remain government and corporate secrets, the extent of those risks will remain unknown.

The post Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest appeared first on The Intercept.

How 3D Models and Other Technology Could Make it Easier to Convict War Criminals

Alice Speri — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 19:17:54 +0000

Standing before a computer monitor in a courtroom in The Hague in 2020, a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court zoomed in and out on a detailed 3D digital reconstruction of the city of Timbuktu. She moved around the interactive map through squares and markets, zooming past renderings of city buildings, eventually descending to street level. There, she played a video that showed a Malian rebel holding a whip and escorting two cuffed men to an open area, then ordering the men to kneel and whipping them before a crowd of bystanders, including several children.

It was a vivid opening to the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, a member of the Ansar Dine Islamist group, which took over swaths of northern Mali in a 2012 coup. Al Hassan stands accused of leading the Islamic police and committing widespread crimes, including torture, rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriages.

“Mr. Al Hassan’s work was not confined within the four walls of his office,” the prosecutor, Sarah Coquillaud, said in her opening statement, as Al Hassan watched quietly, his reactions hidden behind a face mask. “His work did not only consist in dispatching men and writing reports at his desk; he took it outside in open places and preferably places where his idea of justice could be seen and taught to everyone.”

The trial against Al Hassan ended late last month, with a verdict expected in the coming weeks. It will not only determine the fate of a man whom prosecutors accused of being an “enthusiastic” war crimes perpetrator, but will also answer a key question facing human rights advocates: Can sophisticated digital evidence platforms, part of a rapidly growing arsenal of technology deployed in the documentation of human rights abuses, help secure convictions?

“Many of us are watching to see how visual and other forms of digital evidence become useful or are challenged, what the judges think,” said Alexa Koenig, a co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and a leading expert on the use of emerging technologies in human rights practice.

The Al Hassan case marks the first use of an immersive virtual environment — or IVE, in the court’s lingo — in an international criminal trial. (SITU, the visual investigations team that built the model, developed a simpler platform for a 2016 war crimes prosecution that was resolved with a guilty plea before trial.) Yet these types of tools — which are increasingly being used by human rights groups and media organizations, and have even contributed to landmark settlements in cases involving police violence in the U.S. — are likely to become a critical part of international justice efforts moving forward.

Take Ukraine, where scores of alleged crimes have been documented almost in real time by an unprecedented number of actors. As prosecutors increasingly rely on digital evidence and reconstructions in their work, they will face the challenge of sorting through massive amounts of data efficiently, a process that experts say will inevitably need to become automated in some way. Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor’s office launched what it called “the most ambitious technical modernization initiative in its history,” including a new evidence management platform to handle the influx of large amounts of digital evidence.

The proliferation of such tools and their expected contribution to criminal accountability efforts raises a number of pressing questions, human rights experts caution, like issues of fairness in judicial proceedings, particularly as prosecutors’ teams in international criminal tribunals are often better resourced than the defense. It also raises ethical questions, for instance about the re-traumatization of victims.

“Will this be in any way prejudicial to the accused and violate some fair trial norms that are so important to the effectuation of justice? What does it mean for the psychosocial well-being of the people in the courtroom, let alone the survivors of something so horrific, if you are able to immerse yourself in the scene of an atrocity?” asked Koenig.

“They can be really helpful for people to situate themselves at the scene of a series of atrocities and be able to explore what that atrocity means to the surrounding community,” she added. “But there are a lot of unknowns still in the field about how we control to give ourselves the best that can come from these digital platforms while at the same time minimizing the risks and the harm.”

Click here to watch the video.

An immersive, 3D reconstruction of the city of Timbuktu, populated with digital evidence of alleged crimes that took place there was used during the trial of Malian rebel Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz before the International Criminal Court. While a rapidly growing arsenal of technology has been deployed in the documentation of human rights, the case marks the first use of such technology in an international criminal trial.

Source: SITU

Is Seeing Believing?

SITU researchers assembled the Timbuktu reconstruction through a combination of satellite imagery, drone footage, and other materials. They populated the reconstruction with evidentiary videos, some that witnesses provided directly to prosecutors and others that prosecutors collected from the internet. During the trial, prosecutors used the platform to show some instances of violence — like the floggings of a couple accused of adultery and of two young men accused of drinking alcohol, both of which Al Hassan allegedly participated in — as well as the places where other alleged crimes, which were not caught on video, took place.

In exchanges with the court, Al Hassan’s defense team raised concerns about the platform. “Unfair prejudice arises from the inherently persuasive and unduly demonstrative nature of the material,” they wrote in one email. They cited research that argues that “at first glance, these graphical reconstructions may be seen as potentially useful in many courtroom situations,” but cautioned against “the undue reliance that the viewer may place on the evidence presented through a visualisation medium, this is often referred to as the ‘seeing is believing’ tendency.” The court overruled the defense team’s objections. Al Hassan’s lawyers did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Gilles Dutertre, the lead prosecutor in the case, referred questions to the ICC’s office of the prosecutor, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

The team at SITU — with which The Intercept has collaborated in the past — said that while they worked with evidence provided by the prosecution, the platforms are designed to be used by all parties to the proceedings, including the defense. “It’s not a linear narrative that walks a viewer through specific sets of events, tries to make an argument and to thread a line through all of the pieces of evidence,” Bora Erden, a senior researcher and technical lead at SITU, told The Intercept. “Instead, it allows any user to query the platform for their own purposes.”

Koenig, who advised the former ICC prosecutor’s office on the use of emerging technologies, told The Intercept that the office’s interest in such tools was inspired in part by the realization, a decade after the court first started operating in 2002, that many of its cases were falling apart early on because prosecutors were not bringing enough corroborating evidence to support what witnesses were saying. The growing availability of a range of digital evidence sources — from geospatial imagery and drone footage to the spread of the smartphone and the rise of social media — offered not only new ways to corroborate witness testimony, but also ways to link evidence of crimes on the ground to the higher-level perpetrators the court was tasked with pursuing. “All of these were tools that the prosecutor needed to become more effective and efficient,” she said.

Still, the new tools were met with some resistance, in part because those developing them worked in fields — from architecture and design to computer programming — that fell outside the disciplines more traditionally associated with forensic work. “When you’ve been doing your job for decades, and you have a set methodology for how you find the evidence, verify the evidence, introduce it into court … there’s a very healthy skepticism that comes with introducing new ways of working with evidence,” Koenig added. “I have definitely seen some reticence to engage with these newer methodologies.”

More Accessible Courtrooms

The immersive nature of these platforms can make them a more effective way to engage survivors and eyewitnesses, proponents say.

Anjli Parrin, a Kenyan human rights advocate and lawyer and director of the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic, told The Intercept that in many countries, courtrooms are elitist settings, “not an environment where victims groups, survivors, and impacted communities are going to feel welcome.”

But when they can see a recreation of places they know and experiences they lived through, “it helps make the courtroom accessible,” she added, drawing a contrast to technical reports that can be difficult for the layperson to understand.

“What is actually exciting and revolutionary about this is how it can simplify the problem, not how it’s an exciting, shiny new thing that looks cool.”

Yet these tools are not a panacea, cautioned Parrin, who has investigated mass atrocities and served as an expert witness in international criminal proceedings, especially when it comes to communities without access to certain technology. She cited a recent visit to a Central African Republic village where she interviewed witnesses after 30 people were massacred. “Not one person had a smartphone,” she said.

“What is actually exciting and revolutionary about this is how it can simplify the problem, not how it’s an exciting, shiny new thing that looks cool,” Parrin said. “It’s about how you actually make this meaningful to the people who are affected.”

Update: June 14, 2023
This article has been updated to clarify the accusations against Al Hassan.

The post How 3D Models and Other Technology Could Make it Easier to Convict War Criminals appeared first on The Intercept.

Children Are Dying Because Companies Are Too Scared to Sell Medicine to Iran

Murtaza Hussain — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:00:21 +0000

Amir Hossein Naroi, an Iranian boy, was only 10 years old when he died from thalassemia, an inherited blood disease. The condition is highly prevalent in the southern Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan, where Naroi’s family lives; tens of thousands of people in the region are believed to suffer from the disease. It is not an inevitably fatal condition: Thalassemia can be treated with regular blood transfusions and oral medications designed to remove the excess of iron built up in the bodies of patients. For much of his short life, Naroi was able to get treatment. His fate, however, was decided when access to the necessary medicines inside Iran began to dry up in recent years.

In the earliest years of his life, Naroi was taking a specialized drug known as Desferal, which is manufactured by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis. Starting in 2018, however, around the time that President Donald Trump launched a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions against Iran, supplies of the iron-chelating drug in Iran — along with other medicines used to treat critical diseases — started to become difficult or impossible to access inside Iran, according to local NGOs supporting patients with the disease. By the summer of 2022, his organs failing due to complications from the disease, including damage to his organs from excess iron in his blood, Naroi passed away in a hospital, surrounded by his family.

According to documents obtained by The Intercept, multinational companies providing drugs for thalassemia and other conditions, as well as banks acting as intermediaries for attempted purchases, said U.S. foreign policy was ultimately causing the problems delivering drugs to Iranians. Namely, American sanctions against Iran have made the transactions so difficult that supplies of the medicines are dwindling.

The U.S. government is now facing a lawsuit from the Iran Thalassemia Society — an Iran-based NGO supporting victims of the disease — on behalf of Iranians with thalassemia and another inherited disease, epidermolysis bullosa, claiming that thousands of Iranian patients have been killed or injured after foreign companies producing specialized medicines and equipment for these diseases and others began cutting off or reducing their business with Iran as a result of sanctions. While the U.S. has given assurances that humanitarian trade with Iran will be exempted from sanctions, the lawsuit, which is currently pending appeal after being dismissed, alleges that the large-scale sanctioning of Iran’s banking sector has created a situation in which foreign companies are either unwilling or unable to do any trade with Iran at all.

“The American government has said that they will consider some exceptions for humanitarian aid, but in practice we have seen that there are no exceptions.”

“The American government has said that they will consider some exceptions for humanitarian aid, but in practice we have seen that there are no exceptions,” said Mohammed Faraji, staff attorney at the Iran Thalassemia Society. “We have had communications with countries that export medicines and medical equipment who have clearly told us that we cannot import medicaments to Iran because of sanctions. Banks won’t work with us, and health care companies won’t work with us. They are afraid of secondary sanctions and tell us that directly.”

Documents obtained by The Intercept bear out the picture of some companies balking at humanitarian trade with Iran because of the risk of being caught up in sanctions enforcement or because sanctions have closed off legal pathways for transacting with Iran. The communications reviewed, between European health care companies, foreign banks, and their Iranian counterparties, began in 2018. At times, the messages relayed are explicit: The companies won’t engage in trade with Iran — even to provide lifesaving medicines — due to the sanctions.

The intensity of foreign companies and banks aversion to dealing with Iranians reflects a victory of sorts for sanctions advocates, including hawkish pro-Israel advocacy groups and think tanks like United Against Nuclear Iran and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Thanks to their efforts, Iran today is one of the most sanctioned and isolated countries on Earth. While its government has held on to power and continues to remain aggressive and defiant despite the international pressure, life for ordinary Iranians has become materially worse under the sanctions regime, especially patients suffering from rare diseases.

The letters between banks, drug companies, and their Iranian interlocutors show in detail how the “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iranian financial institutions have blocked even mundane transactions for medical equipment required to treat a range of conditions.

A letter in September 2018 from a Danish manufacturer of urology products, Coloplast, informed its Iranian distributor that “despite the fact that Coloplast products are not excluded by US and/or international export control sanctions, we now face a situation, where the international banks have stopped for financial transactions with Iran. Under current conditions it is not possible to receive money for products sold in Iran.” (Coloplast did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mölnlycke, a Swedish provider of specialized bandages needed to treat patients with epidermolysis bullosa, sent a letter that same year to the head of an Iranian NGO supporting patients with the disease, EBHome, commending the organization for its work helping patients with the condition. Despite the approbation, the company said it would not be sending any more bandages to treat Iranian epidermolysis bullosa sufferers: “Due to the U.S. economic sanctions in force Mölnlycke Healthcare have decided not to conduct any business in relation to Iran for the time being.” A complaint from an Iranian NGO was filed against the company in Sweden in 2021 over the humanitarian impact of its cessation of business in Iran, but the complaint was rejected. (Mölnlycke did not respond to a request for comment.)

The denial of these specialized bandages has been particularly dire for Iranian patients. Epidermolysis bullosa is a disease that causes painful blisters and sores to appear on patients’ bodies. Many people with the condition are children whose skin is particularly tender and who require specialized wound dressings to avoid tearing the skin off when bandages are changed. An Iranian specialist on the disease submitted a testimony as part of the pending lawsuit describing the cases of six young Iranian patients who suffered excessive bleeding, infection, and “excruciating, severe pain” as a result of losing access to the specialized bandages produced by Mölnlycke.

The sanctioning of these supplies has at times led to desperate workarounds by foreign governments. In 2020, the German government and UNICEF cooperated to purchase and deliver a shipment of specialized bandages to Iran. Iranian doctors have also been forced to rely on locally produced approximations of specialized foreign medicines, many of which are of poorer quality and have resulted in life-altering complications and even deaths of patients.

Thalassemia sufferers, in particular, have been forced to use a product known as “Desfonac,” a local equivalent which is less effective at treating the disease and carries debilitating side effects not found in the original product. The Intercept obtained communications made in 2018 by local country representatives for Novartis, the company that manufactures Desferal, telling their Iranian interlocutors the drug company experiencing difficulty conducting transactions as a result of banking sanctions. These transaction problems, local organizations working on the disease say, were the beginning of the end of their own steady access to thalassemia drugs, which must be regularly administered to patients with the disease to be effective.

“We have documented at least 650 people who have died since 2018 when we stopped being able to import medicine.”

“We have been fighting for years to control this disease inside Iran, and it is achievable, but the simple reality is that if patients do not get the iron-regulating drugs they need to treat it, they will die,” said Younus Arab, head of the Iran Thalassemia Society. “We have documented at least 650 people who have died since 2018 when we stopped being able to import medicine and over 10,000 who have had serious complications.”

Unlike other companies, and despite difficulties in receiving payments, Novartis did not cut off ties with Iran in response to U.S. sanctions. A spokesperson for Novartis told The Intercept that the company is willing to send medical supplies to Iran and has done so since the imposition of the “maximum pressure” sanctions, including through the use of a humanitarian trade channel created by the Swiss government in 2020.

The problem created by sanctions, according to the company, is less an unwillingness to do business with Iran over legal fears than an inability of Iranian officials to access their own foreign currency reserves to make payments. The sanctions, while not eliminating Iran’s foreign reserves, have frozen Iran’s access to them, sending the country’s accessible reserves from $122.5 billion down to a mere $4 billion between 2018 and 2020, according to International Monetary Fund figures. The collapse of accessible reserves has made it impossible for the Iranian government to carry out basic economic functions like stabilizing its currency or engaging in foreign trade, even with willing parties.

“Since the imposition of certain sanctions in 2018, the most significant challenge observed by many pharmaceutical companies has been a shortfall of foreign exchange made available by the Iranian government for the import of humanitarian goods, such as medicines,” said Michael Meo, the Novartis spokesperson. “With respect to thalassemia medicines specifically, Novartis has supplied these medicines continuously since 2019. We have been — and remain — ready to satisfy orders for these medicines.”

“However,” Meo’s statement continued, “for our medicines to reach thalassemia patients in Iran, Novartis relies on the action and collaboration of the Iran Ministry of Health and Food and Drug Authority in allocating sufficient foreign currency resources to import these medicines through regular commercial channels.” (The Iranian Ministry of Health and Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to requests for comment.)

For Arab, whether sanctions are creating difficulties importing medicines due to companies’ reticence or a lack of foreign currency reserves, the results are the same: Patients under the care of his organization are dying.

“We don’t want money,” he said, “what we need is medicine for these patients.”

Iranian citizens seem hopeful that incoming U.S. President Joe Biden will lift the sanctions as they read the news regarding the U.S. election on Nov. 9, 2020, in Tehran, Iran.

Photo: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The Trump-era economic sanctions were considered a crowning achievement of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Some of the economic sanctions against Iran targeted specific individuals and institutions involved in human rights abuses, but many others went after entire sectors of the Iranian economy, including its financial sector.

The blanket sanctions on Iranian banks essentially severed the country from trade with the rest of the world by cutting its financial arteries, including access to Iran’s own reserves held in foreign banks. The U.S. government has also imposed so-called secondary sanctions on Iran, meaning that any foreign entity that still dares to engage in trade with Iranian banks or companies puts itself at risk of being sanctioned and being cut off from doing business in the U.S. — a risk that few businesses are willing to take.

Though the U.S. government repeatedly insisted that humanitarian trade with Iran would not be affected by its “maximum pressure” campaign, economic sanctions experts said the claim is misleading. Assurances that ordinary Iranians will still be able to purchase food and medicine are meaningless, they say, when the sanctions in place are so broad that banks and foreign countries view any dealings at all with the country as a looming violation.

“The banking issue is the real crux of the problem. There is a general blocking authority on all of Iran’s financial institutions, some on which have been designated for terrorism-related reasons, some for WMD reasons, and some for human rights reasons,” said Tyler Cullis, an attorney at Ferrari & Associates, a D.C.-based law firm specializing in economic sanctions. “The Trump administration then came and imposed sanctions on Iran’s entire financial sector, and that has targeted any remaining Iranian institutions that were not covered by those measures.”

Although President Joe Biden campaigned in part on restoring the Obama-era nuclear deal, his administration effectively maintained the maximum pressure policy. The banking sanctions that made Iranian business anathema to foreign financial institutions remain in place, making the prospect of doing any trade with Iran too legally and financially risky to be worth it for any foreign company. Those risks are augmented by hawkish activist groups like United Against Nuclear Iran, which maintains public lists of companies accused of engaging in trade with Iran. The blacklists — on which UANI has in the past included companies engaged in legal trade, including for medicines, with Iran — create a potential for reputational risk that makes doing business with Iran an even more unsavory prospect.

“At the end of the Obama administration, we had ideas in front of the administration calling for a direct financial channel between the U.S. and Iran that would be able to facilitate licensed and exempt trade between the two countries. To be frank, the Obama administration rejected creating such a channel on multiple occasions,” said Cullis. “The U.S. has now hit a dead end where they have used up all their levers of pressure other than military force.”

He went on, “I sympathize with folks in Iran, as there are a lot of people there who are nonpolitical and simply trying to find solutions. But it’s really hard to find a solution when U.S. government itself is not interested in one.”

While U.S. sanctions succeeded at wrecking Iran’s middle class and preventing Iranians from accessing necessities like food and medicine, they failed to achieve the aims of Washington: forcing Iran to change its foreign policy or renegotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal on less favorable terms. Instead, the Iranian government has survived waves of popular anger by doubling down on repression — including through executions and imprisonment of political dissenters — against an increasingly impoverished population.

Despite growing misery in the country, the Islamic Republic of Iran seems to be as firmly in charge as ever. The hardening narrative echoes the story of U.S. economic sanctions on countries like Iraq, Cuba, and Venezuela that succeeded in harming civilians but never resulted in regime change.

“The original idea of such sanctions is that they will cause people to rise up and overthrow their government, but there is not much evidence of that while there is a lot of evidence that they harm ordinary people,” said Amir Handjani, a nonresident senior fellow at the Quincy Institute and a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project. “When you consider regular Iranians living under sanctions with rare diseases, who need specialized drugs that can only be imported from the West, they are facing a very dark future.”

“We’re talking about little children who need medical dressings and didn’t get them.”

The lawsuit currently filed in U.S. federal court in Oregon on behalf of Iranians with thalassemia calls on the U.S. government and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, which administers sanctions and trade licenses, to “permit the reintroduction of life-saving medicines and medical devices into Iran through normal business channels.”

The suit was recently dismissed by the court on grounds of proving standing by the plaintiffs; an appeal of the ruling was filed in May. Lawyers working on the case say that they will continue pressing the matter in U.S. courts to compel the government to create a solution that will allow critical medicines to reach patients inside Iran. Neither the Office of Foreign Assets Control nor the Biden White House responded to requests for comment.

“On a visceral level, people are suffering and dying. We’re talking about little children who need medical dressings and didn’t get them,” said Thomas Nelson, the attorney for the plaintiffs in the case. “No one is willing to stand up to the impunity and bullying of the U.S. government on this subject, and particularly OFAC. It ought to be brought to the public’s attention that these types of things are happening.”

The post Children Are Dying Because Companies Are Too Scared to Sell Medicine to Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

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