The Intercept

Trump Revives “Muslim Ban” While GOP Courts Muslim Voters for 2024

Murtaza Hussain — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 21:14:33 +0000

The culture war raging throughout American politics has, of late, created an unexpected alliance between the Republican Party and some conservative Muslim Americans. Once derided as terrorist fifth columnists, a growing number of Muslims have joined the GOP base in protests opposing sex and gender education programs in public schools, with many even featured sympathetically on outlets like Fox News.

The shift represents a stark contrast with the hostile relations between Republicans and Muslims over the past two decades, as well as the integration of many younger Muslim Americans into progressive politics. The GOP’s outreach, reported on recently by Semafor and other outlets, also comes at a moment when the current Republican presidential frontrunner is tripling down on the most directly anti-Muslim government policy in U.S. history: the so-called Muslim ban.

At a campaign speech in Iowa last Friday, former President Donald Trump promised that he would bring back the controversial policy. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” Trump said.

The notion of a ban was first introduced by Trump early in his 2016 presidential campaign, when it was marketed explicitly as a prohibition on all Muslims entering the United States. After Trump was elected, he instated a ban targeting travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, prompting chaos in airports and inside the government. Later, the Trump administration began referring to the policy more antiseptically as a “travel ban,” modifying it to include restrictions on some non-Muslim countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

Yet in his speech in Iowa last weekend, Trump made very clear that the target of his policy would be Muslims, conflating Islam with terrorism and extremism. “Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told the audience to applause.

Trump’s statements highlight an awkward contradiction. On one hand, some Muslim Americans, bound by a shared commitment to conservative social values, are enjoying a period of warm relations with the Republican Party and conservative activists who share their opposition to LGBTQ+ education in schools. At the same time, the wildly popular leading Republican presidential candidate — and the center of gravity in the party — is publicly vowing to revive a policy aimed at curtailing the presence of Muslims in the U.S. entirely.

“This will be a challenging moment for the Muslim community, but I do believe that the issue of LGBT education in schools will become a wedge issue,” said Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a progressive human rights organization. “On a state and local level, many conservative Muslim voters will likely vote for candidates who are anti-LGBT, which will mean mostly Republicans, while on a national level, the same people may choose to vote for a Democrat.”

In one sign of warming relations between Muslims and the Republican Party, major Islamic civil rights organizations have spoken out in support of the recent GOP-supported protests aimed at letting parents opt their children out of LGBTQ+ readings in schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has been among the most vocal, collecting hundreds of signatures to demand that parents be allowed to remove their children from gender- and sex-based courses.

CAIR has been a favorite target of the Republican Party and conservative activists over the past two decades, with the group being labeled as a front for terrorism and Islamic extremism. On this issue, however, they find themselves aligned, even applauded, by erstwhile foes.

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR said its positions reflect an agnosticism toward the partisan divide in American politics.

“CAIR defends the rights of Americans to live according to their sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director. “We decide our policy position based on principle, not party.”

Protesters react to Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in New York.

Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The initial ban resulted in chaos at American airports, as people from targeted countries whose documents were otherwise valid found themselves abruptly detained by U.S. border security. In some cases, people with permission to enter the U.S. wound up stranded abroad without recourse, with some even dying or taking their own lives after being trapped in immigration limbo by the measure.

The cruelties and absurdities brought by the ban also impacted many people living in the U.S. who found themselves separated from loved ones. In one infamous case, the Yemeni mother of a 2-year-old Yemeni American boy dying of a terminal illness was forced to fight a legal battle to come and see him in the hospital after being denied entry to the U.S. because of the ban. She was later granted a waiver to the rule, arriving in the U.S. just days before her son died in the hospital.

The Supreme Court shot down two versions of the “Muslim ban” as unconstitutional, before finally upholding the measure in a 5-4 decision handed down in 2018.

After taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order lifting the ban entirely. The precedent, however, remains.

Trump has made reviving the measure a notable part of his reelection campaign, reportedly telling his advisers in May that he would bring back an expanded version of the infamous travel restriction — a policy that he called “beautiful.”

Trump’s renewed vow to ban Muslims from the U.S. comes at a time when some Muslim Americans have begun to gravitate back to the Republican Party. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans tended to vote as a majority for Republicans, by some accounting providing the crucial swing vote that tilted Florida for George W. Bush in 2000.

Many Muslim Americans who found themselves transformed into punching bags for Republican politicians in later years came to rue their decision to support the GOP. Trump’s initial proposal of the “Muslim ban,” which was met with enthusiastic approval by his base, was only the capstone of a long, ugly falling out between Muslims and Republicans.

With tensions around terrorism and U.S. wars in the Middle East ebbing, some conservative Muslims seem to be turning back to the party.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s promotion of a new and improved “Muslim ban” will sour the halting rapprochement between these two groups. Muslim Americans have transformed into solidly Democratic voters in recent decades, with several Muslim members of Congress taking up highly visible roles in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Even during the period when Trump had imposed the ban, however, some exit polls in the 2020 election showed as many as 35 percent of Muslim voters supporting the candidate who had made the legal exclusion of their coreligionists from the country a highlight of his presidency.

Muslim voters who choose to buck Trump’s GOP might find little reprieve in his chief rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time a member of U.S. Congress, sponsored a bill that sought to ban refugees to the U.S. from a number of Muslim-majority countries where the U.S. had conducted military operations. In recent months, DeSantis has also pushed measures through state legislatures banning foreigners from owning certain properties or even enrolling in public universities to people from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These bans provide a window into how lists of targeted nationalities could be used to deprive individuals of rights well beyond travel in the future.

Trump’s remarks in Iowa suggested that he might impose other restrictions for Muslim immigrations, making remarks aimed at radical terrorists in the same breath as those about farm ownership. “We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers,” Trump said. “We don’t want people blowing up our cities, and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”

As for LGBTQ+ issues in the Muslim community, Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values said that her community needed to spend more time coming to grips with the specifics of the materials that are becoming an increasingly bitter culture war flashpoint.

“We should be taking those books and educational materials that people have issues with and sitting down on both sides to decipher what the problem is and how we can resolve this. In many cases, people are not even sure what’s in the books in question, and this approach of simply shouting at one another doesn’t help,” said Zonneveld, who recently wrote a piece for the website Religion News Service about the controversy. “One thing to emphasize, however, on principle, is that LGBT people are human beings created by God, just like you and I, and they should not be discriminated against, end of story.”

The post Trump Revives “Muslim Ban” While GOP Courts Muslim Voters for 2024 appeared first on The Intercept.

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.”

The post With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More appeared first on The Intercept.

Supreme Court: Affirmative Action Is OK — If the Students Are Getting Sent to Die in Wars

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:23:36 +0000

Affirmative action supporters and counterprotesters shout at each outside of the Supreme Court on June 29, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In what is being described as a victory for a merit-based and colorblind approach to college admissions, the Supreme Court Thursday struck down affirmative action as a tool to redress race-based inequalities. The ruling by the court’s conservative majority dealt with affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, but would apply across the country.

The precedent set by the court’s decision is primed to transform college admissions standards around the country, yet there is one area where the law mandating diversity in recruitment is remaining conspicuously unchanged: U.S. military academies.

When it comes to national priorities, the defense establishment has long been treated with kid gloves and afforded its own perks and protections. Think of the way fiscal hawks on both sides of the aisle regularly greenlight bloated Pentagon budgets. The divergence on diversity guidelines for elite colleges and U.S. military institutions stands out for its gross irony, not least because the most pernicious forms of affirmative action — those which protect the ruling class — remain untouched.

“The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.

A quick look at the details of the ruling itself sheds some light on the problem. The U.S. government had previously filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit asking for an exception for military academies. That brief stated that U.S. military leaders “have learned through hard experience that the effectiveness of our military depends on a diverse officer corps that is ready to lead an increasingly diverse fighting force.” Although the court rejected the same logic being applied to elite colleges, it evidently accepted the need for diversity among future generations of West Point graduates, stating in a footnote to the majority opinion that:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

Affirmative Action for Whom?

A common criticism of affirmative action programs at universities is that they undermine merit as a primary criterion for selection. Yet the same concern seems equally, if not more, relevant to U.S. military leadership, particularly given the strong emphasis on national security normally espoused by U.S. politicians and the electorate.

The court is apparently hesitant to prioritize demographic diversity in admissions to colleges that, ultimately, determine the future appearance of the country’s elite. But the same concerns do not seem to apply to the military, where one of the possibilities of membership, rather than joining the gilded class, is being severely injured or killed in one of the U.S.’s many foreign military conflicts.

Despite the court’s ruling, which has been widely celebrated among opponents of affirmative action, it is not entirely clear how much that the composition of elite colleges will change. The decision says that universities may continue to consider in admissions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

The far more pervasive form of elite affirmative action — embodied by preferential treatment for legacy admissions — was left untouched by the court ruling.

This apparent loophole potentially allows applicants to continue to be accepted on the basis of racial background, provided they also give a personal statement about their race that could easily become de rigueur in the future.

The far more pervasive form of elite affirmative action — embodied by preferential treatment for legacy admissions, the children of financial donors, athletes, and relatives of school staff — was left untouched by the court ruling. The oversight is a significant one.

There was, however, one mention of it: In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch chastised elite schools like Harvard for their attempts to uphold affirmative action while continuing to defend legacy admissions. Harvard’s “preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, a 2019 study found that a whopping 43 percent of white students at Harvard were beneficiaries of one of these forms of preferential access. While 70 percent of legacy admissions were white, only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian students benefitted from these preferential considerations.

In effect, while rolling back affirmative action, the court left unscathed a backdoor means of demographic engineering in college admissions that is equally indifferent to merit as a criterion.

Sotomayor’s Dissent

The reversal of affirmative action at elite schools will likely have reverberations well beyond the institutions themselves, including downstream changes in the internal culture of workforces and non-governmental institutions that had been encouraged for years to make demographic diversity a priority in hiring.

Yet the apparent inconsistencies in the ruling, including carve-outs for the military and continued preferential treatment for the wealthy and well connected, will likely make the decision a bitter one for many who had supported affirmative action to address America’s history of racial inequity.

In her dissent to the ruling, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the military exemption in particular “highlights the arbitrariness” of the court’s decision. Sotomayor minced few words in expressing the depths of her objections to the ruling, which will likely be a landmark one in the history of America’s post-civil rights legal movement.

“When proponents of those arguments, greater now in number on the Court, return to fight old battles anew, it betrays an unrestrained disregard for precedent,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “It fosters the people’s suspicions that ‘bedrock principles are founded … in the proclivities of individuals’ on this Court, not in the law, and it degrades ‘the integrity of our constitutional system of government.’”

The post Supreme Court: Affirmative Action Is OK — If the Students Are Getting Sent to Die in Wars appeared first on The Intercept.

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.”

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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.

The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With “Brain Development Issues” to Become a Terrorist

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:01:02 +0000

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a teenager in Massachusetts on allegations of providing financial support to the Islamic State group.

A flurry of reports picked up on the arrest of Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old resident of the sleepy town of Wakefield, echoing government claims that an international terrorist financier and ISIS supporter had just been busted in the United States. The Department of Justice’s own press release on the case likewise trumpeted Ventura’s arrest for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”

The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old.

The only problem with the case and how it has been described, however, is that according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family.

The arrest has shaken his family, who denied allegations that their son was a terrorist and said that he had been manipulated by the FBI. Ventura’s father, Paul Ventura, told The Intercept that Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying from other students.

“He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” Ventura said. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”

Contrary to the sensational narrative fed to the news media of terrorist financing in the U.S., the charging documents show that Ventura gave an undercover FBI agent gift cards for pitifully small amounts of cash, sometimes in $25 increments. In his initial bid to travel to the Islamic State, the teenager balked — making up an excuse, by the FBI’s own account, to explain why he did not want to go. When another opportunity to travel abroad arose, Ventura balked again, staying home on the evening of his supposed flight instead of traveling to the airport. By the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI.

There is still much that remains to be known about Ventura’s case, which remains in its early stages. More information may still come to light as it moves to discovery and trial, including about his dealings with the FBI and other activities online.

Yet based on the government’s own account of what led to Ventura’s arrest, there is reason to believe that his case is less a serious terrorism bust than one of the many instances in which a troubled or mentally unfit young man was groomed by undercover FBI agents to commit a crime that would not have otherwise happened.

This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement. A 2014 Human Rights Watch report criticizing the use of informants in terrorism investigations said, “In this way, the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals.”

This FBI tactic was a mainstay of terrorism prosecutions for roughly two decades. While its use lately has waned, the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.

“There is still significant use of informants and undercover agents in FBI investigations who aren’t just gathering information about potential crimes but are actively suggesting ideas for crimes or making it easier for people to do the things that they claim they want to do,” said Naz Ahmad, acting director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, or CLEAR, project at the City University of New York School of Law. “There are documented cases where the government has provided people everything that they needed to execute a plot. Informants and undercover agents have often been used as a tool in these investigations to prod things along.”

“Instead of them telling me that he’s doing what he’s doing online and to take his computer away, they let him keep doing it.”

Paul Ventura said that in 2021 armed FBI agents from visited his home, informed him that his son had been browsing websites “that he shouldn’t be looking at,” and connected him with what they said was a counselor. After the initial visit, he said he had no knowledge of his son’s ongoing communications with the FBI undercover agent online.

“Two years ago, the FBI came to my house and they took his computer and said he’s on these sites he shouldn’t be on. We said OK, and he wasn’t arrested at that time or anything. I didn’t hear from them again after that, but I guess over time things escalated,” said Paul Ventura. “I wasn’t home a lot because I work, and he wasn’t at school because of the bullying. Instead of them telling me that he’s doing what he’s doing online and to take his computer away, they let him keep doing it.”

The facts of the case against Mateo Ventura laid out in the government’s criminal complaint detail how his relationship developed with the FBI.

In August 2021, when he was 16 years old, Ventura began communicating with an undercover FBI agent online. He told the agent of his desire to make “hijrah,” or migrate to territories under control of the Islamic State.

By the time of the discussion, ISIS had been largely vanquished in its home territories of Iraq and Syria, though it is not clear whether Ventura had been aware of this. According to the Department of Justice’s complaint, an undercover FBI agent impersonating an ISIS member communicated to the 16-year-old in broken English, encouraging his decision and expressly telling him not to inform anyone else about their online conversations, including friends or family. The criminal complaint in the case describes the exchange between Ventura and “OCE,” or the “FBI employee acting in an undercover capacity”:

VENTURA: I reached out to brother [A.D.] for hijrah [migration] I dont know if it is still possible but if it is I know it will take sometime.

OCE: Ahh

OCE: Inshallah [if Allah wills it] I help u, but before talk have rule my brother.

OCE: U must no talk about what said here or intention to anyone. No tell family.

No tell friend. No tell ikhwan [brothers] at masjid [mosque]. No one. This for

both are safety.

OCE: Intention stay between U and Allah azzawajal [the mighty and majestic].

Ventura continued chatting with the undercover agent about what he could do for ISIS, including potentially fighting for them in a foreign country. The two settled on him buying a $25 Google Play gift card and sending the redemption code to the FBI agent. At the FBI’s direction, the 16-year-old also recorded an audio file of himself elaborately pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS and transmitting the audio recording over the chat.

Over the next year two years, Ventura continued sending small amounts of cash through gift cards to the FBI agent, mostly through gaming stores like Steam, PlayStation Network, and Google Play. The amounts of his small transactions, which spanned over roughly two years, added up to a total of $965 during the time that he was a juvenile, and another $705 after he became a legal adult.

All the while, Ventura’s conversations with the FBI undercover operative online continued, including promises to make a passport and assurances that he would teach himself Arabic “very fast” in case he traveled to Egypt on behalf of the group.

In the end, Ventura appeared to get cold feet. In September 2022, when he was 17 years old, he told the agent that he could no longer “go for hijrah,” because he had been “hurt very bad in fall and can no longer walk.” The injury was an excuse that the FBI — which, according to the affidavit in the case, interviewed Ventura six days thereafter — concluded had been made up by the teen.

In January 2023, just after his 18th birthday, Ventura got back in touch with the FBI agent on the encrypted messaging platform. Apologizing for not being communicative in previous months after his supposed injury, Ventura again said he wanted to travel to the Islamic State. The pair discussed the possibility of him dying in an attack by ISIS fighters somewhere in the world or attending a training camp.

At the FBI undercover operative’s direction, Ventura took a video of himself and sent it over the chat, telling the agent that he had a beard now. The FBI agent praised the performance, saying Ventura was “strong” and “Look (sic) like lion.”

Ventura sent the FBI operative another $25 Google Play gift certificate, which he was assured would be used for jihad, before trying and failing to book several flights due to apparent lack of access to a credit card. On April 10 this year, Ventura finally succeeded in booking a Turkish Airlines flight to Egypt.

But instead of boarding the flight, or even leaving his residence on the night it was scheduled, Ventura contacted the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center and reported a tip, stating in a rambling message that he wanted “10 million dollars in duffel bags” in exchange for information on future terrorist attacks. “I known (sic) you thought I am retarded fool but jokes on you I will not admit I sent this or communicate until the cash is delivered,” the message said, according to the criminal complaint in the case.

By this time in the investigation, Ventura had not only seemingly developed cold feet about joining the group, but appeared eager to sell out his supposed ISIS contact to law enforcement.

Ventura called the FBI again several times in the coming days, telling them that he wanted to help with “terror” and again offering to help stop a future ISIS terrorist attack and to provide information about people who were facilitating travel for the group, in exchange for cash and legal immunity for himself.

On April 20, according to the affidavit, he was informed in a phone call from the FBI that the information he had provided was “not specific and therefore not actionable.”

Meanwhile, as his attempts to blow the whistle on the FBI’s own informant in exchange for millions of dollars of cash appeared to stall, Ventura also continued communicating with their undercover operative online, apologizing for missing his flight to Egypt and inquiring about other ways he might travel to join ISIS. On May 16, he sent another Google Play gift card to the agent, with a value of $45.

These interactions continued until Ventura was arrested in early June and charged with one count of “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization” — reference to the gift card donations he had spent years sending to the FBI during their chats online.

Although news reports echoed the Justice Department’s portrayal of the arrest as the foiling of a nascent Islamic State funding operation in the U.S., there is no indication in the allegations against him that Ventura had ever been in touch with the terrorist group.

Following his arrest, Ventura’s father told reporters outside the courthouse that his son was being “railroaded” and is “100 percent a loyal American.”

Ventura now faces up to 10 years in prison, if convicted of the charges of providing material support to a terrorist group.

Cases of ISIS operatives being arrested in the U.S. have become increasingly rare following the group’s defeat several years ago in Iraq and Syria. Even at the peak of the ISIS’s influence, many terrorism cases have been criticized for utilizing entrapment and grooming tactics against people that seemed to cross the line into both encouraging and facilitating them to break the law. Despite growing scrutiny from the public and civil rights groups, those tactics have never been reformed.

“That kid has special needs, he got bullied out of school. He needed help.”

More information may still come out in Ventura’s case about his own actions leading up to his arrest. Based on the FBI’s own account of what took place, however, depictions of Ventura as a dangerous terrorist fundraiser currently spreading in the press are hard to deem credible.

The picture that emerges in the charging documents is, instead, the more familiar tale of an impressionable, vulnerable young man, legally a child at the point the investigation began, groomed by FBI undercover agents online to break the law and generate flashy headlines in the aftermath.

“That kid has special needs, he got bullied out of school,” Ventura’s father told The Intercept. “He needed help.”

The post The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With “Brain Development Issues” to Become a Terrorist 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.

In Secret Meeting, Pakistani Military Ordered Press to Stop Covering Imran Khan

Ryan Grim — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 19:49:46 +0000

The Pakistani military invited the owners of the country’s major media organizations to Islamabad this week for a secret meeting to discuss coverage of the ongoing political and constitutional crisis, Pakistani journalists familiar with the gathering told The Intercept. The invitation was not one that could be refused, and the message was equally direct: Cease all coverage of former Prime Minister Imran Khan amid his ongoing clash with the military.

Following the meeting, which has not been previously reported, top editors at news organizations across Pakistan issued directives to their journalists to pause coverage of Khan, said the Pakistani journalists, who requested anonymity for fear of their safety. An inspection of Pakistani media sites reveals a stark change. Earlier this week and every day for years before, Khan was a leading subject of coverage. He has effectively vanished from the news. The ban was confirmed by more than a half-dozen Pakistani journalists.

“They have lots of levers to hurt media companies.”

Khan is at the center of a political crisis that has paralyzed Pakistani cities, prompted clashes and riots targeting the all-powerful military, and seen tens of thousands of his political supporters sent to prison. You wouldn’t know that from reading the Pakistani press today, even as he continues a campaign against an attempt by the military to exclude him and his party from contesting upcoming elections.

The recent crisis began when Khan was hit with corruption charges, which he and supporters of his political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, claim to be a political exercise aimed at excluding him from politics.

Khan, a former cricket player and philanthropist, has become Pakistan’s most popular politician by galvanizing public anger against the country’s dynastic political parties. He served as prime minister from 2018 to 2022, when he was removed from office by a coalition of opposition parties. While his original rise to power was widely believed to have been patronized from behind the scenes by the military itself, after falling out with military leadership, Khan has become a fierce opponent of their domineering role in politics.

In Pakistan, there is no bigger story than the battle between Khan and the military, which has played out in spectacular fashion, including the extrajudicial arrest of Khan from inside a courtroom, sparking nationwide protests and, eventually, a Supreme Court order to free him. Khan is also the No. 1 driver of ratings and web traffic to news organizations — until Thursday, when he virtually disappeared from the national news media. (The Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The explicit directive from the military was not delivered in writing, said sources. A more vaguely worded order was issued by Pakistan’s Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, which oversees television stations, barring coverage of “hate mongers, rioters, their facilitators and perpetrators.” The directive does not name Khan, but its meaning is clear. On May 9, following Khan’s arrest, protests erupted around the country, with some leading to arson. Khan has called for an independent inquiry into the cause of the arson and has suggested the military may have carried it out as to create a pretext for the resulting crackdown.

The PTI’s U.S. Twitter account condemned what it called censorship. “Trying to keep Imran Khan off the media is censorship and curtailment of media freedom by the imposed regime in Pakistan,” the party said.

BBC’s Caroline Davies reported that sources at two different Pakistani TV stations had said they were under orders not to mention Khan, even in the ticker tape running along the bottom.

In the wake of the military’s imposed blackout over Pakistani media, Khan has taken to Western press and social media platforms like Twitter to try and get his message out. Even these platforms have not escaped censorship: Many Pakistani social media users have reported being contacted by the military over their posts and asked to remove them, lest they find themselves in prison as thousands of other supporters of Khan’s party have over the past several weeks.

Thousands of Khan’s loyalists have been imprisoned in recent weeks, and most of his party leadership has similarly been jailed, released only on the condition they publicly resign from the party. Several high-profile former officials have recently been forced to give bizarre press conferences following their arrests in which they announce their resignation from the PTI and, often, politics in general.

The post In Secret Meeting, Pakistani Military Ordered Press to Stop Covering Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Preempt State-Level Bans on Foreigners Buying Property

Murtaza Hussain — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 14:52:36 +0000

In recent months, officials in a handful of states have proposed legislation aimed at preventing citizens from select foreign countries from owning property. In Texas, a bill to ban Iranian, Syrian, North Korean, Russian, and Chinese citizens from buying farmlands advanced to the state Senate. A bill in Florida banning citizens of most of the same countries from buying property near “critical infrastructure” was signed into law last month by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

With the bills moving forward, activist groups are mounting a challenge at the state level. Now, they are getting support from Washington, where a new bill in the U.S. Congress aims to stop states from discriminating on the basis of citizenship.

The federal legislation comes in response to the proliferating state-level efforts. Legislation to restrict property ownership based on citizenship has been signed into law in Arkansas and Tennessee, and similar measures are also being pushed forward in Kansas, Louisiana, Hawaii, and South Carolina. In some cases, the bills include even more far-reaching restrictions that would, for example, ban foreign citizens’ enrollment in public universities.

The potential for legislating discrimination based on citizenship has alarmed civil liberties groups, who are calling for a federal response to the measures.

“These bills are 21st century versions of the Alien Land Laws.”

“These bills are 21st century versions of the Alien Land Laws,” said Myriam Sabbaghi, national organizing manager for the National Iranian American Council, which is part of a coalition of groups opposing the laws, referring to a series of proposed laws a century ago banning foreign ownership. “These laws are being passed in southern states with relatively minimal national attention. It could be a slippery slope towards bringing more discrimination based on people’s ethnic identity.”

Public pressure roused by activists has helped stall some of these bills in state legislatures. One measure proposed in Texas earlier this year was significantly watered down after public protests and has not yet been signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican.

The Texas bill was originally proposed in response to concerns over plans by a Chinese firm to buy land to build a wind farm, portions of which would have been near a U.S. military base. Although U.S. officials who reviewed the purchase did not deem it to be a threat, the Chinese-run firm involved in the purchase was ultimately forced to sell to a Spanish company.

Despite the questionable security benefits of the laws, DeSantis championed the bill in his state as “one example of Florida really leading the nation in terms of what we’re doing to stop the influence of the Chinese Communist party.” The measure in Florida, set to take effect on July 1, would ban property purchases within 10 miles of sites deemed to be critical infrastructure.

Chinese immigrants living in Florida are currently suing over the measure, with the American Civil Liberties Union saying that the laws “will have the net effect of creating ‘Chinese exclusion zones’ that will cover immense portions of Florida, including many of the state’s most densely populated and developed areas.”

The coalition of organizations opposing the bills around the country represent those targeted, including Asian and Iranian American communities.

The proposed federal measure against the state laws — introduced in the U.S. House in late May by Reps. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and Al Green, D-Texas — aims to preempt state legislation seeking to ban property purchases based on citizenship.

“We don’t want 50 states to have 50 different laws related to ownership of land. If there are rules around sensitive sites, that is something that we should legislate at the federal level and it should apply to individuals rather than targeting people based on their citizenship,” Green told The Intercept. “I think that we have to be very careful because many persons will take this type of legislation as an invitation to determine that people not born in this country, or who are not citizens, are unfit to have property or even to be in the country.”

The bill was announced by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. A press release announcing the bill last week took aim at the laws for unjustly discriminating against individual citizens of foreign governments.

“Buying real property – whether that’s a new house to call home or a commercial property to run a business in – is a critical step for immigrant families, students, and refugees to pursue the American Dream,” Chu said in the statement. “While there are specific, legitimate threats that these foreign governments and their state-owned enterprises pose to our national security, banning individuals from purchasing land or properties because of their citizenship, national origin, race, ethnicity, or immigration status is a flagrant assault on their civil rights and unconstitutional.”

The post U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Preempt State-Level Bans on Foreigners Buying Property appeared first on The Intercept.

Ban on Property Sales to Citizens of China, Iran, and Others Is Cruising Through Texas Legislature

Murtaza Hussain — Fri, 05 May 2023 09:00:56 +0000

Last week, the Texas Senate passed a bill putting restrictions on land purchases by citizens of China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, raising alarms among civil liberties advocates who fear it is the first step toward legally enshrining discrimination based on national origin in the state.

The bill, Senate Bill 147, would ban the purchase of “real property” by citizens from China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, even if they are in the country legally on certain visas. The bill defines “real property” as “agricultural land, an improvement located on agricultural land, a mine or quarry, a mineral in place, or a standing timber.” Currently awaiting review by the Texas House of Representatives, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has publicly vowed that he will sign it into law if it reaches his desk.

“Discrimination against certain groups has often been justified by invoking national security concerns. This bill and others like it echo this shameful history.”

“The bill perpetuates anti-immigrant bias and racism by unconstitutionally encouraging discrimination on the basis of immigration or citizenship status and national origin,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for the civil rights group Project South. “Discrimination against certain groups has often been justified by invoking national security concerns. This bill and others like it echo this shameful history.”

The current iteration of the bill, which has gone through multiple revisions, is a watered-down version of a far more draconian proposal that would have completely banned all property sales, including home purchases, to citizens and dual nationals of the four targeted countries.

The announcement of the original measure last year triggered widespread protests by Chinese and Iranian American activist groups in Texas. In response to the pressure, the bill was narrowed to focus on purchases of farmland by individuals deemed to be foreign citizens but created exemptions for citizens and permanent residents of the U.S.

Civil liberties groups say that the changes do not go far enough and are asking for the measure to be killed in its entirety. Even with the changes, these groups say that it will contribute to a climate of fear and suspicion targeting immigrant groups.

“The original text of this bill released in November was its most xenophobic and racist version, and its announcement triggered a lot of fear and panic in the community,” said Lily Trieu, executive director of the advocacy group Asian Texans for Justice. “In February, the author came back and amended the bill to address some concerns, though still not enough to make it good policy.”

She added, “This bill continues to conflate individuals with the governments of their countries of origin, even though many people in the United States who hold foreign citizenship are here because they were opposed to those governments.”

The bill was first introduced by Republican state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst last year. While Kolkhorst attempted to roll back extreme measures, activists say that a Pandora’s box has already been opened by the proposed legislation. (Kolkhorst did not respond to a request for comment.)

A copycat bill was introduced last month targeting citizens from the same four countries and would ban them from attending public universities in the state if passed.

“The rhetoric that people from these countries pose a danger and should be unwelcome is already out there,” said Trieu. “People are already using this bill to discriminate against people from these four countries.”

Though the bill in Texas has faced headwinds from activist groups, a similar measure targeting the same four countries, as well as citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria, is also being pushed ahead in Florida by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The introduction of S.B. 147 has hit Iranian American communities in the state particularly hard. Many Iranian Americans are still feeling the lingering effects of Trump-era suppression of their civil liberties, most notoriously the so-called Muslim ban that targeted Iranians and citizens of several other Muslim-majority countries for exclusion from entry to the U.S.

The ban became a signature part of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant governing platform. The list of seven countries that were subject to the ban was originally taken from a previous visa-waiver exclusion list built under President Barack Obama’s administration that targeted these states as “countries of concern.”

From there, it was a simple matter of escalation for Trump to take the list and use it to exclude citizens of those countries from entering the U.S. entirely. Iranian American activist groups say that they fear the bill from the Texas Senate could lead to a similar slippery slope, where the precedent of a ban on large farmland purchases could be used as a means to introduce discriminatory restrictions on other rights they hold in the U.S.

“This bill looks like 21st century version of the Alien Land Laws that targeted Asian immigrants in the 19th century and should be rejected as unconstitutional by legislatures,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “The Iranian American community has already had this experience where a measure that may seem a little more reasonable at first is then used as justification for far more extreme actions targeting people based on their national origin.”

The original impetus for the bill was concern over plans by a Chinese firm to buy land to build a wind farm in Texas, portions of which would have been near a U.S. military air base. Although U.S. officials who reviewed concerns about the purchase determined that it would not pose a security threat, the firm, controlled by a Chinese billionaire named Sun Guangxin, was forced to sell its interest in the project to a Spanish company.

Last month, a coalition of human rights groups issued a letter to Abbott, the Texas governor, calling on him not to sign the bill, arguing that it would contribute to a climate of intolerance and fear in the state.

“We are deeply concerned,” the letter said, “that Asian, Iranian, Russian, and other communities are being singled out and denied the ability to do what every other similarly situated individual in America has the right to do: build a life and put down roots in the place that they call home.”

The post Ban on Property Sales to Citizens of China, Iran, and Others Is Cruising Through Texas Legislature appeared first on The Intercept.

The "Pro-Israel" Smear Campaign to Cancel a Global Charity

Murtaza Hussain — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 21:44:40 +0000

A nonprofit think tank that serves as a fiscal sponsor for hundreds of progressive causes around the world was recently severed from access to vital financial services due to its support of a French NGO working on Palestinian issues.

In February, the Alliance for Global Justice, or AFGJ, issued a statement announcing that the company that handled its credit card transactions had blocked its ability to process donations. The move came after a “pro-Israel” group accused one of the organizations sponsored by AFGIJ, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, of serving as something of a front for a leftist Palestinian militant group that is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization.

“Groups like Alliance for Global Justice provide terror groups with the funding that is critical to their operations and the fact that they do so with U.S. taxpayer subsidies,” an attorney for Zachor Legal Institute told the Washington Examiner. The article also noted that Zachor Legal Institute had filed a complaint asking the IRS to investigate AFGJ’s nonprofit status and accusing the organization of supporting terrorism.

The Alliance for Global Justice provides fiscal sponsorship for roughly 150 grassroots nonprofit organizations around the world, mostly in Latin America. The abrupt severance of a critical financial lifeline came as a shock to the organization, which survives on individual donor support.

“They cut off our ability to accept credit card donations without warning or cause, which absolutely affected our ability to fundraise and support sponsor organizations — many of which need this money to literally pay rent and keep their lights on,” said Camille Landry, outreach coordinator for AFGJ, adding that AFGJ’s own operations had come to “a screeching halt” as a result of the shutdown.

The controversy revolves around a France-based member organization of Samidoun known as the Collectif Palestine Vaincra that was previously accused of links with extremism by the French government of Emmanuel Macron and ordered dissolved. The Collectif successfully appealed this claim in French courts and was cleared in May of last year. A French court found that charges that the Collectif was antisemitic were “unfounded,” ordering Macron’s ban to be reversed. “The French government has much more information and much more access to their activities, and said they’re they’re not engaged in any unlawful activity,” said Mark Burton, an attorney who sits on the board of directors of AFGJ.

The lawyer with Zachor accused the Collectif of having ties to the radical leftist militant group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The Collectif has denied any links with the PFLP, though has defended it as a legitimate resistance movement against the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Burton said that AFGJ has never had to defend its association with the group, because Zachor’s complaint has not led to any IRS inquiry, yet it’s been enough to badly hobble the organization.

AFGJ also flatly denied the charge that its sponsored organizations had ties to terrorism. “Some years ago we got into the business of being fiscal sponsors to grassroots organizations that needed to operate as nonprofits but didn’t have the means to do so,” said Landry. “It is being claimed that one of our sponsored organizations, Samidoun, that exists to support Palestinian political prisoners and their families, broke the law. That is untrue.”

The scrutiny of Palestinian organizations appears to be highly selective. As The Intercept has previously reported, pro-Israel groups in the United States with ties to designated terrorist organizations have been known to fundraise domestically through tax-exempt movements linked to the far right in Israel and the occupied Palestinian terrorities.

As first reported in the progressive Jewish publication Mondoweiss, the AFGJ’s credit card donations were handled by a company called Salsa Labs, a fundraising software provider for nonprofit organizations. Salsa Labs in turn uses a contractor called CardConnect to process card transactions. According to the AFGJ, it was CardConnect that cut off the organization from services this February.

A letter from CardConnect to the AFGJ dated January 24 informed the group that it was being cut off from services, stating “we will no longer process credit, debit, or prepaid card transactions that you may submit to us.” The letter provided no context to the decision other than stating that the business relationship was being terminated and telling the AFGJ to make new arrangements for credit card services. CardConnect did not respond to questions from The Intercept.

Since then, transactions by the AFGJ with donors and member organizations have been forced to be carried out individually via physical checks and wire transfers: a costly and time-consuming process that has impeded its ability to fundraise.

The takedown of AFGJ appears part of a coordinated effort. Zachor Legal Institute’s website describes itself as a “legal think tank and advocacy organization” focused on combating the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. The organization also describes its role as “producing legal scholarship that is then made available for use by the entire Zionist umbrella of organizations,” with the aim of reducing “the negative impacts of anti-Israel lies and misrepresentations.”

Zachor has also targeted universities in the United States, including the University of California, Los Angeles, whom it has accused of supporting antisemitism by declining to crack down on BDS activism on campus. The group has also filed amicus briefs in support of state anti-BDS laws, including a measure seeking to ban BDS in the state of Texas.

Over the past several years, the Israeli government and associated organizations have launched a crackdown on NGOs run by Palestinians or perceived to be supportive of Palestinian rights. The Israeli government in 2021 announced raids against a group of Western-supported civil society organizations in the Palestinian territories on accusations of supporting terrorism. The allegations were criticized by some U.S. officials as well as European Union officials who have continued to provide funding to targeted groups after finding that terrorism allegations were unfounded.

The AFGJ is still working to find an alternative credit card service provider after being turfed by CardConnect. In a statement issued this February after the original severance, the organization highlighted the stress that the financial shutdown had caused to the organization.

“Our staff and board collective is working overtime, under stressful conditions, to find alternatives to protect AfGJ and our projects. We are doing everything we can to stop this assault on our freedom and our right to organize for that more beautiful, just, and sustainable world we all dream of,” the statement said. “One thing is certain: If they succeed in destroying Alliance for Global Justice, they will turn their sights on other organizations that are fighting back the rising tide of repression. They will come for you.”

The post The “Pro-Israel” Smear Campaign to Cancel a Global Charity appeared first on The Intercept.

Leaked Pentagon Document Shows How Ukraine War Is Bleeding Into Middle East

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 22:50:52 +0000

A recently leaked cache of highly classified U.S. intelligence reports sheds light on the growing risk of a U.S. conflict with Iran, as well as apparent Israeli efforts to directly involve the U.S. in operations targeting Iranian interests in the Middle East. The documents expose the sensitivity of the geopolitical situation, and how tension between Russia and Israel could escalate dramatically in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The set of classified documents is reported to have been shared online in a gaming forum. Police on Thursday arrested a 21-year-old U.S. Air Force National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira on suspicion of involvement in the leak.

A briefing document dated February 28, marked “Top Secret” and prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, details four scenarios it considers possible under which Israel could provide lethal aid to Ukraine — something Washington has sought but that Israel, which has ties to Russia, has refused to do.

In one plausible scenario, the briefing says, “Russia continues to allow Iranian advanced conventional weapons through Syria, prompting Israel to request expanded U.S. support for Israeli counter-Iran activities in exchange for lethal aid to Ukraine.” (Israel has accused Iran of transferring military equipment into Syrian territory that could be used against Israel in a future conflict.)

The document also provides “background” to this scenario, which appears to refer to current circumstances that could set the stage for such a situation: “Israeli defense leaders are advocating for increased risk-taking to counter Iran, including proposing bilateral Israeli-U.S. operations.” Both countries have been engaging in high-profile military drills as tensions in the region have risen. This January, the U.S. and Israel conducted their largest joint military exercise in history — an exercise that reportedly simulated airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

Another plausible scenario, according to the briefing, is that Russia “incurs casualties” from a periodic Israeli strike in Syria and directly targets Israeli aircraft with the help of Iran. The document also reports that Israel has “regularly requested” overflight support from the U.S. to carry out strikes against Iranian interests in Syria.

The same document provides a laundry list of Israeli weapons that might be transferred to the Ukrainians in the quid pro quo that the U.S. is pushing for, such as Israeli-built surface-to-air missile and anti-tank systems. Such lethal aid might be transferred by Israel, the document notes, “under increased U.S. pressure or a perceived degradation in its ties to Russia.”

The National Security Council declined to comment on the document detailing Israeli scenarios, specifically.

Iranian press photographers stand next to burnt U.S. and Israel flags during an anti-Israel protest in downtown Tehran on Aug. 9, 2022.

Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal under the Trump administration, the U.S. has been on a collision course with the Iranian government over its nuclear energy and ballistic missile program. Documents from the cache also shed light on other U.S. surveillance efforts focused on Iran. One document states that according to “a signals intelligence report and imagery analysis,” the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had made plans to launch a missile equipped with a communications satellite known as the Nahid-1 in early March.

Another reported on discussions between two Iranian officials — a spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear program named Behrouz Kamalvandi and the Iranian vice president of political affairs, Mohammed Jamshidi — outlining their strategy for handling an expected visit by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi to Iran in March. That document quoted Kamalvandi as saying that Grossi was prepared to “defuse the situation,” related to a forthcoming IAEA report on Iranian nuclear activities, adding that Jamshidi had tasked Kamalvandi with coming up with talking points that could be conveyed to the media, “thereby mitigating any negative effect of the IAEA report.”

A report from the IAEA issued at the end of March found that IAEA inspectors had found uranium particles enriched up to 83.7 percent at an Iranian nuclear site. The level of uranium enrichment considered sufficient for building a nuclear weapon is 90 percent, though the report suggested that the enrichment discovered at the Fordow nuclear plant may have been an incidental fluctuation rather than a sign of future weaponization.

In recent years, after Donald Trump exited the nuclear deal and Joe Biden failed to revive it, the U.S. has signed off on a hawkish approach to Iran prominently championed by some Israeli political figures, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu publicly campaigned against the nuclear agreement and has spent years pushing for the U.S. to take a harder line on Iran. Israel has carried out its own operations targeting Iranian interests in Syria and has even hit Iran directly over the past year as part of what Israeli military officials have called the “Octopus Doctrine” of treating Iranian territory as a target for military strikes and assassinations.

With key military decisions spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations, the groundwork for conflict with Iran has in many respects already been laid and more ominous preparations appear to be on the horizon. On January 16, 2021, just days before Biden’s inauguration, Trump ordered Israel to be moved from the U.S. military’s European Command — where it had been kept to avoid tensions with its Middle East neighbors — to Central Command’s area of responsibility in the Middle East, facilitating military cooperation against Iran. Biden did not rescind the order.

The Pentagon also developed a contingency plan for war with Iran in the fiscal year 2019, as The Intercept has reported.

Despite growing tensions, U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated that they do not believe that Iran has decided to weaponize its nuclear energy program. “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one,” the Pentagon’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review found late last year. CIA Director Bill Burns reiterated that point more recently in an interview with CBS in February. “To the best of our knowledge,” Burns said, “we don’t believe that the Supreme Leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program that we judge that they suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.”

Yet intense distrust and hostility between the two parties continues to lead U.S. security and political officials to view the program as a danger — with the threat of war, and even regime change, increasingly discussed in public as a means of resolving it.

A report by the centrist national security think tank Center for a New American Security recently advocated for “U.S. leaders” to “consider sending private messages to Iran’s political and military leaders indicating its resolve to see them removed from power should they not abandon the nuclear program.” Recent assassinations of Iranian officials, it added, should convince them that the nuclear program is a “millstone around their necks, rather than an insurance policy that ensures their survival.”

Photos of the leaked intelligence documents have been circulating on the messaging platform Discord over the past several months. The documents deal with a variety of subjects, but the majority of the ones that have surfaced so far are detailed analyses of the progress of the war in Ukraine and U.S. intelligence assessments of a number of foreign partners and adversaries. The U.S. government has not officially confirmed that the documents are authentic, but has launched an investigation into their origins and made public statements indicating that they are likely real.

“The Department of Defense and the intelligence community are actively reviewing and assessing the validity of the photographed documents that are circulating on social media sites, but we are not in a position to confirm or comment on any specific information they contain,” Rebecca Farmer, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told The Intercept.

The leak comes at a time when the conflict in Ukraine and ongoing tensions in the Middle East are becoming more closely linked. Iran has emerged as a major supplier of drone technology to the Russian military, while Iranian state media sources recently said that Iran has closed a deal to purchase advanced fighter aircraft from Russia.

Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, Israel has been loath to become directly involved against Russia. It has sought to maintain communication channels with Russian forces in Syria as it carries out strikes against Iranian targets in that country, and has also generally welcomed the Russian presence there as a bulwark against Iranian influence. This understanding has come under increasing stress as Russian and Iranian ties have grown closer since the Ukraine war — something alluded to in the classified document.

Israel’s concern about Iranian influence in the region has fed an increasing appetite to confront Iran militarily, particularly after diplomatic efforts were torpedoed along with the nuclear deal. The U.S. has seemed quite willing to continue to co-sign this bellicose approach, even in the likelihood that a future war would draw in the U.S. as well. On Monday, CENTCOM announced the deployment of a nuclear submarine, this one armed with guided missiles and in the Mediterranean Sea. It was widely understood to be a threatening message for Iran — to which Iran promptly responded by accusing the U.S. of “warmongering.” It is extremely rare for the Navy to disclose the location of its submarines, whose stealth is paramount.

At an event in Jerusalem this February, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides also appeared to give Israel a green light to take steps against Iran with U.S. support. “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran],” Nides said. “And we’ve got their back.”

The post Leaked Pentagon Document Shows How Ukraine War Is Bleeding Into Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

Israeli Settlers Move on the Holiest Site in Jerusalem — Setting Off a New Crisis

Murtaza Hussain — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 14:55:21 +0000

A woman performs the third Friday prayer during the month of Ramadan at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem on April 7, 2023.

Photo: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Recent scenes of Israeli security forces beating Palestinians inside Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque have put the Middle East on the brink of a major conflict yet again. In response to Israeli raids on the site, videos of which inflamed the region and generated international condemnation, Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon fired rocket barrages at Israeli territory. The fusillade from Lebanon was the largest since the 2006 Israeli invasion of that country.

Following Thursday’s missile attacks, the Israeli government struck back, bombing targets in both Gaza and Lebanon and announcing a new military operation, codenamed “Strong Hand.”

The conflict may seem like just another turn in an endless cycle of violence, but its proximate cause reflects a novel crisis, if only for its depth: the increasing radicalization of the Israeli settler movement, and its political patronage by the Netanyahu government.

BREAKING: Israeli police brutally beat Palestinian worshippers inside al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan. pic.twitter.com/IiFU10qI5c

— IMEU (@theIMEU) April 4, 2023

In recent weeks, radical settler groups issued calls to conduct an animal sacrifice at the site of Al Aqsa, or the Temple Mount as it is known to Jews.

Understanding the implications of such an act requires some historical background. The site that presently hosts the Al Aqsa Mosque was once home to the temple that was the center of the ancient Jewish religion and was demolished following a failed revolt against the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago. Centuries later, after the Romans and Persians lost control of the region, the mosque that stands there was constructed by conquering Arabs. Today, some Jewish extremists in Israel seek to reassert control over the site and rebuild the temple anew — demolishing the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, in the process.

This threat, however arcane it may sound to secular ears, has driven tensions at the site for decades. When British rule in Palestine ended in 1947, the holy sites were supposed to be shared as part of an internationalized Jerusalem. After the 1948 war that accompanied the founding of Israel, however, the city was split between Jewish Israelis in the west and Jordanian control in East Jerusalem, including over the Old City.

The Israeli government took control of the site following 1967’s Six Day War with its Arab neighbors. Since then, Israel has overseen a fragile status quo wherein it controls the city of Jerusalem yet allows Palestinians to maintain a limited degree of sovereignty over Al Aqsa itself. This arrangement has come under pressure in recent years, as Palestinians have alleged that Israel has plans to assert direct control over the site.

The annual observance of Ramadan has become a regular scene of violence at Al Aqsa, as Israeli security forces routinely raid the site to evict Palestinians, often using gratuitous violence in the process.

These tensions have burst to the fore yet again this year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his government has no plans to change the status quo at Al Aqsa. Yet his government includes leaders from some of the most extreme settler groups in Israel. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the national security and finance ministers, respectively, are members of settler movements who pursue a radical religious agenda. Both men have been at the vanguard of demanding changes in the delicate arrangement that currently governs Al Aqsa.

The presence of such figures in the government appears to have emboldened the extremists. Several settlers in recent days were arrested by Israeli police in Jerusalem on suspicion of bringing livestock to the site in order to conduct a sacrifice there. Even though most mainstream Jewish groups oppose efforts to reestablish the temple, this politically ascendant fringe has, since Netanyahu brought its adherents into his government, gained more legitimacy and confidence than at any time in history.

In response to the threats by settlers to conduct an animal sacrifice at Al Aqsa — an act that would be considered equal parts desecration and threat — Palestinians have been holding nightly prayer vigils inside the mosque. The purpose of these vigils is partly to commemorate Ramadan, and partly to defend against what many view as a prelude to a later destruction of the mosque that stands there.

Nighttime prayer vigils are common during Ramadan and the attack on worshippers by Israeli security forces wielding batons and tear gas, documented by Palestinians themselves in harrowing cellphone footage, has generated widespread anger. During the day, Israeli police were again videoed, appearing to gratuitously push Muslims worshipping outdoors off their prayer rugs. That evening, the Israeli police raids came again to the doorstep of the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Israeli soldiers push Palestinians off their prayer rugs mid-prayer.

This comes a day after Israeli police brutally beat Palestinian worshippers inside al Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites for Muslims, during Ramadan. pic.twitter.com/JnfVwWHVoW

— IMEU (@theIMEU) April 5, 2023

Although the site has a religious value, it is also a nationalistic symbol to both Israelis and Palestinians. For the latter, it also represents one of the few pieces of Jerusalem that they can still call their own. “Palestinians also have very earthly reasons to fear even limited changes to the status quo,” the political commentator Matthew Petti recently wrote about the subject. “Al-Aqsa is one of the few Arab-run public spaces in the Old City of Jerusalem, an island of Palestinian sovereignty in a sea of Israeli-annexed territory.”

It remains to be seen how far the current military escalation will continue. The Netanyahu government has been embattled by domestic protests in recent weeks and may benefit from the distraction of a foreign war. Yet a larger conflict with Palestinian groups that generates unintended consequences, including drawing in more powerful actors like the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, would risk raising the tempo of the conflict beyond a point where the Israeli government can retain control.

The Second Intifada was triggered by a visit by a right-wing extremist politician, Ariel Sharon, to the Temple Mount. As violence ramps up in the region, it seems as though the Israeli government has once again tripped over an issue that has been a red line in the region for decades. The consequences this time could be more dire than in years past. While Israeli governments have occasionally sought out of prudence to police the most extreme members of the settler movement, this time the sound is coming from inside the house.

The post Israeli Settlers Move on the Holiest Site in Jerusalem — Setting Off a New Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

Pro-Israel Fund Manager Invested $500M in Israeli Arms Firm. Now Activist Investors Want Answers.

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 17:40:50 +0000

The Canadian bank that holds the largest foreign share of an Israeli weapons manufacturer is coming under scrutiny from human rights groups over its stake in the company.

Last fall, Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest banks, was reported by Bloomberg to have become a major shareholder in Elbit Systems, Israel’s premier defense contractor. On Tuesday, at a shareholder meeting, a representative of the ethical investing activist group Eko delivered a petition on behalf of 12,000 signatories calling on Scotiabank to divest from the firm.

“Since the petition started in October, we have asked Scotiabank to divest from Elbit Systems. This is a company whose weapons have caused countless civilian deaths,” said Angus Wong, the senior campaign manager from Eko, the group formerly known as SumOfUs. “The question is not why they own shares — it is why they are the biggest foreign shareholder in Elbit. We demand to know why Scotiabank is investing hundreds of millions of dollars of funds from middle-class families in this company.”

A representative of Scotiabank at the meeting did not address questions about Elbit’s human rights record or the large scale of Scotiabank’s investment, Wong, who delivered the petition, told The Intercept. At the Scotiabank shareholder meeting, a representative of the bank characterized all fund decisions as being driven by “the interests of shareholders.”

Scotiabank’s gigantic stake in Elbit Systems, estimated to be about $500 million, dwarfs that of its two larger domestic competitors, TD Bank and Royal Bank of Canada. The two other banks hold around $3 million in shares, combined, in the company.

“1832’s investment in Elbit Systems is unusually large for a bank its size,” said Adriana DiSilvestro, a research consultant focused on corporate accountability. “It’s unusual that an asset manager of this size would own that percentage of outstanding shares of a company unless they have some sort of strategic interest.”

The investment in Elbit comes through Scotiabank’s asset management arm, 1832 Asset Management, and a particular subdivision known as Dynamic Funds, several of whose funds are run by a fund manager and executive named David Fingold. (Scotiabank declined to comment, and Fingold did not respond to a request for comment.)

Fingold is a prolific investor in controversial Israeli firms: As of recent reporting funds under his management had also taken a roughly 2 percent stake in Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank, an Israeli company on a United Nations list of firms profiting from Israeli settlements, and 8 percent of Strauss Group, a conglomerate that co-owns Sabra and has been previously criticized for its vocal public support of the Israeli military. The funds that Fingold manages accounted for the entirety of 1832 Asset Management’s stake in these companies.

Fingold’s Israel Investments

While it’s not possible to attribute Fingold’s eyebrow-raising investments in companies like Elbit to a particular ideological stance, his social media postings consist heavily of links to pro-Israel influencers and websites. Many of his posts reshares content from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and pro-Israel figures like Hananya Naftali, including posts characterizing Palestinians as supporters of terrorism and Nazism.

In late 2021, Fingold also shared an article on Twitter referring to Ben and Jerry’s board of directors chief Anuradha Mittal as “antisemite of the year” — a reaction to the company’s announcement that it would not be selling its products in Israeli settlements. (Following The Intercept’s request for comment, Fingold made his Twitter account private.)

Ben and Jerry’s boycott announcement coincided with 1832 Asset Management’s divestment from large financial positions in the brand’s parent company, Unilever. The company became a target of widespread divestment efforts from state investment funds across the U.S. in 2021 over Ben and Jerry’s stance on the conflict.

Publicly available information shows that 1832 Asset Management held nearly 700,000 shares of Unilever on March 31, 2021, a large position that the firm sold off all the way down to zero by September of the following year. The most recent update to the firm’s position shows a smaller position of roughly 67,000 shares. The breakdown of positions does not indicate whether it was Dynamic Funds trading that accounted for the sell-off.

In a 2019 interview with an Israeli financial news outlet, Fingold explained that his investments in Israel were outsized compared to the MSCI World Index, which serves as a guideline for how mutual funds should distribute their investments across various global economies. Some funds hew to the index’s weighting, but Fingold said Dynamic did not.

“We came into Israel as early as 2002, and we have had holdings here for a long time,” Fingold said in the interview. “Most firms can’t invest beyond Israel’s weight in the [MSCI] indices, but we don’t care about Israel’s weight, and Israel accounts for a larger share of our investment portfolio than its proportion in the indices.”

Socially Irresponsible Investing

While socially responsible investing has become an attractive marketing tool for financial institutions, it has not translated into much in the way of altering the balance sheets of major firms.

Scotiabank prominently touts its “four pillars for responsible banking” and boasts of its listing on socially responsible investment indices. The company also touts its “allyship” to various marginalized communities in public-facing marketing materials and has identified “advancing human rights” as a core environmental, social, and governance objective in investment decisions.

This saccharine language has not impeded it from holding a major stake in a weapons manufacturer accused of facilitating terrible human rights abuses.

Elbit Systems has been under scrutiny from activists for years over its involvement in arming Israeli military units operating in the occupied Palestinian territories. The company is a major developer of drone technology for the Israeli military, as well as weapons systems, munitions, and surveillance tools.

Drones developed by Elbit have been involved in carrying out attacks that have killed civilians. A notorious 2014 strike in the Gaza Strip that killed four children playing on a beach was reported to have been carried out with the help of an Elbit-designed surveillance drone.

Activists have charged that surveillance technology developed by Elbit has also been sold to regimes like Ethiopia, which have deployed them to target dissidents and journalists both domestically and abroad.

Several major European banks and pension funds have divested from Elbit over the past decade due to the use of its technology in the occupied West Bank. The company has also come under fire for its alleged involvement in the production of cluster munitions blamed for causing indiscriminate harm to civilians in war zones.

Last spring, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund banned investment in Elbit due to a subsidiary’s alleged manufacturing of cluster bombs. The move followed similar steps taken by Norwegian and Swedish government-run funds, as well as the London-based bank HSBC, to divest from Elbit over broader human rights concerns.

As the security situation in the occupied Palestinian territories continues to deteriorate, Elbit has remained a subject of ethical investment concerns.

The petition submitted by activists at this week’s shareholder meeting for Scotiabank is only the latest salvo in a growing campaign against Western financial institutions’ involvement with Elbit.

Human rights activists say simply declaring that fund decisions are based solely on returns does not go far enough to address ethical concerns by many investors.

“This is a weapons company, and the situation in Israel makes putting money in Elbit Systems a potentially profitable investment,” said Ward Warmerdam, an economic researcher with the Netherlands-based ethical investing research firm Profundo. “But it should concern consumers that funds they have invested are being directed towards a company that is profiting from the occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

The post Pro-Israel Fund Manager Invested $500M in Israeli Arms Firm. Now Activist Investors Want Answers. appeared first on The Intercept.

Elon Musk’s Twitter Widens Its Censorship of Modi’s Critics

Ryan Grim — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:16:16 +0000

Two months after teaming up with the Indian government to censor a BBC documentary on human rights abuses by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Twitter is yet again collaborating with India to impose an extraordinarily broad crackdown on speech.

Last week, the Indian government imposed an internet blackout across the northern state of Punjab, home to 30 million people, as it conducted a manhunt for a local Sikh nationalist leader, Amritpal Singh. The shutdown paralyzed internet and SMS communications in Punjab (some Indian users told The Intercept that the shutdown was targeted at mobile devices).

While Punjab police detained hundreds of suspected followers of Singh, Twitter accounts from over 100 prominent politicians, activists, and journalists in India and abroad have been blocked in India at the request of the government. On Monday, the account of the BBC News Punjabi was also blocked — the second time in a few months that the Indian government has used Twitter to throttle BBC services in its country. The Twitter account for Jagmeet Singh (no relation to Amritpal), a leading progressive Sikh Canadian politician and critic of Modi, was also not viewable inside India.

Under the leadership of owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has promised to reduce censorship and allow a broader range of voices on the platform. But after The Intercept reported on Musk’s censorship of the BBC documentary in January, as well as Twitter’s intervention against high-profile accounts who shared it, Musk said that he had been too busy to focus on the issue. “First I’ve heard,” Musk wrote on January 25. “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.”

Two months later, he still hasn’t found the time. Musk had previously pledged to step down as Twitter CEO, but no public progress has been made since his announcement.

While Modi’s suppression has focused on Punjab, Twitter’s collaboration has been nationwide, restricting public debate about the government’s aggressive move. Critics say that the company is failing the most basic test of allowing the platform to operate freely under conditions of government pressure.

“In India, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies have today become handmaidens to authoritarianism,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. “They routinely agree to requests not just to block social media accounts not just originating in India, but all over the world.”

Punjab was the site of a brutal government counterinsurgency campaign in the ’80s and ’90s that targeted a separatist movement that sought to create an independent state for Sikhs. More recently, Punjab was the site of massive protests by farmers groups against bills to deregulate agricultural markets. The power struggles between the government and resistance movements have fueled repressive conditions on the ground.

“Punjab is a de facto police state,” said Sukhman Dhami, co-director of Ensaaf, a human rights organization focused on Punjab. “Despite being one of the tiniest states in India, it has one of the highest density of police personnel, stations and checkpoints — as is typical of many of India’s minority-majority states — as well as a huge number of military encampments because it shares a border with Pakistan and Kashmir.”

“Punjab is a de facto police state.”

Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has justified its efforts to arrest followers of Amritpal Singh by claiming that he was promoting separatism and “disturbing communal harmony” in recent speeches.

In late February, Singh’s followers sacked a Punjab police station in an attempt to free allies held there. The Indian media reported that the attack triggered the government’s response.

In the void left by Twitter blocks and the internet shutdown across much of the region, Indian news outlets, increasingly themselves under the thumb of the ruling government and its allies, have filled the airwaves with speculation on Singh’s whereabouts. On Tuesday, Indian news reports claimed that CCTV footage appeared to show Singh walking around Delhi masked and without a turban.

The Modi administration has told the public a story of a dangerous, radical preacher who must be stopped at any cost. Efforts by dissidents to contextualize Modi’s crackdown within his increasingly intolerant and authoritarian nationalism have been smothered by Twitter.

“People within Punjab are unable to reach one another, and members of the diaspora are unable to reach their family members, friends, and colleagues,” Sethi told The Intercept. “India leads the world in terms of government imposed blackouts and regularly imposes them as a part of mass censorship and disinformation campaigns. Human rights defenders documenting atrocities in Punjab are blocked, and activists in the diaspora raising information about what is happening on the ground are blocked as well.”

Modi’s government tried to throttle Twitter even before Musk’s takeover. Twitter India staff have been threatened with arrest over refusals to block government critics and faced other forms of pressure inside the country. At the time that Musk took charge of the company, it had a mere 20 percent compliance rate with Indian government requests. Following massive layoffs that reduced 90 percent of Twitter India’s staff, the platform appears to have become far more obliging in the face of government pressure, as its actions to censor its critics now show.

Musk, who has consistently characterized his acquisition of Twitter as a triumph of free speech, has framed his compliance as mere deference to the will of governments in countries where Twitter operates. “Like I said, my preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates,” Musk tweeted last year. “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed.”

“The main thing that the Indian government is trying to accomplish is to protect the reputation of Modi.”

Critics say that Musk’s policy of deferring to government requests is dangerous and irresponsible, as it empowers governments to suppress speech they find inconvenient. And a request from the executive branch is not necessarily the same thing as an order from a court; under previous ownership, Twitter regularly fought such requests from government officials, including those in the Modi administration.

As the manhunt for Singh and his supporters continues, large protests have broken out in foreign countries with large Punjabi diasporas, including a protest in London that resulted in the vandalism of the Indian Embassy. Despite this backlash, Modi appears to be pressing ahead with internet shutdowns.

“The main thing that the Indian government is trying to accomplish is to protect the reputation of Modi,” said Dhami. “They have a zero tolerance for anything that harms his reputation, and what triggers them most of all is a sense that his reputation is being attacked.”

The post Elon Musk’s Twitter Widens Its Censorship of Modi’s Critics appeared first on The Intercept.

After Tide of Memoirs From Americans, an Iraqi Journalist Offers Inside Account of War’s Destruction

Murtaza Hussain — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 10:00:36 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Iran Won the U.S. War in Iraq

Murtaza Hussain — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:22:02 +0000

In January 2015, as Islamic State militants were waging an offensive across Iraq and Syria, an Iranian intelligence officer known among his colleagues by the code name Boroujerdi sat down for a meeting with an important official: then-Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

The meeting, held at Abadi’s office in Iraq’s presidential palace in Baghdad, took place “without the presence of a secretary or a third person,” according to a report about the discussion contained in a leaked archive of cables from Iran’s shadowy Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

Abadi was a member of Iraq’s exiled political class, mostly Shia, who had returned to take power following the U.S. invasion. The two men discussed a range of topics, including the threat of ISIS to the Iraqi state, the role of foreign powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the region, and, finally, the position of the West. On at least one point, they agreed: Despite the threat of ISIS and other regional powers, the political conditions wrought by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein had created an opportunity for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allied Iraqi elites to “take advantage of this situation,” according to the Ministry of Intelligence and Security report.

Twenty years after U.S. troops first invaded Iraq, the classified Iranian intelligence documents, which were leaked to The Intercept and first reported in a series of stories that were published beginning in 2019, shed light on the important question of who actually won the war. One victor emerges clearly from the hundreds of pages of classified documents: Iran.

Today, Iran enjoys privileged access to Iraq’s political system and economy, while the United States has been reduced to a minor player. Iraqis themselves remain fractiously divided; many of their own political elites are close allies of Iran. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security cables, which were written between 2013 and 2015, the peak of the international campaign against ISIS, provide no shortage of examples of the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq. While helping train and organize Iraqi security forces who are ideologically tied to the Islamic Republic, activities documented at length in the cables, Iranian officials had also been routinely involved in promoting favored Iraqi politicians to important roles in the Iraqi government to protect Iran’s economic and political interests. One classified 2014 report contained in the trove of Iranian cables described then-future Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi as having a “special relationship” with Iran and named a laundry list of other Iraqi cabinet members who were close with the Islamic Republic — often people who had spent years exiled in Iran. The cables discuss how these close relationships have benefitted Iran, including by having sympathetic Iraqi officials give Iran access to Iraqi airspace and vital transportation connections with their allies in Syria.

The privileged conversation between Boroujerdi and Abadi was being replicated at that time at many levels of Iraqi government and society. In the cables, Iranian officials documented their work to solidify business and security interests in Iraq while obtaining oil and development contracts in the northern Kurdish regions and water purification projects in the south, the latter won with the help of a $16 million bribe paid to an Iraqi member of Parliament, according to one of the documents. The cables also show how former Iraqi military officials, including individuals trained or supported by the U.S. during the occupation, had been pressed into the service of Iranian intelligence, with one typical operative described as being forced to “collaborate to save himself.”

The war’s benefits to Iran were not solely political or security based either. Iraq is home to many sacred sites of Shia Islam, which, as the cables note, have opened up to Iranian tourism and influence. The documents in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive mostly provide individual reports of conversations and intelligence activities carried out by Iranian operatives inside Iraq. Yet overall, they depict Iran’s far-reaching political, security, and even cultural influence over Iraqi society in the vacuum left by the U.S. invasion.

This picture of Iranian ascendance is not only reflected in that country’s own intelligence documents. A massive two-volume study published in 2019 by the U.S. Army War College came to a similar conclusion, stating that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the conflict. The study is the most comprehensive look yet at the costs and consequences of the war from a U.S. military perspective. Some of those costs are obvious and well known: Thousands of Americans were killed in combat after an ill-defined mission to find weapons of mass destruction devolved into a counterinsurgency campaign and civil war. But although most of the burden of the war was borne by the relatively small number of Americans who directly took part, the war had broader impacts on American society that continue to be felt today.

“In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”

“The Iraq War has the potential to be one of the most consequential conflicts in American history. It shattered a long-standing political tradition against pre-emptive wars,” the War College authors wrote. “In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”

Iraqis themselves have suffered greatly from the war; millions have been killed, wounded, or displaced as a result of the invasion and the subsequent civil conflict. The emergence of the Sunni Islamist extremist group ISIS, which Iran’s intelligence documents discuss at length, was itself the product of the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, including abuses by rogue Iranian-backed militias. In the same 2015 conversation between Boroujerdi and former Prime Minister Abadi, the Iranian intelligence officer opined that “today, the Sunnis find themselves in the worst possible circumstances and have lost their self-confidence,” adding that they “are vagrants, their cities are destroyed, and an unclear future awaits them.”

The miserable condition of Iraqi Sunnis had worried others within Iran’s intelligence establishment, who warned that many Sunnis, reeling from massacres by Iraqi government security forces and militias, had been driven not merely to welcome ISIS, but also other Iranian enemies as well.

“The policies of Iran inside Iraq have given legitimacy for the Americans to return to Iraq,” one Iranian intelligence officer lamented. “People and parties who were fighting against America from the Sunni side now are wishing that not only America, but even Israel could come and rescue them from Iran.”

In the end, ISIS was destroyed as the result of a tacit coalition between the Iraqi government, the United States, Iran, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, which combined to fight the group and regain control of its territories. Today, Iran remains the most powerful outside player inside Iraq. Although it has achieved a goal longed for since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s — to wield power in Iraq and incorporate its Shia-majority areas into Iran’s sphere of influence — Iran’s victory has proven, in many ways, an unhappy one.

During protests against government corruption in Iraq in 2019, Iraqis often blamed Iran and its allies, along with the United States, for the parlous state of the country. In 2020, Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a major architect of Iran’s policy in Iraq whose role is documented at length in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archive, was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad’s airport, following tit-for-tat attacks between Iranian-backed militias and U.S. troops in the country.

Despite relative peace following the defeat of ISIS, Iraq today remains a powder keg with widespread unemployment, environmental degradation, and poverty that its ruling elites, widely denounced by Iraqis as kleptocrats and puppets of foreign countries, have been unable or unwilling to address. Two decades after the first U.S. troops invaded Iraq, Iran is facing its own challenges with internal instability and the economic impact of a U.S.-led international sanctions campaign that has destroyed its economy.

Yet when it comes to the shadow war between Iran and the United States in Iraq, Iranian elites likely view themselves as having prevailed — at a steep price to themselves, Americans, and Iraqis alike.

The post How Iran Won the U.S. War in Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

“Trauma Never Goes Away”: As America Forgets, Iraq War Stays With U.S. Veterans

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 14:36:42 +0000

Tim McLaughlin commanded a Marine Corps tank platoon that took part in some of the earliest fighting of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Like many veterans, the experience left him with post-traumatic stress and conflicted feelings about the war. In an attempt to process his experiences, after his service, McLaughlin left the U.S. and moved to Bosnia, where he lived for nine months in a home looking over the old city of Sarajevo — a place that, like Iraq, had been the site of terrible violence.

“I just wanted to be able to go to a country that had experienced mass trauma and to see how people dealt with it,” McLaughlin said. “What I learnt is that for people who experience it, trauma never goes away.”

Twenty years since U.S. troops first invaded, the U.S. war in Iraq has become a faded memory to many Americans. For Iraqis themselves, the consequences of the war are still an unavoidable part of their daily lives. But trauma also lingers for a group of Americans unlikely to forget the war as long as they live: former U.S. service members. More than a million Americans are estimated to have served in Iraq over the course of more than a decade, mostly in noncombat roles. Alongside millions of Iraqis who were killed or displaced by the conflict, thousands of Americans died or were wounded in Iraq.

For many veterans, the war has been the defining event of their lives. Yet it has been difficult to reconcile the terrible sacrifices they made during the conflict with the unhappy outcome or the false narratives that initiated it.

“The idea of going to war is horrible. When people are talking about it on TV, they are talking about something that is not real to them. When it becomes real to you, it stays real to you your whole life,” said McLaughlin. “For me, the experience was violent, stressful, and sad. I truly believe that we were the best in the world at our job and what we did. Unfortunately, the job of the Marine Corps was killing people and destroying stuff.”

In the years after the conflict, McLaughlin struggled with what he had experienced in Iraq. He later published his diaries, documenting the violence and terror of the early days of the invasion. He has also grappled with the tragic nature of the war for Iraqis, who, due to the decision to invade by the Bush administration, were forced to suffer for the September 11 attacks despite having no connection to them.

“I didn’t decide to invade Iraq. I have no negative feelings towards Iraqis at all. The people I served with who are alive, I love and adore. The people who are dead and gone, I love and adore,” said McLaughlin. “Where I do get frustrated is with the people who chose to do this. I just had a job. The people in Iraq were just living their lives. I do get frustrated with the people who made this decision. I mean, you sent us to invade the wrong country.”

An Iraqi family reacts after three family members, innocent civilians, were shot and killed by U.S. Marines in an incident in Baghdad, Iraq, on April 9, 2003. (Photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Hell for Life

The initial claim that launched the war, which was that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat to the United States and its allies, was disproved early on in the conflict. What Americans and Iraqis were then left to experience was a slow, grinding military occupation and insurgency, fought without a clear purpose, which gradually devolved into a civil war that left millions dead, wounded, or displaced.

At the end of all the bloodshed, Saddam Hussein and his family were gone, but life in Iraq today remains difficult for many who have had to deal with the aftermath of the war (and there are still approximately 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq as trainers and advisers to the Iraqi military). Many Americans who had joined the military out of a sense of national duty following September 11 found themselves killing and dying in a war against people who had had nothing to do with the attacks.

“For people who had enlisted in the aftermath of 9/11 with the intention of avenging the attacks, to then end up in Iraq — which had very little or nothing to do with it — it is very difficult to reconcile,” said Gregory Daddis, a former U.S. Army colonel and veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom who later served as a military historian. “You have veterans now dealing with their experiences and trying to answer the question of whether their sacrifices were worth it. With wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, it is very difficult to answer that in a positive way.”

In addition to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the war, it is estimated that roughly 4,500 U.S. service members died in Iraq. Many thousands more were wounded, often with debilitating injuries that have required long-term care and made a return to normal life impossible. Despite whatever support they may receive from the federal government, the catastrophic wartime injuries that many Americans in Iraq suffered has been beyond what even attentive medical service can heal. Some are still dying today as a result of wounds suffered during combat. While the war may be disappearing from the memory of Americans, these injuries and traumas are a daily reminder of the legacy of the Iraq War to those who experienced it firsthand.

Dennis Fritz served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years before resigning in the early days of the war and spending over a decade working at the Warrior Clinic at Walter Reed Military Hospital, helping with the recovery of service members wounded in Iraq and other conflicts. The experience of dealing with a constant stream of grievously wounded service members has fed a sense of anger on behalf of soldiers manipulated by political leaders who made the decision to invade Iraq.

“I’m upset about it to this day because our service members were used as pawns.”

“Most Americans don’t even understand that war is real when they are watching it on television. It is only when they come to Walter Reed to see a family member who lost a limb or had PTSD that they realize,” said Fritz, who retired from the Air Force at the rank of master sergeant and now does writing and public advocacy on behalf of veterans in favor of military restraint. “We have people who suffer wounds that mean it’s going to be hell for them for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, as we now know, Iraq was no threat to us. I’m upset about it to this day because our service members were used as pawns.”

Many of those responsible for the Iraq War have gone on to enjoy rewarding careers as senior policymakers in Washington or have cashed in on their time in government by taking well-paid roles in the private sector. Meanwhile, the trail of suffering left behind by the conflict continues to claim victims, both in the Middle East, where the consequences of the war are still felt by millions, and in the towns and cities of the United States, where the physical and psychological wounds of the war are still quietly carried by many veterans.

“I know two people who were officers during the war and are going through a hard time with PTSD right now and the guilt that they feel because their soldiers lost their lives,” Fritz said. “But it’s not because of them that they died; it’s because of the political leaders who sent them to war on a lie. They’re ones who should have PTSD — but they don’t. They just go off to write books and get themselves lucrative jobs.”

The post “Trauma Never Goes Away”: As America Forgets, Iraq War Stays With U.S. Veterans appeared first on The Intercept.

The Key Factor in the Saudi-Iran Deal: Absolutely No U.S. Involvement

Murtaza Hussain — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:00:53 +0000

Ever since it pushed aside colonial Britain and France, the United States has prided itself on being the dominant outside power in the Middle East. That lofty image was shaken this past week by the surprise announcement that Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner, and Iran, a longtime enemy, had negotiated a normalization agreement on their own to restore diplomatic ties. The final meeting to conclude the agreement took place in the Chinese capital of Beijing.

The symbolism of the signatures being put on paper with the support of the preeminent U.S. adversary China without an American presence starkly underlined the failures of an approach to the Middle East that prioritized belligerence and confrontation over cooperation and impartiality. Few can deny that U.S. policy has ended up playing a destabilizing role in regional geopolitics.

For years, hawks have argued that U.S. military and political drawdowns from the Middle East risk generating a chaotic vacuum. What unfolded in Beijing appears to be the inverse. Rather than dissuading conflict, the American role as an enforcer for certain powers against others has incentivized them to pursue policies like military aggression and even apartheid out of a sense of assurance that an outside superpower will always have their back.

The scene of two Middle Eastern rivals negotiating peace on their own also strengthens the arguments of noninterventionist foreign policy advocates. These figures have long argued that the U.S.’s presence itself has been an accelerant for regional conflicts. In the end, an increasing reluctance on the part of the U.S. to get more directly involved in the region, rather than fomenting chaos, incentivized local powers to sort things out on their own — exactly what are now seeing with the Iran-Saudi deal.

For all the challenges that a post-American world may entail, U.S. hegemony in the Middle East has been an undeniably disastrous project both for Americans and especially the people of the region. By engaging in direct violence, as well as enabling its aggressive client states, the U.S. helped turn the Middle East into a nightmare of instability. Yet as U.S. influence recedes and other countries adapt to its absence, a more sustainable status quo may be ready to emerge.

Saudi Arabia is a signal example. In years past, the erratic Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, seemed eager for war with Iran, publicly vowing to take the proxy conflict between the powers directly into Iranian territory and comparing Iran’s supreme leader to Hitler. These provocative statements were undergirded by an implicit assumption that the U.S. would be doing the heavy lifting in a future war and ensure Saudi Arabia’s defense.

Yet, in 2019, after years of the Saudi government’s feting of President Donald Trump, following an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil facilities, many Saudis were shocked to find that the U.S. government did not retaliate on their behalf.

The realization after the Abqaiq incident that Saudi Arabia was on its own and would never enjoy Israel-like security guarantees in Washington, painful as it may have been, ultimately helped spur years of peace talks between Iranian and Saudi officials in Iraq and Oman that have now reached their conclusion in Beijing.

The Saudis may have preferred to see a destructive U.S. war against Iran so long as they were provided their own American security umbrella to shield them from the blowback — a classic moral hazard. With that prospect off the table, peace gradually became the more attractive option.

“When Trump didn’t retaliate for the Abqaiq attack, that sent shockwaves throughout the region. If the U.S. had continued to show a willingness to fight for Saudi Arabia and uphold Saudi security, MBS never would’ve gone down path of diplomacy in first place,” said Trita Parsi, president of the D.C.-based realist foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “This shows how U.S. military power has actually become an obstacle to security and stability in the region. As long as MBS felt that he could hide behind U.S. military power, that was more attractive to him than going down the difficult road of diplomacy with Iran.”

“This shows how U.S. military power has actually become an obstacle to security and stability in the region.”

Saudi Arabia and Iran still have serious obstacles to overcome to achieve a lasting détente. The normalization deal has a two-month implementation period before the return of ambassadors to their respective capitals, allowing time for outside parties, including Israel, which has objected loudly to the agreement, to act as spoilers. The two countries remain on opposite sides of the conflict in Yemen, which is still unresolved and poses a serious security threat to Saudi Arabia, while Iran is facing domestic unrest that has humiliated its government and thrown its economy into turmoil.

The deal includes a mutual agreement by the parties to stay out of each other’s domestic affairs — a clause that will also require some major course corrections. Saudi Arabia, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, has indicated it will modify the coverage of Iran International, a Saudi-funded Persian-language television station that has become a favored outlet for anti-regime Iranian political activists, as well as, allegedly, Israeli intelligence.

Despite these challenges, if the agreement between them holds, it would put Saudi Arabia outside of the firing line of a possible U.S.-Israeli campaign to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. Following the U.S. decision to violate the Iran nuclear deal — or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the JCPOA — the likelihood of armed conflict is looking higher than ever.

Saudi Arabia’s agreement with Iran appears to be an attempt to stay out of the fray in case a war comes to pass. Yet it also signals the U.S.’s own relative isolation in the region, outside of its lockstep relationship with Israel, as it presses forward with a campaign to isolate Iran that even its own partners have begun to balk at.

“The Saudi-Iran agreement comes at a time when there is widespread acceptance that the JCPOA is not going to be revived and is effectively dead,” said Kristian Ulrichsen, the Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The Biden administration is running of patience with Iran and its statements are becoming increasingly hawkish. But China moving in now and successfully engaging with the main regional antagonists suggests that the rest of the region does not share any U.S. or Israeli desire for escalation.”

U.S. officials have said time and again that they will not be turning attention away from the Middle East. Yet the country’s track record in the region has not been a good one.

Americans have suffered military casualties and terrorist blowback because of elite-driven interventions. The civilian population of the region has suffered more gravely — with millions killed, maimed, or displaced by American wars, immiserated under U.S. sanctions regimes, or repressed by U.S.-backed dictatorships and military occupations.

Now it seems like the U.S. may have exhausted its runway for pursuing similarly disastrous adventures in the future.

“The U.S. foreign policy establishment is not good at learning — it takes a lot of suffering, and sometimes killing and dying, for them to learn a lesson,” said Justin Logan, an expert at the Cato Institute. “If you look at the people involved in making U.S. policy for the region, many of them are still maximalists. But things have still improved, and we are not going to see a repeat of the Iraq War anytime soon.”

Although it cuts against the interests of a small yet vocal minority of D.C.-based hawks, a pivot from the region would be a welcome sign for many in the wake of years of military and diplomatic failures.

Recent farcical U.S. diplomatic agreements like the Abraham Accords did not entail any actual cessation of active hostilities and were largely based on U.S. concessions rather than any made by the involved parties. Unlike those deals, the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran represents a genuine diplomatic accomplishment in which two rival powers were convinced to make compromises in the name of peace.

The U.S.’s extreme stances on various issues have not done it any favors. On the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, the U.S. makes no secret of its slanted position. And on issues like the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. stance was erratic, violating the agreement shortly after it was signed. Outside powers like China have proven able to exploit the low bar of U.S. diplomatic performance in the region and position themselves as preferred mediators.

“In order to be able to serve as an effective mediator, you need to have a reputation of being fair. The U.S. has been clear that it does not want to be fair — it has not been impartial between Israelis and Palestinians, and it wouldn’t be impartial between Saudi Arabia and Iran,” said Parsi of the Quincy Institute. “This stance has disabled its ability to be an effective broker and peacemaker in the region. Now that other states are stepping into the vacuum to play that role, we are really going to start to see the costs of pursuing a policy that is explicitly perceived as biased.”

The Middle East is sufficiently far away from the U.S. that fomenting continued chaos through military interventions and abysmal diplomatic endeavors there may actually be politically acceptable in Washington. With rising powers taking a role in the region and the U.S. grappling with other challenges, a healthier status quo may be given space to emerge.

As Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud acknowledged after the announcement of the normalization deal with Iran, “The countries of the region share one fate.”

The post The Key Factor in the Saudi-Iran Deal: Absolutely No U.S. Involvement appeared first on The Intercept.

Two More Jan. 6 Capitol Rioters Have Fled Charges, Bringing Total to Six

Murtaza Hussain — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:55:51 +0000

Over two years since a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol, a small but growing number are on the run after being hit with federal charges for their involvement in the attack.

Federal authorities have launched an ongoing dragnet to identify and detain individuals wanted for crimes that took place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in the wake of Trump’s election loss. Despite these efforts, several of those identified on video footage remain at large, while others, who have been identified, arrested, and are facing charges, have decided to try their luck on the lam — including at least one man who has fled abroad to claim political asylum.

This week, the U.S. issued arrest warrants for accused Capitol rioters Olivia Michele Pollock and Joseph Daniel Hutchinson, who, while out on bail, slipped their ankle monitors and escaped days before they were supposed to go on trial. They became the fifth and sixth Capitol rioters to flee following their arrests — with four of those still on the loose.

Pollock’s brother, Jonathan Daniel Pollock, was one of those already on the run from charges related to his own involvement in the riot, where he is alleged to have shown up in combat gear and physically attacked several Capitol Police officers.

The Pollock siblings and Hutchinson, all of whose whereabouts are unknown, were seen in footage of January 6 wearing tactical vests and engaging in clashes with police, as the authorities attempted to keep rioters out of the Capitol building.

Over a thousand people have been charged for their involvement in the Capitol attack, according to Insider. More than half of those already pleaded guilty to federal charges.

A few of the people arrested were kept in pre-trial confinement awaiting trial, with allegations by some lawyers that their conditions have been punitive and entailed violations of their civil rights.

A few former fugitives who, like the Pollock siblings and Hutchinson, went on the run after being hit with charges have since turned themselves in or been recaptured by authorities. Among those are Michael Gareth Adams, a Virginia man seen on footage from the Capitol brandishing a skateboard, who turned himself in last month, and Darrell Neely of North Carolina, who was arrested last fall after failing to show up to court hearings and allegedly selling his house in anticipation of fleeing the country.

The most bizarre of all the Capitol riot fugitive stories, however, is the case of Evan Neumann. A January 6 participant who was seen helping shove a metal barricade past a line of police officers, Neumann fled the U.S. to Italy in the aftermath of the riot, traveling onward to Belarus where he applied for political asylum.

In the spring of 2022, Neumann was granted asylum by the dictatorial government of Alexander Lukashenko. Before his asylum came through, though, Neumann appeared on Belarusian state television for a special titled “Goodbye America,” where he claimed that the Capitol riot had been staged and that he faced torture if returned back to the United States.

Neumann had previously been charged in connection with an incident where he and his brother entered an evacuation area during a fire to retrieve personal possessions. A local news story about the 2018 incident referred to him as a “self-described libertarian.”

According to later reports, the incident, which, according to Neumann’s statements, involved guns being brandished by National Guard members at him and his brother, sowed a sense of grievance on his part against the government. Neumann acted as his own attorney in that case and eventually pleaded guilty in exchange for community service and a fine.

The U.S. government crackdown against participants in the Capitol riot continues, over two years after the attack.

The FBI has released photos of others it believes committed crimes during the attack to solicit public help in identifying and arresting culprits, while the riot itself and the fate of the arrested participants has become a political football between Democrats and some Republicans.

The defiance of those currently on the run from charges is unlikely to endear them further to law enforcement agencies and the Justice Department. Many rioters, including the notorious “QAnon Shaman,” have received significant prison terms already, and more such sentences are likely to come.

Neumann likely feared this outcome when he made the decision to sell his Mill Valley, California, home for $1.3 million and flee the country in 2021, rather than face trial for his role in the attack.

“They added my picture to the FBI’s most wanted list of criminals, asking for the public’s help to identify me. I knew I would be identified immediately,” Neumann said, according to a transcript of his Belarusian television segment. “So the first thing I did was to leave my place.”

The post Two More Jan. 6 Capitol Rioters Have Fled Charges, Bringing Total to Six appeared first on The Intercept.

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