The Intercept

The Ejection of Tucker Carlson Is a Classic “Reverse Ferret” by Rupert Murdoch

Peter Maass — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:00:54 +0000

It’s been a lifetime since Fox News offloaded Tucker Carlson, and when I say a lifetime, I mean six days.

It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Carlson was fired because he used the C-word. Carlson was fired because he prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Fox despised him.

That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.

In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”

One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenoweth wrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused to back policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.

That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his son Lachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson even dined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned just a few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.

This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.

Protesters outside Fox News HQ in the wake of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and the firing of Fox’s anchor Tucker Carlson on April 25, 2023.

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelter explained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on his second book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”

That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPR reported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.

The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.

It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.

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Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From Fox News

Peter Maass — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 21:16:29 +0000

Lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems talk to reporters outside the Leonard Williams Justice Center following a settlement with Fox News in Delaware Superior Court on April 18, 2023 in Wilmington, Del.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Will private equity save American democracy?

That question, which has lurked behind the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News, was answered today in an unsurprising fashion: no.

Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement just moments before opening arguments were set to begin in the Delaware trial. A jury had been selected, and everyone was preparing for what seemed likely to be a six-week trial that would scrutinize Fox’s broadcasting of false conspiracy theories that Dominion machines stole votes from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox.

The settlement is not a total shocker. Just days ago, there was a flurry of speculation that Fox wanted to settle, with the goal of avoiding a court’s verdict that it had lied with malice when it aired false accusations — from its hosts and guests like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani — that Dominion had tried to rig the presidential election.

The settlement is unlikely to be welcomed by Fox critics who believed that a guilty verdict would serve a mortal blow to the network’s reputation. The idea was that Fox, on the ropes, should not be allowed to slip away by writing a settlement check and mumbling an insincere apology. As a headline from The New Republic pleaded amid the settlement rumors a few days ago, “Don’t Settle, Dominion! Drag Fox News Across the Coals.” It argued that with a guilty verdict, “we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.”

Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest. It is a for-profit company owned by a small private equity firm.

But Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest or liberal magazines. It is a for-profit company owned by Staple Street Capital, a small private equity firm. Staple Street has fewer than 50 employees and claims $900 million of assets under management (a modest amount in its industry). It was founded in 2009 by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and Stephen D. Owens, who previously worked at Carlyle Group and Cerberus Capital Management, giants in private equity. Yaghoobzadeh and Owens graduated from Harvard Business School and have no records of political donations or political activity; they are business people, not pro-democracy agitators.

The size of the settlement represents a windfall on Staple Street’s investment in Dominion: Its controlling stake cost just $38.3 million in 2018, according to a filing in the case. While Dominion’s lawsuit has attracted an enormous amount of attention, it’s actually not a large company, as the market for its vote-counting services is limited; its expected revenues in 2022 were just $98 million, according to the filing.

While Dominion and Staple Street have not explained why they agreed to the settlement, the rationale is pretty clear. Their case was strong, but it wasn’t certain that a jury would deliver as much as they were seeking, and it also was not certain how quickly they might see any award, as Fox would likely appeal. The owners of Staple Street — along with John Poulos, who is Dominion’s chief executive and has a 12 percent stake in the firm — were unlikely to have been strapped for cash before the settlement, but now their companies will reap an immediate and significant bounty. In its discovery efforts, Fox unearthed a text message from a former Staple Street employee to a current executive that noted, “Would be pretty unreal if you guys like 20x’d your Dominion investment with these lawsuits.”

Speaking to reporters after the settlement was announced, a lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, said, “The truth matters. Lies have consequences.” A statement from Fox said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

It’s not uncommon for a company to turn its back on the public good for the sake of enriching its owners (a transaction that’s traditionally known as maximizing shareholder value). That’s essentially what happened, for instance, when Twitter’s board eagerly decided to sell the company to Elon Musk for the generous sum of $44 billion. The board lunged at the lucrative transaction even though it was widely predicted that Musk would diminish the usefulness of the social media site, which has indeed happened (Musk recently admitted the company is now worth half as much as he paid for it).

A mobile billboard deployed by Media Matters circles Fox News Corp. headquarters on April 17, 2023 in New York City.

Photo: Getty Images for Media Matters

Triumph of American Capitalism

The discovery process that preceded the trial’s opening was a nightmare for Fox, because it exposed in detail the levels of deceit practiced by hosts and executives as they pumped out the conspiracy theory that Trump actually won the 2020 election. But those disclosures appear to have had zero impact on the network’s ratings, which remain strong. While Fox’s reputation is at rock bottom with its critics, its viewers have remained loyal, and it’s not clear that a jury’s verdict would have influenced them any more than the bounty of evidence that emerged in discovery. It’s pretty certain, however, that a settlement will have even less sway.

The high hopes that were riding on the trial reflected the exasperated state of the longtime — and so far unsuccessful — effort to counteract the deceptive and racist programming that has been Fox’s hallmark since its founding in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, who is now 92 years old and oversees the network with his eldest son, Lachlan (both were deposed and were expected to testify in the trial). Despite years of criticism from journalists and politicians — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., memorably described Fox as a “hate-for-profit racket” — the network has prospered. While most advertisers have fled its airwaves, Fox remains profitable because the bulk of its income consists of exorbitant payments from cable and satellite providers (so-called carriage fees). Despite several years of attempts to pressure those companies, there has been little success, though a renewed push is underway.

“Cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue,” noted The New Republic. “If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.”

These hopes, while widely held among Fox’s detractors, constitute the kind of magical thinking that circled around earlier efforts to undo the lies and violence of the Trump era. Just as the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to deliver the knockout blow that was hoped for by its supporters, the now-settled lawsuit filed by Dominion is unlikely to alter the nature of Fox News, as the network has escaped the legal, moral, and financial punishment of a judicial verdict. We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this outcome: One terrible limb of American capitalism was always unlikely to save us from another terrible limb.

The post Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From Fox News appeared first on The Intercept.

In Pentagon Leak, the Problem Is What’s Classified, Not What Gets Out

Peter Maass — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:33:12 +0000

Only death and taxes are certain in life, Ben Franklin wrote in 1789, though he could have done us a favor by also noting that we can count on our government to make exaggerated claims about the unauthorized publication of classified documents.

Like clockwork, after a set of secret national security documents burst into public view last week, the Washington Post reported a “high level of panic” at the upper echelons of the Department of Defense, with officials “stunned” and “infuriated.” According to Politico, one Pentagon aide even said he was “sick to [his] stomach” over the alleged betrayal. The Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation, while John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, warned, “This is information that has no business in the public domain. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”

The intelligence documents appear to have entered the public domain in an unusual way — someone began sharing them, starting late last year, on an obscure Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. While several hundred documents were shared there, according to the Post, about 100 later spilled into a Discord chatroom affiliated with a YouTuber named wow_mao. Most of those relate to the war in Ukraine — though some cover the Middle East and Africa — and they reached a broader public when they spread onto Telegram and Twitter last week, drawing the attention of journalists and the U.S. government. The alleged leaker, Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested this afternoon.

It is traditional for the government to exaggerate the alleged harms of classified information becoming public, and this appears to be happening again. It first occurred in a big way back in 1971 with the Pentagon Papers, which the government sought to have squelched by the Supreme Court. But the court ruled in favor of the media’s right to publish the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, and the release of the Pentagon Papers is widely regarded as an essential act of transparency that revealed the hidden truth of America’s conduct in Vietnam.

More recently, the releases of classified information by Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency, and Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, were treated by the government as catastrophes that jeopardized human lives. This did not turn out to be true. Documents released by Snowden revealed that the government was engaged in unconstitutional spying on Americans, while information that Manning provided to WikiLeaks showed that U.S. forces killed journalists and civilians in Iraq and lied about it afterward. Despite the government’s dire warnings, subsequent reviews showed that no deaths could be linked to the disclosures by Manning and WikiLeaks. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates even called the government’s rhetoric about those leaks “significantly overwrought.”

What’s somewhat unique about the new documents is that they are quite fresh — some appear to have been written and distributed inside the government as recently as February and contain time-sensitive information about battlefield developments in Ukraine. While transparency experts told The Intercept that some intelligence of this sort might justify the protection of the classification system for a short while, other documents from the leak are either banal or of genuine public interest — in other words, their publication causes no harm or some good.

On the totally boring side, one of the documents contains a section titled “Worldwide: 5G Services May Pose Satellite Interference Risk” and explains that “the expansion of 5G services worldwide is increasing the risk of satellite interference that would disrupt commercial and military communications.” This information is widely known in the public sphere and has been extensively discussed for years, but its classification marking is “S//NF,” which means it is secret and should not be shared with foreign nationals (NF is short for “NOFORN”).

Another document lists the number of U.S. and NATO soldiers in Ukraine. These numbers are sensitive and interesting because the U.S. and its allies have been coy about their military footprints in Ukraine — and even whether they are in the country at all. The numbers are relatively small, according to the document: The U.S. has 14 special operations soldiers in Ukraine and a total of 100 military personnel. Publication of the document appears to be clearly in the public interest by clarifying the size of U.S. and NATO forces in a country that is at war with Russia.

Several documents that have received significant media attention reveal that the U.S. government was surveilling private communications of officials in the Israeli and South Korean governments, both close U.S. allies. While those disclosures have proved embarrassing, it is an open secret that friendly governments spy on each other. The awkward conversations that are now taking place between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Seoul will soon be overtaken by other matters.

Sky Not Falling

It’s not just the government that hypes the allegedly negative consequences of leaks; the media can play an unhelpful role too.

“I can’t even name a time in which there was a leak to the news media in which the government’s damage claims absolutely bore out.”

“The journalists covering this story probably know there is a massive overclassification problem, and they almost certainly know that any time there is a leak of any magnitude, the government goes on TV and claims that national security will be forever damaged,” noted Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Almost inevitably, we find out later that [government officials] were exaggerating. … I can’t even name a time in which there was a leak to the news media in which the government’s damage claims absolutely bore out. You can go all the way back to the Pentagon Papers.”

Yet the government’s claims are weakly challenged, if at all. Timm pointed to a 16-paragraph New York Times story about the likely damage from the new leaks, noting that it wasn’t until paragraph 14 that a crucial fact was mentioned: “In the past, U.S. officials have overstated the damage from leaks.” The media coverage has been so overwrought that a former CIA official, John Sipher, felt obliged to tell everyone to calm down. “The sky is not falling,” he wrote on Twitter, responding to a somewhat alarmist editorial in the Washington Post. “Our most sensitive collection doesn’t make it into documents like this.”

What’s often overlooked is that the real problem isn’t what’s leaked, but what’s classified. Almost every news story about the latest disclosures has noted that the Pentagon and other government agencies will now put tighter lids on secret documents, even though, as historian Matthew Connelly points out in his new book, “The Declassification Engine,” the government already puts way too much material behind its moat. “One way to look at it is to be more discriminating in what needs to be kept secret,” Connelly told The Intercept. “If [government officials] weren’t trying to protect hundreds of millions of records, some dating back to the 1940s, they might be able to protect information that could really get people killed.”

In fact, the human harm caused by unauthorized leaks is almost always inflicted by the government itself in the form of egregious prosecutions of leakers. Although Snowden, Manning, and, more recently, Reality Winner, revealed secrets that the public had a right to know, the government charged all of them under the draconian Espionage Act. While Snowden sought safety in Russia, Manning served seven years in prison (she was originally sentenced to 35 years), and Winner was sentenced to more than five years for leaking just a single document that revealed Russian interference in U.S. voting systems.

Update: April 13, 2023 7:14 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with the arrest of alleged leaker Jack Teixeira.

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Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own.

Peter Maass — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 10:00:32 +0000

A U.S. Marine doctor holds an Iraqi girl after front-line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family in central Iraq on March 29, 2003.

Photo: Damir Sagolj/Reuters via Alamy

If you write a 4,500-word article about a 20-year war, you might want to mention how many people were killed.

While that seems obvious, Max Boot, an energetic backer of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has written a lengthy article on the war’s 20th anniversary that fails to note the number of deaths. The toll is in the hundreds of thousands, if not more — the carnage is too vast for an exact count — but Boot merely mentions a “high price in both blood and treasure” and quickly moves on.

How high a price? Whose blood? There is no explanation.

Boot is hardly the only anniversary writer unable to mention the apparently unmentionable. Peter Mansoor, a retired colonel with several deployments to Iraq, likewise failed to squeeze a reference to the death toll into his 2,000-word assessment of what happened. Mansoor’s story, like Boot’s, was published by Foreign Affairs, which is funded by the Council on Foreign Relations and is pretty much the true north of establishment thinking in Washington, D.C.

Their failure, which is replicated in about 99 percent of America’s discussions about Iraq, is a lot more than sloppy journalism. The Pentagon and its enablers prefer to turn the killing and maiming of civilians into an abstraction by calling it “collateral damage” so that it becomes a detail of history that we can pass over.

Ignoring civilian casualties is a necessary act of erasure if you wish to avoid a frank assessment of not just the Iraq War, but also the legacy and future of U.S. foreign policy. If you specify those casualties — which is not just hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in an illegal war begun with lies, but also millions of people injured, forced out of their homes, and traumatized for the rest of their lives — the discourse must change. The “high price” reveals itself as so grotesque that discussions can no longer center around the finer questions of how to better fight an insurgency or why “mistakes were made” by supposedly well-intentioned leaders. It becomes a matter of when do the trials start; who should be in the dock with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice; how large should Iraq’s reparations be; and when can we impose on ourselves something like the constitutional ban on the use of military force to settle disputes that we imposed on Japan after World War II?

Killing Ourselves

Until Covid-19 came along, I thought the willful ignorance of Iraqi casualties was principally a matter of Americans not caring about the deaths of foreigners, especially those who are not white and not Christian. And that’s certainly true: We don’t care enough about those deaths, even if (or especially if) we are responsible for them. But the larger truth is that we also don’t even care about the deaths of our own citizens. Choices have been made that caused America to have one of the highest per-capita rates of Covid deaths, with more than a million dying so far, and probably another 100,000 dying this year. The numbers tick upward, but most of us hardly notice.

We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations.

In addition to the Covid toll, there is also the violence America inflicts on itself with guns, cars, opioids, and a predatory health care system that yields the highest maternal mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations. The situation is getting worse, not better, because life expectancy in the U.S. is plummeting while in comparable countries it is increasing.

It would take more than 4,500 words to get to the bottom of why America is so ruthless to itself as well as others. We certainly have a long history of externalized as well as internalized violence, thanks to the many wars we fought in the past century and a system of slavery that endured for generations. But it’s not as though the rest of the world is composed of quiet Luxembourgs: Whether we look at what happened in Germany in the 1940s or Rwanda in the 1990s or what Russia is doing now to Ukraine (and did to Chechnya), we are not unique.

Anniversary Lessons

In the early hours of March 19, 2003, which was 20 years ago, I drove to the Iraqi border in a Hertz SUV, and when I got there, a U.S. soldier whose face was daubed with camouflage paint yelled from the predawn darkness, “Turn off your fucking lights! Turn them off now!” He ordered me back into Kuwait, but after a few hours, I managed to sneak across the border at Safwan and joined the American march to Baghdad. Three weeks later, I watched as Marines toppled a statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square.

Since then, I have written a lot about Iraq. My goal is to make Americans care about the violence committed in their name and to hold to account the political and military leaders whose orders our soldiers and mercenaries were carrying out. One of the lessons I have learned is that the stories I and other journalists write about those victims — and Afghan and Yemeni and so many other victims of American warfare — are insufficient, on their own, to turn the tide.

It is naïve to expect us to stop killing foreigners in large numbers if we remain complacent about killing ourselves in even larger numbers. Even if every story about Iraq noted the civilian casualties, I don’t think it would make everyone suddenly wake up (though it would still be the right thing to do). We’re not going to start caring about the lives of others until we start caring about our own lives.

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Trump’s Last Defense Secretary Has Regrets — but Not About Jan. 6

Peter Maass — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 11:00:19 +0000

When bureaucrats get big promotions, they tend to receive congratulations from their friends, but after Christopher Miller landed the biggest job of his life, his wife and some of his colleagues were horrified.

It was November 9, 2020, the day President Donald Trump fired his secretary of defense, Mark Esper. It was widely assumed that Trump would install an acolyte who would do whatever was needed to help the defeated president stay in power. Esper, just days before, had confided to a journalist, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real yes man. And then God help us.”

Trump appointed Miller, an unknown whose rise was so far-fetched that the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, had to Google his new boss to figure out who he was. Wikipedia was useless because at the time, Miller didn’t merit an entry.

After retiring from the Army as a Special Forces colonel in 2014, Miller moved from one mid-level job to another in Washington, D.C., a nobody in a city of somebodies. Things began to pick up after Trump’s election, and by August 2020, he was promoted to director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Just three months later, he was summoned to the Oval Office and put in charge of the world’s most powerful military.

“I’m at work on a Monday morning, and the phone rings, and they’re like, ‘Get your ass down here,’” Miller said in an interview, referring to the moment he was called to the White House. “I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”

Miller knew his name was circulating in the White House, but the announcement came abruptly and was not greeted with warmth by his life partner. “Yeah, my wife is like, ‘The only thing we have is our name and you’re ruining it,’” Miller recalled. “She’s like, ‘You’re an idiot. I think this is the stupidest thing that’s ever happened.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes dear, I know that.’”

Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and his wife Kathryn make prerecorded remarks for the Military Spouse Employment Partnership New Partner Induction Ceremony at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 4, 2020.

Photo: Department of Defense

As improbable Washington stories go, Miller’s blink-and-it’s-over journey from Beltway nothingness to what his detractors regard as a semi-witting participant in a plot to overthrow the constitutional order — well, it’s quite something. Miller was in charge of the Pentagon on January 6, 2021, and is accused of delaying the deployment of National Guard troops so the mob that beat its way into the Capitol might succeed in creating more than a pause in the Senate’s count of Electoral College votes. At a combative oversight hearing a few months later, Democratic members of Congress derided Miller as “AWOL,” “disgusting,” and “ridiculous,” to which he responded, “Thank you for your thoughts.”

As is customary, Miller has written a memoir of his extremely brief time in power, “Soldier Secretary,” published last month by Center Street, whose other authors include Newt Gingrich and Betsy DeVos. It’s a typical Washington book in many ways — revealing at times, suspect at others. For instance, Miller describes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as suffering a “total nuclear meltdown” during a phone call with him on January 6, but there is no evidence for that characterization. His book sticks closely to the Beltway norm of having a principal character who displays calmness and reason while others go nuts; the principal character is the author.

His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

But just as Miller’s journey to the top is atypical, so too is his obscenity-flecked memoir, because the retired soldier emerges as a scorched-earth critic of the institution he served for more than three decades and presided over for 73 days. He wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex, and he describes the invasion of Iraq as an unjust war based on lies. His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

“Today, there are virtually no brakes on the American war machine,” Miller writes. “Military leaders are always predisposed to see war as a solution, because when you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail. The establishments of both major political parties are overwhelmingly dominated by interventionists and internationalists who believe that America can and should police the world. Even the press — once so skeptical of war during the Vietnam era — is today little more than a brood of bloodthirsty vampires cheering on American missile strikes and urging greater involvement in conflicts America has no business fighting.”

I was as surprised as everyone else when I heard the news about Miller’s appointment, but it’s not because I had to Google him. I knew who he was. We first met in Afghanistan in 2001, when he was a leader of the Special Forces unit that chased the Taliban out of their final stronghold, and I was reporting on that for the New York Times Magazine. I got to know him and wrote an article in 2002 about his Afghan combat and his preparations for the Iraq invasion the following year. With the publication of his memoir, Miller is now making the media rounds, so we got together again.

After more than two decades of the forever wars, Miller is pissed off in the way a lot of former soldiers are pissed off — and, I have to say, in the way a lot of former war reporters are pissed off too. It’s hard to have been a participant in those calamities and not feel betrayed in some fashion, as pundits attempt to whitewash the disaster and promotions are announced for officials who masterminded it. Miller’s evolution from Special Forces operator to Trump Cabinet member is a forever wars parable that helps us understand the moral injury festering in our political corpus.

Christopher Miller displays his recently published book “Soldier Secretary” on his home bookshelf on Feb. 7, 2023.

Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

A Historic Error

Miller’s 9/11 journey got into literal high gear when he roared into Kandahar in a Toyota pickup with blown-out windows. It was December 2001, he was a 36-year-old major in the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, and this was his first combat deployment.

I spotted Miller at the entrance to a compound on the outskirts of the city. Until a few days earlier, it had been the residence of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban who, after Osama bin Laden, was the most hunted man in the country. The scene was surreal because the compound was now the temporary home of Hamid Karzai, the soon-to-be leader of Afghanistan, whose security was guaranteed by Miller’s soldiers. These just-arrived Americans were dressed half in camouflage, half in fleece jackets, and they sported the types of accessories that ordinary GIs were prohibited from having, such as beards and long hair. Mixed among them were Afghan fighters with AK-47s who had fought with the Taliban not long ago but switched loyalties, which is an accepted practice in Afghanistan when your team is losing.

I struck up a conversation with Miller, a tall officer with bushy red hair and a wicked-looking assault weapon slung over his shoulder. Most of his soldiers were silent and grim — they weren’t happy about the journalists who had shown up — but Miller, who recognized my name because he had read my memoir on the Bosnian war, was friendly and answered a few questions. I asked if he had been to Bosnia, and he gave me a vague special operator laugh and said, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” As it turned out, he’d worked undercover in Bosnia in the late 1990s alongside CIA operatives tracking Serb war criminals.

I stayed in Kandahar for a while longer, as did Miller. We were both spending time around the city’s U.S.-installed warlord, Gul Agha Shirzai, whom Miller describes in his book as “a self-serving piece of shit,” which is totally accurate. After we both returned to America, I got Miller to invite me to spend a few days at his battalion’s headquarters at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We talked for hours about what happened in Afghanistan, about the soldiers he lost, about the Al Qaeda fighters he helped kill, and about the next war on the horizon (this was a year before the illegal invasion of Iraq). Miller was as friendly and transparent as I could hope for from a Special Forces officer. His favorite word was “knucklehead,” which he sometimes used to describe himself.

Miller didn’t know it at the time, but he was at the cusp of a profound disenchantment with the country’s military and political leaders, a disillusionment he shared with a lot of soldiers, thanks to the deceptions and errors embedded in the wars they fought. Miller is exceptional only in his Cabinet-level end point. While it’s important to remember that the vast bulk of these veterans are law-abiding, a small but influential group have been radicalized to violence rather than government service.

Veterans are one of the key subjects in historian Kathleen Belew’s lauded book about right-wing extremism, titled “Bring the War Home.” American history teaches us a consistent lesson: There will almost always be blowback at home from wars fought elsewhere. Of 968 people indicted after the storming of the Capitol, 131 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Due to the respect military service generates among civilians in right-wing movements, veterans composed a disproportionately large number of the ringleaders on January 6, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy last year.

Soon after we met in 2001, Miller noticed omens of dysfunction in the American war machine. It began, he wrote in his book, with a visit to the airport that U.S. Marines seized outside Kandahar a few days after the Special Forces sped into town in their four-wheel-drive vehicles. Miller and one of his sergeants had to pick up supplies at the airport, and they saw Marines putting up a big tent. The sergeant told Miller, “Sir, it’s time for us to get the fuck out of here.” Miller asked why, and the sergeant replied, “They’re building the PX. It’s time for the Green Berets to leave.”

“We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater.”

He meant the military was settling in for the long haul. Sprawling bases would be constructed with Burger King and Pizza Hut outlets, staffed by workers flown in from Nepal, Kenya, and other countries. There would be more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the peak of President Barack Obama’s surge, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the country, yielding decades of full employment for generals and executives in the weapons industry. Miller had a front-row seat at this carnival. “We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater,” he told me. In other words, quickly arrange a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban rather than try to eliminate the Taliban and leave a small number of special operators to find and kill Osama bin Laden and the remnants of Al Qaeda.

I don’t think Miller sensed all this when he saw that tent going up; nobody knew what was going to happen that early in the game. And remember, you can’t trust Beltway memoirs; they’re a racket of myth construction. But locating the exact moment of Miller’s awareness is less important than the fact he eventually recognized, as most of us did, a historic error that he blamed on his leadership. “As soon as we went conventional, that war was lost,” Miller said. “That’s what I’ll take to my grave. As soon as we brought in the Army generals and all their big ideas — war was over at that point.”

Christopher Miller in old photos from his time in Afghanistan, left, and Iraq, right. Photos: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

The Betrayal

Like many veterans, Miller participated in not just the Afghanistan disaster, but also the one in Iraq. There he had an even stronger sense of betrayal.

As the invasion neared, Miller was responsible for operational planning for his Special Forces battalion, and he put together a blueprint for seizing an airfield southwest of Baghdad as an advance position for the capture of Iraq’s capital. He thought the buildup was a bluff to coerce Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein into giving up the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration insisted he possessed (though he did not). In Miller’s telling, it wasn’t until he was geared up in an MH-53 helicopter at night, heading deep into Iraq, that he knew it was on. The future acting defense secretary turned to a soldier next to him and said, “We’re really doing this. I can’t believe we’re fucking doing this.” According to Miller, the soldier replied, “Me neither.”

Miller and I were sitting in a café at the public library in Westport, Connecticut — he lives in northern Virginia and was visiting this wealthy suburb for a fundraiser for a play about the Special Forces. He was dressed in khaki pants and a casual shirt, and his shag of red hair from 20 years ago was gone; it had thinned out to a distinguished-looking silver. He is 57 years old now and looks no different from any other close-to-senior citizen killing time at a library (same goes for me, I should confess). He sipped his coffee and continued, “Invading a sovereign country is a big deal, you know. We typically don’t do that except in extenuating circumstances. I thought it was all coercive diplomacy. Then when it goes down, you’re like, ‘Damn.’” As he writes in his book, “I had been an active participant in an unjust war. We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a god-damned lie.”

“You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army. But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If your nation calls on you to send your comrades to their deaths in battle, you expect it will be for a good reason; soldiers have a lot more at stake than Beltway hawks for whom a bad day consists of getting bumped from their hit on CNN or Fox. That’s why Miller describes himself as “white-hot” angry toward the leaders who lied or dissembled and suffered no consequences; many have profited in retirement, thanks to amply compensated speaking gigs and board seats. “You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army,” Miller told me. “But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If that line came from a pundit, it would be a platitude. But Miller described to me the case of a soldier he knew well who was forced out of the military for not having the paperwork for a machine gun he left in Afghanistan for troops replacing his unit. The soldier was trying to help other soldiers who didn’t have all the weapons they needed. It didn’t matter; he was gone, and Miller couldn’t stop it.

Miller trembled a bit as he narrated this story. Maybe he was on the verge of tears; I couldn’t be sure. There’s a saying in journalism that if your mother says she loves you, check it out. Never trust a source, especially one selling a book and an image of himself. As these things always are, our conversation was a bit of a performance by each of us, both trying to get out of the other as much as we could. Miller’s intentions were hard to pin down, but his anger was not. I had seen some of what he had seen.

In 2014, after three decades in the Army and more than a dozen deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bosnia, and elsewhere, Miller retired. He had a lot of baggage to deal with. As he writes, “For years I had been cramming unpleasant memories into a box and storing them on a shelf deep in the recesses of my psyche, knowing that someday I’d have to unpack each one.”

He set a goal: Complete a marathon in less than three hours. His long practice runs of 15-25 miles were, as he put it, therapy sessions to work through the wreckage of the wars he fought and “a simmering sense of betrayal that every veteran today must feel — the recognition that so many sacrifices were ultimately made in the service of a lie, as in Iraq, or to further a delusion.” After running that marathon, he entered a 50-mile race on the Appalachian Trail and finished in less than eight hours, ranking second in his age group.

There were no epiphanies at the end. Physical exhaustion would not eliminate his bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan. “It still makes my blood boil,” he writes, “and it probably will until the day I die.”

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, center left, walks with Lt. Gen. John Deedrick after arriving to Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 22, 2020.

Photo: Staff Sgt. Jack Sanders/DoD

More Juice

While Miller describes himself as falling “ass-backwards” into the job of acting secretary of defense, you don’t rise to the top by mistake in Washington, and people who run ultramarathons don’t tend to be lily pads just floating along. Miller has a gosh-darn way of talking, and even his detractors describe him as affable, but he’s a special operator, and you shouldn’t forget that. After retiring from the military, he made a series of canny moves to join the National Security Council at the White House and pair up with a key figure in Trump’s orbit, Kash Patel.

Patel became Washington famous in the first years of the Trump era because, as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, he played a behind-the-scenes role in the GOP effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In early 2019, Patel was rewarded with a job on the NSC, reportedly on direct orders from Trump. Miller had joined the NSC the previous year as senior director for counterterrorism and transnational threats, and Patel became his deputy. Miller claims that initially, he was wary.

“I got online and Wikipedia’d him, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is the crazy guy,” he told me with a laugh.

What happened next could be a how-to guide for Beltway strivers.

“I just had convening authority,” Miller recalled of his time at the NSC. “I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit.’ So I went to the Pentagon and took a job as a political appointee because I needed to have money and people.”

It was early 2020 when he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism. This gave him greater influence over the hunt for ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, which had been his obsession at the NSC. Yet it wasn’t enough. As Miller describes it, “Now I had people, now I had money, but still not being very successful. … I still need more juice.”

Kash Patel, former chief of staff to then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, departs from a deposition meeting on Capitol Hill with the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, on Dec. 9, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

One of his friends in the administration made a suggestion: Why don’t you shoot for a Senate-confirmed position?

“I was like, ‘That gives me more wasta, right?’” Miller said, using an Arabic word for clout. “And I’m like, ‘Shit yeah.’”

Trump nominated him to head the National Counterterrorism Center, and on August 6, the Senate confirmed him in a unanimous voice vote.

“So now I’ve got more fucking throw weight,” Miller continued. “Patel’s working in the National Security Council with the president. We’re starting to grind down the resistors.” The resistance, he said, was against a heightened effort he and Patel advocated to finish off the remaining leaders of Al Qaeda and rescue a handful of remaining American hostages.

Miller was invited for a talk with Johnny McEntee, the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. In the twilight of the Trump era, McEntee was one of the president’s most loyal confidantes; though just 29 years old at the time, he was described, in a magazine article, as the “deputy president.” Miller knew through the grapevine that he might be in line for Esper’s job because the administration had just a few Senate-confirmed officials with national security credentials. McEntee was sizing him up.

“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ because I didn’t want the job,” Miller told me.

This was part of Miller’s “ass-backwards” shtick. Why grind as hard as he did to stop short of the biggest prize of all? I pushed back, and he acknowledged that while the job might “suck really, really badly,” it could be worthwhile even if Trump lost the election. “I had a work list,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘I can get a lot of shit done.’” His main tasks, he told me, included stabilizing the Pentagon after Esper’s ouster; withdrawing the remaining U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia; and elevating special operations forces in the Department of Defense’s hierarchy.

Just before the election, he heard the shuffle was imminent.

“The word comes down: They’re getting rid of Esper, win or lose,” Miller said. “It’s payback time.”

On Monday morning, six days after Trump lost the election, Miller’s phone rang. Come to the White House, now.

Pictured, from left, Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, Vice Adm. Sean Buck, President Donald Trump, Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley before the start of a game at Michie Stadium on Dec. 12, 2020, in West Point, N.Y.

Photo: Dustin Satloff/Getty Images

Murderer’s Row

Miller suffered a literal misstep his first day on the job: Walking into the Pentagon, he tripped and nearly fell on the steps in front of the mammoth building. That prompted laughs online, but the bigger issue was the entourage that surrounded him as he took charge of the nearly 3 million soldiers and civilians in the Department of Defense.

He was accompanied by a murderer’s row of Trump loyalists. Patel was his chief of staff. Ezra Cohen, a controversial analyst, got a top intelligence post. Douglas Macgregor, a Fox News pundit, became a special assistant. Anthony Tata, a retired general who called Obama a “terrorist leader,” was appointed policy chief. Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was reportedly so alarmed that he told Patel and Cohen, “Life looks really shitty from behind bars. … And if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.”

Miller, when I asked about his advisers, waved off the concerns and said, “Complete misappreciation of those people.”

Cutting the U.S. footprint overseas was one of his top priorities, the residue of his long journey through the forever wars. It was a big part of his support for Trump, who was far more critical of those wars than most politicians. In the 2016 primaries, Trump distanced himself from other Republicans by accusing the George W. Bush administration of manufacturing evidence to justify the Iraq invasion. “They lied,” Trump declared at a debate in South Carolina, drawing boos from the Republican audience. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.” This was an occasion on which Trump’s political interests — trying to embarrass front-runner Jeb Bush, the brother of the former president — aligned with something that was actually true.

Once he got to the White House, though, Trump didn’t make a lot of changes. Since 9/11, the generals who oversaw America’s wars had resisted when civilian leaders said it was time to scale back. And Trump actually quickened the tempo of some military operations by offering greater support to the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and taking an especially hawkish position on Iran. But he was stymied on Iraq and Afghanistan, not just by active-duty generals at the Pentagon, but also by the retired ones he appointed to such key posts as national security adviser, chief of staff, and secretary of defense. They were all gone by the final act of his presidency.

By the time Miller left the Pentagon when President Joe Biden was sworn in, U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq had been cut to 2,500 troops in each country (from about 4,000 in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq). The approximately 700 soldiers based in Somalia were withdrawn. But that would not be Miller’s most memorable legacy.

The Phantom Meltdown

It was mid-afternoon on January 6, 2021. A pro-Trump mob had bashed its way through police barricades and invaded the Capitol. Ashli Babbitt had been shot dead. The rioters who occupied the Senate chamber included a half-naked shaman wearing a horned helmet and carrying a spear. Where was the National Guard?

Miller was the one to know, which is why he was on the phone with Nancy Pelosi at 3:44 p.m.

“I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon holding a phone six inches away from my ear, trying my best to make sense of the incoherent shrieking blasting out of the receiver,” he writes on the first page of his book. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on the line, and she was in a state of total nuclear meltdown. To be fair, the other members of congressional leadership on the call weren’t exactly composed either. Every time Pelosi paused to catch her breath, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Congressman Steny Hoyer took turns hyperventilating into the phone.”

That passage in Miller’s five-page introduction got a bit of attention on social media when it was first excerpted in January, and not all of it was positive. Wonkette described Miller’s account as “verifiably false” and pointed its readers to a video released by the January 6 committee showing Pelosi and other congressional leaders speaking in urgent but calm voices with Miller. They asked him to send troops immediately and demanded to know why it was taking so long. Pelosi is intense but not melting down; McConnell, Schumer, and Hoyer are not hyperventilating.

When I met Miller in Westport, I asked if he was aware of this discrepancy. He became slightly agitated.

“The one they show is a different call,” he replied. “The one used [by] the January 6 committee is a later phone call where they’re much calmer. The first call was frantic. Like literally losing their shit. … So that’s bullshit, dude.”

He told me to look into it.

The January 6 committee released partial footage of two calls that show Pelosi speaking with Miller. The first call, according to the time stamp on the committee’s video, occurred at 3 p.m. The sequence begins with Pelosi sitting near Schumer, who is holding a cellphone and saying, “I’m going to call up the effing secretary of DOD.” The next shot shows Schumer, Pelosi, and Hoyer huddled around the phone talking with Miller in measured voices; McConnell is not shown in this clip. The second call for which the committee released some footage is the one Wonkette pointed to. The participants in this second call are the ones mentioned by Miller in his book: McConnell is in this footage, along with Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer. There are no meltdowns. The committee’s time stamp for this call is 3:46 p.m., which is a nearly exact match for the time Miller provides in his book: 3:44 p.m.

What this means is that the phone call Miller described in his book almost certainly is the one Wonkette pointed to and did not occur the way Miller describes, unless there is an incriminating portion of the video we have not seen, which is what Miller claims. Yet that seems unlikely because there is no mention, in the multitude of testimonies and articles about that day, of Pelosi melting down at any moment. And that makes another passage in Miller’s introduction problematic too.

“I had never seen anyone — not even the greenest, pimple-faced 19-year-old Army private — panic like our nation’s elder statesmen did on January 6 and in the months that followed,” Miller wrote. “For the American people, and for our enemies watching overseas, the events of that day undeniably laid bare the true character of our ruling class. Here were the most powerful men and women in the world — the leaders of the legislative branch of the mightiest nation in history — cowering like frightened children for all the world to see.”

Except they weren’t cowering. They had been evacuated by security guards to Fort McNair because a mob of thousands had broken into the Capitol screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Pence!” Miller makes no mention in his book of the speech Trump delivered on January 6 that encouraged his followers to march on the Capitol. There is no mention of the fact that while Pelosi and others, including Vice President Mike Pence, urged Miller to send troops, Trump did not; the commander in chief did not speak with his defense secretary that day. Although Miller has elsewhere gently described Trump’s speech as not helping matters, his book mocks the targets of the crime rather than criticizing the person who inspired and abetted it.

“Prior to that very moment, the Speaker and her Democrat colleagues had spent months decrying the use of National Guard troops to quell left-wing riots following the death of George Floyd that caused countless deaths and billions of dollars in property damage nationwide,” he writes. “But as soon as it was her ass on the line, Pelosi had been miraculously born again as a passionate, if less than altruistic, champion of law and order.”

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

This is unbalanced because the violence in the summer of 2020 — on the margins of nationwide protests that were overwhelmingly peaceful — did not endanger the transfer of power from a defeated president to his duly elected successor. The buildings that were attacked were not the seat of national government. And there weren’t “countless deaths” — there were about 25, including two men killed by far-right vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The rhetoric in Miller’s book has the aroma of reheated spots from Fox News.

The contours of his political anger comes into clearer focus after reading a passage from his chapter on Iraq. He recalled his pride in the swift capture of Baghdad, but as he flew home in a C-17 aircraft, he couldn’t fully enjoy the triumph, couldn’t really unwind. “The further we got from the war zone, the more my stress turned into burning white-hot anger,” he wrote. He returned to an empty house in North Carolina — his family was in Massachusetts for the July 4 holiday — so he worked out, drank some beer, and read a lot. It didn’t help much. There was, as he put it, “a rage building inside me” that was directed at two groups. The first was the group he regards as the instigators, “the neoconservatives who bullied us into an unjust and unwinnable war.” The second was Congress “for abrogating its constitutional duties regarding the declaring, funding, and overseeing of our nation’s wars.”

Miller’s homecoming was reenacted by a generation of bitter soldiers, aid workers, and journalists. His list of culprits is a good one, though I would add the names of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the top, because they issued the orders that destroyed Iraq. Their omission from Miller’s list, combined with his rant against Pelosi, reveals how his outrage follows a strange path, focusing on a political party that, while energetically backing the wars, was not the one that started them. And Democrats did not foment the storming of the Capitol either.

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

A video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on a phone call with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, is played during a hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, in Washington, D.C. on October 13, 2022.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Clusterfuck

Just as the Watergate scandal had its 18-minute gap, there’s a now-infamous gap of more than four hours between the storming of the Capitol and the arrival of National Guard troops around 5:30 p.m. Miller is at the center of the controversy because the singular status of the District of Columbia means the Pentagon controls its National Guard — and Miller was the Pentagon boss on January 6.

The January 6 committee, which deposed Miller and other military and police officials, said in its 814-page final report that it “found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard.” The committee blamed the delay on “a likely miscommunication” between multiple layers of civilian and military officials. The abundant depositions reveal that the committee was being extremely kind when it chose the word “miscommunication.” Soldiers have a special word to describe what seems to have happened at the Pentagon: a clusterfuck.

At 1:49 p.m., as pro-Trump demonstrators beat their way past police lines, the head of the U.S. Capitol Police force called the commander of the D.C. National Guard, Gen. William Walker, and notified him there was a “dire emergency” and troops were needed immediately. Walker alerted the Pentagon, and a video conference convened at 2:22 p.m. among generals and civilian officials, though not Miller. Walker told the January 6 committee that generals at the Pentagon “started talking about they didn’t have the authority, wouldn’t be their best military advice or guidance to suggest to the Secretary that we have uniformed presence at the Capitol. … They were concerned about how it would look, the optics.”

The “optics” refers to the Pentagon being sharply criticized after National Guard soldiers helped suppress Black Lives Matters protests in the capital on June 1, 2020. Lafayette Square, just outside the White House, was violently cleared in a controversial operation that even involved military helicopters flying low at night to disperse protesters. At one point, Trump triumphantly emerged from the White House with a retinue that included Defense Secretary Esper and Milley; later, both men apologized for allowing themselves to be connected to the crackdown. After that debacle, the Pentagon was reluctant to involve troops in any crowd control in the capital, and local leaders made clear that they opposed it too; there was no appetite to amass troops that Trump might misuse.

Yet the storming of the Capitol, taking law enforcement by surprise, created an emergency that justified using the Guard. As Walker told the committee, “I just couldn’t believe nobody was saying, ‘Hey, go.’” Walker testified that he admonished the generals and officials on the 2:22 p.m. call: “Aren’t you watching the news? Can’t you see what’s going on? We need to get there.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy — who two months earlier had to Google Miller’s name to figure out who he was — testified that he joined the 2:22 p.m. call and then ran a quarter mile through Pentagon hallways to Miller’s office, arriving there out of breath (“I’m a middle-aged man now,” he told the committee. “I was in a suit and leather shoes.”). At 3:04 p.m., Miller gave a verbal order for the mobilization of the D.C. Guard. It was an hour-and-a-quarter since the Capitol Police’s first plea for help, but it would take more than two additional hours for the troops to get there. This is the delay Miller has been particularly blamed for, though it does not appear to have been his fault alone.

Miller regarded his 3:04 p.m. order as final; Walker and his direct civilian commander, McCarthy, now had a green light to move troops to the Capitol, Miller testified. Some troops were already prepared to go there, according to the committee report. A ground officer, Col. Craig Hunter, was ready to move with a quick reaction force of 40 soldiers and about 95 others who were mostly at traffic control points in the area. Despite Miller’s 3:04 p.m. order, it would be hours before Hunter would be told to roll.

Members of the Washington D.C. National Guard arrive to keep rioters away from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The committee’s report includes a 45-page appendix that’s a catalogue of recriminations among Walker, McCarthy, Miller, and others. Their depositions offer conflicting accounts of what was said in chaotic conversations that day, and they even disagree about whether certain conversations took place. They also express contrary views on who had the authority to issue orders, precisely what orders were needed, and what some orders even meant. The depositions were taken under oath, so despite their contradictions, they are the best record we have about what happened and far more reliable than most of the books and interviews that some of the principals have produced.

McCarthy prioritized the time-consuming task of drawing up an operational plan that doesn’t appear to have been necessary because Hunter’s troops were already equipped for riot control and knew what to do and where to go. McCarthy also spent a lot of time talking on the phone to politicians and journalists, as well as joining a press conference. As he told the committee, “So it went into the next 25 minutes of literally standing there, people handing me telephones, whether it was the media or it was Congress. And I had to explain to all of them, ‘No, we’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming.’ So that chewed up a great deal of time.”

Meanwhile, Walker said he couldn’t reach McCarthy to find out whether he had permission to send his troops to the Capitol. Testifying on April 21, 2022, Walker said he was never called by McCarthy and was unable to contact him directly because the work number he had for McCarthy didn’t function: An automated message said, “This phone is out of service.” One of his officers happened to have McCarthy’s private cellphone number, but there was no answer on it. “The story we were told is that he is running through the Pentagon looking for the secretary of defense,” Walker testified. “That’s why he wasn’t answering his phone.” (McCarthy insisted in his testimony that they had talked.)

The delay wasn’t due to faulty telecommunications alone. McCarthy told the committee that he believed he needed another order from Miller, beyond the one issued at 3:04 p.m., before he could tell Walker to move. Miller issued an additional order at 4:32 p.m., but McCarthy failed to immediately inform Walker; the order didn’t reach the National Guard commander until 5:09 p.m., when a four-star general happened to notice Walker in a conference room and said, “Hey, we have a green light, you’re approved to go.” By the time Walker’s troops arrived at the Capitol, the fighting was over, and they were asked to watch over rioters already arrested by the bloodied police.

Toward the end of his testimony to the January 6 committee, Miller was asked why Walker had not scrambled his troops sooner. “Why didn’t he launch them?” Miller replied. “I’d love to know. That’s a question I was hoping you’d find out. … Beats me.”

Christopher Miller poses for a portrait in between media interviews at his home office on Tuesday, February 7, 2023. His book “Soldier Secretary” was released that day.

Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

“Blah Blah Bluh Blah”

One of the people I interviewed for this story was Paul Yingling, who, in 2007, became famous in military circles for writing an article titled “A Failure in Generalship.” Yingling was serving as an Army officer at the time and broke the fourth wall of martial protocol by calling out his wartime commanders. In a line that’s been quoted many times since — Miller repeated a variation of it to me — Yingling wrote, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Yingling wasn’t particularly flattered by Miller’s embrace of his idea. Miller is right about the generals, Yingling said, but “much of the criticism he’s made has been made elsewhere earlier and better. … It’s not original work.” That wasn’t Yingling’s main beef with Miller; he was incensed over what he regards as a fellow officer’s involvement in an effort to overturn a presidential election. “I don’t think he is aware of his role to this day,” Yingling said. “He has spun a narrative for himself that justifies his actions on J6. He was in over his head in a political world that to this day he doesn’t understand.”

Yingling mentioned the story of Caligula appointing his horse as a consul in ancient Rome. That myth goes to the strategy of discrediting and disempowering institutions by filling them with incompetent leaders (or beloved equines). And Yingling is certainly right that Trump appointed D-list characters to sensitive positions: the internet troll Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, for instance, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser.

It’s also true that the January 6 clusterfuck seems to have had less to do with malignant decisions by Miller than with a parade of errors by officials under his command. As acting secretary of defense, he failed to ensure that his orders at 3:04 p.m. and again at 4:32 p.m. were carried out with greater speed, though Miller says he didn’t want to micromanage his subordinates. There may have been an element of subconscious bias, too.

“I’m African American,” Walker told the committee. “Child of the ’60s. I think it would have been a vastly different response if those were African Americans trying to breach the Capitol.”

Yet I hesitate to ignite the tinder around Miller. If we drop a match at his feet and walk away with a sense of satisfaction about the justice we think we’ve delivered, we have not changed or even recognized the political culture that gave us the forever wars and everything that flowed from them, including January 6. At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

Look, for instance, at who Joe Biden chose to fill the seat kept warm by Miller: Lloyd Austin, a retired general who earned millions of dollars as a board member of defense contractors Raytheon Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton. Look at Esper, who preceded Miller: He was a lobbyist for Raytheon Technologies, earning more than $1.5 million in salary and bonuses. Look at who came before Esper: Jim Mattis, who was on the board of General Dynamics (as well as Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing firm). And take a moment to read a few pages of Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers,” which uses government documents to reveal a generation of lies from America’s top generals and officials. The professional interests of these people have been closely connected to exorbitant defense spending and “overseas contingency operations” that account for the U.S. devoting more money to its military than the next nine countries combined — all while school teachers drive Ubers at night and people in Mississippi have to drink bottled water because the municipal system has collapsed.

Where are their bonfires?

A year ago, before Biden’s State of the Union address, Miller joined a press conference outside the Capitol that was organized by the GOP’s far-right Freedom Caucus and featured speakers against mask and vaccine mandates. The last to talk, Miller riffed for seven minutes, saying nothing about Covid-19 and focusing on Afghanistan instead. As he recalled being on a mountainside where an errant American bomb killed nearly two dozen U.S. and Afghan soldiers, a woman behind him shifted with visible unease as he angrily described in graphic terms what you don’t often hear from former Cabinet members: “I stood there and it looked as if someone had taken a pail of ground meat, of hamburger meat, and thrown it onto that hill. And those were the remains of so many who gave their lives on that day.”

Let’s agree, then, that Miller is a bit askew. One of his encounters with reporters in his final days as defense secretary was described by a British correspondent as a “gobsmacking incoherent briefing” that included the phrase “blah blah bluh blah,” according to the Pentagon’s official transcript. But if you’re not askew after going through the mindfuck of the forever wars, there’s probably something wrong with you. It’s an inversion of the “Catch-22” scenario in which the novel’s protagonist, Capt. John Yossarian, tries to be declared insane so that he can get out of the bomber missions that he knows are nearly suicidal, but his desire to get out of them proves he’s sane, so he’s not excused. In an opposite way, generals and politicians who emerge from the carnage of the forever wars without coarse passions, who speak in modulated tones about staying the course and shoveling more money to the Pentagon — they are cracked ones who should not operate the machinery of war.

So here we are, just a few days away from the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion on March 19, a cataclysm that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions of dollars, and began with lies. The Pentagon just decided to name a warship the USS Fallujah, after the city that suffered more violence at the hands of American forces than any other place in Iraq. And Harvard University has just decided to give a prominent position to Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bush administration official who helped design the invasion and occupation of Iraq and since 2017 has been a board member of — you may have heard this one before — Raytheon Technologies (for which she was paid $321,387 in 2021). It’s been 20 years and thanks in part to journalists who were complicit in spreading the first lies and were rewarded professionally for doing so, there has been neither accountability nor learning.

Individual pathologies determine how we medicate ourselves after traumatic events, and I think the politics we choose are forms of medication. Miller opted for service in the Trump administration, and while it strikes me as the least-admirable segment of his life since we met in Kandahar, he’s not an outlier among veterans. For as long as our nation is subordinate to its war machine, we’ll be hearing more from them. Forever wars do not end when soldiers come home.

The post Trump’s Last Defense Secretary Has Regrets — but Not About Jan. 6 appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Military Vets in Ukraine Are Fighting Each Other in Court

Peter Maass — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 18:50:16 +0000

A month after Russia invaded Ukraine last February, a private American organization with an unusual name — the Mozart Group — was created to train Ukrainian soldiers who were scrambling to the front lines with little preparation. Initially composed of a handful of retired Marines, the Mozart Group attracted extensive media coverage as a noble effort by American volunteers to transfer their combat skills to the embattled Ukrainians.

Mozart’s name was an attention-getting retort to the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian paramilitary company accused of war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere. In contrast, Mozart was described by the American veterans who formed it as a donor-funded initiative to provide humanitarian assistance as well as military training; its members do not engage in combat and say they do not even carry weapons. By August, Mozart deployed three teams of former soldiers — two teams for military training, one for extracting civilians from the front lines — with each one costing up to $100,000 a month in expenses, according to a fundraising email from the group’s public leader, former Marine officer Andy Milburn.

But war is a messy business, and last week a landmine exploded under the Mozart Group.

Andy Bain, a businessman in Kyiv since the 2000s and a former Marine, filed a lawsuit in Wyoming, where Mozart is registered as a limited liability company, accusing Milburn of financial fraud, sexual misconduct, burglary, attempted bribery, avoidance of U.S. weapons-transfer regulations, and even threatening a retired American general. The lawsuit asks the court to remove Milburn from the company and order him to pay damages of more than $50,000. According to the suit from Bain — who says he is the majority shareholder of Mozart — Milburn presided over the group “in a manner which has caused senior Ukrainian military officers to remark ‘can’t he go home and stop saving our country.’”

Milburn, reached for comment by The Intercept, described the suit’s allegations as “completely ridiculous.” He added that he had “placed this matter in the hands of legal experts.”

The last few decades of global warfare have seen a profusion of private military companies operating with little scrutiny and engaging in widespread abuses. The most notorious after 9/11 was Blackwater, led by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, whose highly paid mercenaries — mostly retired U.S. service members — ran amok in Iraq and were implicated in war crimes there, though Prince was not personally charged. Wagner’s troops have been accused of atrocities in pretty much every war zone where they fight.

Mozart casts itself in a different mold, as it claims its members are unarmed and help civilians in addition to soldiers; Milburn reacted with public anger when an American magazine described him as a “foreign fighter.” Nonetheless, Mozart has found a unique way of marching into controversy.

A day after Bain’s lawsuit was filed, Milburn responded with a barrage of counter-accusations in posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He described Bain as Mozart’s disgruntled former chief financial officer and said that Bain had been accused of financial and sexual misconduct. He also said Bain was “heavily invested in Russia,” which in wartime Ukraine is not a trivial accusation. And in a particularly surprising twist, Milburn even alleged that Bain had tried to sell Mozart to the Taliban. Milburn subsequently deleted those posts, though he told The Intercept he still stands by them.

“I apologize for allowing this individual to be affiliated with the Mozart Group,” Milburn wrote on Twitter. “We are reevaluating our vetting process and will not allow this to happen again.”

Bain, asked to respond to Milburn’s accusations, told The Intercept, “I am not going to comment on pending litigation, but recent posts and comments ensure defamation will be a much larger part of the proceedings than originally envisioned.”

The full story of what’s happening inside Mozart is not yet known. While it’s not unusual for a startup’s founding partners to have a falling out, it doesn’t tend to happen in an active war zone. And an intriguing subplot may involve an alleged effort to monetize Mozart’s high-profile work in Ukraine by turning it into a private military company with global aspirations.

While Milburn consistently presents Mozart as surviving off donations and being singularly devoted to saving Ukraine, the lawsuit accuses him of seeking military contracts in Armenia. That accusation does not seem unfounded: a recent article in Intelligence Online reported that Mozart “is now planning to become a conventional for-profit private military contractor (PMC) and expand into other war-torn areas.” The article said Mozart’s chief operating officer, former Marine officer Martin Wetterauer, confirmed it was “looking for new clients in other locations in the world.”

Whatever its outcome, the lawsuit calls into question the stability and credibility of what the New York Times described a few months ago as “one of the biggest private military companies in Ukraine.” It seems certain to lend strength to Russia’s vivid criticisms of not just Mozart but also the overall U.S. effort to aid Ukraine, as Mozart has been one of America’s most visible citizen-led initiatives.

Ukrainians train during courses with the Mozart Group, in the Donetsk region on Sept. 22, 2022.

Photo: Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images

From Iraq to Ukraine

From its birth, Mozart has been intricately connected to Milburn, who describes himself as the group’s founder.

A British-born American, Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after more than three decades of service that included deployments in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, most recently as deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Central, which plans special operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. He has written a memoir about his career, “When the Tempest Gathers,” and has contributed military-themed articles to publications including The Atlantic, USA Today, The Hill, and Task & Purpose.

He traveled to Kyiv as a freelance journalist within weeks of the Russian invasion in February, filing five stories for Task & Purpose, a military website. His last story, published on April 2, was about a former Marine accused of rape in Ukraine, but that story was subsequently withdrawn and now carries an editor’s note that says it is “undergoing editorial review for standards and practices and will be unavailable until the review is complete.” Editors at Task & Purpose did not respond to messages from The Intercept about the editorial review; Milburn told The Intercept he stands by the story.

A day after that article was published, Milburn made what appears to be his first public mention of Mozart Group in an April 3 tweet that said it “comprises former US SOF [special operations forces] personnel who deliver critically required capabilities to front line units in Ukraine. The Group’s activities primarily consist of advising, training and equipping Ukraine SOF and Resistance units.” A day after that, his first fundraising effort on PayPal raised the maximum allowed, $20,000, “within hours,” he tweeted; half of the total, $10,000, came from a military contractor, Obsidian Solutions Group. Two weeks later, Milburn explained in an article for Newsweek that his work for Task & Purpose seemed “frivolous” with a war raging around him, so he decided to organize military training after people “who I knew from previous visits, who are now in the Ukrainian military, asked me for help.”

With U.S. military personnel largely staying out of the country and U.S. diplomats departing in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Milburn attracted a considerable amount of media attention: He was one of the few Americans on the ground with combat experience who was working with the Ukrainian military and willing to talk with journalists. He has been interviewed frequently on cable and broadcast TV, especially CNN and ABC, while major newspapers in the U.S., U.K., and France have published articles about him. A New York Times profile bore the headline, “An American in Ukraine Finds the War He’s Been Searching For.”

None of these stories hinted at the accusations Bain has now lodged against Milburn.

“Crazy American”

Bain announced his 12-page lawsuit in a LinkedIn post last week that challenged Milburn’s self-portrayal as Mozart’s founder. “At the outset of the war,” Bain wrote, “having lived in Kyiv near on 30 years and recognizing Ukraine’s dire need for basic military training, I contacted a retired U.S. Marine general friend asking if he knew anyone who could come develop training. He put me in contact with Andy Milburn, who came to Ukraine a few weeks later.” According to Bain’s post, “I registered, named and arranged financing to launch the Mozart Group with a goal of providing training and support as needed for the war.”

Bain’s LinkedIn post states that he owns 51 percent of the shares in Mozart Group, while Milburn owns 49 percent. In response to a request from The Intercept for documentation, Bain provided three pages from a 35-page “Operating Agreement” for Mozart. One of the pages shows a chart that attributes 51 percent of the company’s “units” to Bain and 49 percent to Milburn.

While Bain has not previously publicized his ownership of Mozart — it is not disclosed on the group’s website and has not been mentioned by Milburn — there is a public record of the two men collaborating. On April 10, they started a YouTube channel called “Two Marines in Kyiv,” which now hosts seven videos, most of which feature discussions between them. The channel’s “About” page describes Milburn as CEO of the Mozart Group and Bain as president of Ukrainian Freedom Fund, which according to its website is a nongovernmental organization that has raised more than $3 million since February for military and humanitarian aid.

Bain’s most serious allegations revolve around Milburn’s handling of donated money — what the suit describes as efforts to “facilitate the diversion of funds away from Mozart Group LLC.” The lawsuit alleges that Milburn was “insisting on personal compensation payments exceeding $35,000 per month from company accounts … and not accounting to the company for donated funds received which were received in personal or other accounts controlled by him.” At least some of Milburn’s personal fundraising was not hidden from donors: His social media solicitations for donations have included clear links to his Venmo and PayPal accounts, which he said was necessary because Mozart’s donation platform was not working at the time, possibly due to Russian interference. But until Bain’s suit, he had not been accused of misusing funds deposited into those or other accounts he controlled.

That wasn’t all, however. According to the suit, Milburn hired as his personal assistant a woman he met on a social media dating site and had a relationship with, paying her an annual salary of $90,000, which according to the suit was “at least four times more” than the going rate. The suit further alleges that Milburn made “unwanted sexual advances and propositions to a female office manager.”

The lawsuit even accuses Milburn of “orchestrating and participating” in the burglary of a warehouse leased by Bain’s Ukrainian Freedom Fund. In addition, it claims Milburn was intoxicated and broke Kyiv’s curfew, leading to his temporary detention by Ukrainian authorities on more than one occasion. And according to the suit, Milburn sent “hostile and caustic messages” to a retired commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe after the general declined to join Mozart (the retired general was not named). Milburn’s conduct, the suit added, exasperated senior Ukrainians.

“Defendant Milburn is now commonly referred to by Ukrainian military leadership as the ‘Crazy American,’” it alleges.

The post U.S. Military Vets in Ukraine Are Fighting Each Other in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s Easy to Write a Memoir About War — but Hard to Write an Anti-War Memoir

Peter Maass — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 12:00:52 +0000

War is hell, we hear that all the time. If the cliché is true, another one is too: Depictions of war’s brutality can entice people to seek it out.

The 9/11 wars have yielded a bumper crop of books and films about U.S. soldiers that often have the effect of glorifying combat. Some of these works are blunt odes to violence and chauvinism, such as “American Sniper,” the memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle that was turned into a blockbuster film by Clint Eastwood. While many memoirs and movies are more honest and complex, there’s a dilemma that even the best war literature has a hard time avoiding. No matter how much a writer might emphasize the dehumanization of boot camp or the dreadfulness of killing, there’s usually enough of a heroic glint in their tales to make young Americans want to get some of the action themselves.

Lyle Jeremy Rubin deals with this conundrum in his thoughtful new memoir, published by Bold Type Books, about being a Marine in the time of the forever wars. “If there is one thing most agree on, it is that to die at war as an American is to be a hero,” he writes. “To almost die at war as an American is to be a hero. To go to war at all as an American is to be a hero. … American war is American heroism.” Anyone who might wish to write an anti-war book about soldiers in combat winds up staring into the smoking barrel of the quandary Rubin faces: How can he leave no pathway for readers to emerge from his book with a desire to get their own taste of that heroism?

Rubin chose as his title a Marine motto that would seem to promise his readers nothing but dumb machismo: “Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body.” But the subtitle – “A Marine’s Unbecoming” – gets at the real business he undertakes, which is to subvert the traditional thrall and scope of war memoirs.

The book opens with a requisite combat scene from Afghanistan, though it’s just a few pages long. The reader must then leaf through nearly 200 pages before Rubin’s narrative settles back into Afghanistan. He charts how his slow epiphany began during a pre-deployment stint at the National Security Agency — the electronic spy agency where he saw how America could “eradicate anyone holding an earmarked SIM card” and used that power with insufficient restraint. He realizes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not innocent mistakes by a well-meaning superpower that happened to overreach. “Now I was prepared to accept the obvious – that U.S. militarism counted as a principal part of this problem,” he writes.

His book includes lengthy passages on how American militarism oppresses not just foreigners, but Americans too, and how he morphed from an eager college Republican before joining the military to a supporter of Occupy Wall Street after his service. It is, in many ways, a bildungsroman of the 9/11 generation, about his Jewish upbringing, his early political and sexual experiences, his initiation into a military culture that breaks down and reconstructs identity, and his unsuccessful efforts to remain connected to a civilian girlfriend. He is struggling, as so many young people do, to understand who he is and what he believes.

By the time he gets to Afghanistan in 2010, Rubin is already skeptical about his line of work. The Afghan war section of his memoir is less than 40 pages and is printed in a different font, creating a book within a book. It’s not so much to accentuate his front-line experiences, I think, but to separate them out, as though to tell us with a bit of distaste, “OK, the war genre requires that I provide some ‘bang bang,’ so here it is.” As combat material goes, it’s pretty mild. Rubin was a signals intelligence officer, so his exposure to bullets and bombs mostly occurred during visits to members of his unit who were on outlying bases.

Typical soldier narratives have once-innocent men and women waking up to the horror of war; picture in your mind Charlie Sheen in “Platoon.” In Rubin’s book, the horror that would gradually reveal itself is the condition and purpose of his homeland. Yet as he set off for Afghanistan, he still didn’t see everything. “I was not ready to fess up to the most wretched ramifications of my slow-going disillusionment,” he writes. “I was not yet equipped, mentally or intellectually, to see the empire, but I was becoming more sensitive to my own status as both its product and its guarantor, a crossroads fraught with conflicting excuses, self-deceptions, and escalations.”

The cover of “Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body” by Lyle Jeremy Rubin.

Photo: Courtesy of Bold Type Books

In Afghanistan, he finds that despite his new political consciousness, he is nonetheless susceptible to the brute attractions of inflicting violence on strangers. Just before going out on a patrol to hunt down insurgents, he gathers with other Marines for a chaplain-led prayer that, he writes, “includes phrases like ‘Please, Lord, allow us to track down and kill those cowardly little pricks.’” When the patrol is called off at the last minute, he is deflated: “The fact is, I want to get some like everyone else. And so I’m disappointed as fuck.”

The strength of this book is that its passages on his yearning for violence, and his embarrassment at that yearning, are not the endpoints of his exploration, as they might be in the hands of other veterans. Yes, he is soul-searching, but the soul he examines most intensely is America’s, not his own. I think you could put 100 war memoirs on a shelf and they would not contain as many references to Western intellectuals as Rubin’s 290-page book, which mentions Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Simone Weil, Joan Didion, Dwight Macdonald, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Samuel Freeman, Sigmund Freud, H.L. Mencken, and Guy Debord, as well as the poets Sylvia Plath and Czesław Miłosz, among many others.

This is also a weakness, however. One of the reasons war memoirs tend not to stray from the battlefield or boot camp is that it’s easier to write a compelling narrative when you keep your readers anchored in these crazy and violent places. I’ve written about war before, perhaps too much, and one of the reasons might be that it’s relatively easy; how could I not find a way to entrap readers when there was so much gore and drama to draw upon? Rubin resists this easier path, while acknowledging that whatever approach he takes, “there is no way I can speak about my past or my politics without risking the encouragement and benefits of America’s cheap yet profitable obsession with war … to unveil the treachery of my service, I must first capitalize on it.” Yet by capitalizing as little as he can get away with, and trying to educate his readers, he is doing the literary equivalent of rowing upstream; instead of “bang bang,” he offers his readers Frantz Fanon.

Rubin’s narrative can at times feel choppy and baggy, the hallmarks of a too-indulgent editor, perhaps. But if Rubin does not produce Pulitzer-ready material on every page, he recognizes other writers who are masters of the word. One of the quotations in his book comes from James Baldwin, and though Baldwin wasn’t describing empire and war, his words fit perfectly into the final pages of Rubin’s memoir: “One of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

The post It’s Easy to Write a Memoir About War — but Hard to Write an Anti-War Memoir appeared first on The Intercept.

Not a Joke, the Pentagon Wants to Name a Warship the USS Fallujah

Peter Maass — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 11:00:12 +0000

U.S. soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division patrol at a coalition checkpoint in Fallujah, Iraq, on Nov. 20, 2003.

Photo: Anja Niedringhaus/AP

If you need to unite a hundred bickering historians of the Middle East, you could ask them to identify the Iraqi city that suffered the greatest amount of violence at the hands of the U.S. military. They would all say “Fallujah.”

Fallujah is where, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a crowd of civilian protesters and killed 17 of them; the U.S. military claimed that the first shots came from Iraqis, but there is no convincing evidence for that assertion and significant reporting to the contrary. Fallujah was a stronghold of the ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and for that reason, its residents fiercely opposed an unprovoked invasion that was, according to international law, flagrantly illegal.

Those killings were the prelude to a torrent of violence and destruction in 2004. The bloodshed that year included the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians; the point-blank murder of prisoners; and the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, just 20 miles away. Fallujah’s punishment even extended beyond the brutal era of its U.S. occupation; in years after, there has been a spike in cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages, apparently due to America’s use of munitions with depleted uranium.

“There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”

Instead of apologizing for what was done, the U.S. is choosing to celebrate it: The Pentagon announced this week that a $2.4 billion warship will be named the USS Fallujah. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, made clear that the military has decided to double down on its fairy tale of Fallujah as an American triumph. “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending an urban area,” he said in a press release about the naming. “The battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in the minds of all Marines and serves as a reminder to our nation, and its foes, why our Marines call themselves the world’s finest.”

The announcement noted that more than 100 U.S. and allied soldiers died in Fallujah but said nothing about the far larger toll of Iraqi civilians killed, the flattening of swathes of the city through extensive bombings, the apparent war crimes by U.S. forces, the health impacts on civilians that continue to this day — and the inconvenient fact that U.S. forces were unable to keep their hold on Fallujah for very long. For the Pentagon, it’s as if none of it mattered, or it didn’t happen.

While the whitewashing is generating little pushback in the U.S., it is eliciting protests from Iraq and elsewhere.

“The pain of defeat in Fallujah is haunting the U.S. military,” wrote Ahmed Mansour, an Al Jazeera journalist who reported from Fallujah during the fiercest fighting. “They want to turn the war crimes they committed there into a victory. … I was an eyewitness to the defeat of the Americans in the Battle of Fallujah.”

I reached out to Muntader al-Zaidi, an Iraqi human rights activist who famously threw his shoe at President George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. “It is insulting to consider the killing of innocent people as a victory,” Zaidi said. “Do you want to boast about forces that kill and hunt innocent people? I hope this ship will always remind you of the shame of the invasion and the humiliation of the occupation.”

A statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations got straight to the point: “There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”

If you were an American in Iraq after the invasion, Fallujah was one of the most dangerous places you could visit. Based in Baghdad, I had to drive through Fallujah in an ordinary sedan in late 2003 to reach a nearby U.S. base where I had an embed. What I remember of that journey was the feeble disguise I donned (a red and white kaffiyeh over my brown hair); the way I slunk down in my seat as far as I could as we drove into the city; and the clenching in my gut as my car stopped in traffic and people could notice the Americans inside.

I was fortunate; nobody spotted me or the blond photographer I was working with. But a few months later a two-vehicle convoy of heavily armed contractors from Blackwater, a private security company, was ambushed by rebel fighters on the main street where I was briefly stuck. Four Americans were killed and their mutilated bodies were hung over a bridge on the Euphrates River. The killings — and particularly the ghastly images widely published in the U.S. media — prompted the Pentagon to launch a series of revenge attacks against the city. It was an egregious over-reaction, especially because the slain Americans were not soldiers, they were well-paid mercenaries who, as a general rule, were regarded by Iraqis and U.S. troops alike as reckless, ill-behaved, and unprofessional. One of the worst massacres of the entire American occupation would take place in 2007 in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where a convoy of Blackwater mercenaries opened fire on the cars around them and killed 17 civilians.

There were two battles of Fallujah in 2004. The first was a U.S. invasion in the spring that ended with a partial seizure of the city and its handover to Iraqi authorities who soon ceded control back to the rebels. More than 800 Iraqis were killed in that battle, with more than 600 of them being civilians, half of whom were women and children, according to Iraq Body Count. Later that year, the second battle began when the U.S. military returned with an even greater number of forces and retook the entire city block by block in fighting that stretched from November to December.

During the second battle, freelance journalist Kevin Sites, on assignment for NBC News, followed a squad of Marines into a mosque that contained a handful of injured Iraqi fighters who were disarmed and lying on the ground. Sites was filming and a Marine’s voice can be heard on the video saying, “He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s fucking dead.” One of the Marines then fires his assault weapon into an Iraqi lying on the ground, after which a voice says, “Well, he’s dead now.” A military investigation subsequently determined that “the actions of the Marine in question were consistent with the established rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict, and the Marine’s inherent right of self-defense.”

After the second battle, more than 700 bodies were recovered from the rubble, and 550 of them were women and children, according to the director of Fallujah’s hospital, who at the time said his count was partial because areas of the city remained unreachable for civilian rescuers. This toll made the second battle even more deadly for civilians than the first one. “It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children,” said Dr. Rafa’ah al-Iyssaue, in an article published in January 2005 by IRIN News, a United Nations-funded media outlet that specialized in humanitarian issues. “It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started.”

A man suspected of involvement in attacks on coalition forces is questioned in the living room of his home during a raid by the 82nd Airborne Division near Fallujah, Iraq, on Jan. 14, 2004.

Photo: Julie Jacobson/AP

History is inscribed in multiple ways, not just in books, movies, speeches, articles, and statues, but even on the transoms of warships. The U.S. military obviously wants to foment a historical narrative that acknowledges only the bravery of its soldiers rather than their crimes or their civilian victims. And yes, there was bravery by U.S. troops in Fallujah, so it’s not a total lie; they attacked an entrenched enemy, they fought hard, they protected each other, most of them didn’t commit war crimes, and some of them paid the price with their own blood. But that’s true for pretty much any army in any war; it could be said of some German soldiers in World War II (hello “Das Boot”).

But it’s a lie if all you do is look at individual acts of bravery rather than the totality of what happened in a battle or war. I honestly can’t fathom how or why the Pentagon officials who decide such matters settled on “Fallujah” as the best name for this yet-to-be-constructed ship. Are they unaware of what happened? Are they aware but hoping to smother the truth? Are they counting on us to not care enough to say, “Excuse me, this is bullshit,” or do they want to remind the rest of the world at every port call that the U.S. is capable of destroying any city it chooses at any time of its choosing — a kind of floating “suck on this”? It could be any of that or all of that, who knows. The fog of war lingers long after the last bullets.

While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin.

This isn’t a done deal. The ship won’t be completed for at least several years, and names have been changed before christening and after entering service. While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin. Maybe there’s a chance of succeeding; President Joe Biden stood up to the generals who wanted to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan forever, so perhaps he’ll tell them to get lost on this one too.

If you step back from the narrow question of whether this ship should be named after Fallujah or Fresno, the larger truth is that it should not be built at all. The United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined. It’s a sickness that weakens the nation by fueling the militarization of domestic policing while depriving Americans of the support they need for essentials like good schools and decent health care.

So if you want to do the right thing for our soldiers and their dependents and their heirs, don’t name this ship the Fallujah, don’t build this ship, and don’t invade a country that has not attacked us. It shouldn’t be this hard.

The post Not a Joke, the Pentagon Wants to Name a Warship the USS Fallujah appeared first on The Intercept.

America's 9/11 Wars Created the Foot Soldiers of Far-Right Violence at Home

Peter Maass — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:00:18 +0000

Tear gas is deployed against pro-Trump rioters breeching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most aggressive generals of his generation, and after his military service ended in a bitter fashion, he went home to Tennessee and found a new way to fight. A defeated general in the Confederate army, Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan and was named its inaugural “grand wizard.”

Forrest was in the first wave of American veterans who turned to domestic terror once they returned home. It also happened after World War I and II, after the Korean and Vietnam wars — and it is happening after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sedition trial now taking place in Washington, D.C., features five defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, and four are veterans, including Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers militia. In December, another sedition trial is set for five members of the Proud Boys militia — four of whom served in the military.

A relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence.

The point here is not that all or most veterans are dangerous. Those who engage in far-right extremism are a fraction of the more than 18 million Americans who have served in the armed forces and returned to civilian life without indulging in political violence. Of 897 people indicted after the January 6 insurrection, 118 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. The point is that a relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence, thanks to the respect that flows from their military service. While they are outliers from the mass of law-abiding vets, they are the tentpoles of domestic terror.

“When these guys get involved in extremism, they shoot to the top of the ranks and they are very effective at recruiting more people to the cause,” noted Michael Jensen, a senior researcher at the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

This is a consequence of our society venerating a massive army and going to war at regular intervals: The last 50 years of far-right terror have been dominated by men with military backgrounds. Most infamously, there was Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, who set off the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995 that killed 168 people. There was Eric Rudolph, an Army vet who planted bombs at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as well as two abortion clinics and a gay bar. There was Louis Beam, a Vietnam veteran and Klansman who became a dark visionary of the white power movement in the 1980s and was tried for sedition in 1988 (he was acquitted, along with 13 other defendants). The list is nearly endless: A founder of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division was a vet, while the founder of the Base, another neo-Nazi group, was an intelligence contractor for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the man who attacked an FBI office in Cincinnati after federal agents searched the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump in August was — you guessed it — a veteran.

Adjacent to the violence, key figures in far-right politics come from the military and boast of their wartime service, such as former Gen. Michael Flynn, who has emerged as a high-profile promoter of QAnon-ish conspiracy theories as well as an election denialist. In New Hampshire, former Gen. Donald Bolduc is the GOP candidate for Senate and a spreader of lunatic ideas that include the notion that school children are allowed to identify as cats and use litter boxes (do a web search of “Bolduc litter box”). GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, reportedly the “point person” for Trump’s fake elector scheme in Pennsylvania, blanketed his campaign with so much military imagery that the Pentagon told him to dial it back.

The “why” of this pattern is complex. When wars are drenched in as many high-level lies and pointless deaths as the ones in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no shortage of good reasons for veterans to feel betrayed by their government. Leaving the service can be a fraught process even without that baggage. After years in an institution that brought order and meaning to their lives — and that defined the world in a simplistic binary of good versus evil — veterans can feel adrift at home and yearn for the purpose and camaraderie they had in the military. As the special forces veteran-turned-journalist Jack Murphy wrote of his comrades who fell into QAnon and other conspiratorial mindsets, “You get to be part of a movement of like-minded people, you’re fighting evil in a worldview that you have become comfortable with. Now you know why you don’t recognize America, not because you had a silly preconception of it from the beginning, but rather because it has been undermined by a satanic cabal.”

There is an added twist that historian Kathleen Belew points out: that while the role of veterans in domestic terror is underappreciated, they are not the only ones unhinged by war.

“The biggest factor [in domestic terror] seems not to be what we have often assumed, be it populism, immigration, poverty, major civil rights legislation,” Belew noted in a recent podcast. “It seems to be the aftermath of war. This is significant not only because of the presence of veterans and active-duty troops within these groups. But I think it’s reflective of something bigger, which is that the measure of violence of all kinds in our society spikes in the aftermath of war. That measure goes across men and women, it goes across people who have and have not served, it goes across age group. There’s something about all of us that is more available for violent activity in the aftermath of conflict.”

In 2005 the so-called war on terror was justified by President George W. Bush as “taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.” The irony is that those wars — which cost trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians — instead radicalized a generation of American zealots who for years to come will inflict violence on the country they were supposed to protect. This is yet another stupendous offense for which our political and military leaders should face history’s vengeance.

The post America’s 9/11 Wars Created the Foot Soldiers of Far-Right Violence at Home appeared first on The Intercept.

The Murdoch Family Exposes Its Hypocrisy in Lawsuits Over Fox News

Peter Maass — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 14:14:50 +0000

Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of Fox Corporation and co-chair of News Corp., attends the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in 2019 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In a spectacular display of audaciousness, Fox News is defending itself against a defamation lawsuit in the U.S. by saying it should not be punished for broadcasting lies about the 2020 election — but one of the network’s owners, Lachlan Murdoch, has just filed a suit in Australia against a news outlet that he accuses of (wait for it) lying about Fox and the election.

The suit that’s gotten the most attention was filed against Fox last year by Dominion Voting Systems, which was falsely accused by the network’s hosts and guests of rigging the election to deprive then-President Donald Trump of victory. The Dominion suit — a similar one has been filed by another voting company, Smartmatic — seeks $1.6 billion in damages and has advanced into discovery, with Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Jeanine Pirro reportedly being deposed.

Fox’s defense is that its broadcasts are protected under the First Amendment, which has consistently been interpreted by courts as allowing news organizations to publish falsehoods about public figures so long as it’s not done knowingly and there is not a reckless disregard for the truth. Fox contends it wasn’t endorsing conspiracy theories about the election, rather it was just allowing people to voice the lies, including its hosts. However, a Delaware judge, denying the network’s motion to dismiss the suit last year, noted that “the Court can infer that Fox intended to avoid the truth” and ruled that the case should proceed.

The curious thing is that last week Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corp. and son of the network’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, filed a defamation suit in Australia against a small independent news site called Crikey that published an article describing the Murdoch family as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Jan. 6 insurrection and the election lies that preceded it. The legal complaint contends that the Crikey article, as well as social media posts about it, caused Lachlan Murdoch to be “gravely injured in his character, in his personal reputation, and his professional reputation.”

The offending article by Crikey political editor Bernard Keane was about the evidence presented at the Jan. 6 hearings in Washington, D.C., and focused mostly on Trump’s culpability. But its penultimate paragraph noted that Fox had peddled “the lie of the stolen election” and played down Trump’s role in the insurrection. The final line stated that if Trump is indicted, “the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”

That line would not be remarkable if it appeared in America; it’s a statement that is easily defensible under the First Amendment. While Murdoch would have nearly zero grounds for suing in the U.S., Australia does not have anything like the First Amendment. Instead, it has a woeful reputation as the defamation capital of the world.

The upshot is that Fox is trying to have its legal cake and eat it too.

The company argues in the U.S. that it should not be punished for broadcasting lies about Dominion and the 2020 election, while seeking punishment in Australia for what it claims are lies about its role in the election. What’s especially galling is that Fox is trying to avoid any punishment for the significant harm that Dominion has already documented — including threats made against its employees — while Murdoch is seeking damages for “substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment” allegedly caused by an article in a publication whose modest readership has for years heard far worse about Murdoch and his even more loathed father.

“It’s a pretty incredible contrast,” noted Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a nonprofit media watchdog. “It exposes their inconsistency and hypocrisy.”

The reasons for filing the suit against Crikey are obvious as well as a mystery.

Murdoch’s lawyers, taking advantage of Australia’s strict libel laws, contacted Crikey a day after the article was published, and the outlet took it down. But the article was later returned to the site amid an exchange of unfriendly letters between Murdoch’s lawyers and Crikey. This culminated last week with Crikey publishing the correspondence and challenging Murdoch to carry out his threat of suing — which, in short order, he did. “We welcome Lachlan Murdoch’s writ,” Crikey responded.

On the one hand, the suit makes sense because Murdoch could win in Australian courts. The expense of going through the legal process is considerable on an objective scale but a pittance for a billionaire like him. Crikey, on the other hand, is a tiny publication and has had to launch a fundraising campaign to support its legal efforts.

But lawsuits of this sort are unpredictable because of the discovery process — you never know what might be found once opposing counsel has access to emails and other forms of internal communication. That’s one of the reasons Fox settled a suit that had been filed against it by the family of Seth Rich, the late staffer from the Democratic National Committee whom Fox falsely accused of leaking emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election: The company clearly did not want hungry lawyers looking through its confidential correspondence.

“Nobody draws the dots to the Murdochs,” Carusone noted. “The Murdochs run the company. You cannot make the case that they don’t run the company. There is no way those things are taking place without their tacit or explicit consent. Crikey will have the capacity to dig into it.”

The Dominion lawsuit has already opened the potential for disclosures about the Murdochs’ involvement in the publication of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The New York Times reported last week that Rupert and Lachlan, in addition to the hosts they employ, may be deposed. The Murdochs traditionally claim that they don’t make day-to-day decisions on programming and would never tell their hosts what to say or not to say. This claim, for which there is already evidence to the contrary, such as text messages between Lachlan Murdoch and Tucker Carlson, can now come under direct scrutiny in Australia if Crikey can assemble the resources to go the distance against the most powerful media family in the world.

The post The Murdoch Family Exposes Its Hypocrisy in Lawsuits Over Fox News appeared first on The Intercept.

An Accused War Criminal Trained Florida Cops in "New Concepts of Shooting"

Peter Maass — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 11:00:22 +0000

Should a military veteran who has been reliably accused of war crimes, and who admitted that he killed a prisoner, be invited to train police officers on how to do their job?

The police department in Tallahassee, Florida, found a surprising answer to that question. Retired Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, accused by his fellow operators of intentionally shooting civilians and murdering a prisoner in Iraq, shared a photo and video on Instagram last week in which he described working with Tallahassee police officers in close-quarters combat and other lethal skills. He posted a picture of himself flanked by the rifle-bearing officers in Florida, with his caption describing an “awesome day of training” with “an extraordinary group of men who were ready to train and take on new concepts of shooting and CQB to add to their tool box. It was truly an honor!”

After Gallagher’s picture was spotted and shared by journalist Wesley Morgan, the Tallahassee Police Department stumbled forward with a believe-it-or-not statement that its officers were merely practicing at a private facility operated by a company called Stronghold SOF Solutions, which Gallagher is affiliated with. Gallagher happened to be at the facility and offered his “input” to the officers, according to the TPD. The department did not provide an explanation of how or why its officers assembled for a group photo with Gallagher, whose current business endeavors include private instruction on weapons and tactics.

Gallagher, imprisoned before his court-martial in 2019, is a free man because a military jury controversially declared him not guilty of premeditated murder, and his conviction on just one minor count — of posing in a picture with a dead prisoner — was essentially overturned when former President Donald Trump granted him clemency. Not long after the trial and grant of clemency, the New York Times released a trove of evidence from Gallagher’s fellow operators that laid out their damning case against him.

The core problem here is not Gallagher or the Tallahassee Police Department. The conduct of each is consistent with a decadeslong meshing of the military and policing — a violent disaster in America. The process, explored in Radley Balko’s “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” began in the 1960s, was stepped up during the so-called war on drugs, and reached terminal velocity after 9/11, when vast amounts of funding and weapons were poured into local law enforcement agencies, which deployed these resources mainly against minority and poor communities. One of the most notorious signatures of this destructive process is the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which since 1990 has distributed more than $7.4 billion in military weapons — including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles — to police departments across the country.

This deluge of military hardware among civilian populations is harmful enough, creating mini-armies inside American communities that are desperate for better schools and social services. But what’s been just as harmful, if not worse, is the military mindset instilled in police ranks after 9/11. As Arthur Rizer, a former police officer and military veteran, wrote recently, “We have for years told American police officers to regard every civilian encounter as potentially deadly, and that they must always be prepared to win that death match. … It was always obvious to me that military tactics, training and weaponry had little place in civilian policing.”

And that’s where “trainers” like Gallagher come into play.

In a post on Eddie Gallagher’s Instagram, members of the Tallahassee Police Department are seen with Gallagher for a training hosted by a company called Stronghold SOF Solutions at its facility in DeFuniak Springs, Fla.

Screenshot: The Intercept

On Killing

One of the most prominent and controversial police trainers these days is Dave Grossman, a retired military officer who catapulted onto the lecture circuit after writing a book titled “On Killing.” Our paths crossed in the early days of the 9/11 era, when I was working on a magazine story and attended a talk he delivered in 2002 to a military audience whom he saluted at the end. It was a boilerplate speech for him, delivered hundreds if not thousands of times since, in which he talked about the ways in which soldiers should be trained to kill so they do not hesitate to pull the trigger and do not feel guilty about it afterward. Even in the military community, his theories were controversial and disputed by academics who believed that Grossman did not fully understand the dynamics or history of killing in wartime.

Grossman was primarily speaking to military audiences in those days — there was a lot of demand for people like him as the Pentagon was beefing up its ranks and starting its catastrophic wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. After a while, as fewer U.S. soldiers were deployed overseas, he transitioned to speaking to a broader range of civilian groups, especially police departments, even though his base of experience is in combat psychology. His policing lectures are grafted from his military talks, emphasizing the danger of the job and the need for split-second aggression — even though policing is hardly the most dangerous profession in America. (Loggers, roofers, farmers, and sanitation engineers, among other workers, have higher on-the-job fatalities.) In a 2020 story on Grossman, the writer Justin Peters noted that “there is a cottage industry of trainers and consultants who encourage police to see their beats as a battlefield” and described Grossman as likening America to “a terrifying place where police are both the primary targets of and defenders against super-predation.”

Grossman, like Gallagher, is just a symptom of the problem.

In an encouraging development, Grossman’s lectures to police audiences are getting criticized more frequently than before. Last year, the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police canceled a talk by him after justice advocates noted that his observations on police killings have included a remark that law enforcement officers can have the best sex of their lives after an on-the-job shooting. (A spokesperson for Grossman, asked for comment, told The Intercept via email, “The human body processes stress and a deadly force encounter many different ways. This is one way of MANY that humans react to and process what they just went through.”) A recent story by the Washington Post noted that the sorts of workshops conducted by Grossman and others were cited in a lawsuit over a police killing in Spokane Valley, Washington.

Yet Grossman, like Gallagher, is just a symptom of the problem. Even as the Tallahassee Police Department was trying to back away from its connection to an accused war criminal who has become a right-wing rock star in the fashion of Kyle Rittenhouse, local journalists unearthed a recruitment video from the department that highlighted an array of military-grade equipment and tactics used by its officers. The video showed off an armored personnel carrier, a camouflage-covered sniper, a squad of riot police marching in a V formation, and an armored bulldozer called the “Rook.” But don’t blame the TPD for being over-the-top: The gear in its video is standard in police departments across the country.

The fundamental problem, which was generations in the making and will perhaps be generations in the solving, is the internalization of a military force and a military ideology that were ostensibly built for external purposes. This is the forever wars coming home. The problem is not just that military spending since 9/11 has helped impoverish America while destroying foreign countries in illegal wars that cost trillions of dollars and left a million or more people dead (mostly foreigners, but plenty of Americans too). History has shown that the aftermath of foreign wars is not what you might expect. “War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state,” noted Kathleen Belew in “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” She added, “It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”

And we have just seen one of those ways: Eddie Gallagher giving shooting tips to cops.

Update: August 12, 2022
This story was updated to include a comment from Dave Grossman that was provided after publication.

The post An Accused War Criminal Trained Florida Cops in “New Concepts of Shooting” appeared first on The Intercept.

America Tolerates High Levels of Violence but Suppresses Photos of the Slaughter

Peter Maass — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 11:00:53 +0000

People mourn at a makeshift memorial outside Uvalde County Courthouse in Uvalde, Texas, on May 26, 2022.

Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

It is one of the rituals of school shootings in America — another round of debate, usually among journalists, on whether graphic photos should be published. If people could just see what assault weapons do to young bodies, the argument goes, they would no longer tolerate the policies that enable these killings. No, the other side warns, these photos would only cause further pain to the survivors and have no impact on a divided society that moves from one gruesome entertainment to another with the flick of a switch.

This debate skips along the surface of an American aberration: We passively tolerate high levels of violence while actively suppressing evidence of the slaughter. It is not just school shootings that we forbid ourselves from seeing — and I mean really seeing, not the thoughts-and-prayers equivalent of gazing in sadness at memorial wreaths. It is also the visual evidence of more than 1 million people who died from Covid-19 in the U.S that we don’t see. It is the visual evidence of not just American soldiers killed in our forever wars, but the far greater number of civilians who have perished (at least several hundred thousand in Iraq). And it is the other forms of avoidable death in our homeland that we don’t really see, including traffic violence and drug overdoses.

The scale of American violence is awe-inspiring in all the wrong ways. The rate of shootings — school shootings, mass shootings, police shootings, accidental shootings, suicidal shootings — is top of the charts compared with almost every other country on our planet. The same goes for the other ways Americans kill and die; we excel at the fatal work of extinguishing each other. No single factor can be blamed, but it’s notable that energetic measures are consistently taken to prevent us from seeing what is done. These measures have only intensified as our society has become more visual, with screens tuned to every aspect of the human experience except its final act. As the photographer Nina Berman explained to a New York Times reporter a few days ago, “For a culture so steeped in violence, we spend a lot of time preventing anyone from actually seeing that violence. Something else is going on here, and I’m not sure it’s just that we’re trying to be sensitive.”

Law enforcement officers obstruct the view from members of the press during the joint funeral service for teacher Irma Garcia and her husband Joe Garcia on June 1, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas.

Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

There’s a curious thing about this visual void: It requires an aggressive act of construction to come into existence. Let’s look first at school shootings.

There are several barriers that prevent us from seeing graphic photos of school shootings. The first is that the victims tend to be inside their schools, which are crime scenes that the police seal off from reporters. Even after the job of evidence collection is finished and the cleaners are called in, journalists are kept out. Law enforcement entities make their own photos and recordings of these sites, but those are closely held and sometimes protected by law. Even if graphic photos become available — and that’s rare to nonexistent — news outlets are reluctant to publish them, due to concerns about privacy, propriety, and criticism from readers.

One of the few graphic photos that has been circulated is from Columbine in 1999, when a photographer from the Rocky Mountain News flew in a helicopter over the school on the day of the shooting and took a photo of a student’s body on the ground outside, not far from a police officer and several students sheltering behind a car. While the newspaper’s pictures earned a Pulitzer Prize, the reaction was mixed locally. “Hostility against the press got so bad that we had people throwing snowballs with rocks in them at our photographers,” noted John Temple, the paper’s editor at the time. Imagine what would happen today if an equivalent photo were published from Uvalde: The bad-faith brigade would find a hundred ways to distract us from an honest discussion about what it conveys.

During the Columbine High School massacre, an aerial view shows a student’s body laying on a walkway while students and police officers shield themselves behind a car in Littleton Co., on April 20, 1999.

Photo: Rodolfo Gonzalez/Rocky Mountain News via AP

But let’s remember that government and public hostility to graphic photos extends far beyond our schools, to battlefields thousands of miles away. Particularly since 9/11, the U.S. military has maintained strict prohibitions on journalists taking pictures of injured or dead soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other combat zones. In recent years, the military has found the most efficient solution of all: It all but forbids journalists from embedding in combat operations. Even photography of military caskets was out of bounds for a long while. The Pentagon has an ever-growing cache of footage of people being killed in U.S. bombing attacks, but it’s only in exceptional circumstances, like the furor over the drone killing of an extended family in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2021, that we see any of it.

The economy of war zone photos is not controlled by the military alone. News organizations have proved reluctant to publish pictures of dead soldiers. In 2008, freelance photographer Zoriah Miller was expelled from his military embed in Iraq after posting on his blog a photo of a dead U.S. soldier. Even after that, no major publication was interested in his rare picture. The New York Times did eventually publish it, but for a story about military censorship. One of the most haunting photos from the Gulf War, showing the corpse of an Iraqi soldier burned alive, was not distributed by any major outlet. “If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it,” said Kenneth Jarecke, the photographer.

The essence of America — its raw capitalism — is at least partly to blame. What would the readers and advertisers think? More than a million people have died of Covid in the U.S., yet there have been precious few images of these people as they perished in hospitals. I spent a good deal of time last year investigating why we were seeing so many pictures of doctors and nurses but almost none of the people whose lives were lost. One of the principal reasons was that hospitals were concerned about legal liability and the damage that images of death and chaos could do to their brands. “There was no benefit to them showing the apocalypse and what it looked like,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “Having patients all over the emergency department on oxygen canisters and people intubated is not going to be a good image for your hospital.”

I think the familiar debate about whether to publish graphic photos of school shootings — or Covid victims or war casualties — has lost its urgency. Like so much else, it has become a ritual that we dutifully enact after another outrage occurs. I think the answer to the debate is clear — yes, publish the photos, it’s the right thing to do, we should be aware of what our plagues of violence beget. I also think it’s now more likely that if news outlets get possession of the right photo from Uvalde or from the next school shooting (we won’t have to wait long, this is America), they will publish it. But it will be from a position of desperation. They have tried everything else to change minds; this is all that’s left.

The truth is, it no longer matters so much. It’s not just, as the critic Susie Linfield wrote the other day, that photos rarely result in the kind of change that their supporters hope for. What’s different now is that on the life-or-death issues that confront us — shootings, wars, Covid, opioids, traffic violence — the awfulness of what has been allowed to accumulate over the decades is so damn vast. How can those responsible begin to backtrack? We’re not talking about a modest correction. America without its violence — without the factions that don’t mind the violence and even draw some benefit from it — would be a new country. There’s a path to getting there, but it’s going to require work and discomfort that’s far more complicated than publishing a shocking photo.

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After Buffalo, Will Corporate America Turn Against the Murdochs and Fox News?

Peter Maass — Sat, 21 May 2022 11:00:52 +0000

Rupert Murdoch, left, and his son Lachlan Murdoch in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 13, 2018.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If your anger at Fox News is directed toward Tucker Carlson, you’re focusing on the symptom rather than the cause of what’s wrong. It is the Murdoch family, which owns Fox News, that’s the biggest advocate in America for the “great replacement theory.”

It’s right to be furious about Carlson espousing the racist conspiracy theory that inspired a white supremacist to kill 10 people in Buffalo last weekend, but Carlson serves at the pleasure of Rupert Murdoch and his heirs. Even if popular pressure forced Carlson off the air, the Murdochs would just find or create another racist host to take his place, probably a worse one. (They’ve done it before.) That’s why we need to focus on the Murdoch family, on its base of support in corporate America, and ask a simple question: Shouldn’t the Murdochs become the next Sacklers?

The decisive role of the Murdochs was emphasized this week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who implored them to cease platforming “great replacement” lies. “For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” Schumer wrote in a letter to Rupert Murdoch, his eldest son Lachlan, and two Fox News executives. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”

In other words, the Murdochs are Stormfront with clout.

Due to public pressure, most major advertisers have pulled away from Carlson in recent years, and other programs on Fox News are heading in that direction. But it doesn’t really matter: The network derives most of its income from cable providers that pay generous fees to carry it. Comcast and other cable companies do not think twice about pouring nearly $2 billion a year into a pseudo news operation that’s been described as a “hate-for-profit racket.” So long as there’s not too much of a stink — which a campaign called #UnFoxMyCableBox is aiming to create — cable providers do not mind enriching a family whose marketing of intellectual poison remains an attractive business proposition.

The Murdochs have adopted an ancient strategy associated with money launderers and bootleggers who do not wish to live in the shadows: They surround their objectionable endeavors with reputable ones. Challenges to their propriety are diminished by the legitimate things they actually do and the upstanding associates they really have. The Murdochs, for instance, possess an array of valuable assets in the U.S. that include a network of TV stations that broadcast sports and entertainment programs. This gives the family a loyal army of bankers, producers, actors, sports stars, and journalists who are willing to see them as they wish to be seen and uninterested in asking about those other things they do with their money and time.

Just last week, Lachlan Murdoch, who runs the family’s sprawling empire on a day-to-day basis (Rupert is 91 years old), had a friendly earnings call with a group of Wall Street analysts. The softball financial questions from the representatives of Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America steered miles away from the political untidiness at Fox News. Nobody asked why Lachlan, when Carlson breaks another taboo, responds by texting or calling his favorite host to let him know the family is behind him all the way.

On Monday, Lachlan was back in the establishment’s kind embrace, this time with advertising executives and media buyers who were attending the “upfront” presentations of his family’s U.S. broadcast units: Fox Entertainment, Fox Sports, and Fox News. Lachlan, according to Variety, was dressed in sneakers and watched as his management team outlined their offerings for the coming year, including the next Super Bowl and World Cup, as well as entertainment programs featuring, among others, actors Jon Hamm and Susan Sarandon. The presentation about Fox News made no mention of the network spreading the idea that white Americans are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants, and Carlson’s name was not uttered once.

The inevitable truth is that corporate America loves the Murdochs. Powerful executives who would leave a room if Alex Jones or Steve Bannon presented himself are delighted to have a moment with Rupert or Lachlan.

A protester outside Fox headquarters in New York on April 19, 2022.

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Hollywood and the Murdochs

Is there any way to disconnect corporate America from the family that operates the “central node” of the far-right conspiracy machine?

Reader, I have mused about this a lot. Again and again. Perhaps too much. In fact, maybe I have a problem. But the dilemma of Fox News and the Murdochs does not go away, it just gets worse. Government action is not the answer, as the protections of the First Amendment exist for good reason. The key question, in my mind, isn’t whether the government should allow the Murdochs to operate a racist cable network — they have that right — it’s whether major corporations should line up to do business with them.

The prospects are not good for a change of heart in corporate America. For instance, it’s impossible to imagine that Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner who is paid $63 million a year by billionaire team owners to make as much money for them as possible, will suddenly decide to pull the plug on the league’s lucrative $2.3 billion-a-year contract with Fox Sports. Goodell, remember, is the man who had no problem with the banishment of quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence against Black people.

But let’s think creatively. Fox Corp., the parent company of the Murdochs’ networks in the U.S., is a shareholder-owned firm in which the Murdochs have a controlling stake. What would happen to the share price if NFL players or their union spoke out against the owners of Fox Sports and called for the league to not renew its broadcast rights (which unfortunately don’t expire for a number of years)? Alas, there’s a tremendous disincentive for players to criticize the Murdochs, because they could forget about ever being hired by Fox Sports as a commentator after they retire. And Goodell might be tempted to allow the Kaepernick treatment for any dissidents, meaning that their playing careers could be in jeopardy too. So this thought experiment isn’t encouraging.

Balance sheets do not have line items for doing the right thing by turning against the first family of “great replacement.”

How about the Murdochs in Hollywood? The major companies that will no longer put their ads on Fox News are glad to have their wares advertised on Fox television shows like “The Simpsons.” Corporations respond to consumers, and while consumers punish them for supporting political programs on Fox News, that’s not the case for sponsoring “The Masked Singer” on Fox TV. Absent consumer pressure, there’s no market-driven reason for any company to withdraw its ads from, say, “The Cleaning Lady.” Balance sheets do not have line items for doing the right thing by turning against the first family of “great replacement.”

What about the creative talent? While Hollywood proclaims itself to be devoutly anti-racist, there’s little sign that the enlightened writers, actors, and producers who create Murdoch’s entertainment programs are having second thoughts about who they work for. Susan Sarandon, famous for her political activism, was on the upfronts stage last week to promote her new Fox show and did not, in front of Lachlan Murdoch, seize the moment to pull a Nan Goldin.

Goldin is an art photographer who set off a dramatic wave of protests against the Sackler family — the owners of the pharmaceutical company that flooded the U.S. with the addictive painkiller OxyContin. Goldin became addicted to opioids after OxyContin was prescribed for her tendonitis, and in 2018 she led a now-famous protest at the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which she and other activists threw prescription bottles into a reflecting pool and shouted “Sacklers lie, people die!” Those protests came amid a wave of lawsuits that recently culminated with a settlement in which the Sackler family agreed to pay as much as $6 billion to communities harmed by the opioid epidemic and transfer ownership of Purdue Pharma. The family’s name has been taken down from the Met and other museums.

Lawsuits against the Murdochs have not gotten far because the First Amendment offers broad protections for news organizations and individuals in ways that no constitutional provision or law protects a pharmaceutical company. Proving direct harm from an opiate is far easier in a court of law than proving direct harm from a broadcast. There are exceptions, but they are narrow. While the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been sued into bankruptcy for saying the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that’s because he was accused of defamation — making false statements about the parents of the slain students and causing them damage.

You never know what a bit of protesting might do, however. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find examples of anyone in the television business, even people who don’t currently work on Fox shows, protesting against the Murdochs in a consistent and public way. It’s a pattern that seems to affirm the silencing effect, in itinerant Hollywood, of not knowing who will sign your next paycheck. Though one exception is Judd Apatow, the prolific director and writer who for years has been drilling holes into the family Murdoch.

Sure people in the administration will quit. Who will show some honor and quit working for @FoxNews ? Who will stop working for Lachlan Murdoch and the people who monetize division, racism, corruption, bad covid information which kills and treason?They helped create all of this.

— Judd Apatow ?? (@JuddApatow) January 7, 2021

Reporting the Murdochs

There’s been extensive discussion in the media about needing to cover the GOP as an extremist entity that threatens democracy rather than as a standard political party. The same discussion should probably be raised about Fox and the Murdochs. Should they be covered as something other than a conservative news outlet with a cranky proprietor who enjoys watching his children battle each other for his attention and love? If so, what would that mean?

For a long time, news organizations have treated the Murdochs with generosity and indulgence, as a tale of financial success and succession intrigue. I’m not referring just to the usual suspects of CNBC and MarketWatch, but also the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others. Just watch this 2018 public interview of Lachlan Murdoch by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin and try not to cringe at Sorkin’s knee-bending solicitude. The only remotely tough question came during the audience Q&A from a New Yorker reporter.

The Times has improved in the past few years, starting with an excellent series in 2019 that was headlined “How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World.” In April, the Times published another lengthy investigation, “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.” But this kind of hard-nosed criticism remains patchy. In March, the Times published a puff piece about Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son. The article, “How a Murdoch Hopes to Save American Democracy,” was more than 1,300 words of fluff about a supposedly centrist member of the Murdoch clan donating to nonpartisan causes. It neglected to mention that Kathryn Murdoch has never really criticized Fox News — the closest she has come is saying on Twitter that she agreed with a tweet in which Jake Tapper urged the Murdochs and Fox to put country before profits — and it failed to note that her husband played a loyal and key role in the family empire, stepping aside in 2020 mainly because his father finally chose Lachlan as second-in-command.

One of the lessons of the past few years is that journalists need to call things by their names, and that means, when covering Fox News, naming not just the hosts who mouth the words that inspire violence, but the family that approves of these words and pays for them to be spread from coast to coast. This is a drum I’ve been banging for a long time, and while the coverage of the Murdochs has improved, it has a ways to go. In an otherwise acceptable news story this week about the conservative media’s embrace of “great replacement” ideas, the Washington Post mentioned Tucker Carlson 15 times — but did not once mention the Murdochs.

Update: May 24, 2022
This story has been updated to include a tweet that a representative of Kathryn Murdoch, asked for comment before this story published, brought to The Intercept’s attention after publication.

The post After Buffalo, Will Corporate America Turn Against the Murdochs and Fox News? appeared first on The Intercept.

Putin's Endgame Is Not a Mystery. It's Regime Survival.

Peter Maass — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 12:00:20 +0000

Left: A Bosnian child leaves his father on Nov. 11, 1992, in Sarajevo. Right: A man says goodbye to his son and his wife on a train to Lviv at the Kyiv station, Ukraine, on March 3, 2022.

Photos: Patrick Baz/Getty Images, Emilio Morenatti/AP

He is the president of a Slavic nation who takes advice from no one and gambles on a war that does not go as planned. Fierce resistance prevents his forces from seizing the capital he covets. Western sanctions send his economy into a tailspin, the middle class flees, and state media offers ridiculous propaganda (“Our enemy is bombing themselves”).

This sounds like Vladimir Putin in 2022, but it’s Slobodan Milošević in 1992, when military forces under the Serbian leader’s control went on a genocidal rampage in Bosnia. The war dragged on for years and involved sieges of Sarajevo and other cities, including Srebrenica. Milošević claimed Bosnia was an artificial country that didn’t deserve to exist — the kind of lie that Putin has deployed against Ukraine. Serbs shelled apartment buildings and attacked civilians as they tried to flee — just as the Russian army is now doing in Ukraine. You can look at a picture of Sarajevo in 1992 and a picture of Kyiv in 2022 and not know which is which.

There’s a lot of guessing about what Putin will be able to achieve in Ukraine and whether he’ll survive in power, now that his opening gambit has failed. But there has been surprisingly little reference to the precedent of Milošević and Bosnia. It’s as though what happened in Bosnia is not regarded as an authentic chapter of Europe’s history — because most of the war’s 100,000 victims were Muslim, and Muslims aren’t considered fully European. As the historian Edin Hajdarpašić noted last week: “If 1990s Bosnia is taught, it is in courses on genocide & violence, but rarely as part of European history courses.” It’s an omission that does more than reveal how prejudice tilts our choices about which history to highlight and which history to ignore; it deprives us of a greater understanding of what may lie ahead.

There are two sides to the lessons from Belgrade and Sarajevo. The first is that a leader who embarks on a violently nihilist path can remain in power far longer than you might expect. There is speculation about a possible coup in Moscow, but Milošević stayed in office throughout the war, which ended after four years, and wasn’t ousted until late in 2000 when he tried to rig an election that he lost. The second lesson is that an underdog fighting for survival can stave off, though with immense loss of life, a far larger force that lacks its motivation. The Bosnian Army was thrown together after the Serb onslaught began and persevered, despite an unconscionable arms embargo by the United Nations (imposed against all parties but hurting only the Bosnian side, because Serbs had plenty of weapons of their own).

It goes without saying — so of course I feel obliged to say it — that what happened a generation ago in the Balkans is not predictive of what will happen in Ukraine and Russia. The differences are considerable. In many ways, what we’re seeing in Ukraine is a speed-chess version of the wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Syria, with the pieces on the board now including nuclear weapons. But in addition to covering the war in Bosnia, I studied Russian at Leningrad State University back in the Soviet era and occasionally reported from the USSR during its collapse and afterward, including a brief stint in Ukraine when it became independent (a story I wrote in 1991 was headlined “Ukrainians Fear Border Disputes Could Bring Conflict With Russia”). What is happening today is uncanny, an old tune played in a new key with a faster tempo and higher stakes.

Left/Top: Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Bocharov Ruchei state residence in Sochi, Russia, on Sept. 29, 2021. Right/Bottom: Portrait of President Slobodan Milosevic in his office on Dec. 13, 1992, Yugoslavia. Photos: Vladimir Smirnov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images, Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Staying in Power

What is Putin’s endgame?

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and prominent commentator on the war, has given voice to a consensus view. “Putin has no endgame,” he wrote last week. “Even if he takes Kyiv, then what? Ukrainians will never submit to him. Never.” It’s true that Ukrainians have amply demonstrated they will not give up, but in the context of the Milošević experience, McFaul’s assessment seems unimaginative.

Putin is a true believer in the idea of a greater Russia: He genuinely would like to return Russia to what he regards as its lost glory. Milošević’s embrace of Serbian nationalism was different. He was opportunistic from the start; nationalism was just a vehicle to take him to power and keep him there. With Kyiv demonstrating that it will not become Russia’s property, Putin is moving toward Milošević’s cynical position. As his army appears to move slowly, with large amounts of equipment abandoned and significant numbers of soldiers captured or killed, we’re already hearing less talk of national glory and territorial expansion. Staying in power — doing whatever is necessary to stay there — is the new endgame. The more clearly we understand that, the better we can understand what Putin’s tactics will be in the time ahead.

For context, let me take you back in time to the noisy dining room of the Serbian Parliament in Belgrade during the Milošević era. It was late in 1992, when the war and genocide in Bosnia were searingly hot. Serbia was a strange place. It wasn’t a full dictatorship; there were some independent media outlets. If you didn’t like Milošević, you could say so, within limits. The dining room was filled with political hacks and war criminals, as well as a handful of dejected reformers. One of them recognized me. He had been my interpreter a year earlier, but now he was a senior functionary in the federal Yugoslav government, a powerless entity that was nominally separate from Milošević’s Serbian government, where all power resided. Laszlo sat down at my table and laughed when I remarked that Milošević would not like the latest peace proposal because it wouldn’t give him the land he sought for a greater Serbia.

“Don’t ask what strategy is best for achieving a greater Serbia, or what strategy is best for the welfare of the Serbs,” Laszlo told me. “Ask what strategy will keep Milošević in power, and that’s the one he will follow. All of these things that he talks about, like nationalism and protecting Serbs, are just tools that he uses to stay in power. He doesn’t care about them at all. He doesn’t care about anyone at all. He cares only about staying in power.”

The pursuit of violence was the best strategy for staying in power.

The pursuit of violence was the best strategy for staying in power. War allowed Milošević to drape his regime in the national flag and blame everything — the sanctions and corruption and penury and hyperinflation — on the supposed threats Serbs faced from Bosnia’s Muslims and America’s imperialism. Those excuses eventually ran out of steam, but Milošević survived longer than expected by combining the rhetoric of national defiance with the cowardly violence of soldiers sitting in the hills and bombing civilians in the valleys below. Peace, when it finally came, was a tactic he used to maintain his rule. It was not his goal.

What does this tell us about Putin? It’s important to note, again, that it’s impossible for any of us to know what Putin will do or what’s going on in his head. But precedents are instructive.

Ben Judah, an Atlantic Council fellow who wrote a book about Putin, noted the other day that the structure of power in Russia is a “personalistic dictatorship.” Putin has been in charge for more than two decades and is surrounded by cowering “yes” men; just watch the videos of his meetings with his national security council, his generals, and top business executives. In a similar vein, when I interviewed Milošević in 1993, there was nobody else in his spacious office: no bodyguard, no note-taker, no media adviser. He ruled alone. The interests of men like Milošević and Putin come before all else. “He could either suddenly declare ‘the anti-terror operation was a success’ or escalate dramatically,” Judah wrote on Twitter, of Putin. “Depending on what he thinks is in it for him, he’s capable of ditching the offensive or ditching the entire economy as we’ve known it in massive escalation.”

The rationale for continued warfare is that it binds more Russians to Putin than would come from an acknowledgment of his blunder and withdrawal of his forces. Retreat, even if packaged as a victory by wringing a concession or two out of the Ukrainians, could wind up being a larger blow to his hold on power. The math could easily change, with Putin calculating that retreat would better serve his interests; this could happen anytime. But until then, the violence will carry on. The war crimes that horrify so many of us are unlikely to factor into his calculations, because he has done this before, in Chechnya as well as Syria, with no fallout at home. Witness, for instance, the news reports in which ordinary Russians deny their forces are bombing cities in Ukraine despite being shown evidence of it. Yes, these are early days, but denialism of this sort is not unusual years into wars and afterward too. It helps to remember that in the 1990s, only a small number of Serbs believed their forces in Bosnia were guilty of war crimes despite an inundation of proof. And they still feel that way. Despite an international tribunal ruling in multiple cases that Bosnian Serbs committed genocide, Serbia’s current president is none other than Alexander Vučić, a minister in Milošević’s last government.

A Ukrainian tank rolls along a road on March 8, 2022, in Ukraine.

AFP via Getty Images

Fighting for Weapons

There is good news for Ukraine from Bosnia, and it has to do with weapons.

The Bosnia war began after a majority of voters cast their ballots in favor of independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. The United Nations had placed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, using the rationale that more weapons would mean more fighting as the country broke up. In fact, the Serbs had plenty of weapons because they controlled the Yugoslav National Army and had open borders with the rest of the world to acquire whatever they did not already possess. The Bosnian government, on the other hand, had no weapons at the start and limited means to acquire them even illicitly, because it was mostly encircled by its Serb enemy and faced its off-and-on Croat allies elsewhere. The embargo meant only that the Serbs, who started the war, would never lose their advantage in armaments. At the end of one of my winter reporting trips to Sarajevo, I left my boots with my interpreter because his brother was on the snowy front lines in sneakers.

The Bosnian Army hung on and prevented Serb forces from overrunning Sarajevo and other chunks of the country that had not been conquered in the first months of the war, when the Serbs made most of their gains. This showed what can be achieved by a motivated army even if it is outmatched in firepower. Serb fighters were cowardly: At the war’s outset, they attacked towns that had no defenses, shooting people at will, and once the front lines were set, they squatted in the hills and shot at civilians from a distance. I visited Serb soldiers in their mountain bunkers; they were glad to kill but afraid to put their lives on the line. When they finally starved and broke Srebrenica in 1995, they executed more than 8,000 men and boys.

The parallel to Ukraine is startling, with a crucial difference.

Ukrainians are defending their homes and their independence. Russian soldiers do not really know what they are fighting for.

The Russian Army is massive compared to Ukraine’s, which is why Putin was so confident of prevailing in a matter of days, just as Milošević did not anticipate fighting for years in Bosnia (he had planned to quickly carve up Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia). But the Ukrainians, like the Bosnian forces, are defending their homes and their independence. Russian soldiers do not really know what they are fighting for; many were reportedly not even told they would be invading Ukraine. Just as lackluster Serb forces resorted to indiscriminate fire against civilian targets, the Russians are falling back on that dismal strategy in Ukraine.

But here is a key distinction: While the Bosnian Army was starved of weapons due to the U.N. embargo, Ukraine has been preparing for this war since Russia seized Crimea in 2014; it has been getting support in this effort from the U.S. and its NATO allies. More to the point, it is now on the receiving end of a massive infusion of weapons in the billions of dollars and apparently growing by the day. I don’t think interpreters in Kyiv are finding it necessary to solicit donations of winter boots for their front-line siblings.

It was a journalist from Bosnia who made this comparative point the other day. “Don’t underestimate Ukraine,” Melina Borčak wrote on Twitter. “Bosnia was independent, but didn’t have an army when it was attacked. … There was an arms embargo, so we couldn’t even buy a handful of guns. Everyone thought, we will bleed out fast. We resisted for 4 YEARS.”

The resistance came at a terrible cost. Not just the 100,000 deaths, but the physical and psychological scars that millions of survivors carry to this day, as well as internal borders that divide Bosnia still, thanks to a peace treaty, negotiated at a U.S. military base, that gave half the country to the genocidal Serbs. Let us hope, this time, that the U.S. and its allies conduct themselves in a manner that helps Ukraine arrive at a fairer and quicker endgame of its own.

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Pentagon Professes Shock That U.S. Airstrikes Frequently Kill Civilians

Peter Maass — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 12:00:36 +0000

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks during a news briefing at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., on Jan. 28, 2022.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Pentagon is not known for staging revivals of classic movies, but it just reenacted a famous scene from “Casablanca.”

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — after months of news reports about civilians killed by U.S. bombs, including the deaths of seven children and three adults in a Kabul drone attack — just issued a directive to reduce what the military traditionally describes as collateral damage. “We can and will improve upon efforts to protect civilians,” Austin vowed this week. “The protection of innocent civilians in the conduct of our operations remains vital to the ultimate success of our operations, and as a significant strategic and moral imperative.”

His two-page directive calls for the creation of a “Civilian Harm and Mitigation Response Plan” in 90 days that will lay out a comprehensive approach to improve the training of military personnel and the collection and sharing of data, so that the wrong people don’t get killed so often. He also ordered the establishment of a hazily defined “civilian protection center of excellence” to institutionalize the knowledge needed to prevent wrongful killings. The underlying idea is that military culture will be changed so that protecting civilians is a core goal.

If you were just tuning into the catastrophe of America’s forever wars, you might be impressed by Austin’s directive, in the same way you might be impressed by Capt. Louis Renault in “Casablanca” when he shuts down Rick’s Café because, shockingly, gambling was happening in the casino. Renault’s horror was feigned, of course. He was a regular visitor to the cafe, and after blowing his whistle on gambling, he was handed his winnings for that night.

It’s not as though the Pentagon is taking action — or pretending to take action, as is much more likely — because battlefield abuses have suddenly been brought to its attention. From the beginning, one of the hallmarks of the post-9/11 wars has been the widely reported killing of civilians by U.S. forces. These things have been revealed in exhaustive detail year after year by generations of journalists (I even did a bit of it during the Iraq invasion), as well as nonprofit organizations and military whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale.

There has even been a begrudging chorus of admissions by the Pentagon that go back more than a decade. In 2010, the Joint Chiefs of Staff completed its classified “Joint Civilian Casualty Study.” In 2013, a Pentagon office called Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis published a report titled “Reducing and Mitigating Civilian Casualties: Enduring Lessons.” The remarkable thing about that 2013 report — other than the fact that it included most of the remedies Austin mentioned this week — was that it contained a list of a dozen other reports on civilian casualties that JCOA alone had published in the previous five years.

And five years later, in 2018, the Joint Chiefs completed yet another classified report on civilian casualties. The Washington Post, which revealed its existence, described that report as “a major examination of civilian deaths in military operations, responding to criticism that [the Pentagon] has failed to protect innocent bystanders in counterterrorism wars worldwide.” Sound familiar? And that secret report came two years after President Barack Obama had issued an executive order that said the military was killing too many civilians and needed to take a range of actions to change that.

The Pentagon’s protestations of disappointment at what has happened, and its promises to do better, are the standard confetti of insincerity.

You get the point. The Pentagon’s protestations of disappointment at what has happened, and its promises to do better, are the standard confetti of insincerity. In many ways, it’s similar to executives at Facebook expressing dismay and regret at some of the ways their platform has been used and abused, and promising to do a better job. The important thing to watch is not what powerful institutions promise to do but what they actually do. And when they do nothing after promising again and again to make changes, you would be foolish to regard their latest vow as meaningful.

“While a serious Defense Department focus on civilian harm is long overdue and welcome, it’s unclear that this directive will be enough,” noted Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project. “What’s needed is a truly systemic overhaul of our country’s civilian harm policies to address the massive structural flaws, likely violations of international law, and probable war crimes that have occurred in the last 20 years.”

The best template for understanding the endurance of the Pentagon’s failures on civilian casualties might be its record on curbing sexual abuse in its ranks. This is a problem that has existed forever but jumped into the public realm in a particularly strong way with the 1991 Tailhook scandal, when 83 women and seven men were sexually assaulted at a Navy conference in Las Vegas. Since then, the military has continually promised to do everything it could to fight sexual abuse. There has been no shortage of studies and plans and hearings, but the problem persists, with nearly one in four servicewomen reporting sexual assault in recent studies, and more than half reporting sexual harassment.

There is now hope of real change after Congress finally passed legislation in December that transfers to independent military prosecutors the authority to pursue sexual assault cases. Under an executive order signed by President Joe Biden this week, sexual harassment has also been added as a crime to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. These moves came more than three decades after Tailhook.

It would be good if we could save ourselves another decade or two of insincere Pentagon reports and jump forward to the day when commanders no longer have the ability to protect their subordinates, and themselves, by standing in the way of prosecutions after civilians are recklessly killed. (There was no disciplinary action taken against any soldier after the Kabul drone bombing, for instance.) But that day is probably a long way off, especially when the current defense secretary is a former general who for many years commanded U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the meantime, there is one thing Biden could do that would show the government is just a little bit serious about reducing civilian casualties. Daniel Hale, who pleaded guilty to leaking classified military documents that revealed the scale of civilian killings by U.S. drones, is currently serving a 45-month sentence for violating the Espionage Act. He should be pardoned, to demonstrate that it was terribly wrong to punish someone who tried to stop the murder of innocent people.

“I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life,” Hale said at his sentencing. “I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretend that things weren’t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.”

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The Warning Lights Are Flashing Red for America

Peter Maass — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 11:00:11 +0000

Law enforcement use a smoke grenade to push back protesters at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images

It was the winter of 1991, and the country I was working in, the Soviet Union, was months away from its demise. Yet the collapse, so close, was unimaginable.

Moscow was frigid and miserable. The currency was a wreck, stores had empty shelves, and the Kremlin seemed more of a ghost ship than command center. The country’s Baltic republics were seeking independence, and when I reported on the violence that had already occurred there, struggle and darkness were all that seemed possible.

I was visiting the Soviet Union to help my overworked colleagues from the Washington Post, and on one of my first nights, I had dinner with a few correspondents who lived in the country and knew what was going on — or were supposed to. They talked of a grim era ahead in which the KGB and the Soviet Army would rule the country, because its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was losing control; his reforms unleashed only discontent and poverty.

A few years later, after the Soviet Union was no more, I wrote about that dinner and what would have occurred if I had known the future and told my friends about it. “If I would have suggested that, in six months, hard-liners might stage a coup against Gorbachev, and that the coup would fail and that the Soviet Union, which we all had grown up with and believed to be immortal, would die on the spot, breaking into bits and pieces with names like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, my colleagues would have laughed and wondered whether my water glass was filled with vodka.”

The astounding thing isn’t that every warning light was flashing red in the winter of 1991 and we didn’t see them. We saw those lights. Everyone did. We couldn’t miss them. We knew there was danger. The astounding thing is that we couldn’t imagine their submerged meaning, the future they indicated.

One year after the storming of the U.S. Congress, it’s a good time to recognize that we are no longer observers of the distressed futures that afflict other people. We are those people now. It is we, not the out-of-luck them, who are at the mercy of nightmares. So today is a good day to understand what that means.

A Lithuanian demonstrator runs in front of a Soviet tank during an assault on the Lithuanian Radio and Television station in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Jan. 13, 1991.

Photo: Andre Durand/AFP/Getty Images

Sinister Dimensions

I am a glutton for dystopia. While covering the war in Bosnia, I read J.G. Ballard’s “High-Rise,” a 1970s novel about a luxury apartment building in London where the residents devolve into war against each other, begun by a dispute over a loud party. I can’t remember why I chose to read Ballard, but the first sentences of “High-Rise” spoke to what I was learning in the Balkans about the ways societies slip, without knowing it, into the realm of nightmares:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension.

Even as Sarajevo suffered its first casualties in April 1992, during a peace march, lots of people still couldn’t see what was in front of them: a genocidal war by Serbs against Muslims. There were plenty of flashing red lights before the shooting started, years before it started, in fact — the death of Yugoslav ruler Josip Broz Tito; the publication of a nationalist tract by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts; the rise of Slobodan Milošević — but what did these things mean, what was the future they foretold?

These questions lead me to another book I read during my time in the Balkans, this one about the Balkans. Though Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” is a classic that was published in 1941 and elicits some groans nowadays for its Serbian orientation, it has a line from its narrator that remains a truth bomb: “In writing this book I have been struck again and again by the refusal of destiny to let man see what is happening to him, its mean delight in strewing his path with red herrings.” These red herrings are somewhat universal: the plans we have, the dreams we covet, the delusions we nurture.

It would be wrong to punish ourselves over our inability to see the future. Who could be expected to realize that it wasn’t just a reality TV star but the next president of the United States who rode down an escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, and implausibly announced, as he described Mexicans as rapists, that he wanted to be the 45th commander in chief? For that matter, how could a young reporter in Budapest in 1990 foresee that the cool 20-something anti-communist activist he interviewed from time to time, just elected to parliament, would become a racist and antisemitic prime minister one day? (The cool kid was Viktor Orbán, and the young reporter was me.)

Red herrings, everywhere.

Bosnian soldiers engage in house-to-house fighting in Sarajevo on June 24, 1992.

Photo: Morten Hvaal/ Rapport/Newscom

Patriot Games

The warning lights have been flashing in America for a long time. We could start in 1619 or 1789 and jump forward 200 years to Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh, for instance. What I saw in the Balkans makes me think the emergence of Fox News in 1996 was the trigger mechanism for our current predicament. It’s hard to overstate the necessity, if your goal is national madness, of mainstreaming racism and hatred — a function that was fulfilled by Radio Television of Serbia before the Bosnia war.

The late Miloš Vasić, one of the most fearless journalists in Serbia during the 1990s, chronicled his homeland’s descent into extremism and corruption. Vasi? knew that the great unwinding in the former Yugoslavia was not a unique phenomenon. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years,” he said in 1993. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”

The Murdoch family, which owns Fox News, has required more than five years to create an actual war in the U.S., but the network’s millionaire hosts are not without results, and they remain hard at work encouraging their mostly white viewers to be the worst they can be and feel like patriots. I think Vasi?, who died last year, would have a lot of wisdom to share about our January 6 anniversary, and some of it would revolve around Americans finally seeing they are not the well-mannered exception to internal calamity that they liked to believe themselves to be.

While it’s too much to expect we can foretell our future, we can know from the multitude of flashing lights that we have slipped into what Ballard would instantly diagnose as a sinister dimension. And our journey is not complete. Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian American writer, put it well: “What the actual resolution might look like, I fear to envision, but I know it will not resemble anything Americans can remember or dare to imagine.”

The fortunate thing is that we don’t need to know precisely what the future holds. History, and the presence of 20 million assault rifles in America, provides us with enough data to know the outlines of what’s ahead if we continue to pretend that nightmares are for other countries, not ours.

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The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity

Peter Maass — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 12:00:50 +0000

An Air Force AC-130 gunship in an undated photo.

Photo: U.S. Air Force/Getty Images

My education in wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000.

How does America react when it kills civilians? Just last week, we learned that the U.S. military decided that nobody will be held responsible for the August 29 drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. After an internal review, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin chose to take no action, not even a wrist slap for a single intelligence analyst, drone operator, mission commander, or general. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby bizarrely said, “We acknowledge that there were procedural breakdowns” but that “it doesn’t necessarily indicate that an individual or individuals have to be held to account.”

There has been quite a lot of savagery-adjacent news to absorb this month. The New York Times just published a two-part series by Azmat Khan, based on military documents, revealing that U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians but that the Pentagon has done almost nothing to discern how many were harmed or what went wrong and might be corrected. As Khan noted, “It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use.”

Savagery consists of more than the act of killing. It also involves a system of impunity that makes clear to the perpetrators that what they are doing is acceptable, necessary — maybe even heroic — and must not cease. To this end, the United States has developed a machinery of impunity that is arguably the most advanced in the world, implicating not only a broad swathe of military personnel but also the entirety of American society.

Left: A mass funeral for the 10 civilians killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. Right: People gather around a vehicle hit by a U.S. drone that killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. Photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Elite Accountability

Impunity tends to begin at the top. No American general has been disciplined for overseeing the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor for lying to Congress about these disasters. The opposite has occurred: Stars have usually been added to their shoulders, and when they retire from the military, they tend to march into well-paid positions as board members in the weapons industry or elsewhere (even though they are not strapped for resources, thanks to pensions that can reach $250,000 a year). The reputation-protection racket is so galling that an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq wrote a now-famous article in 2007 that noted: “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

We should not be surprised. We are a society that excels in elite unaccountability. Just look at the number of bank CEOs who faced criminal charges after the 2008 financial collapse (zero), or the number of Sackler family members who were criminally charged after their company, Purdue Pharma, started the opioid epidemic with OxyContin (also zero), or the number of billionaires who avoid paying income taxes (lots of them). And let’s not forget the politicians and pundits who goaded America into an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and suffered no consequences. It’s not clear who takes their cues from whom, but it is obvious that all of these elites benefit from the con.

Military impunity is somewhat unique because it stretches downward, too. If an intelligence analyst or drone operator or fighter pilot follows orders and procedures for an airstrike that kills dozens of civilians in a wedding party — which has happened — they need to be excused of wrongdoing. After all, who gave the orders, and who set the procedures? These questions would require looking up the chain of command, and for that reason, they are not asked with any intention of finding the answers. That’s why it was with no sense of alarm that secret military documents published by The Intercept in 2015 noted that in a two-year campaign called Operation Haymaker, 9 of 10 Afghans killed in U.S. drone strikes were not the intended targets. For the U.S., this was the acceptable cost of doing business.

The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous pursuit of soldiers for other offenses.

The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous pursuit of soldiers for other offenses. Unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the financial industry, or the IRS, which oversees taxpayers, or the Senate and House ethics committees, which keep an eye on members of Congress, the U.S. military has wide authority and deep resources to impose an array of penalties, from pay reductions to loss of rank and death sentences. The military avidly uses these powers, too. In 2020 alone, there were more than 37,000 cases of discipline in the armed forces, and since 2001, there have been more than 1.3 million cases.

Yet these powers have been used sparingly or not at all when it comes to airstrikes that kill civilians. One of the worst massacres in two decades of warfare occurred not long ago, on March 18, 2019, when U.S. warplanes dropped bombs that killed scores of civilians, mostly women and children, in an Islamic State enclave in Syria. The carnage was immediately apparent. As the Times reported last month, an analyst who watched the attack on a drone video typed into a secure chat system, “Who dropped that?” Another analyst wrote, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” A quick battle assessment settled on 70 people killed.

A legal officer flagged it as a possible war crime that warranted an investigation, the Times noted, “but at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.” The Pentagon’s inspector general looked into what happened, but even its report was “stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.” An evaluator who worked on the inspector general’s report, Gene Tate, was forced out of his job after complaining about the lack of progress and honesty. Tate told the Times: “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.”

I could go on for thousands of words describing other airstrikes that killed civilians and resulted in no discipline or slight reprimands that were issued only after embarrassing reports from news organizations and human rights groups. For instance, there was a 2015 airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz , Afghanistan, that killed 42 patients and staffers; the military’s reluctant discipline included counseling and retraining for some of the personnel involved. The point is this: A military establishment that has enthusiastically enforced requirements for things as petty as wearing a reflector belt while jogging has consistently failed to discipline soldiers for wrongful bombings that its own battle assessments acknowledge have killed civilians.

The machinery of impunity actually has two missions: The most obvious is to excuse people who should not be excused. The other is to punish those who try to expose the machine, because it does not function well in daylight. That’s why Daniel Hale, an Air Force veteran whom the government accused of leaking those classified drone documents to The Intercept, was sentenced under the Espionage Act to nearly four years in prison. It is not the act of killing civilians that will result in definite and heavy punishment, but exposing the act of killing.

A hospital run by Doctors Without Borders after a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on Oct. 16, 2015.

Photo: Najim Rahim/AP

Undoing Impunity

In 1992, I interviewed a Muslim girl in Bosnia who had been raped. “The Višegrad warlord took a fancy to her,” I later wrote, “and one night dragged her and her younger sister away from their mother, who of course was crying hysterically and holding onto the legs of the warlord, who kicked her away and shouted, ‘I am the law.’”

The warlord’s name was Milan Lukić, and he was one of the most evil men in a war that had a surplus of them. He killed women and children with particular ruthlessness, one time setting fire to a house in which 59 civilians were sheltering; they all perished. But Lukić was saying one honest thing when he kidnapped the sisters: He was the law. His paramilitary thugs had a monopoly on violence in Višegrad and the full support of Serb political and military authorities. At the time, I didn’t imagine that their crimes would catch up with any of them.

My interest right now is in the durability of these machines of impunity, not the comparative depravity of the crimes they protect (what happened in Bosnia was genocide). It seems ridiculous to think that the U.S. military’s cover-ups will be undone. The Pentagon is now getting even more support from the country in a form that is easy to measure and crucial to sustaining its clout: funding. Congress has just passed a military budget of $768 billion, which is more than was allocated in 2020, even though U.S. troops withdrew this year, in a humiliating fashion, from their forever war in Afghanistan. Despite what has happened, America’s elected representatives are not loosening their protective embrace of the Pentagon.

Yet the impunity that seemed eternal in Bosnia turned out to be short-lived, at least for the elites of criminality. Lukić is now in prison with a life sentence, thanks to his conviction at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity. Key wartime leaders were extradited to the Hague too. Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia, died of a heart attack before his trial concluded, but Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military leaders of Bosnia’s Serbs, were convicted of genocide.

America in 2021 is not Serbia in 1995. Our machinery of impunity is not susceptible to pressure from larger nations. But the journalists, whistleblowers, and researchers who have done the hard work of exposing its lies — they are still at work. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more these people uncover, the harder they toil. I wouldn’t bet against them.

The post The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity appeared first on The Intercept.

As Omicron Surge Begins, Hospitals Have New Reason to Open Covid-19 Wards to Journalists

Peter Maass — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 11:00:14 +0000

Michael Dowling made an unorthodox move when the Covid-19 pandemic got underway. Dowling is the chief executive of the largest hospital network in New York, and he decided that instead of barring journalists from Northwell Health’s facilities, he would let a documentary team inside one of its hospitals.

A prominent figure in the U.S. health care industry, Dowling was making a radical break from other CEOs. As people stricken with Covid-19 began to perish, most hospitals closed their doors to journalists, claiming that patient privacy had to be protected and that outsiders who weren’t medical professionals might contract the virus or get in the way of their swamped staffs. Dowling had been a top health official in New York during the AIDS epidemic and didn’t think that it would be a problem.

He was right.

The journalists he let inside Long Island Jewish Medical Center were led by an award-winning director, Matthew Heineman, whose just-released documentary, “The First Wave,” is being hailed for its up-close realism of a hospital at the pandemic’s outset. There were none of the disasters that other hospital executives claimed to fear if they granted access to journalists: No violations of patient privacy occurred, none of Heineman’s team contracted the virus, and the hospital’s staff has warmly embraced the film.

With the Omicron variant starting to overwhelm the U.S., the lessons learned from Northwell’s experience are timely in the extreme: hospitals do not have valid excuses for keeping journalists out, and letting reporters inside will confront skeptics with graphic evidence that might sway some of them.

A still from Matthew Heineman’s documentary feature “The First Wave,” filmed inside the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York.

Photo: National Geographic

Telling the Real Story

In an interview with The Intercept, Dowling became the first senior executive in the health care industry to say publicly that it was a mistake for hospital leaders to stand in the way of journalists trying to report on the fatal seriousness of Covid-19.

“I think they were unsure whether they can trust what goes on inside their organization,” Dowling said. “They were wondering, ‘Well, this is dangerous, why would you do that, you’ll never know what will come of it, this could be a disastrous [news] report, it could all be negative about mistakes that are made.’” He added, “But that’s the risk you take, and I’m not afraid of taking risks like this. Because I believe, especially in this case, telling the real story was important.”

As previously reported by The Intercept, the general exclusion of journalists from U.S. hospitals early in the pandemic meant that there were scant photos or videos of patients afflicted with the virus. This paucity of graphic imagery came at a malleable time when Americans were making up their minds on whether lockdowns and other anti-Covid measures were truly necessary. While it is impossible to say whether stronger visual evidence would have diminished the skepticism that took root in the early days, a number of academics and doctors believe that would have been the case.

The pandemic has exposed how the documentation of what’s unfolding in an emergency room or intensive care unit can have a real impact on public safety and national politics. In less fortunate countries that have been consistently rattled by war or natural disasters, hospitals are common locations of newsgathering, because that’s where the casualties and their truths are found. If climate change and political turmoil in the U.S. lead to a greater number of mass casualty events, hospitals will increasingly become contested spaces where corporations come into conflict with journalists trying to report the news that’s unfolding behind their closed doors.

The head of the American Hospital Association, Richard Pollack, declined an interview request for this story. The AHA provided a vague statement from Nancy Foster, its vice president of quality and patient safety policy, who noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health authorities recommended that hospitals restrict outsider access to prevent the spread of Covid and that even family members were not let inside at the pandemic’s outset. “Media visitation policies always prioritize patient safety and privacy, along with whether hospitals have the material and staffing resources to ensure members of the media can visit safely and without unduly disrupting patient care,” her statement said.

CEO of Northwell Health Michael Dowling poses with nurses, doctors, and other staff during an event at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y., on April 23, 2020.

Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Taking Care of Business

Hospitals are big business. The largest network in the country, HCA Healthcare, had revenues of more than $51 billion in 2020, and its CEO was paid more than $30 million that year. The educational and professional profiles of the industry’s CEOs tend to be little different from those in other fields: While some have medical backgrounds, most worked their way to the top as managers and began their careers with business degrees. The prospect of letting journalists roam around their facilities during a pandemic is about as welcome to them as it would be for executives at Facebook or Exxon Mobil to let reporters attend strategy meetings during a public relations crisis.

In most ways, Northwell is a typical health care company. Like many, it is structured as a nonprofit, though the business practices of these nonprofits are largely indistinguishable from for-profit networks. Dowling is paid very well for his services — more than $4 million in 2019, according to the latest salary information available, and 14 other executives at Northwell earned in excess of $1 million that year. The company has acted aggressively to collect unpaid bills: In 2020, as most hospitals in New York ceased legal actions against overdue patients because of the pandemic, Northwell sued more than 2,500 people for an average of about $1,700 plus interest, according to the New York Times, which described it as “a flood of litigation even as the pandemic has led to widespread job losses.” (A Northwell spokesperson told The Intercept that more than half of those suits were filed by hospitals affiliated with the network but not owned by it.)

When it comes to media relations, Northwell is an outlier. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dowling was a senior official in Gov. Mario Cuomo’s administration, serving as health director and deputy secretary to the governor, which means that Dowling came into health care management after public service rather than business school. “I spent 12 years in government where I was in front of the media all the time,” Dowling recalled. “I was not uncomfortable with that at all.”

In 2001, Dowling was selected as the leader of what was then called North Shore-LIJ Health System, which in 2016 was rebranded as Northwell Health; the company now has more than 75,000 employees and annual revenue of about $15 billion. Dowling has become the most visible executive in New York’s hospital industry — according to the LexisNexis database, he was mentioned in far more news articles from 2018 to 2020 than the CEOs of other hospital systems that are more famous, such as Memorial Sloan Kettering, NYU Langone Health, and Mount Sinai Health System. Dowling even has an active Twitter account, unlike the other CEOs.

His profile during the first year of the pandemic was enhanced by a close association with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the son of Dowling’s former boss. Dowling assumed an unofficial position as Cuomo’s top Covid adviser in the private sector, often appearing at press conferences with him. When the time came for the first FDA-approved doses of the Covid vaccine to be delivered at the end of 2020, a nurse and doctor at Northwell were selected to receive them — a boon for the company’s profile, as the event was broadcast live by CNN and showed Dowling standing beside nurse Sandra Lindsay and Dr. Yves Duroseau.

Northwell Health employee Yves Duroseau, MD, right, chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital who volunteered to be the second person to receive the Covid-19 vaccination at Northwell Health at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, speaks during a press conference in Queens, New York on December 14, 2020.

Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Practice for a Pandemic

In what turned into an unintended dry run for the pandemic, Northwell gave a green light in 2017 for a documentary team to film at its Lenox Hill Hospital. The team worked there until the end of 2019 and crafted an eight-episode series for Netflix called “Lenox Hill” that came out in 2020. An extra episode was added after the team was allowed to return to Lenox Hill as the pandemic began. So at the start of the Covid-19 crisis, Dowling actually had two teams of independent journalists inside his hospitals: one at Lenox Hill, the other at Long Island Jewish.

“This was not a big leap for us at all,” he said. “We have been doing these kinds of things for years.”

A key concern expressed by hospitals is that a journalist might disclose the name or identity of a patient without their consent, violating the privacy law known as HIPAA and potentially leading to heavy fines. But there’s a simple workaround that Northwell reached with the Netflix team and with Heineman’s team: The hospital was allowed to view a rough cut of their work before broadcast to make sure that every patient who was identified had given their consent.

“We had gone through that experience, we knew the protocols that would have to be followed, we knew the privacy issues that we had to deal with,” Dowling said. “I had other hospital CEOs say to me, ‘Man, this is crazy that you allow people to sit in your hospital watching everything that goes on full time for months on end.’ My attitude is, I’m OK with it.”

Most CEOs were not OK with it. Their decisions to ban reporters, taken one by one and with an impact that was collective, helped turn the sudden battle against Covid-19 into a long war with hundreds of thousands of victims whose terrifying plight could not be witnessed. This spared Americans from the medieval inconvenience of seeing the suffering and death of a plague in their midst. In its first months, the pandemic was defined by empty streets and grounded planes, by 6 feet of distance between nervous people, and by the strained faces of hospital workers who were swamped and frightened.

The enemy was microscopic, and its victims were invisible.

The post As Omicron Surge Begins, Hospitals Have New Reason to Open Covid-19 Wards to Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals

Peter Maass — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 12:00:23 +0000

It is time to make a strange addition to the shortlist of essential documents on the dishonesty of America’s generals: a new book from retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal titled “Risk: A User’s Guide.”

McChrystal was removed from his command by President Barack Obama but afterward created a thriving consulting firm and often appears on TV to talk about war and politics. His new book is intended to be a primer for corporate leaders trying to navigate the perils of doing business in America. The conceit is straightforward: Hello, I am a retired four-star general who bravely led troops into battle, and I can tell you everything you need to know about managing risk.

There is a lot that McChrystal might teach us, because he was responsible for a series of consequential errors from which valuable lessons could be learned. Those errors include the concoction of a plan in 2009 to defeat the Taliban insurgency by flooding Afghanistan with as many as 80,000 additional U.S. soldiers. This was the kind of troops-and-money strategy that succeeded mainly in killing lots of civilians and helping the Taliban return to power.

A cover of Stanley McChrystal’s latest book, “Risk: A User’s Guide.”

On a less catastrophic scale, McChrystal actively participated in the cover-up of the friendly fire killing of NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman, whose 2004 death the Pentagon initially blamed on the Taliban, knowing that this was untrue. McChrystal also took the ill-advised risk of allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to embed with his entourage on a trip around Europe, and the resulting article, which conveyed the general’s disdain for America’s elected leaders, led to his early retirement in 2010.

I am not arguing that McChrystal should abstain from writing about risk or suggesting that he didn’t have wartime successes. A book that intelligently drew from both sides of his military career could be useful. But that is not the book McChrystal chose to write, and for that we should be grateful, because he has instead provided us with a far more important document. “Risk” is stuffed with so many displays of dishonesty, ignorance, and banality that it’s the ultimate self-own for a generation of generals who led America into disaster after 9/11 — and profited from it.

With his new book, McChrystal turns himself into an accidental whistleblower.

Fighting the Truth

There is a basic question to ask before buying a general’s advice book: Why are we listening to this guy?

America treats its generals as revered proxies for its ordinary soldiers, loving them even though the wars they’ve presided over have been catastrophic. There has been more than $14 trillion in defense spending since 9/11, more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at least several hundred thousand civilians killed (which is a conservative estimate). Throughout these calamities, the generals lied about what was happening, telling Congress and the American public that things were going well when they knew it wasn’t true. The breathtaking scale of their deceit was revealed in classified documents that the Washington Post published in an award-winning 2019 series titled “At War With the Truth.”

Their failures have occurred outside the battlefield too.

One of the most venerated generals of recent times is James Mattis, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and went on to become President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary. Before joining the Trump administration, Mattis was on the board of directors of Theranos to provide advice on “building elite teams.” He received an annual stipend of $150,000 and continued to defend Theranos even after the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2015 that the company’s blood-testing machines were fraudulent. Testifying in September at the trial of the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, Mattis avidly threw her under the bus, saying that he was “disappointed at the level of transparency from Ms. Holmes.”

A different type of flameout happened to retired Gen. David Petraeus, another famous commander of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who served as Obama’s director of the CIA. Petraeus didn’t last long at Langley because he was having an affair with his biographer and shared classified information with her. The tradecraft he employed to covertly communicate with her was amateurish: They used the drafts folder in a shared Gmail account. And while in Afghanistan, his military aides were excluded from helicopter trips so that his secret girlfriend could ride along. Petraeus resigned from the CIA and pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information, but he’s still respected and has a lucrative partnership at KKR, a private equity firm.

One more item from the annals of generals gone bad:

There’s retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser until it was realized that he had deceived Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with a Russian diplomat. After pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, Flynn became a star of the QAnon conspiracy crowd and called for America to have one religion (no prizes for guessing which one). His leap into the world of the unhinged is not unique. Retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan and led Special Operations Command Africa, is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire and has described the state’s governor, also a Republican, as a “Chinese communist sympathizer.”

You get the point. Putting aside the conspiracy theories, corporate frauds, and the sharing of classified documents with persons not authorized to receive them (your girlfriend), there is little evidence that the experience gained by generals translates into business acumen. In fact, there is evidence that companies with military officers on their boards have worse outcomes than their competitors. It’s hard to imagine two cultures more different. In the military, a general can order the court-martial of a subordinate for disobeying orders. In the corporate world, Elon Musk is powerful, but he can’t send lazy workers to prison. The skills used to organize a sales team for another round of cold calls are not what you need to lead Delta Force operators into mortal combat. And lest we forget, the U.S. military has a culture of sexual assault and harassment that has resisted decades of reform efforts.

Gladwell for Dummies

McChrystal appears to have the distinction of making more money from his military service than any U.S. general of his generation.

According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, McChrystal has served as a board member or adviser to at least 10 companies since leaving the military. He was paid more than $1 million for serving on the board of just one firm, Navistar International, which also paid $50 million to the government to settle accusations that it fraudulently overcharged the Marine Corps for armored vehicles. McChrystal also drew $70,000 for a single speech at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and $50,000 for an engagement at California Polytechnic State University. Both are public institutions not known to be awash with funds.

The engine of McChrystal’s business endeavors is his eponymous McChrystal Group, which has more than 50 employees and provides consulting services to corporate and government clients. While “Risk” is written in the first person, McChrystal has a co-author, Anna Butrico, who is an associate at his firm. References to the firm are scattered throughout the book, and its acknowledgments section gives credit to about a dozen employees who provided ideas and assistance. The book is prominently featured on the website of McChrystal Group.

The handful of pages about Afghanistan skate past colossal failures in which McChrystal was deeply complicit.

The book is dishonest because it ignores or distorts the risks undertaken by McChrystal that failed. This includes the Tillman episode but most crucially the disastrous war strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq. While there are boastful passages about military missions in Iraq that are portrayed as successful — special forces would “identify and engage enemy fighters with stunning speed,” McChrystal claims — the abundant errors made there are basically unmentioned. More to the point, the handful of pages about Afghanistan skate past colossal failures in which McChrystal was deeply complicit. Violent raids by forces under his command are described only as creating “extraordinary political controversy” because they were “antithetical to the Afghan culture.” Nowhere does McChrystal admit the actual reason for the controversy: U.S. and Afghan forces killed an unconscionable number of civilians, and in some instances, the violence constituted war crimes.

Much of the book is not lies, just utter banality. It is a torrent of platitudes like this: “Fear of change is only natural — adaptability requires the ability, willingness, and, I’d argue, courage to dare to become something different.” Or this assemblage of clichés: “Knowing that transformation is inevitable, we can ensure that we’re asking the right questions of ourselves and our teams to calibrate to our new reality in order to be successful in an increasingly digitized world.” And this insight: “Against the greatest threats, winning is most often the product of teamwork.”

The book moves from one bromide to another with eighth grade-level graphics, and one of its key messages is perplexing from a grammatical perspective: that “the greatest risk to us — is us.” It evokes famous events or personalities to make points that are manifestly self-evident, with references to the Alamo, Google, Apollo 13, Aunt Jemima, Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Goebbels, Blockbuster, Enron, Lehman Brothers, “The Wizard of Oz,” the Bay of Pigs, Greta Thunberg, Napster, Gettysburg, the Maginot Line, Coco Chanel, Hurricane Katrina, and the Fosbury Flop, among others. One can imagine McChrystal’s agent pitching the germ of this book as “Malcolm Gladwell for Dummies.”

Stanley McChrystal, chair of Siemens Government Technologies Inc., speaks during the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., on May 2, 2016.

Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Manufacturing Fame

It’s harmless, you might think. What could be so terrible about a retired general making a few bucks with potted wisdom from West Point and the Sunni Triangle? We can even enjoy a cynical laugh, if we wish, watching a grift come to life as corporate executives make bulk purchases of “Risk” and do calisthenics at dawn with Navy SEALs hired by McChrystal Group. The gullible marks get what they deserve, which is nothing. But I can’t steer my thoughts away from the sacrifices of the soldiers and civilians I met while covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think few of them are pleased or amused by the ease with which fortune and fame are showered on generals who got so many people killed and maimed. Many would regard it as an injustice.

The villain in this story isn’t really McChrystal or his book. He’s doing what Americans are encouraged to do: Swim toward available commercial opportunities and make as much money as you can without breaking the law. Maybe he doesn’t need all that extra cash — generals can receive more than $250,000 in annual retirement pay, after all — but how many people would turn down the partnerships and board seats that are offered to former generals?

The deeper problem, I think, is the adulation that McChrystal and other military leaders get from media organizations. They manufacture the fame that is so misplaced. Here, for instance, is a partial list of the outlets that gave fawning coverage to the rollout of “Risk”: Axios, CNN, PBS, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, MSNBC, NPR, CBS News, Yahoo Finance, and Foreign Policy. It seems that there was just one news outlet in the U.S. that published a critical take: The National Review, with an article by military veteran Bing West that was scathingly headlined “A General Who Failed in War Assesses Risk.”

The post Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals appeared first on The Intercept.

"The First Wave" Shows What We Haven't Seen of Covid-19

Peter Maass — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 12:00:48 +0000

At Long Island Jewish Medical Center, a loudspeaker announces an emergency in one of the rooms. It is March 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic has just begun to take hold in the U.S. A team of nurses and doctors in the hospital is preparing a patient for intubation. A doctor leans over the patient, whose name is Patrick George.

“George,” the doctor shouts, “do you want to be put on a respirator?”

“Put me on,” George responds weakly.

“We’ll let your family know, OK?” the doctor says.

George is struggling to breathe and knows it’s his last hope.

“Put me on now,” he says.

If you have survived the pandemic without going inside a Covid ward, you will likely be stunned by the grim intimacy of this scene and the fact that you are witnessing it, with real-time urgency, in Matthew Heineman’s new documentary, “The First Wave.” The scene offers the kind of life-and-death drama that medical staffs have staggered through every day while the rest of us rarely or never saw it. We were — and are — isolated from the traumatic realities inside U.S. hospitals as more than 750,000 souls perished from the virus.

This opening scene, not yet 30 seconds long, twists in ways you cannot forget.

A nurse puts a phone, encased in a plastic bag, in front of George’s face. On the other end, seeing him via FaceTime, is George’s wife.

“I love you, baby,” she cries out.

“I love you too,” George responds.

“OK, be strong.”

“Bye,” George says.

“I love you,” she repeats.

“Bye bye,” George says. “Bye bye bye bye bye bye.”

This scene is not done with us but I won’t say what happens next. What I can say is that “The First Wave” is necessary to watch. Unless you have already seen and heard the kinds of events it shows, you have an incomplete understanding of the pandemic and of what three-quarters of a million deaths mean — when instead of a statistic in a news story, the casualties are a man on his back, his wife on the phone, and the nurses and doctors doing everything they can to save his life.

The saving grace of this film, if that’s the right way to put it, is that it journeys around the epidemiological trenches at this New York City hospital and brings back a variety of stories, some of them uplifting, and they thread into an effective narrative. There are patients who seem on the verge of death and struggle back, there are family members urging them along on those plastic-encased phones, and there are medical staffers whose trauma-filled work is getting the attention it deserves in our less troubled lives.

It sounds strange to say, but there is art in this film too. The way the camera lingers just long enough at the right moments and not too long at others, the way the lifted brow of a nurse speaks louder than words, the way the film breaks out of Long Island Jewish and moves into the streets of New York City, taking us from the gasps of Covid patients to the “I Can’t Breathe” chants of the Black Lives Matter movement — this is masterful work.

Heineman is no stranger to documentaries. He directed the Academy Award-nominated “Cartel Land,” about the drug trade on the U.S.-Mexico border. He also directed “City of Ghosts,” an award-winning film about citizen journalists in Raqqa, Syria. Those films demonstrated a willingness and ability to work in dangerous areas and gain the confidence of people who otherwise might not let an outsider into their worlds. Those talents are what went into the making of “The First Wave.”

Heineman used his experience and contacts to gain unparalleled access to Long Island Jewish. Across the U.S., hospitals were shutting their doors to journalists as the pandemic began. Only a handful gained entry, and their visits were short, usually just a few hours or a few days at most. Heineman’s team was at Long Island Jewish for months. Hospital administrators have cited safety and privacy concerns for keeping journalists out, but as Heineman’s experience showed, they could work inside Covid wards without getting in anyone’s way or spreading the virus.

That’s what makes the footage in his documentary so extraordinary. I worked for months on an investigative article that delved into the way hospitals cracked down on reporters in the U.S., and I spent a lot of that time scouring through the imagery that was published by journalists, including filmmakers, and by medical staffers (some hospitals even threatened doctors and nurses who shared photos or videos). I’ve seen nothing that comes close to Heineman’s graphic portrayal of Covid victims.

The only visual documentation of the pandemic that’s in the same league comes from far away. The director Hao Wu, working with Chinese journalists in early 2020, got relatively unfettered access to four hospitals in Wuhan, where the virus originated. His powerful documentary, “76 Days,” came out last year and won an Emmy. Until the emergence of Heineman’s film, which opened Friday, Americans who wanted a visceral look inside a Covid ward had to watch a film shot in China.

It is hard to categorize “The First Wave” because it crosses boundaries: It is a documentary that also feels like a horror film, an exposé of social injustice, and a love letter. In its review of “The First Wave,” the Washington Post has a line that manages to be insightful and off-kilter at the same time. “The film feels like a viscerally effective time capsule from the recent past,” wrote Michael O’Sullivan, “yet one whose arrival in theaters may still be too soon for many.”

A time capsule is filled with the familiar objects of a civilization. But what’s in “The First Wave” is unfamiliar to most of us; we have not seen it before and perhaps have been unable to imagine it. There is the anguish of patients as they labor to breathe, the medical instruments warning of hearts no longer beating, the body bags zipped up and hauled away, and the moments of silence before nurses rush to the next room to try to save another life. Stumbling onto this time capsule, we are visitors from another world who are seeing for the first time what the Covid pandemic really meant.

This film has not come too soon. It has come too late.

The post “The First Wave” Shows What We Haven’t Seen of Covid-19 appeared first on The Intercept.

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