The extent of any injuries sustained by Trump remain unclear; a campaign spokesperson issued a statement saying the former president “is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility.” It is unclear how the incident might affect his campaign, but given historical precedent, his popularity is likely to benefit.

Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record in the past of boosting their public appeal.

In the months after he was shot in the leg at a political rally, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan saw support for his party grow as the public came to view him as a solitary figure battling a corrupt establishment.

Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed at an event in 2018, before going on to win elections boosted by the support of voters who saw him as surviving an attempted murder by their ideological enemies.

President Ronald Reagan likewise benefited from public sympathy and support after an attempted assassination — support which helped him push through a raft of controversial economic policies that would define the country for decades to come. 

Scholars have warned of an apparent increase in political assassinations in recent years, after a number of foiled and successful attempts targeting officials in the U.S. and abroad. Following the killing of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, the national security publication War on the Rocks blamed the possible increase in attacks on “accelerationists” seeking to drive social conflict through destabilizing political institutions.

In the aftermath of the apparent shooting at his campaign rally, an image of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist to the crowd began spreading virally on social media, including among supporters who lauded his defiance. The world awaits more details on Trump’s condition and what exactly took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. It will also be watching what this moment means for Trump’s popularity and the 2024 election.

The post Will This Make Trump More Popular? appeared first on The Intercept.

The communications include new allegations about Khan’s history with Munir. According to those in touch with the imprisoned prime minister, Khan is making new allegations that Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

Imran Khan is making new allegations that Asim Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

The deposed prime minister also alleges that Munir conspired with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to cooperate against him in exchange for dropping corruption charges that had forced Sharif into exile.

The escalating personal conflict between Khan and Munir also looms large in the communications. Khan alleges that Munir ordered agents of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service to kill him and that the general covered up assassination attempts by squashing a police probe and burying CCTV footage.

The allegations from Khan about Munir come as the general has continued amassing political power and leading a brutal crackdown on rival political parties, activists, and the press in Pakistan.

The crackdown included the removal and imprisonment of Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician; violence and arrests targeting his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party; and a rigged election this February.

Khan’s fate remains the biggest unanswered question in the country’s politics, which the prison communiques suggest are driven by acrimony between him and Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists.”

With transnational repression reaching the U.S. — the military reportedly detained Pakistan-based family members of rivals living in the U.S. and Canada — the crackdown is drawing increasingly stronger condemnations from American officials.

Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., issued a video statement condemning the targeting of family members of Americans and called for sanctions to be placed on Pakistani military leaders including Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists,” Khanna said. “We all know the elections in Pakistan were rigged, and Imran Khan is still in jail. The United States needs to sanction Asim Munir and any military leader in Pakistan who is targeting Americans.”

Assassination Attempts

Khan’s allegations about Munir were shared with The Intercept by a number of sources close to him who requested anonymity to protect their security.

In the communications, Khan alleges the existence of CCTV footage and other evidence showing that Munir concocted a scheme to have Khan killed at a tumultuous court appearance on March 18, 2023.

Khan’s car was mobbed by spectators on the way to court, some of whom, Khan alleges, were Inter-Services Intelligence agents dressed in civilian clothes. The attempt on his life, Khan says, was only thwarted by a crowd of PTI supporters who surrounded his car.

Khan also offered his own narrative on a November 2022 incident when he was wounded in a shooting attack at a political rally that killed one of his supporters. The Pakistani government detained a single person for the attack, whom officials claimed had been motivated by religious extremism.

According to sources close to the former prime minister, Khan accused Munir of being behind a cover-up of the incident. The general, he claims, blocked an independent probe into the attack and that eyewitness accounts pointed to the involvement of multiple assailants.

Munir’s Political Plays

Pakistan has been held hostage to the political clash between Khan and Munir, with the former prime minister now imprisoned on charges widely seen as politicized.

Khan claims that Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including Sharif, the former prime minister, to spare them from corruption charges. In exchange, the politicians like Sharif supported jailing Khan and cracking down on his party.

Khan claims Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to spare them from corruption charges.

The crackdown — extrajudicial killings, torture, mass detentions, and other sweeping measures aimed at dismantling the PTI — has so far failed to dim Khan’s popularity. In elections this February, candidates affiliated with PTI won sweeping support, according to exit polls, before electoral rigging engineered by the military allowed a coalition government of Khan’s opposition to form.

Khan characterizes the events as a betrayal by Munir. In Khan’s telling, according to the sources close to him, the prime minister’s downfall was precipitated after Munir reneged on an agreement. Khan says that the then-President Arif Alvi, a senior member of his party, had the power to block Munir’s ascension to the top military post in the country but allowed it to go forward after the general’s emissaries said he planned to stay out of politics.

Munir, like Pakistani military leaders before him, plays a prime role in the country’s political affairs.

Khan’s legal status remains in flux after serious corruption and espionage charges against him were thrown out in court. The former prime minister now remains imprisoned solely on charges that he improperly married his third wife in contravention of religious guidelines.

PTI meanwhile remains at odds with the military establishment, with halting attempts to mediate a resolution to Pakistan’s ongoing political standoff so far unsuccessful.

Deepening Crackdown — and Crises

Khan’s removal by his military and civilian rivals came in a 2022 no-confidence vote organized amid pressure from the U.S. over the prime minister’s foreign policy stances.

Since the removal, Pakistan has been wracked by overlapping economic and political crises that have paralyzed the nation of 200 million.

Even with Khan and PTI sidelined, the military continues its attempts to suppress speech. This year, the military blocked X and issued a statement denouncing “digital terrorism.” Government officials have also made reference to imposing a national firewall on the country’s internet.

Khan’s personal safety is widely believed to be in jeopardy by his supporters, including Pakistani Americans who recently lobbied for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to contact the Pakistani government about his safety.

In addition to blaming Munir for betraying his trust and attempting to engineer his murder, from prison Khan has repeatedly raised the specter that the general is leading the country toward a repeat of its traumatic 1971 partition — a stinging embarrassment for Pakistani nationalists.

The partition occurred following a military-led crackdown and massacre after an army rival won elections. The civil war spurred the secession of the eastern half of the country into the nation of Bangladesh.

Correction: June 27, 2024, 2:47 p.m. ET

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Imran Khan was prime minister at the time of Asim Munir’s ascension, and could have blocked it. This story has been updated to note that Arif Alvi was president at that time.

The post From Prison, Imran Khan Says Top Pakistani General Betrayed Secret Deal to Stay Out of Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

As with many large corporations, Apple employees can make donations to a number of nonprofit organizations and receive matching contributions from their employer through a platform called Benevity. Among the charitable organizations eligible for dollar-matching from Apple are Friends of the IDF, an organization that collects donations on behalf of soldiers in the Israeli military, as well as a number of groups that contribute to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank, including HaYovel, One Israel Fund, the Jewish National Fund, and IsraelGives.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

“Unfortunately, there has been very little scrutiny into 501(c)(3) organizations that openly support illegal activities in the West Bank and Gaza,” said Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who described the organizations listed in the campaign as among “the worst actors.”

A legislative effort in New York called the “Not On Our Dime Act” is seeking to challenge the ability of nonprofit organizations in the state to fundraise for illegal settlements, including by making them subject to legal liability or loss of their nonprofit status. Laws against funding activities that violate international human rights law are poorly enforced by the IRS, said Shamas, leaving it to companies and individuals themselves to ensure that their contributions are not going toward organizations potentially engaged in illegal activity.

“Companies often rely on the fact that an organization has 501(c)(3) status. But regardless of whether an organization has nonprofit status, it is illegal to aid and abet war crimes,” Shamas said. “Apple should ensure that it is not sending funds to any of these organizations — especially now when there’s no shortage of evidence or information about the unlawful activities of the settlement movement in the West Bank.”

Apple employees, who organized under the name Apples4Ceasefire, had previously objected to the disciplining and firing of Apple Store employees who “dared to express support of the Palestinian people in the form of kaffiyehs, pins, bracelets, or clothing,” according to a public statement published in April.

The letter — signed by 133 people who describe themselves as “a group of shareholders and current and former employees” — comes on the heels of broader activism at tech companies by some workers objecting to perceived complicity between their employers and the ongoing war in Gaza. Earlier this year, Google fired dozens of employees who took part in a protest over the company’s involvement in a cloud-computing project known as Project Nimbus, which provided services to the Israeli government and military. An open letter from employees of Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — has criticized its treatment of Palestinian solidarity within the company.

The provision of donations to NGOs helping facilitate the illegal occupation of the West Bank has come under increasing scrutiny as the situation in the region has deteriorated since the October 7 attacks by Hamas and subsequent Israeli military onslaught. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, are believed to have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces in a campaign that has resulted in war crimes charges brought by the International Criminal Court and genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. 

The conduct and discipline of the IDF has come under particular scrutiny as soldiers have been accused of torture, extrajudicial killings, and other abuses against Palestinians, alongside social media footage posted by many IDF service members themselves of apparent looting and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees. Friends of the IDF, one of the charities on Apple’s matching donations list, is registered as a nonprofit organization for the purposes of fundraising for IDF service members and claims to have transferred $34.5 million in donations to the Israeli military in the first weeks after the war began.

This conflict windfall has helped other organizations on Apple’s matching contribution list. An analysis by The Guardian last December showed that the crowdfunding platform IsraelGives received over $5.3 million in donations in just two months after the war to support military, paramilitary, and settlement activity in the West Bank. The same analysis showed that this money came disproportionately from U.S. donors, and included specific funding campaigns to support illegal settlements whose residents had a history of violent attacks against Palestinian civilians. 

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Other organizations on Apple’s matching contribution list appear to include support for religious extremism or back activity in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law. The One Israel Fund, for example, includes on its website a talk titled “The Arab Takeover of Judea and Samaria: Who Is Behind It; What Can Be Done?” — invoking the religious name of the territory that is deemed to be part of a future Palestinian state under international law. HaYovel, a Christian Zionist organization, states on its website that its goal is to help further the “prophetic restoration” of a region that “many incorrectly refer to as the West Bank.” The charitable status of the Jewish National Fund has come under criticism in both the U.S. and European Union due its historic involvement in the “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians since the founding of the state of Israel, as well as ongoing support for dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank. 

Like many of its competitors, Apple professes a corporate commitment to “respecting internationally recognized human rights” frameworks, including the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to its website. Since the war began, the U.N. Human Rights Office has repeatedly decried atrocities committed by the IDF.

The post Apple Matches Worker Donations to IDF and Illegal Settlements, Employees Allege appeared first on The Intercept.

Khan’s acquittal by the Islamabad High Court is a major victory for the former prime minister and his supporters, coming on the heels of a suspended sentence in a separate corruption case.

The ruling leaves Khan behind bars on precisely one charge: namely, that he and his third wife Bushra Bibi entered into an “un-Islamic marriage,” a crime for which Khan and Bibi are serving seven-year sentences. 

The court, both during the hearing and in its ruling, dove into the details of Bibi’s menstrual cycle, ultimately rejecting her claim that three cycles had passed between her divorce and her marriage to Khan. Instead, the court relied on the word of her ex-husband.

Asked by The Intercept at a briefing, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said the case and its merits were none of the United States’ business.

“We’ve addressed the question of Imran Khan many times,” Miller said. “The legal proceedings against him are something for the Pakistani courts to decide.”

Pressed on whether it was truly the case that Bibi’s menstrual cycles were a matter for the courts, Miller said that perhaps a Pakistani court will toss out this conviction just as they did the cypher case.

The overturning of the so-called cypher case was a blow to the Pakistani government’s contention that Khan was a traitor to his country, and bolsters his supporters’ position that the charges against the imprisoned former prime minister are politically motivated.

Khan and his ex-Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly mishandling the secret document, including Khan’s alleged brandishing a paper copy of it at a political rally.

The cypher has long since been a central piece of drama in Pakistan’s political wrangling. Khan had claimed in several instances, even when still prime minister, that the cypher revealed U.S. involvement in his removal from power in a no-confidence vote in 2022. 

In 2023, the cypher was provided to The Intercept by a source in the Pakistani military. The document showed that during Khan’s time in office, U.S. State Department officials had threatened the then-Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. about damaged ties between the two countries if Khan remained in power. Shortly after the meeting, a vote of no-confidence in Parliament advanced, a move orchestrated by the powerful Pakistani military that succeeded in removing Khan from office.

Since then, Khan and his supporters have been in an escalating conflict with the military, which has led to widespread crackdowns, killings, and torture, as well as a ban on Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI. Khan himself was imprisoned on an array of charges. 

The State Department has remained muted on the crackdown on democracy in Pakistan, including after February elections marred by extensive and brazen fraud.

Despite Khan’s imprisonment and a general ban on his party, candidates associated with PTI did resoundingly well in the vote. Following exit polls that seemed to show PTI-affiliated politicians sailing to victory, official announcements began to pour in that the candidates were losing. Amid allegations of election rigging by the military at the regional level, a coalition of opposition parties took power and was quickly recognized by the U.S.

The charges against Khan have now almost all fallen apart, save for an allegation of legal impropriety in Khan’s marriage to Bibi. 

The court, in its ruling, writes that her ex-husband tried to prevent his then-wife from visiting Khan, saying he “tried to stop her by force and during which hard words and even abuses were also exchanged but of no avail.”

The court, in its ruling, also approvingly reproduced her ex-husband’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, noting that “complainant believes that sister of respondent No.02” — Khan’s wife — “who resides in UAE has strong connection with Jewish Lobby.”

Bibi’s ex-husband, according to the ruling, also complained he was denied his right of “rujuh” — which refers to a husband getting their wife back in the initial period after a divorce. “He pointed out that under the law and ‘Shariah,’ the complainant has a right to have ‘Rujuh’ to his wife,” the ruling says, “but he was deprived of such right by the respondents.”

The post Imran Khan Remains Imprisoned Over His Wife’s Menstrual Cycles. State Department Says That’s “Something For the Pakistani Courts to Decide.” appeared first on The Intercept.

Top ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s announcement — coming after weeks of rumors that warrants may be imminent — stunned many legal observers of the court.

The news sparked immediate outrage from the U.S. government. Warrants against Israeli leaders would mark a new era for international humanitarian law where even close allies of the U.S. can be held to account for their actions.

“The ICC has never indicted a Western official,” said human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody. “Up until now, the instruments of international justice have been used exclusively against enemies and outcasts.”

Putting Israel in a camp with world outcasts could have grave ramifications for the U.S., a close ally of Israel and chief provider of its weapons and diplomatic cover.

“The prosecutor’s announcement will likely impact assessments of the legal risks for other states which are supporting or aiding Israel’s war in Gaza,” said Sarah Knuckey, an expert on international law and professor at Columbia Law School. “If there are reasonable grounds to believe that senior Israeli officials are responsible for war crimes, then countries aiding Israel’s war in Gaza are at risk of complicity in those same crimes. We may see accelerated efforts in other countries to stop them from selling weapons or providing military aid to Israel.”

The announcement from the ICC means that a panel of judges will decide on whether to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh. The charged men are accused of several crimes associated with the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, as well as the subsequent Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

While Hamas is already internationally isolated, the political ramifications of the charges are potentially grave for Israel. Decades of subjugating Palestinians under a military occupation has led to widespread criticism of Israel, with its conduct during the current war increasingly pushing it toward becoming a pariah.

An issuance of warrants by ICC judges for the arrest of Israeli and Hamas officials — highly likely following the recommendation of its chief prosecutor — would make the world a much more hostile place for Israeli officials accused of crimes by the institution.

“All of the 124 countries that are parties to the Rome Statute are legally obligated to cooperate with the ICC and must arrest anyone on their territory that is subject to an ICC arrest warrant,” said Knuckey. “This would significantly curtail the ability of the suspects, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, to travel abroad and participate in international events.”

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Legal experts also expressed surprise that Khan, seen as close to the foreign policy interests of Western states and even said to be a favorite of Israel, wound up being the one to pull the trigger on one of the most consequential announcements in the history of the ICC.

“Palestinian efforts to invoke the ICC for alleged Israeli war crimes — including illegal settlements — have gotten the slow walk for almost 15 years under three successive prosecutors,” said Brody. “There was an assumption that Khan, so quick to indict Vladimir Putin for atrocities in Ukraine, was reluctant, despite his strong warnings to both Hamas and Israel, to actually hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes.”

The request for arrest warrants comes against the backdrop of a devastating war in Gaza that has already killed tens of thousands of civilians and destroyed the physical infrastructure of the territory. The World Food Programme assessed that parts of Gaza are now in a state of “full-blown famine,” owing largely to Israel’s attempts to block the provision of humanitarian aid.

The war has triggered an outpouring of condemnation of Israel, including denunciations by several European, Asian, and Latin American countries, as well as mass protests across the globe, including in the United States.

The Israeli government has already been hit with genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, over its conduct in the war. Additional charges at the ICC by Khan will increase pressure on the Israeli government, even as it vows to press ahead with the conflict.

“It’s hard to know exactly what forced his hand,” said Brody, “but I think that the overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes, the growing global condemnation of Israeli actions and the ICC’s inaction, and the ICJ’s decision that there was a plausible violation of the genocide convention all played a part.”

“I was at the ICC assembly in December as Khan and his team came in for intense criticism from many quarters,” Brody added.

The U.S. government has already attacked the ICC allegations against Israel.

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” President Joe Biden said in three-sentence statement. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the U.S. “fundamentally rejects” the accusations against Israel, also decrying an “equivalence of Israel with Hamas.”

The U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, and in the past has threatened and even sanctioned prosecutors associated with the court who have attempted to investigate allegations of war crimes against U.S. military officials. Israel is also not party to the treaty.

There may be limits to how much the U.S. can do to protect Israeli officials, short of campaigning to destroy the ICC and unwind the infrastructure of international law globally.

“How governments react to today’s announcement will be a test of the genuineness of their commitment to international justice for all.”

Despite condemnations by the U.S., other states have issued statements welcoming the ICC announcement, including Ireland, a critic of Israel within the European Union, whose foreign minister called on other countries to respect the “independence and impartiality” of the ICC while condemning threats to the court and its staff. The issuance of warrants against Israel, over the objections of its most powerful superpower patron, will likely be a watershed moment for the ICC as it seeks to establish a reputation as a consistent force for the application of international law globally.

“The ICC, and international justice in general, are often critiqued for being selective, or imperialistic, or reflecting the geopolitical interests of powerful states,” said Knuckey, the Columbia law professor. “Today’s announcement may help to rebalance international justice, and sends a strong message that all governments must comply with international law.”

She added, “Many Western states were very supportive of arrest warrants for Russian President Putin for his crimes in Ukraine. How governments react to today’s announcement will be a test of the genuineness of their commitment to international justice for all.”

The post Can a U.S. Ally Actually Be Held Accountable for War Crimes in the ICC? appeared first on The Intercept.

The legendary Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose works remain an influence on U.S. military officers today, wrote in his famous 19th-century treatise “On War” that “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” A military general himself advising on how best to wage an armed conflict, Clausewitz nonetheless reminded his readers that the purpose of war is to achieve political goals, not to pursue violence as end to itself, or as a wholesale substitute for diplomacy.

Clausewitz’s words would have been well-heeded by the U.S. and Israel before the start of the current war in the Gaza Strip, which has now reached a painful yet predictable impasse. So far, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded, Israel now faces genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, and Hamas control is already returning to parts of Gaza previously declared conquered by Israel.

Israeli military officials are now going public with criticisms that the war in Gaza had been misguided for a simple reason that Clausewitz himself would have recognized: Besides revenge, the war never had a clear political strategy or objective.

Israeli leaders have taken the position that Palestinians are merely a subject population to be suppressed and controlled.

This lack of a political approach reflects long-standing attitudes in Israeli society that have now trapped the country in a forever war with the Palestinians and their other neighbors — with the U.S. as its patron effectively pulled along for the ride. The roots of this failure had been years in the making.

Well before October 7, the Israeli government decided that the Palestinians, whether in the West Bank or Gaza, were no longer politically relevant. Rather than dealing with the Palestinians as political agents, Israeli leaders have taken the position that Palestinians are merely a subject population to be suppressed and controlled with a mixture of military, technological, and economic tools.

While continuing a policy of blockading and periodically bombing Gaza, Israel has either ignored or rejected the Palestinian Authority’s calls, with the support of international law, for a two-state solution. Instead, Israel proceeded unilaterally with its colonization and annexation of the West Bank, cementing a consensus among major human rights groups that Israel is an apartheid state.

The U.S. under President Joe Biden, following in the line of other administrations, abetted this process of dismissing the political claims of Palestinians. Most notably, Biden followed the Trump administration in its pursuit of faux-diplomacy in the form of regional arms deals and normalization agreements between Gulf Arab states and Israel: the so-called Abraham Accords. That myopia eventually produced the current conflagration in Gaza, when the October 7 Hamas assault exposed Israel’s technological and military control over the Gaza Strip as much less robust than advertised.

From a U.S. perspective, Biden’s reflexive backing for a war that has proven to be equal parts aimless and brutal has now trapped the U.S. in a situation where it is the primary enabler of an alleged genocide.

The war has not only tarnished America’s reputation abroad but is also increasingly tearing at its own social fabric. Even diehard subscribers to the U.S. foreign policy consensus have been forced to reckon with the failures of treating the Palestinians as politically irrelevant. In a recent interview with Politico, former top U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland acknowledged that this approach had laid the groundwork for the present calamity.

“Beginning with the Trump administration, everybody fell in love with regional normalization as the cure-all for the instability and grievances and insecurity in the Middle East,” Nuland said. “But if you leave out the Palestinian issue, then somebody’s going to seize it and run with it, and that’s what Hamas did.”

The Folly of Its Path — and Ours

The Gaza war began in the heat of emotion after Hamas’s attacks against Israeli civilian communities. It was quickly advertised to the Israeli public as a war to eradicate the group entirely. Yet seven months later, with tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and wounded, Israel remains mired in the territory with no prospect of an endgame in sight.

One of many sad ironies is that Hamas itself had made repeated political entreaties toward Israel, which Israeli leaders had rejected alongside their rejection of engaging with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank. Instead, Israeli leaders preferred to visit Dubai and continue developing military and surveillance technology that they believed would allow them to control and ignore the Palestinians indefinitely.

The consequences of this approach have now become clear, but the collapse may be only in its early stages. As a result of the war, Israel now faces the prospect of another conflict with Hezbollah on its northern border, where tens of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated since October 2023. And it faces other risks too, such as the potential demise of its key security relationship with neighboring Egypt, which has threatened to suspend the landmark Camp David peace accords and has recently joined the ICJ case charging Israel with committing genocide.

Despite this escalating pressure, Israeli leaders show no sign of relenting or returning to political bargaining. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently declared that Israel should build a large new city in the occupied West Bank, in part to move “the population of Israel to the east.” If a two-state solution remains a possibility at all, development like this on the land allotted by international law for a future Palestinian state would stamp out whatever hope there is. Palestinians, meanwhile, would be further confined to a series of penned-in encampments on their own homeland.

The political landscape in Israel doesn’t offer much solace. Israel’s government contains far-right and even openly fascist ministers. Gallant, for his part, is considered a “mainstream” political figure in the country — a stark demonstration of just how much politics in Israel has moved away from the realm of diplomacy and negotiation.

Just as its war in Gaza is winding up in a slow-rolling military failure, Israel’s policies in the West Bank are likely to produce more catastrophes in future. Israel continues to reject talks with the Palestinian Authority as well as the Arab League, which has offered full diplomatic and economic ties in exchange for a two-state solution for over two decades.

The U.S. enables Israel’s continued digging of this ditch, despite overwhelming international consensus that it is violating international law. The unquestioning support and diplomatic cover it has received from successive U.S. governments, most recently from the Biden administration, has allowed a small country to defy global norms and public opinion, as it descends into a North Korea-like posture of paranoia and defiance.

Biden is now tanking in the polls, despite his own reported disbelief. If he loses the next election after enabling all of Israel’s worst tendencies, he will go down not only as the leader who handed the presidency back to Donald Trump, but also as a diplomatic failure. He will have locked a superpower into a relationship with a client state that has long since abandoned diplomacy and international law in exchange for apartheid, endless war, and the use of brutal, even eliminationist force to address its problems.

Clausewitz himself warned of the shortcomings of such an approach. “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes,” he wrote. For Israel, and the U.S. alongside it, the future is one in which war will likely continue to be waged with no clear goals at all.

The post Israel Wants Endless War Without the Politics. Biden’s Going Along for the Doomed Ride. appeared first on The Intercept.

There’s an adage among observers of American Middle East policy that suggests the Arab world can’t have democracy because it would be bad for Israel. Arab publics favor the Palestinians, the thinking goes, and will vote in governments that act accordingly — and that is a no-go zone.

Now, with discontent in the U.S. boiling over amid Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, the framing might need a small update: The U.S., it seems, can’t have democracy either, lest an American democracy end its support for everything and anything Israel wants to do to the Palestinians.

Recent weeks saw violent crackdowns on protests, the passage of bills severely curtailing American free speech rights, and lawsuits seeking to effectively outlaw student groups hostile to Israel.

A serious red line has been crossed: America’s democratic freedoms, expansive on paper, will simply not tolerate serious dissent on the U.S.–Israel relationship. As criticisms of Israel have become more mainstream, the attempt to shut them down entirely has become more extreme.

In pursuit of this blank-check relationship with an Israeli government that is becoming ever-more intransigent with each passing year, pro-Israel forces in the U.S. are attacking our own democratic freedoms in order to suppress public outcry about apartheid and potential genocide 6,000 miles away. And, if the recent campus crackdowns are any indication, these forces are winning their battle.

With tens of thousands of Palestinians left dead and the Israeli assault on Gaza ongoing, the U.S. protests targeting university ties with Israel over the last month — voluble and outspoken — have been overwhelmingly nonviolent.

Yet these nonviolent protests have met with the full brutal force of the U.S. security state. Dispersing the protest encampments, police have viciously beaten protesters, fired rubber bullets, and enveloped students in dense clouds of tear gas.

Much of the focus has been on the crackdown in New York City, where Columbia University students established the first major encampment the day its president testified at a House antisemitism hearing — but these incredible scenes of police attacking students have played out across the country. By recent count, over 2,300 people have been arrested on campuses in the U.S. since April 18.

It’s not the Middle East, but it is the same anti-democratic suppression of dissent. And one could be forgiven for noting that the crackdown sometimes resembles the suppression in dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain.

In one stateside case, the squashing of a campus protest even involved what could be called “baltagiya”: the signature Egyptian tactic where unofficial state-aligned militias armed with clubs attack demonstrators before the police swoop in.

This wasn’t, however, Cairo in 2011. It was Los Angeles. At the University of California, Los Angeles, a pro-Israel mob videotaped itself descending on a protest camp and brutally beating protesters, including journalists.

The violence at the UCLA raged on for three hours before police intervened to restore order. Roughly two dozen people were reportedly hospitalized for injuries. It is not clear whether the gangs that attacked the encampment were students of the school.

The following day, police came to tear down the protest camp, firing rubber bullets and arresting some of the same demonstrators who had been attacked by thugs the night before.

Anti-Democracy in D.C.

While brutal suppression is being carried out on the street level, the ground is being prepared for even more disfiguring restrictions on democratic freedoms in Washington.

Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act. While on its face the bill simply seeks to express Congress’s view in favor of tackling anti-Jewish bigotry, in reality its provisions would encode a controversial definition of antisemitism geared at inoculating Israel from criticism.

Drawing from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, the bill would categorize acts of speech as antisemitism. The IHRA definition states that “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” are all prima facie antisemitic speech.

The vague nature of these IHRA standards, including inevitable ambiguity about the definition of “double standards” regarding the state of Israel, has led the definition to be widely condemned as a Trojan horse for defining any criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

In Europe, where there is no First Amendment, the IHRA definition of antisemitism has already been widely used to criminalize speech that is critical of Israel.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act doesn’t quite go so far as to challenge the First Amendment. Instead, the bill gives the “sense of Congress” about the IHRA language. On Capitol Hill, it is a familiar technique: Resolutions that carry no criminal weight are used to mainstream language and ideas that are later used to enact more stringent statutes.

The purveyors of the Washington IHRA bill have already suggested that the legislation is, indeed, a first step toward something more concrete. “This bill has broad, bipartisan support and will begin the process of cracking down on the antisemitism we’ve seen run rampant on college campuses across America,” the lead sponsor, Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., boasted on X.

Lawler’s legislation is only one of a number of other proposed bills that would create a new congressional body to subpoena individuals over ill-defined allegations of antisemitism, criminalize and increase punishment guidelines for engaging in nonviolent protest, force federal agencies to submit lists of employees allegedly supportive of Hamas, force colleges to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism to receive federal funding, and bar entry or deport individuals who are even charged in connection with demonstrations deemed by authorities to be antisemitic.

Attacks on Dissent

The efforts to crush dissent on Israel aren’t limited to campuses or the halls of power in Washington. The multipronged approach is playing out everywhere: in courts, in state legislatures, and elsewhere.

In state houses, measures taken by Republican officials in states like Florida, Indiana, and Arizona have already aimed to ban the activities of pro-Palestinian activist groups on college campuses. Many of these proposals employ language that would ban funding for groups accused of antisemitism or “supporting the activities of a foreign terrorist organization,” despite criticism from educators and activists that their ambiguous language could simply outlaw any pro-Palestinian activism.

Finally, survivors and families of those slain in the October 7 attack in Israel are now filing lawsuits against the pro-Palestine activist groups.

Backed by the Big Law firm Greenberg Traurig, the plaintiffs are suing Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, accusing the groups of acting as “as collaborators and propagandists for Hamas,” demanding they pay damages to compensate for the October 7 attacks in Israel.

SJP is one of the largest pro-Palestinian student organizations involved in the recent protests, and the lawsuit says the group is “operating and managing Hamas’s mouthpiece for North America, dedicated to sanitizing Hamas’s atrocities and normalizing its terrorism.”

Put all together, this sweeping crackdown on the basic rights of Americans to speak, organize, and freely debate would effectively declare public discussion of a core area of U.S. foreign policy off-limits.

The scenes of crackdowns on U.S. campuses have already prompted statements of concern from international human rights and civil liberties organizations that are more accustomed to condemning suppression of civil society activism in places like China and Russia.

It’s an approach that will likely become even more stringent if, as likely, and in defiance of international opinion, the Israeli government continues with its policy of annexing the West Bank or expands the present war to Lebanon.

A free and frank debate about U.S. ties with Israel in such a context is more necessary than ever. But armed with political and legal support, along with street pressure from the police and even armed agitators, it seems that holding such a debate in the U.S. may soon no longer be possible.

The post They Used to Say Arabs Can’t Have Democracy Because It’d Be Bad for Israel. Now the U.S. Can’t Have It Either. appeared first on The Intercept.

“If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

“This bill is very concerning because it’s the beginning of a process of criminalizing something that is very normal for many people, which is traveling to Iran,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

Along with a flurry of other sanctions bills targeting Iran, the bill calling for the travel restrictions passed the U.S. House last week. The bill is now slated to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Introduced last fall, the No Paydays for Hostage-Takers Act languished until tensions between Iran and Israel escalated into a series of reciprocal attacks earlier this month.

Among other provisions, the bill seeks to bar U.S. passport holders from traveling to Iran by rendering their passports invalid for such travel. Though the prohibition would need to be enacted by the State Department, the legislative proposal effectively encourages the move and, as with other sanctions against Iran, waiving the authority to enact the ban could incur political costs.

If Donald Trump wins a second White House term, a distinct possibility according to polls, the invocation of the travel ban would be likely. In his first term, Trump imposed the so-called Muslim ban on travel to the U.S. for Iranians, among other nationalities, and has promised to reimpose it if elected again.

The idea of banning travel to Iran on American passports was raised last September by former Trump State Department official Elliott Abrams, a right-wing hawk with a controversial history that includes covering up a Central American massacre and involvement in the Iran–Contra scandal.

In practice, many Iranian Americans tend to travel to Iran on Iranian passports, but Americans of Iranian extraction who do not hold Islamic Republic travel documents would be unable to travel there under the ban. The measure is viewed as a potential signal of deeper isolation for the Iranian people and severing of people-to-people ties between Iran and the U.S.

Iran and North Korea?

The bill, originally proposed last October by Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., was promoted as a measure to restrict the Iranian government’s ability to take U.S. citizens hostage as bargaining chips for bilateral negotiations. Some dual-nationals have been arrested in Iran in the past amid tensions between the two countries.

Yet hundreds of thousands of dual-nationals are believed to travel regularly to Iran from across the West. Measures barring their ability to do so would represent an unprecedented step, making it difficult or impossible for people with ties in both countries to visit family or maintain personal and professional connections.

Invalidating U.S. passports for travel to Iran would put it on par with North Korea, which had a similar ban put in place in 2017 — during Trump’s first term — when an American citizen died after 17 months of detention there.

Despite being heavily sanctioned over foreign policy and human rights issues, Iran still has relations with much of the international community and large number of Iranians live throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.

“North Korea and Iran are very different countries.”

“North Korea is really the model for this policy, as it is the only country where there is such a strict prohibition for travel on the books,” said Costello. “But North Korea and Iran are very different countries. The level of isolation of North Korea is far greater, and it doesn’t have the same diaspora that Iran does.”

This week, a delegation from North Korea traveled to Iran, with reported hopes of breaking North Korea’s total diplomatic isolation as conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine forge new geopolitics.

Costello said that NIAC is still hoping that the Senate will not approve the bill when it comes to its consideration. Still, the implications of it coming under consideration, alongside Trump’s promises to revive his “Muslim ban” policy, bode poorly for the future of U.S.–Iran relations.

“You are talking,” he said, “about a policy that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.”

The post House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away From Americans appeared first on The Intercept.

The warning issued late last month by Schumer, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, to Pakistan came after intense activism by members of the Pakistani diaspora amid concerns that the Pakistani military may harm Khan, the former prime minister who was ousted from office in 2022.

“The Pakistani American diaspora has felt let down by Washington’s failure to engage power brokers in Pakistan and hold them accountable for blatant violations of human rights.”

“Chuck Schumer speaking to the ambassador regarding the safety of Imran Khan is very constructive,” Mohammad Munir Khan, a Pakistani American political activist in the U.S., told The Intercept. “The Pakistani American diaspora has felt let down by Washington’s failure to engage power brokers in Pakistan and hold them accountable for blatant violations of human rights, and destruction of basic fundamentals of democracy.”

Imran Khan is currently incarcerated on corruption charges that are widely seen as politically motivated. Khan, who is regarded as the most popular politician in Pakistan, was removed from power in an April 2022 no-confidence vote orchestrated by the country’s powerful military establishment and encouraged by the U.S. Since then, Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, has faced a brutal repression that has raised international alarms and been denounced by human rights groups.

The concerns about Khan’s life that prompted Schumer’s call to the Pakistani Ambassador Masood Khan reflect a growing fear that the military may deal with Khan’s stubborn popularity by simply putting an end to his life behind bars. (Schumer’s office declined to comment for this story. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The outreach from Schumer, who represents a large, vocal Pakistani American community in New York, came as a new governing coalition in the South Asian country seeks to consolidate power despite public disaffection over a February election rife with fraud.

In addition to banning PTI, Pakistan engaged in heavy repression ahead of the February vote. A record turnout suggested PTI-aligned candidates had the upper hand. Ignoring widespread fraud, however, a coalition of parties supported by the Pakistani military successfully formed a government led by Shehbaz Sharif in the vote’s aftermath.

The international community, including the U.S., noted voting irregularities, and credible allegations arose of vote rigging and flagrant fraud in the election.

“There is undeniable evidence, which the State Department agrees with, that there were problems with this election,” Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, told The Intercept in March. At the time, Casar and other members of Congress had just called on President Joe Biden to withhold recognition of the government, but Washington’s ambassador to Pakistan congratulated Sharif in early March.

“There is undeniable evidence, which the State Department agrees with, that there were problems with this election.”

Foreign policy experts in Washington said the Biden administration’s approach risked transgressing democratic principles in the name of security. Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said, “This appears to be an example where the administration is allowing its security relationship with a foreign government to crowd out other critical concerns like democratic backsliding and human rights.”

Imran Khan himself has reportedly been held in dire conditions at a prison in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. Last month, his visitor privileges were abruptly suspended for two weeks, prompting fears from his supporters about his physical conditions in custody. Earlier this month, one of his lawyers claimed that his personal physician was not being allowed to see him in jail. Khan’s wife, who is imprisoned on politically motivated charges of an un-Islamic marriage and graft, has also reportedly suffered health problems due to conditions of her confinement, according to remarks from her lawyer this week.

In a statement given to reporters from prison and later shared on social media, Khan, who was wounded in an attempted assassination in November 2022 at a political rally, alleged that there had been a plot to kill him while behind bars. Khan suggested his fate was in the hands of Gen. Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful army chief.

“Let it be known that if anything happens to me or my wife, it’ll be him who will be responsible,” Khan said.

Schumer’s call to the Pakistani ambassador, however, may play into the military’s calculations about killing Khan. “A senior Democrat influential in the Biden administration is sending a warning, which is somewhat significant,” said Adam Weinstein, the deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, adding that he did not believe the military would kill Khan in prison.

As extreme as a step it would be, the military harming or even killing a leader it ousted, even one as popular as Khan, would fit a pattern in Pakistani history. Several Pakistani leaders have died violently in the past few decades after falling out with the military, some under murky circumstances, while others, like former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, were executed by military rulers after being deposed from power.

Although nominally led by a civilian government today, Pakistan’s military is widely known to call the shots in the country politically and is currently led by Munir, whose clashes with Khan and his party have been the main political storyline in the country for over a year.

For Pakistani activists in the U.S., the American relationship with Pakistan creates leverage that can be used to ensure that Khan is not murdered behind bars. Mohammad Munir Khan, the Pakistani American activist, said, “The least Washington can do is to ensure Imran Khan is not harmed physically.”

Capitol Hill Hearing

The U.S. has played an outsized role in Pakistan’s internal politics, especially over the past several years, including a pivotal role in Khan’s ouster from power. 

In August 2023, The Intercept reported on and published a classified Pakistani diplomatic cable — a contentious document that had become a centerpiece of political drama, though its contents had remained unknown — showing that Khan’s removal from power had taken place following intense pressure placed on the Pakistani government by U.S. State Department officials.

In the cable, Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu, whose office covers South Asia at the State Department, is quoted as telling the Pakistani ambassador to Washington that the countries’ relations would be seriously damaged if Khan were to remain in power.

“I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington,” Lu said, according to the Pakistani cable.

Since Khan’s removal from power, the U.S. has worked closely with the new military-backed Pakistani regime. Pakistan provided weapons to Ukraine in exchange for the U.S. brokering a favorable International Monetary Fund loan package, according to previous reporting from The Intercept.

Before being imprisoned, Khan made frequent reference to the classified cypher and even claimed to be brandishing a physical copy during a political rally. He is now facing a lengthy prison sentence on charges related to his handling of classified information, in addition to the raft of corruption charges that initially landed him in custody.

Coming in the context of a broader crackdown on his party — which has including killings, extrajudicial disappearances, and torture targeting supporters of PTI and members of the press — most observers believe Khan’s continued imprisonment is a politically motivated gambit to keep him and his movement out of power.

Following this year’s election, with Casar and others in Congress raising questions about Khan’s removal and the vote, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing featuring Lu, the assistant secretary of state.

The sole person testifying, Lu denied that he had been involved in a “regime change” in Pakistan — a reference to Khan’s comments about his role and the content of the cable reported by The Intercept.

On the election, Lu paid lip service to concerns about how the ballot was carried off, while failing to outline what consequences there would be for the vote rigging.

“You have seen actions by our ambassador and our embassy,” Lu said, alluding the congratulations extended by the U.S. to Pakistan’s new prime minister. He then quickly added: “We are in every interaction with this government stressing the importance of accountability for election irregularities.”

“In the long term it has never worked out in the United States’ benefit to be seen as propping up illegitimate, military-led governments.”

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., raised the issue of Khan’s safety in detention at the hearing. Sherman urged Lu to meet directly with Khan in prison, earning applause from the mostly Pakistani audience in hand.

“Ensuring the safety of leaders, regardless of political differences, is paramount,” said Atif Khan, another Pakistan American diaspora activist. “Congressman Brad Sherman rightly advocated for accountability and protection, urging the US Ambassador to visit former Prime Minister Imran Khan and prioritize his well-being.”

While Khan’s fate hangs in the balance, members of Congress have warned that continued U.S. support for a government seen as illegitimate by most Pakistanis risks harming not just Pakistan, but also the U.S. position in a critical region.

“Promoting democracy is important in itself, but it’s in our interests as well,” Casar, the Texas Democrat, told The Intercept. “Regardless of the short-term military benefits, in the long term it has never worked out in the United States’ benefit to be seen as propping up illegitimate, military-led governments.”

The post Chuck Schumer Privately Warns Pakistan: Don’t Kill Imran Khan in Prison appeared first on The Intercept.

“I used to be published every month in newspapers from both the left and right. I had a high profile in Austria, and people took me seriously,” Hafez said. “But some years ago, people started calling me to tell me that there were rumors about me spreading behind closed doors. I felt there was a difference, and that something was changing.”

“Eventually,” he said, “I was sidelined to such an extent that newspapers would not even publish me anymore.”

“I was sidelined to such an extent that newspapers would not even publish me anymore.”

Hafez’s growing ostracism in Austria culminated in a controversial police operation in 2020 called Operation Luxor. Hafez and others were targeted with raids and asset seizures. Hafez ultimately left Austria for the United States, where he took up a visiting professorship at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Operation Luxor was later deemed unlawful by Austrian courts, and the police’s terrorism charges against Hafez were eventually dropped. Today, the case is widely viewed as a witch hunt that targeted Austrian Muslims. Despite his exoneration, the damage to Hafez’s life from the yearslong ordeal have been immense.

“A lot of this has basically been about destroying my reputation,” he said. “Everybody knew that I was affected by this, even far from Austria.”

Little did Hafez know at the time, but the rumors about him and others in Austria originated from a research center at George Washington University and a prominent U.S.-based terrorism analyst there named Lorenzo Vidino, according to a lawsuit filed late last month. Hafez’s suit alleges fraud and racketeering, asking for $10 million in damages from Vidino, along with George Washington University and its Program on Extremism, the research center that Vidino heads.

The lawsuit, according to a press release, alleges that Hafez and others were targets of an organized smear campaign, accusing Vidino of “participating in a criminal enterprise that deployed fake journalists, social media bots and pay-to-play reporters to destroy the careers of dozens of individuals by constructing and disseminating false narratives linking them to the Muslim Brotherhood.” (Vidino and George Washington University haven’t filed a response to the lawsuit, and neither replied to requests for comment.)

The campaign against Hafez exploited an environment of suspicion that can result in Muslim or Arab scholars being targeted, said an academic who works on anti-Islam bias, noting that such campaigns often fixate on people whose work touches on politically sensitive subjects.

“Farid Hafez is not the first Muslim professor to be targeted by ideologues who seek to silence and censor scholarship on Islamophobia, or Palestine, or anti-Arab racism,” said Sahar Aziz, a national security expert and director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University. “In the U.S., individuals who are critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East are often slandered as un-American or disloyal. In direct contradiction of American principles of academic freedom and free speech, Islamophobic organizations and government officials seek to censor Arab and Muslim professors when they disagree with the substance of their scholarship.”

“Meanwhile,” Aziz added, “in Europe there is vilification of almost any Muslim individual or group that is politically active, such that their activities are conflated with support for terrorism.”

GWU’s Lorenzo Vidino

Vidino worked with a private investigation firm in Switzerland that covertly spread spurious allegations against various Muslims in Europe, accusing them of involvement in terrorism and extremism, according to a report last year in the New Yorker.

Many of the details in the New Yorker, which are repeated in part in Hafez’s lawsuit, became public when hackers leaked internal communications from the firm behind the campaign, known as Alp Services. The hackers sent the files from Alp, another defendant in Hafez’s suit, to one of its intended targets: an American citizen living in Italy named Hazem Nada, who alleged in a separate lawsuit that his company and personal reputation were tarnished by unfounded accusations of terrorist financing.

The leak suggested that the operation was being financed to the tune of millions of dollars by the United Arab Emirates government as part of a broader campaign to destroy perceived ideological enemies in Western countries, and particularly those it accused of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE campaign reportedly targeted more than 1,000 people in 18 European countries.

Among those mentioned in the files as working with Alp was Vidino, who took a 3,000-euro consulting fee from the firm for “a series of gossipy reports about the Brotherhood’s reach,” according to a passage from the New Yorker quoted in Hafez’s lawsuit. The “gossipy reports,” which helped form the basis of the campaign on behalf of the UAE, appeared to consist of lists of suspected Islamists that Alp could then show it had discredited on behalf of its Emirati client. (Alp has neither responded to Hafez’s lawsuit nor a request for comment.)

In addition to his work with the Austrian government and George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, Vidino maintains public connections with think tanks based in the UAE, including the Abu Dhabi-based Hedayah, which is chaired by members of the royal family. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior analyst at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a think tank run by anti-Muslim activist Steve Emerson.

Nada filed his separate lawsuit against the government of the UAE, Vidino, Alp Services, and several others alleged to have been involved in the smear campaign against him. The UAE-sponsored campaign, the suit says, triggered a series of events that ultimately led Nada’s oil trading company, Lord Energy, to declare bankruptcy.

Nada is seeking $2.7 billion in damages and compensation. In addition to ideological reasons for the campaign against him, Nada’s lawsuit alleges that the UAE, a major oil and gas producer, had commercial motivations when it hired Alp Services to help shut his firm out of competing in the global energy market.

“The enterprise’s sham accusations that Hazim and Lord Energy were involved in terrorist financing were meant to — and did — eliminate a commercial competitor by causing banks and financial institutions to stop lending to Hazim and Lord Energy and causing other industry participants to stop doing business with Hazim and Lord Energy,” Nada’s lawsuit says.

The defendants in Nada’s case have not responded directly to the allegations against them, either in court or in the press.

Luxor’s Toll

Hafez would seem like an unlikely target for a smear campaign. A well-respected academic researcher in Austria, his work focused on documenting and combating anti-Muslim racism in Europe. He was a co-author of the European Islamophobia Report, a scholarly annual analysis of anti-Muslim discrimination on the continent, and was affiliated with a Islamophobia research center based out of Georgetown University.

Starting in 2015, Vidino began appearing as a public commentator and later working as a consultant with the Austrian government, focusing on issues of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez said his reputation began to suffer around the same time.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political movement mostly based in the Arab states, which has often clashed with the conservative monarchies in the region. The movement has been suppressed in countries like Egypt but remains a bogeyman for local leaders as well as right-wing groups in Western countries who have frequently accused Muslim political opponents of association with the group.

Hafez felt himself gradually becoming the target of these attacks. The accusations were often put forward vaguely in public where individuals or organizations were accused of “affiliations” with the Muslim Brotherhood rather than holding any concrete roles or membership. The allegations were amorphous enough that they were impossible to refute, or even challenge, mostly disseminated as they were through whisper campaigns spread through the Austrian government and security establishment.

After the smears took hold, Operation Luxor came down on the night of November 9, 2020. Hundreds of armed police officers raided the homes of Hafez and dozens of others, along with institutions they were affiliated with.

The search warrant used to justify the raid was based on a report authored by Vidino about the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria. Vidino also served twice as a witness for the Austrian government against targets in the case.

The Austrian government at the time — led by right-wing Chancellor Sebastian Kurz — celebrated the raids as a blow to “political Islam.” Despite these claims, however, the operation ultimately failed to uncover evidence of terrorism or even generate any arrests and convictions.

Despite being eventually exonerated by Austrian courts, Hafez’s career and reputation suffered in Austria and his financial assets were frozen. He has suffered ongoing stress — along with his family, including his young children who remain traumatized by the armed raid on their house in 2020.

“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe.”

The lingering impact of the smear campaign and raid on his life have now led Hafez to seek relief from American courts against Vidino, George Washington University, and Alp Services. A press release about Hafez’s lawsuit said, “Vidino presented himself as a disinterested academic with an expertise on terrorist figures and groups, feeding the narrative to both legitimate reporters and pay-to-play journalists, fellow academics and think-tanks that Hafez was deeply connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Hafez knew that Vidino was antagonistic to his work on behalf of Muslim communities in Austria. The New Yorker article and Nada’s lawsuit, however, had raised more troubling questions. Vidino had, according to Hafez’s lawsuit, acknowledged that he strongly suspected the payment from Alp was coming from the Emirates. Hafez’s lawsuit said, “Alp and Dr. Lorenzo Vidino (‘Dr. Vidino’), with the assistance of the other co-defendants, targeted Dr. Hafez and others similarly situated because they saw him as a means of keeping their UAE gravy train rolling and veracity was simply beside the point.”

Hafez’s lawsuit, in other words, raises the possibility that Vidino’s advocacy may not have been merely ideological but driven by financial incentives from the UAE.

“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe,” Hafez said. “But when I first started looking into him, I was focused on his ideological ties to the far-right in the United States. I assumed that he was an ideologically inspired person. I had no clue whatsoever that the UAE was behind his work, and maybe even the main driver.”

The post Lawsuit Links Wild UAE-Financed Smear Campaign to George Washington University appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli bombing of an Iranian consular office in Damascus on April 1 was the first salvo in a new phase of a regional conflict between the two countries. The attack, which killed several senior Iranian military officials, took the conflict from proxy warfare to direct confrontation.

On Saturday night, Iran launched its long-expected response to Israel, targeting the country with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles. The attacks, reportedly telegraphed in the days beforehand as part of backchannel negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, were mostly intercepted en route to Israel.

The first direct attack by a state military against Israel since Iraq’s Scud missile launches during 1991’s Gulf War, the Iranian salvo — slow, deliberate, and forewarned — appeared calculated not to escalate the situation. The same cannot be said of Israel’s strike against the Iranians in Syria.

While Israeli officials, not least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have sought to portray the Jewish state as the victims of an unprovoked Iranian attack, it was their own deadly strike on the Damascus consulate that triggered the new phase of the conflict. Though the U.S. created the conditions that may have encouraged Netanyahu’s gambit, it was reportedly Israel, acting on its own behalf, without coordination with its allies, that precipitated the latest grave escalation.

Even Israel’s patron and closest partner, the U.S., indicated it had not been involved or aware of planning for the consulate attack. Following this weekend’s Iranian response, which did very limited damage, the U.S. cautioned patience and encouraged Israel to see the barrage as an end to the current standoff.

The reciprocal blows between Israel and Iran have now pushed the Middle East into dangerously uncharted waters, at a time when many U.S. policymakers are seeking to leave the region and refocus attention on Europe and east Asia.

Despite reported pleading from the Biden administration to seek a diplomatic off-ramp, Israeli officials are promising an escalated response to Iran. They are threatening to target military sites inside Iran, as well as sites tied to the country’s nuclear program, a longtime Israeli obsession.

The Iranians have said continuing this cycle of strikes would trigger another reciprocal attack against Israel, far broader in scope and less likely to be coordinated with the U.S. or other regional powers to minimize damage. The result could be a full-scale war between two powerful states, including one whose security is all but politically guaranteed by the U.S. military. In that light, the prospect of the U.S. “pivoting to Asia,” or even recommitting fully to the defense of Ukraine would likely become farcical.

The potential handcuffing of U.S. policy has not gone unnoticed in Washington. A report by NBC News on the morning after Iran’s strikes quoted three individuals close to Joe Biden as saying that the president “privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag Washington into a broader conflict.”

Reaping What Is Sown

Despite Biden’s concerns, the U.S. is the one that created a moral hazard by encouraging Israel to act more recklessly. Israel’s decision to attack Iran’s consulate building, where it killed a number of top officials from the elite Quds Force, itself was unlikely to have happened without Netanyahu’s belief that he could count on U.S. support no matter what Israel does.

Who could blame him? There have been sudden U.S. shifts on the war in Gaza, and Biden apparently rejected further Israeli strikes against Iran, but American officials including the president have by and large struck a tone of total, unflinching support for Israel. Though this support has not always extended to Netanyahu himself, the strike against Damascus seemed to be a test of that distinction.

And the violent exchange with Iran also highlights a much wider chasm between the interests of the U.S. and Israel — and the countries’ leaders. The U.S. has material incentives to draw down its focus on the Middle East and does not want to fight another major war in the region, but for Israel and for Netanyahu personally, there are strong reasons to start a direct confrontation with Iran and its allies.

Since the start of its post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Israeli civilians have mostly abandoned the northern area of the country due to the nearby presence, across the Lebanese border, of fighters from the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Many Israeli security officials feel that a war with Hezbollah and by extension Iran is inevitable. They prefer a strategy of initiating one now on Israel’s terms while the U.S. still has a military presence in the region that could be forced into the fight.

From Netanyahu’s perspective, once the current war ends, he is likely to face serious political and legal problems inside Israel. Expanding the conflict to a regional one could delay his day of reckoning — or even change his personal fortunes entirely.

Israeli incentives for war with Iran should logically put it on a crash course with the U.S. political establishment. Yet the deep ideological, economic, and political ties that supporters of Israel have cultivated with U.S. politicians and security elites make it possible that the U.S. may wind up in a war with Iran, whether they like it or not.

It would not be a cakewalk. Iran is larger than Iraq, boasting vastly more sophisticated defenses and a huge web of regional military assets. A major war would not be limited in time or scope. At a moment when the U.S. is running short of munitions and funding to support Ukraine and is nervously eyeing China’s military buildup in east Asia, it is hard to think of worse timing for such a conflict, regardless of how opportune it may be for Israel.

Israeli officials are now reportedly debating whether to “go big” with strikes against Iran, or take a more measured response. Iran meanwhile has said that if Israel lashes out, it will hit back harder — ostensibly in a manner calculated to overwhelm Israeli air defenses. If that happens, Biden will have to confront the contradictions of a policy of embracing Israel and enabling its most extreme tendencies, while at the same time trying to do what is best for the U.S.

Contrary to the words of some sycophantic U.S. politicians, the interests of the two countries are not identical and, today, do not even appear to be aligned.

The post Israel and Israel Alone Kicked Off This Escalation — In a Bid to Drag U.S. Into War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

“We have been receiving many calls from concerned active duty and recently discharged veterans talking about their personal disgust with our foreign policy in light of recent events, and also talking about how these are effecting them psychologically,” said Mike Ferner, the director of Veterans for Peace.

Members of Veterans for Peace, like other anti-war veterans groups, have mobilized around the Israeli war in Gaza, organizing protests across the country and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Following Bushnell’s death by self-immolation, veterans at a protest in Oregon burned their uniforms in tribute to the deceased airman and to register their opposition to the war. Anger over the civilian carnage from the war, coming on the heels of two decades of disastrous U.S. military involvement in the region, has galvanized some veterans who experienced these conflicts up close.

“It’s fair to say that people’s psychological trauma is being activated again by what they are seeing in the news,” Ferner said, “especially people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been through the meat grinder once already with the U.S. military.”

The U.S. has indeed been intimately involved in Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians since last October, providing its Middle East ally with extensive military aid and diplomatic cover, despite widespread public opposition. For years, Israel has received billions of dollars in military aid from the United States annually. The Biden administration has maintained that support and also asked Congress to approve another $14 billion in the wake of the war, while bypassing Congress to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel.

The U.S. has also provided intelligence support for Israel during the offensive, much of it focused on efforts to deter Iranian-backed militants across the region. As The Intercept previously reported, the U.S. had begun quietly expanding a military base it operates in Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, in the months prior to the war. That base, known as “Site 512,” is believed to help Israel track missile strikes, including from Iranian-backed groups in the region.

Despite the desire of most Americans to stay out of the Middle East, blowback from the Israeli war in Gaza is directly dragging U.S. troops back in — with military casualties as the consequence. Earlier this year, Iraqi militias attacked a base in Jordan that was being used to help deter Iranian-backed groups seeking to build up their forces near Israel’s borders, killing three service members.

Many military veterans who have sacrificed their physical and mental health over two decades of disastrous U.S. wars in the Middle East have been enraged by the continued waste of U.S. lives, resources, and moral credibility in the region. Following Bushnell’s death, Dennis Fritz, who served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years, traveled to D.C. to attend a vigil at the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation. Fritz, who worked for years with wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following his resignation from active duty, said that he felt an obligation to pay tribute to Bushnell’s sacrifice.

“As a former senior enlisted leader in the air force, Aaron would have been my responsibility,” Fritz said. “As an officer I would have been the one who would have checked on him to make sure he was OK. So the news of his death struck me very hard.”

Since leaving the military Fritz has worked in anti-war activism as part of the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military officers critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.” Fritz said that he and other former U.S. military officers who had already been critical of U.S. policy in the region are angered by what they are seeing unfold in Gaza. They now believe that the U.S. government is assisting in the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza.

“They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”

“When we are in the military we are taught the Geneva Convention and the law of armed conflict. This teaches us not just that we must do everything we can to protect civilian life, but even the property of innocent people,” Fritz said. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “is definitely not doing that. They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”

Bushnell himself has become well-known for his sacrifice, both in the U.S. and abroad where his image has often appeared at protests denouncing U.S. complicity in the Gaza war. After attending Bushnell’s vigil, Fritz himself said that he holds the U.S. government responsible for Bushnell’s sacrifice, given its lockstep support for Israel in its assault on Gaza.

Fritz said, “Aaron died for the sins of our Congress and the Biden administration.”

The post Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., gave a speech that provoked anger from right-wing supporters of Israel, many who described it as a regime-change effort targeting Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The roughly 40-minute speech, delivered by Schumer on the floor of the Senate, attacked Hamas as well as critics of Israel, while vowing that the U.S. would defend and support Israel through any crises it faced. But Schumer also took direct aim at Netanyahu, describing his government as “an obstacle to peace” and saying that his coalition government “no longer fits the needs of Israel.”

Schumer went further in his remarks, calling for elections in Israel to bring a new government to power and saying that Netanyahu had “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Despite its otherwise pro-Israel tone, Schumer’s speech predictably triggered outrage among staunch pro-Israel Republicans, including many neoconservatives. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams, of Iran–Contra fame, hysterically accused Schumer of attempting to turn Israel into an “American colony” by intervening in its politics. “It’s a shameful and unprecedented way to treat an ally,” he wrote, “and an “unconscionable interference in the internal politics of another democracy.” His views were echoed by Israeli officials like former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who took to social media to denounce his comments as “external political intervention” in Israeli affairs.

These arguments could perhaps be respected were it not for the massive, regular, and institutionalized intervention in U.S. political life carried about by the Israeli government and its supporters, which has successfully turned the affairs of a small country on the eastern Mediterranean into one of the most important domestic political issues in America. Netanyahu himself has shown no embarrassment about his own intervention in American politics, delivering rapturous speeches lobbying the U.S. Congress to legislate in favor of Israel and essentially endorsing his favored political candidates for office during U.S. elections.

American foreign policy is today effectively handcuffed by the lobbying efforts of powerful special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. These organizations are hellbent on ensuring that the U.S. provide Israel unstinting military, economic, and diplomatic support, even as its government rebuffs repeated U.S. requests to allow the creation of a Palestinian state in accordance with international law.

The complaints of people like Abrams and Bennett that the U.S. is intervening in Israeli affairs seem utterly myopic at best, given that extensive U.S. intervention is not just welcomed but also demanded by Israel and its supporters so long as it is in accordance with the security and political needs of the Israeli government.

Now More Than Ever

Schumer’s speech comes at a moment in which Israel has perhaps never been more isolated, or more dependent on U.S. support. The U.S. today has pivoted back to the Middle East against its own wishes, fighting the Houthis on behalf of Israel, providing arms for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, and deterring Hezbollah in Lebanon by parking its aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. When three American military service members were killed in Jordan earlier this year, the assailants were clear that their motive was retaliating against U.S. support of Israel.

The U.S. has used its veto powers at the United Nations to shield Israel from an onslaught of global outrage over the scenes of mass killing and starvation in Gaza. As Israel has faced diplomatic assaults from Brazil, South Africa, China, and across the Muslim world, the U.S. has remained steadfast as its most important and often only defender in international fora.

All this support has come with very little reciprocation from Israel. In the wake of President Joe Biden’s comments expressing rhetorical support for an eventual two-state solution, Netanyahu publicly humiliated his most important patron by publicly vowing that no Palestinian state would ever be created. The right-wing prime minister even bragged about his own historic role in preventing one from coming into existence.

Netanyahu’s steadfast commitment to defying international law and overwhelming global opinion to pursue a project of continued colonization of the West Bank is only made possible thanks to his and his supporters’ tremendously successful campaign at bending U.S. politics in Israel’s favor. No country has been a greater beneficiary of U.S. support, nor has any country given less back for the tremendous blank checks that the U.S. has written it for decades, up until the present day.

Schumer’s comments on the Senate floor, despite their opposition to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition government, were resoundingly supportive of Israel and hostile to its enemies. But in calling for a two-state solution to the conflict, he contradicted not just Netanyahu but also a majority of the Israeli public who today oppose such an outcome and prefer the status quo, which requires systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinians that human rights groups have classified as apartheid.

In this light, the Senate majority leader’s comments should not be taken as an effort to engineer a color revolution on the streets of Tel Aviv, but rather a last attempt to prevent Israel from descending to a level of ostracism from which even the U.S. would strain to rescue it. “Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world,” Schumer said.

Israel’s supporters who were incensed by his words would be better off taking them as wise counsel.

The post Outrage at Chuck Schumer’s Speech: The Pro-Israel Right Wants to Eat Its Cake Too appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter, spearheaded by Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, calls on the U.S. government to withhold recognition of the new Pakistani government barring a “thorough, transparent, and credible” review of the circumstances of the February 8 election. The letter also demands accountability for political prisoners and calls for the U.S. to cease military and other cooperation with Pakistan unless authorities there comply with human rights law and respect democratic outcomes.

Sent to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the letter was signed by 31 members of Congress. The time to collect signatures on the letter was short, Casar said, as a coalition of Pakistani political parties rushed to form a government with military backing following the election. Though a clear majority of Pakistanis voted in favor of candidates aligned with former Prime Minister Imran Khan, authorities manipulated the results, allowing Khan’s opponents to form a coalition.

Pakistan has been in a state of political paralysis since the vote, with supporters of Khan and media organizations around the world condemning the election as fraudulent. In the months preceding the election, Pakistan’s powerful military establishment engaged in a fierce crackdown on Khan and his supporters that has included widespread arrests, killings, and allegations of torture in military custody. The Pakistani media, meanwhile, has been largely muzzled over the past year, with critical reporting on the army and government made nearly impossible.

The congressional letter could pressure the Biden administration to stall a phone call or meeting with the new Pakistani government.

“Pakistan is a longstanding ally of the U.S. and we should hold our allies to an important standard of democracy and free speech. We can’t allow corporate or military interests to override the goal of advocating for democracy around the world,” Casar told The Intercept. “Pakistan is a country of over 200 million people, and this is a critical moment for members of Congress and the Biden administration to stand by democracy. I’m hopeful that through this letter, and the impact of members of Congress standing up for democracy, we can have a real impact before the election is certified.”

Pakistan’s political crisis began when Khan was removed by a vote of no-confidence arranged by the powerful Pakistani military in 2022. Khan is currently in jail on a raft of charges of corruption and mishandling state secrets viewed by most observers as highly politicized. Despite his imprisonment and the barring of his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf, supporters of the PTI who ran as independents in the recent vote did exceptionally well. This success came despite blatant rigging both before and after the polls opened, as well as intimidation and violence against PTI supporters and candidates.

The State Department has remained mostly silent about recent reports of abuses in Pakistan by the military-backed regime, as well as the continued detention of Khan and many of his supporters. Yet it issued a rare condemnation immediately following the election, saying that it “included undue restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly,” and calling for an investigation into claims of election interference or fraud.

Last year, The Intercept reported on the contents of a leaked Pakistani intelligence cable showing that U.S. officials had put pressure on their Pakistani counterparts to remove Khan from office following disagreements over what they called his “aggressively neutral” stance on the Russian conflict in Ukraine. The Intercept later reported that U.S. and Pakistani military officials engaged in cooperation to provide Pakistani ordinances to the Ukrainian military in exchange for support obtaining an IMF loan.

The full text of the letter is below:

Dear President Biden and Secretary Blinken,

We write to express our concerns about pre- and post-poll rigging in Pakistan’s recent parliamentary elections. We appreciate the steps your administration has already taken to draw attention to interference in these elections. Your administration has rightly stood behind the “credible international and local election observers” who documented “undue restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly,” and we join you in “condemn[ing] electoral violence, restrictions on the exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including attacks on media workers, and restrictions on access to the Internet and telecommunication services.” Given these concerns, we urge you to:

1.      withhold recognition of a new government in Pakistan until a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation of election interference has been conducted;

2.      urge Pakistani authorities to release anyone who has been detained for engaging in political speech or activity, and task State Department officials in Pakistan with gathering information about such cases and advocating for their release; and 

3.      make clear to Pakistani authorities that U.S. law provides for accountability for acts that violate human rights, undermine democracy, or further corruption, including the potential for military and other cooperation to be halted.

Prior to the elections on February 8th, former Prime Minister Imran Khan was sentenced to prison terms of 10 years and 14 years on questionable charges of leaking state secrets and corruption. Members of his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), were forced to run as independents and prohibited from using the PTI party symbol on the ballot, despite consistently polling as the most popular party in the country. Leading up to the election, PTI members faced police raids, arrests, and harassment. On the day of the election, Pakistani authorities suspended mobile calls and data, making it harder for voters to find polling stations.[6] While the pre-poll rigging efforts rightly received widespread international and domestic condemnation, attention has now turned to widespread allegations of post-poll rigging.

Concerns arose after delays in reporting final results and early returns showed PTI-backed candidates on a path to victory. Over the coming days and weeks, previously reported vote totals allegedly changed dramatically, while video evidence emerged on social media of purported abuses by security forces and election officials at polling stations, as results were delayed well past legal deadlines.

Findings by nonpartisan observers also lend credibility to these concerns. According to the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), which is nonpartisan but has worked closely with election authorities, more than two-thirds of polling sites suffered from the kinds of election law violations that could have enabled changing outcomes of races. The dispute revolves around discrepancies between the polling center results that were issued to candidates (on a document known as “Form 45”), and the final constituency-wide tally (known as the “Form 47”).  These findings were echoed by other respected election monitors and human rights organizations, as well as the nation’s newspaper of record, which explained in a February 20 editorial that “independent observers, candidates, and accredited media personnel reported being excluded or evicted from the Form 47 compilation process” meant that “the most important check on the process was bypassed without any convincing explanation.” This growing body of evidence and diversity of voices has led many of the leading observers, human rights organizations, and media organizations to call for a transparent, credible audit process to verify the true outcome of the election.

Given the strong evidence of pre- and post-poll rigging, we urge you to wait until a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation has been conducted before recognizing a new Pakistani government. Without taking this necessary step, you risk enabling anti-democratic behavior by Pakistani authorities and could undermine the democratic will of the Pakistani people.

Pakistan is a long-standing ally of the United States, and we recognize the importance of our relationship for regional stability and counterterrorism efforts. It is in the U.S. interest to ensure that democracy thrives in Pakistan and that election results reflect the interests of the Pakistani people, not the interests of the Pakistani elite and military. We look forward to working with you to show Pakistanis that the U.S. stands with them in their fight for democracy and human rights. 

The post Members of Congress Demand Biden Withhold Recognition of Coalition Claiming Power in Pakistan appeared first on The Intercept.

“As we said before, if the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will [be] escalations,” a senior official from an alliance of Iraqi militia groups said in claiming responsibility for the attack. “All the U.S. interests in the region are legitimate targets, and we don’t care about U.S. threats to respond.”

The statement is not new or surprising. While the need for U.S. troops to be stationed at the Tower 22 military base — a dusty outpost on the Syria–Jordan border — has a dubious, if any, relationship to U.S. national security, the U.S. presence has been very helpful to Israel. The U.S. military in the region serves to deter Iran as well as Israel’s many other enemies.

Now, establishing deterrence against Israel’s adversaries is threatening to suck the U.S. back into a broader, open conflict in the Middle East. Take, for example, the recent U.S. attacks against the Houthis in Yemen, which began after the rebels attacked ships in the Red Sea to force an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza.

Especially at a time when the U.S. is trying to pivot away from the region, Israel increasingly looks like a liability to U.S. interests in the Middle East. American officials are forced to expend significant economic, political, and military resources to shield Israel’s government from local threats and deflect international outrage over its campaign in Gaza. Israel, it turns out, extracts a tremendous cost from the U.S. — often in treasure but, as the world saw over the weekend in Jordan, sometimes in blood — with few discernible strategic gains for the Americans.

“Israel’s main selling point to its Western sponsors and allies has been its depiction as an omnipotent local gendarme, and the best bulwark of Western interests in the Middle East,” said Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East affairs expert and co-editor of the Arab Studies Institute’s online publication Jadaliyya. “But now that premise doesn’t really hold.”

Today, some Americans are questioning why the U.S. has become so deeply involved in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has inflicted a horrifying civilian toll and is now bringing U.S. troops into conflict across the region.

Yet an observer would be hard-pressed to find any acknowledgement of wavering commitment within Washington. Prominent American politicians have loudly professed the importance of Israel to U.S. strategic interests and values since October 7. In the days after Hamas attacked Israel, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “Well, the truth of the matter is, if there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one” — a refrain he’s used for decades to make the case that supporting Israel is critical to U.S. interests.

Presidential candidates vying to take over Biden’s job have been just as effusive about the U.S.–Israel relationship. Robert F. Kennedy likened the state of Israel to the U.S. “having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.” In a recent Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley went so far as to say, “Israel doesn’t need us, we need Israel.”

“U.S. military and diplomatic protection has disincentivized the Israelis from pursuing compromises.”

Israel’s usefulness to the U.S. was arguably at its height during the Cold War. As neighboring Arab states built military and intelligence relationships with the Soviet Union, Israel fought these regimes and portrayed itself as a bulwark of U.S. influence in the region. Since then, the relationship has been almost entirely lopsided, as the U.S. has played a far more helpful role to Israel by helping it confront enemies like Iran and develop strategic ties with the Gulf Arab nations. Despite portraying itself as an ally during the U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterterror campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, Israel was mostly absent — likely because its involvement would provoke condemnation and retaliation, not to mention that few Middle Eastern governments crucial to the coalitions’ operations recognize Israel.

Without a national security rationale for maintaining relations with Israel, domestic political pressure appears to be the primary driver of steadfast U.S. support. The political gains for pro-Israel politicians have ultimately enabled Israel to reject solutions to end the political turmoil in the region, while forcing the U.S. to continue intervening on its behalf.

“U.S military and diplomatic protection has disincentivized the Israelis from pursuing compromises,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “When we give unquestioned support and blank checks, we feed the worst behavior of countries that we consider allies.”

Lopsided Relationship

For years, the Tower 22 outpost and other U.S. military bases in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries like Jordan have been criticized for making U.S. troops sitting ducks with no benefit to U.S. interests.

And yet thousands of troops are stationed throughout the Middle East, some for the protection of maritime shipping or counterterrorism operations, but many for fighting a proxy war against Iran. The U.S. has made huge efforts for years to deter Iran on Israel’s behalf — owing mostly to hostile and frequently antisemitic rhetoric from Iran — while hawkish Israeli leaders have sabotaged efforts at détente like the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

U.S. military officials periodically criticize the impact of uncritical U.S. support for Israel on American interests in the region, where Israel remains unpopular for its policies against Palestinians. These complaints, even from U.S. military officials, have often been walked back under political pressure. Despite repeated vows by American leaders to reduce the country’s footprint in the Middle East, the U.S.’s commitment to Israel has turned into military involvement across the region. There are strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah in Lebanon, and skirmishes with Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.

The costs for the U.S. from this new era of conflict are rapidly adding up. According to a recent report in Politico, an estimated $1.6 billion has already been spent on unanticipated U.S. military expenses in the region since October 7 — a price tag Pentagon officials say they cannot pay without a new budget from Congress. Global ammunition shortages are also forcing the U.S. to scramble to replenish its depleted supplies at a time when it is also struggling to contain threats in Europe and East Asia.

For Israel, however, the U.S.’s presence only fortifies its strategic initiatives. “The Israelis view the American presence in the region as very important, because it creates a backstop for them,” said Parsi. “The U.S. presence gives Israel greater maneuverability to carry out strikes in places like Syria and Lebanon, but also a sense of deterrence against those who would like to retaliate against them, since it may mean that the U.S. is dragged into the conflict as well.”

It is increasingly clear that the longer the U.S. maintains a lopsided relationship with Israel, not only will it remain stuck in the region, but also the less likely that Israel will compromise with its neighbors to achieve peace.

Over seven decades after its creation, Israel has failed to come to terms with most of its neighbors and refused many diplomatic opportunities that could have ended much of the violence in the Mideast. Arab governments have recently proposed a new plan that would end the war and create a Palestinian state in exchange for regional recognition of Israel, which Israeli leaders have already rejected.

The Israelis themselves had been clear about these dynamics. Despite progress on limited agreements like the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israeli relations with Gulf Arab monarchies, Israeli officials have reiterated that they are averse to any more significant deals that would allow the U.S. to draw down its presence in the region. That will make it much harder to leave a part of the world where the U.S. has few interests, yet continues to lose much in terms of resources, reputation, and lives.

“As more and more people have come to the conclusion that the U.S. doesn’t need to be in the Middle East at the same level militarily,” Parsi said, “they will begin to question what the purpose is of having this military alliance with Israel.”

Domestic Interests

Absent a compelling foreign policy rationale, the strongest advocacy for U.S. support for Israel largely comes from the American political establishment. Powerful pro-Israel lobby groups in the U.S. like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee use a combination of money, political messaging, and coercion to push for uniform pro-Israel support in Congress. Their fight has only become fiercer as public support for the U.S.–Israel relationship declines among younger Americans and liberals.

“The routine description of the U.S.–Israeli relationship as a close alliance is mostly a function of American domestic politics, and how Israel fits into those politics, rather than an apolitical consideration of U.S. interests overseas or national strategy,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst and expert on the Middle East.

After two decades of bloody and fruitless conflicts in the Middle East, Biden may find himself between Iraq and a hard place. A strong military response to the drone strike against U.S. troops in Jordan that risks triggering a broader war is unlikely to be popular among Americans, many of whom have made no secret of their clear desire to end U.S. involvement in the region. The escalating crisis is revealing U.S. and Israeli priorities to be mismatched.

“Recent events, particularly the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, underscore the substantial gulf between our interests and the policies being pursued by the Israeli government,” Pillar said. “It is plain for all to see that these differences are substantial, even as the Biden administration has bent over backwards to support the Israeli government, despite the enormous horror taking place in Gaza.”

U.S. intelligence and political officials are currently trying to engineer a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, an agreement that would be in the U.S.’s interest toward an end to the war and deescalation of regional conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, has suggested that those discussions may run counter to his own interests.

“As long as the war continues, he will retain his position, power, and political coalition, while fending off the day he will have to face a political reckoning,” said Pillar. “From his point of view, expanding the war and dragging the U.S. in deeper, even beyond what is going on in Yemen and the Red Sea, would be in his interest, even as it would be against U.S. interests.”

And so it is that, with little choice left, the Biden administration promised to retaliate forcefully for the deaths of the three troops in Jordan. With growing anti-war sentiment in the U.S., however, it is not clear how far its response will go. Biden is left facing a situation where domestic politics, particularly the influence of pro-Israel groups and politicians, continue to pull the U.S. military into a region where it is losing precious lives and resources, all with little to show in return.

The post U.S. Troops in Jordan Killed in Retaliation for American Support of Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the past three months, the Houthis have attacked merchant ships passing through the Red Sea, an unexpected military intervention aimed at forcing Israel to end its U.S.-backed offensive in Gaza and allow aid into the besieged territory.

The Houthis’ squeeze on the critical trade route is already impacting the global economy: Spooked shipping companies have diverted vessels toward more costly routes, with risk insurance premiums and global shipping prices rising. The effects of the attempted blockade could soon be seen in the costs of oil and consumer goods worldwide.

The U.S. Navy, considered the security guarantor of maritime shipping routes across much of the world, was eventually pressured into action. Since last week, the U.S. launched five airstrikes on Houthi positions. The Houthis doubled down. They fired at passing ships with several more rounds of missiles and drones. The targets included U.S. commercial vessels and a U.S. Navy warship — signs that the rebels were only emboldened by the U.S. volley.

During a White House press briefing on Thursday, President Joe Biden acknowledged that the airstrikes were not stopping the Houthis but said the U.S. would keep targeting the group anyway.

With its decision to attack, the Biden administration appears to have opened itself up to a geopolitical checkmate by the Houthis. Escalating the strikes against the rebels will likely bring more shipping disruptions — potentially counterproductive to mitigating economic consequences — and risk a full-blown regional war. Negotiating or submitting to the demands of a nonstate militia group from one of the poorest countries in the world would be seen by many as a U.S. surrender and would boost the Houthis’ newfound popularity.

Battle-hardened in a brutal civil war with a Saudi-backed Yemeni government-in-exile, the Houthis look unready to back down, even inviting the wider conflict.

“The Houthis absolutely want this conflict,” said Iona Craig, a journalist and political specialist focused on Yemen. “It is part of their ideology, whose anti-American element was formed during the period of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They now very much see themselves as the defenders of Palestinians and the people of Gaza.”

“The Houthis absolutely want this conflict. … They now very much see themselves as the defenders of Palestinians and the people of Gaza.”

With the Houthis undeterred, the U.S. State Department took a different approach on Wednesday, designating the militia as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group, a partial reversal of its decision in 2021 to remove the Houthis from the more stringent Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The new designation makes the Houthis subject to economic and political sanctions but avoids the stricter rules of the FTO list. Humanitarian groups said harsher measures would impede aid to areas of Yemen that Houthis came to control during the civil war.

Two hours after being redesignated as a terror group in the U.S., the Houthis targeted a U.S. carrier ship, and the U.S. responded with another round of strikes.

“The Biden administration seems to be hoping that degrading Houthi capabilities will coerce them to stop, but that doesn’t appear to be working,” Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, told The Intercept. “Everyone is deterrable, and the Houthis are not lunatics. But the problem when dealing with nonstate actors is that it requires more force to get them to change their strategic calculus.”

He added, “The Saudis also thought that they could beat the Houthis militarily without having to address any of the political demands that they were making.”

Ragtag Rebels to Regional Aspirations

Once a small, ragtag army, the Houthis learned to hit back against much more powerful militaries over years of civil war and foreign intervention — acquiring knowledge they appear to be putting into practice against the U.S.

The Houthis, officially known as Ansarallah, emerged decades ago as a movement opposed to the perceived corruption of the Yemeni government. For the past several years, the group has been at war with the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and are currently in peace negotiations to end the conflict. The U.S. played a key role in the civil war, heavily arming — and for a time giving direct assistance to — an air campaign by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that inflicted huge civilian casualties. The onslaught failed to defeat the Houthis.

The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons — especially air power — in its current operation in the Red Sea. The rebels use inexpensive anti-ship missiles and small boats to attack the shipping vessels, utilizing the advantage of light and mobile forces that drive up costs and weaken the effectiveness of enemies’ attacks from the air.

“The Houthis have a big force, but they rely on distributing their power broadly across the territory that they control. They rely more on being mobile than on heavy infrastructure,” said Baraa Shiban, a political analyst on Yemen and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “They have survived a long air campaign by two of the stronger militaries in the region, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and have adapted how to move and operate their forces accordingly.”

The Houthis are often dismissed as mere proxies of Iran, part of a nexus of groups referred to as the “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian militants of Hamas. Analysts, however, say that while Iran does provide the Houthis with money, weapons, and military training, the Houthis operate with relative political independence.

“It is robbing them of their agency when we say that the Houthis are merely stooges of Iran,” Hisham Al-Omeisy, senior adviser on Yemen with the European Institute of Peace, told The Intercept. “They have their own mindset, agenda, and ideology.”

The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons.

In its most dramatic display of independence, the Houthis reportedly rebuffed Iranian efforts to stop them from taking the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in 2015, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

The Houthis have long made confrontation with the U.S. and Israel a major plank of their ideology, expressed as a blend of Islamism, anti-imperialism, and overt antisemitism. Along with other Iran-backed groups, the Houthis reject most aspects of the U.S.-backed political order in the region and have made serious threats to the stability of U.S.-allied regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

“One of the main things people miss about the Houthis is that their end goal is not just Yemen. This is an expansionist group with regional ambitions,” said Al-Omeisy. “This conflict is a perfect opportunity for them to say that they are the real vanguard of the Arab nation, while other leaders are complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians.”

Winning Hearts and Minds

At the center of the unrest in the Red Sea is the crisis in Gaza, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks since the October 7 offensive by Hamas. Though Israeli troops are carrying out the war that has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians, the U.S. is the patron and enabler. The Biden administration continues to offer unblinking financial and diplomatic support to Israel, despite mounting accusations against the U.S. of complicity in genocide.

The Houthis entered the fray almost immediately. In the days after Israel launched its retaliatory assault, the Houthis sent ballistic missiles toward Israel and began its attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes.

The Houthis have long been a polarizing force in Yemeni politics, but they have seized on anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and the seeming indifference of pro-U.S. regimes to the suffering in Gaza to elevate their geopolitical status. Not only are the Houthis distinguishing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, but they are also rehabilitating their reputation at home, where they have struggled to set up a functional government amid civil war. Houthi spokespeople have become fixtures on Arabic-language television stations, where they relish their role challenging the West over the plight of the Palestinians.

Not only are the Houthis distinguishing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, but they are also rehabilitating their reputation at home.

Anger toward the U.S. seems likely to grow in the region, as the Biden administration appears to be putting the global economy over Palestinian lives in its strikes on the Houthis.

“The U.S. should consider that these actions in Gaza are enraging people throughout the region,” said Al-Omeisy. “The local perception is that when Palestinian blood was being shed the last three months, no one was bothered, but when the economic interests of the West were threatened, they immediately acted. This message fits right into Houthi rhetoric and is resonating very strongly in the region.”

Their bid is working. Rather than weakening the Houthis, the U.S. airstrikes seem to be boosting the Houthis’ political standing throughout the Middle East, where analysts say public opinion of the U.S. has reached lows not seen since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Polls taken among Arabs in the region show widespread anger and disillusionment toward the U.S. since the start of the Gaza war, with far more favorable views of rival countries like China and Russia.

“The Biden administration and U.S. policymakers have not yet grasped how high anti-Americanism is in the region, where it is at a level that we have not seen since the war in Iraq,” Shiban, of Royal United Services Institute, said. “Even if they claim that this is an Israeli operation and we have nothing to do with it, the Arab public does not buy it.”

With the U.S. military now stuck in an exchange of attacks with the Houthis, experts say the Biden administration has no good options.

“I don’t think that the U.S. is trying to engage in regime change in Yemen,” said DePetris, the Defense Priorities fellow, “but if this continues to snowball, that may end up being something that the administration may try to consider.”

The post The Houthis May Have Checkmated Biden in Red Sea Standoff appeared first on The Intercept.

Mashkoor had gone to the airport on December 18 to fly to Dubai, and from there to either Syria or Afghanistan, as part of his alleged plot to join the Islamic State. The trip had been spurred by over a year of online exchanges starting when Mashkoor was 16 years old with four people he believed were members of ISIS. According to the Justice Department’s criminal complaint, the four were actually undercover FBI agents. As a result of his conversations with the FBI, Mashkoor could face a lengthy sentence for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

At an initial court hearing, family members said that Mashkoor, who had turned 18 just a few weeks prior to the arrest, had intellectual difficulties and been diagnosed with autism. Despite acknowledging Mashkoor’s family support and his young age, the judge ordered that he be detained while awaiting trial.

“It’s not lost on this court that Mr. Mashkoor is a young man with possible mental illness and the diagnosis of high-functioning autism. It is clear he has a sea of familial support,” the judge said. “But based on this evidence, there’s no reasonable assurance here that the court can simply chalk all this up to the defendant simply being a young man.”

Law enforcement agents first became aware of Mashkoor’s online activities in support of ISIS in November 2021. But instead of alerting his family, Mashkoor’s lawyers told The Intercept, FBI agents posing as ISIS members befriended him a year later and strung him along until he became a legal adult.

“It is appalling that the government never once reached out to his parents, even while they were sending undercover agents to befriend him online starting when he was 16 years old,” said Joshua Herman, a defense attorney representing Mashkoor. “Almost all of the conduct he is alleged to have committed took place when he was a juvenile.”

“It is appalling that the government never once reached out to his parents, even while they were sending undercover agents to befriend him online starting when he was 16 years old.”

More details may emerge on the circumstances of Mashkoor’s ill-fated attempt to join ISIS, but the facts as laid out in the complaint are hallmarks of terrorism prosecutions based on FBI stings: a young man with developmental disabilities, already on the police’s radar due to mental health episodes and conflicts with family, groomed as a minor over a long period by a group of undercover FBI agents. Mashkoor’s case also follows a pattern of FBI sting operations in which a teenager is arrested shortly after their 18th birthday. As in similar cases, the court documents suggest that Mashkoor was limited in his ability to execute a terrorist plot on his own.

“This case appears consistent with a common fact pattern seen in tens, if not hundreds, of terrorism-related cases in which the FBI has effectively manufactured terrorist prosecutions,” said Sahar Aziz, a national security expert and law professor at Rutgers University. “In this case, it was a 16-year-old kid who otherwise would have just sat in his relatives’ basement posting offensive content in a manner similar to a white supremacist or Proud Boy — people whom the FBI does not spend enormous resources to entrap just so they can get a high-profile press release.”

Known to Police

Mashkoor first came onto the authorities’ radar for social media posts around the time of his 16th birthday. According to the complaint, Mashkoor began posting in support of terrorism in November 2021, and a platform he used alerted the FBI of suspicious activity.

In July 2022, local police were called to Mashkoor’s home after he allegedly assaulted a family member during a dispute. At the time, according to court filings, a relative told police about Mashkoor’s mental illness and autism diagnosis. Two months later, Mashkoor began communicating with an undercover FBI agent posing as a member of ISIS.

That agent eventually introduced Mashkoor to three other FBI agents impersonating ISIS members. With their encouragement, Mashkoor developed a plan to support the terror group. Along with extensive discussions of what types of services he might provide ISIS, Mashkoor regularly confided in the agents about his boredom, family problems, hopes of getting married, and struggles with his mental health. He constantly referred to being a minor, complaining that being under 18 and subject to the monitoring of family members made it hard for him to travel or send funds, including cryptocurrency transactions that he could not figure out how to conduct.

Mashkoor’s anxieties come through in the chats included in the indictment — most of which are limited to his sides of the conversations. At one point, he told an agent that he was considering finding a wife who might be willing to join him in Afghanistan, but he worried about the possibility of abandoning her if he was killed.

Mashkoor went back and forth about whether he even wanted to join ISIS.

Mashkoor also went back and forth about whether he even wanted to join ISIS. Throughout the chats with the undercover agents, Mashkoor expressed support for ISIS and fantasized about fighting with militants abroad. But he also shared doubts about joining the group as well as concerns that he lacked connections of his own in Afghanistan and Syria. In one message, he worried that “the brothers there might not support me in getting married and may just strap something on me and throw me out into the field.” He may, he suggested at one point, instead get a job and finish high school.

In early December, Mashkoor failed to show up to a flight he had booked to Dubai. It’s unclear whether his apprehensions played a role; he told the FBI agents that he had come down with Covid.

“The whole case demonstrates the low level of maturity and social skills often found in people who suffer from autism,” said Thomas Durkin, one of Mashkoor’s lawyers. “He is fantasizing and making up plans to go to Afghanistan that he could not possibly realize on his own.”

In their conversations, agents warned Mashkoor that “life won’t be easy” after joining ISIS, while continuing to offer to help plan his journey. Despite second thoughts, Mashkoor eventually appeared to take the FBI up on their offer and went to the airport weeks after he turned 18.

“Staying here even another second is torture and I’ve only been putting up an act to please those around me,” he had told one of the agents. “But what will any of it matter once I’m 18 and gone.”

The FBI’s Terror Plan

Throughout the period that he was under investigation, it’s unclear how much meaningful contact Mashkoor had with actual members of ISIS. When he originally came onto law enforcement’s radar, he was alleged to have been in communication with other supporters of the group, some of whom were later arrested in foreign countries.

At one point during the investigation, he gave an undercover FBI agent contact information for someone he said he had found in an online ISIS publication. That individual, unnamed in court documents, solicited cryptocurrency from the undercover agents and appeared to offer them assurances that it was possible to travel to ISIS territories. In conversations with an agent, Mashkoor also alluded to an ISIS contact who had suggested he conduct an attack in the U.S., but Mashkoor said he preferred to travel abroad.

But Mashkoor’s most substantive planning — the actions that landed him under a federal terrorism indictment — took place entirely with the group of undercover FBI agents who were in close contact with him over several months, testing the willingness of a vulnerable young man to commit a crime.

“It’s clearly a waste of government resources,” said Aziz, the law professor. “If there was a serious terrorist threat in America, the FBI would not be spending its time entrapping a mentally ill minor.”

The family member who went with Mashkoor to the Denver airport the day he was arrested had been unaware of his plans, according to court documents, and did not know why he was leaving the country. In one of his final conversations with an FBI agent, Mashkoor had worried about his upcoming trip and the toll it would have on his family. He asked the agent whether it would be permissible to leave behind a message for them. As he told another agent, he had tried “to think of something to say” to his father, but whenever he tried to convey that he was leaving for good, his “throat clenches and nothing comes out.”

“My family know I am leaving but don’t know why and they are very sad and it’s been having a toll on my mental health,” Mashkoor told the agent. “I don’t know how to properly say my final goodbyes to them or how to convey the reasons why I left without compromising myself.”

The post Undercover FBI Agents Helped Autistic Teen Plan Trip to Join ISIS appeared first on The Intercept.

The complaint, filed by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, argues that the decision made by the Office of Foreign Assets Control could have consequences for public discourse, including whether news outlets could publish interviews with individuals designated under U.S. sanctions law.

For the lawyers bringing the suit, the current curtailment of speech based on sanctions amounts to the policing of thought. 

“The question at the core of the case is what control the U.S. government has over the American mind and whether it can effectively insulate Americans from ideas and people who it decides are off-limits,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight Institute. “That is an extraordinarily dangerous authority.”

In January, the Foundation for Global Political Exchange, a U.S. nonprofit that organizes small-group discussions across the political spectrum in the Middle East, held an event in Beirut aimed at fostering political dialogue about Lebanon.

The Foundation sought to include five influential political figures in Lebanon who were either sanctioned by the U.S. government or were members of a designated organization. Two of the potential speakers were members of the Lebanese Parliament, one was a senior representative of the sanctioned Palestinian militant group Hamas, and two others were members of Hezbollah, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization but remains a major political party within Lebanon.

“The public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”

Out of prudence, the Foundation informed OFAC, the agency that regulates sanctions, that some of the participants were on the sanctions list or affiliated with sanctioned groups. The agency was categorical in its response: Any event held by Americans with designated individuals was prohibited and risked civil or criminal penalties. OFAC claimed that inviting any of the five people — even those who were members of sanctioned organizations but not themselves listed as individuals — would violate the law by giving them “a platform for them to speak” that would provide a “service,” according to the lawsuit. (OFAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The lawsuit argues that OFAC has no legal authority to prevent Americans from engaging in conversation with people on the sanctions list. The Foundation’s event was specifically protected by legal and regulatory exemptions on the exchange of information and ideas, it claims.

“OFAC is assuming the authority to control whom Americans get to hear from and by extension what views Americans hold,” Anna Diakun, a staff attorney at the Knight Institute, told The Intercept. “But the public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”

OFAC is part of the U.S. Treasury Department and administers and regulates sanctions against individuals and organizations abroad. U.S. sanctions often shift based on political conditions. Given the Foundation’s mission to promote political dialogue, particularly in conflict-stricken regions, the decision to restrict the event in Beirut could be at odds with U.S. political goals, the suit argues.

“While the government sometimes has legitimate interests in imposing sanctions on groups that are hostile to the United States or engaged in human rights abuses,” the complaint states, “prohibiting the Foundation from engaging in political dialogue with designated individuals undermines rather than serves those interests.”

On its face, the case deals with the specific situation of an American organization hosting people on the U.S. sanctions list at events. But the lawsuit argues that OFAC’s decision could be applied to political speech more broadly, making it effectively illegal for Americans to speak with people out of favor with the U.S. government, including restricting journalists from publishing interviews with sanctioned individuals, which is often necessary when reporting on conflicts abroad.

“OFAC legal theory would allow it to criminalize journalists who want to engage with ideas and individuals that the U.S. government disfavors,” Abdo said. “That is a tool of autocracy, not democracy where people get to decide which ideas to engage with.”

The post Barring Speakers Under U.S. Sanctions Puts Ideas Off-Limits, Say Free Speech Advocates appeared first on The Intercept.

Khan remains behind bars while he faces trial for allegedly mishandling a secret document, known as a cypher, which the prosecution claims compromised the integrity of the encrypted communication system used by the state’s security apparatus. But according to an ISI analysis leaked to The Intercept, that claim is entirely false. Internally, the agency concluded that the leak of the text of a cypher could in no way compromise the integrity of the system, an assessment contrary to public claims made repeatedly by prosecutors.

The main charge against Khan relates to his handling of a diplomatic cable describing a key meeting in March 2022 between U.S. and Pakistani officials in Washington. Khan, while prime minister, had repeatedly alluded to the existence of a cypher that outlined U.S. pressure on Pakistan to remove him from power in a vote of no confidence. Though he never disclosed its full contents, at times, in public speeches, he quoted statements recorded in it from U.S. officials promising to reward Pakistan for his ouster. At one rally, Khan even waved what he said was the printed text of the document, without revealing its exact contents.

Prosecutors assert that Khan damaged Pakistani national security by exposing the text of this encrypted document, contents they say could potentially be used by rival intelligence agencies to crack the code of a wide range of other secret Pakistani communications. A criminal complaint against Khan alleges that he “compromised the entire cypher security system of the state and secret communication method of Pakistani missions abroad,” through his alleged mishandling of the cypher. The former prime minister faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act and could face the death penalty if charged with treason in the case.

On August 9, 2023, The Intercept published the text of the cypher outlining U.S. pressure against Pakistan to remove Khan. Shortly afterward, Pakistan’s own intelligence agency issued an assessment addressing the very question of how damaging publishing such a text would be.

The internal conclusion of the ISI was crystal clear: No threat to Pakistan’s encryption existed.

Pakistan did not respond to a request for comment.

On August 11, two days after The Intercept story was published, an internal request for information was sent to the ISI by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The question at hand: Does the revelation of the plain text of such a cypher compromise the integrity of the system’s encryption? The response, filed by the Inter-Services Intelligence Secretariat under the heading ISI-Policy Matters, and titled “Breach of Crypto Security,” determined that contrary to the present charges against Khan, revealing the text of a cypher poses no risk to the government’s encrypted communications network. “If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) … is leaked it has no effect on security of encryptor,” the analysis, which was filed on August 23, concludes. “Leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”

Concern about the security of an encryption system is not entirely unfounded. Some encryption systems can theoretically be compromised by what is known as a “plaintext attack,” in which an attacker has access to a copy of both the plain and encrypted versions of a document’s text and can use the two versions to determine the encryption system.

But the spy agency’s conclusion in the days following The Intercept’s publication of the secret cypher was that the disclosure of the short piece of text alone — without the encryption key — did not pose a risk.

“If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) using DTE is leaked, it has no effect on security of the encryptor due to following,” the analysis reads, referring to “an offline encryption device.”

“The encryption algorithm,” it goes on to explain, “is designed with an assumption that the plain/cipher text pairs and algorithms are known to the adversary, the security lies in the secrecy of the key. Therefore leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”

According to the agency’s own analysis, to launch a plaintext attack an adversary would need a minimum of 2²⁵⁶ bits of “plain/cipher text data encrypted with the same key” to figure it out. That would be an amount of text that exceeds not just the length of Khan’s diplomatic cable, but also the total amount of digital storage space available worldwide. In other words, there was never any risk whatsoever that publishing the contents of the cypher could allow an adversary to crack the state’s encryption system.

“Not Compromised”

The cypher published by The Intercept deals with a March 7, 2022, meeting between a senior State Department official, Donald Lu, and Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the U.S. The document describes a tense meeting in which State Department officials expressed their concerns about Khan’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and threatened that Pakistan could face isolation from the U.S. and European allies. According to the cable, Lu tells the Pakistani ambassador that “all will be forgiven” if Khan were removed from power by a vote of no confidence.

The day after the meeting described in the cypher, on March 8, 2022, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward a no-confidence vote against him — a vote largely seen as having been orchestrated by Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. A month later, Khan was ousted from power, time during which he tried to blow the whistle on U.S. involvement in his removal.

Khan had said that the meeting detailed in the cypher showed proof of a U.S.-led conspiracy against his government. The text of the document published in August 2023 by The Intercept broadly validated his account of that meeting, with portions of it matching word for word what little Khan had quoted from it. (The cypher was leaked to The Intercept by a source within Pakistan’s military, not by Khan.)

Khan, according to prosecutors, did not declassify the cypher document while in office, even as it had become a major part of his battle for political survival. At several points while he was in power, representatives of other branches of the government expressed opposition to declassifying the document, including at a critical March 30 cabinet meeting, arguing that revealing the text of the document would compromise Pakistan’s national security.

Khan’s former foreign secretary echoed these claims, saying that Khan’s government discussed revealing the full text to quiet critics who said he was fabricating the U.S. pressure, but had been informed that doing so might endanger Pakistan’s encrypted communication systems. A probe by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency this November into Khan’s handling of the document also cited a former aide to the prime minister, Azam Khan, who reportedly told investigators that he warned that the “cipher was a decoded secret document and its contents could neither be disclosed nor be discussed in public.”

The allegation that Khan undermined the cryptographic security now forms a major part of state security charges against the former prime minister, who remains Pakistan’s most popular politician. A conviction on the charges would likely prevent Khan from being able to contest future elections, including those expected early next year.

“Regime Change” Cypher

The scandal over the cypher and Khan’s claim that it described a “regime change” conspiracy has gripped Pakistan since his removal from power in 2022. In public statements, Khan had claimed that attempts had been made by foreign powers “to influence our foreign policy from abroad.” After his removal the U.S. subsequently assisted Pakistan in obtaining a generous IMF loan, while Pakistan began producing ammunition for the war in Ukraine. Khan had sought to keep Pakistan neutral in the conflict, a stance the State Department had angrily objected to in the meeting described in the cypher.

Following Khan’s removal, Pakistan has been gripped by a series of political, economic, and security crises. The country has experienced record-breaking inflation, social unrest, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan’s current army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, visited the U.S. last week to build ties with U.S. policymakers, even as the country continues to be nominally led by a civilian caretaker government.

Khan was arrested on August 5, 2023, after being sentenced to three years in prison over a politically dubious corruption case. That conviction was suspended by the High Court later that month, yet he has remained behind bars ever since thanks to subsequent charges made against him over his handling of the cypher.

Khan’s lawyers have criticized his jailing as illegal and unconstitutional. Legal proceedings against him have been mired in secrecy, legal irregularities, and accusations of abuse, including violations of his privacy while imprisoned. Khan’s trial has been under strict controls that have impeded media coverage. During his imprisonment, supporters of his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, continue to hold large rallies in the country despite attempts at government suppression.

After a long delay, Pakistan is expected to hold elections early next year, though Khan, who polls show would likely win a free vote, is unlikely to participate thanks to his compounding legal challenges. Prominent among these is the charge that Khan’s alleged mishandling of the cypher document risked compromising Pakistan’s encryption systems — notwithstanding the ISI’s own internal conclusion that no such risk existed.

While his state secrets trial continues, there is no public indication that the ISI has turned this exculpatory evidence over to Khan’s defense team.

The post Secret Pakistan Document Undermines Espionage Case Against Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

“Concrete measures shall be adopted to hold the suspects accountable,” the memo says. Nijjar was murdered in Vancouver in June, two months after being named as a target in the document, a killing the Canadian government said was ordered by Indian intelligence.

The memo addresses India’s growing concerns about its reputation due to activism from Sikh dissident organizations and portrays its political enemies as extremist or even terrorist organizations. Titled “Action Points on Khalistan Extremism,” using the name Sikh activists use for a separatist state, the document lists several Sikh activist organizations it blames for engaging in “anti-India propaganda,” as well as acts of “arson and vandalization” targeting Indian interests in North America.

The document instructs officials at its consulates to cooperate with Indian intelligence agencies to confront the groups Sikhs for Justice, Babbar Khalsa International, Sikh Youth of America, Sikh Coordination Committee East Coast, World Sikh Parliament, and Shiromani Akali Dal Amritsar America. It suggests that Nijjar and several other “suspects” are affiliated with one of these groups, Babbar Khalsa International. Babbar Khalsa International is proscribed as a terrorist organization in the U.S. and Canada, but the other organizations named in the document are considered legal in both countries.

A leader of one of another of the listed groups, Sikhs for Justice, was the target of an Indian assassination plot, according to federal prosecutors in the U.S. The indictment, unsealed last week, accused Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, of working with Indian officials to kill Sikhs for Justice general counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen based in New York.

The leaked April memo from India’s Ministry of External Affairs does not explicitly order the killings of Sikh activists. Instead, it calls on Indian consular officials operating in the U.S. and Canada to work in cooperation with India’s Research and Analysis Wing, a foreign intelligence agency; the National Investigation Agency, a counterterror police force; and the Intelligence Bureau, an internal security agency akin to the FBI. Aside from Nijjar, a number of people accused in the document of having ties with BKI are believed to be based in Pakistan or currently incarcerated in India.

The Indian government did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication of this story. Following publication, the Indian government released a statement saying “there is no such memo.” “We strongly assert that such reports are fake and completely fabricated,” Indian spokesperson Shri Arindam Bagchi wrote. “This is part of a sustained disinformation campaign against India,” the spokesperson continued, also questioning The Intercept’s previous reporting: “The outlet in question is known for propagating fake narratives peddled by Pakistani intelligence. The posts of the authors confirm this linkage. Those who amplify such fake news only do so at the cost of their own credibility.”

While the U.S. and Canada have both now charged India with orchestrating assassinations against Sikhs in the West, the secret document obtained by The Intercept is the first public evidence showing that the Indian government was targeting these specific Sikh diaspora organizations and dissidents.

Those involved in Sikh diaspora advocacy said that the Indian government frequently characterizes any political activity by Sikh separatist organizations as militant or extremist in nature.

“The Indian government and media consistently aim to manufacture a narrative that describes any type of political advocacy for Khalistan or Sikh sovereignty as ‘Sikh extremism’ as a pretext to justify a repressive security-based response,” said Prabjot Singh, an activist and editor of the Panth-Punjab Project, a digital platform focusing on Sikh politics and sociopolitical issues. “It’s important to recognize that this is a strategy that India employs in Punjab to justify crackdowns on Sikh political organizing, while misusing diplomatic resources abroad to try and enlist other countries as partners in this effort.”

Reputational Harm

India’s crackdown on Sikh activists comes in response to an ongoing campaign advocating for the creation of an independent Sikh state in the Indian province of Punjab. During the 1980s and 1990s, a conflict over separatism in Punjab claimed the lives of thousands of Sikhs and others before the insurgents were crushed by the Indian military. The counterinsurgency involved widespread human rights abuses by Indian security forces, as well as acts of terrorism by separatist militants, including, most notoriously, the deadly bombing of an Air India flight in 1985.

While Sikh separatism has largely been suppressed inside India, the cause has continued in the diaspora as a political movement that organizes protests and lobbies against the Indian government with the aim of holding referendums in Punjab. The Indian government has complained about the activities of diaspora Sikh activists to the Canadian and U.S. governments, often accusing these groups of terrorism.

The secret Ministry of External Affairs memorandum focuses its justifications for the crackdown against Sikh dissident groups on perceived reputational harm from their activities, as well as concerns about the influence of Sikh organizations in Western politics. Under a section labeled “Khalistan Extremism,” the document blames Sikh diaspora organizations for “defaming Indian government of so-called torturing, murdering and disappearing thousands of Sikhs” and “attempting to degrade India’s international image.”

Sikh activists have held major protests at Indian diplomatic missions in Western countries in recent years, some of which have involved provocative denunciations of Indian government officials and vandalism of diplomatic buildings. India has criticized the alleged failure by Western governments to defend its consular staff from perceived threats and harassment during such demonstrations. The document notes with concern the impact of these protests, while suggesting that the Khalistan activist movement is being assisted by public officials in Western countries.

“The pro-Khalistan organizations have become obviously more extreme,” the document says. “Their strategy has gradually shifted from narrative building to street protests, and inputs from our missions indicate that top officials of pertinent countries have provided a guiding hand in pro-Khalistan campaign which has posed a grave challenge to our global interests.”

Ties between India and Western countries have warmed in recent years, owing to a shared interest in containing China. Yet suspicions and tensions in the relationships remain, as the memo indicates. The document expresses the belief that Western politicians may be refusing to crack down on Sikh activists to exert pressure on India on other subjects, including its neutral stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Notably, we have raised our concerns about those elements to the U.S. and Canada constantly. But they keep using human rights and freedom of speech as pretexts, asserting that these organizations have not committed any crime within their territories,” the memo says. “Although the relation between India and the West continues to gain momentum, the Khalistan issue has become a subtle leverage. While depicting India as a strategic partner to contain China and Russia, the West keeps utilizing Khalistan as a geopolitical tool to squeeze India amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”

The classified memo is signed by Vinay Kwatra, India’s foreign secretary, and listed for distribution to several Indian consulates in North America. Kwatra’s signature was analyzed by a forensic handwriting expert and found with high confidence to match records of his signature in other, publicly available documents reviewed by The Intercept.

U.S. and Canadian officials have issued statements indicating that shared intelligence, including intercepted communications of Indian government officials, allowed them to determine that India was involved in Nijjar’s murder. Unsealed court documents in the murder-for-hire plot targeting Pannun likewise indicate significant U.S. government interception of electronic communications between Indian officials and people working on their behalf in the U.S.

Global Assassination Program

The Indian government’s targeting of Sikh diaspora activists made global headlines with the brazen killing of Nijjar, who was shot to death in a hail of bullets outside a Sikh temple near Vancouver in June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused the Indian government of involvement in the gangland-style murder, leading to an ongoing diplomatic crisis.

In the months since Trudeau’s accusation, more details on what appears to be a broad-based Indian targeted killing campaign have become public, including the U.S. Justice Department indictment alleging that Indian intelligence agents also tried to assassinate Pannun, the New York-based American citizen and counsel for Sikhs for Justice. The assassination plot targeting Pannun was thwarted, a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York said, when an person working at the behest of the Indian government hired an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent to carry out the killing.

The indictment against Gupta, the 52-year-old suspect, who has a background in organized crime, includes statements alleging that more people in the U.S. were intended targets. According to documents from the case, Gupta, who is described in court documents as working in close cooperation with intelligence handlers in India, told the undercover DEA operative that India had “so many targets,” including individuals in New York and California, promising “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman after Pannun was killed.

Sikh diaspora activists have alleged Indian government involvement in the mysterious deaths of other dissidents, including, most recently, a 35-year-old British citizen named Avtar Singh Khanda, who died this year in what his family claims to be a case of poisoning. Khanda had reportedly been harassed and threatened by Indian intelligence in the lead up to his death in a British hospital just days before Nijjar’s murder. The Intercept reported this September that the FBI had also visited Sikh-American activists after the Nijjar’s murder to warn them of intelligence showing that they were at risk of assassination.

An assassination campaign against diaspora Sikh dissidents also appears to be underway in countries outside the West. A Sikh activist in Pakistan named Lakhbir Singh Rode, along with another unnamed dissident, were reportedly targets, according to classified Pakistani intelligence documents previously reported by The Intercept. The Pakistani documents said Rode and the other activist were being surveilled and deemed to be at imminent risk of assassination by India’s Research and Analysis Wing. (Rode reportedly died in early December, with press accounts attributing his passing to illness.) At least two other Sikh dissidents in Pakistan have been killed in recent years. According to Pakistani intelligence assessments, “anti-state activists and local criminal networks” working under the direction of RAW were behind the plots and planned to commit more killings of both Sikh and Kashmiri separatists based in Pakistan.

While India has a hostile relationship with Pakistan spanning decades, the revelation that Indian officials have been carrying out offensive intelligence operations in friendly Western countries has become a source of embarrassment for the Indian government. India responded to accusations by Canada that it assassinated Nijjar by halting visa service for Canadians and accusing Canada of acting as a safe harbor for terrorists. In public pronouncements toward the U.S. since the revelation of its alleged involvement in the targeting of Pannun, India has been more conciliatory, promising to conduct an internal inquiry to discover the facts behind the case.

Tensions With the West

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs document obtained by The Intercept expresses considerable alarm about the growing influence of Sikh diaspora movements in the West. Several prominent Sikh politicians in Western countries have a tense or hostile relationship with India, including Jagmeet Singh, a Canadian parliamentarian and major opposition party leader who was barred from entry to India in 2014 over public comments about its human rights record.

“There are about 1 million Sikhs in North America alone,” the Indian memo says. “The growing anti-India activities and propaganda by pro-Khalistan elements are of great concern for India.” The document goes on to say that members of diaspora Sikh organizations have “penetrated the mainstream politics in the U.S. and Canada,” and are working to “manipulate the countries’ policy towards India.”

In addition to calling for a targeted crackdown on Sikh diaspora organizations, the memo advises Indian authorities based in the West to build closer relationships with local law enforcement agencies and “think tanks,” while monitoring Sikh activists own contacts with government officials. The memo also calls for the recruitment of the Indian diaspora in this campaign. “Indian diaspora needs to be mobilized,” it reads, suggesting outreach to a number of low-profile groups.

“These organizations could be cultivated as vital force in the street confrontation with Sikh extremists,” it says. “Special efforts should be paid to establish cooperation with moderate Sikhs, so as to integrate the neutral Sikh community.”

The fallout from Nijjar’s killing and the attempted murder of Pannun continues to impact Indian ties with Western countries. According to Indian press reports, the U.S., Canadian, and British governments reportedly expelled senior RAW officials working at Indian consular offices in response to Nijjar’s assassination, with the U.S. blocking India from replacing its station chief in Washington. The moves have left RAW with no official footprint in North America for the first time since its founding in 1968.

“The chilling effect on speech that Sikhs are experiencing today is real. Some people who would otherwise speak out against [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi are nervous, some who would otherwise organize and protest over the recent foiled assassination plot are staying home for fear that they themselves could be surveilled, harassed, or experience violence of some kind,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University. “Many Sikhs left India seeking to seek refuge in North America, and it is unacceptable that some of those same people now fear that the India government could target them on Canadian or American soil.”

“Sikhs who speak out for Khalistan, which today is a political movement, who speak out to criticize India, or who speak out generally, could be caught up in the crossfire.”

Update: December 10, 2023, 1:40 p.m. ET
The story has been updated with the Indian government’s denial of the existence of the memo, received after publication.

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