With roughly 95 percent of precincts reporting election results, Bush trailed by less than 6,000 of the 112,000 cast. The Associated Press called the race two hours after polls closed.

After spending more than $17 million to topple Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., in July, AIPAC shifted its focus toward ousting Bush. The group poured more than $8 million into the race to unseat Bush in less than two months.

Outside groups dumped $18.2 million into the race. Bell’s backers outspent groups supporting Bush roughly four to one. AIPAC’s super PAC spent $8.5 million backing Bell’s campaign. Democratic Majority for Israel PAC spent half a million and Major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman’s Mainstream Democrats PAC spent $1.5 million in support of Bell.

Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party spent just under $3 million in support of Bush

The infusion of cash made the race the fourth most expensive primary in House history, according to the Working Families Party. 

AIPAC’s money was spent on voter engagement efforts and phone banking in addition to digital and mail ads. One of the mailers, first reported by The Intercept, included images that distorted Bush’s features. AIPAC also helped bundle at least two-thirds of Bell’s campaign haul, Sludge reported.

Bush’s loss marks another victory for a pro-Israel movement seeking to silence critics of Israel’s human rights abuses and its ongoing war on Gaza. 

Bush was one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian American member of Congress. Tlaib won her uncontested primary Tuesday after AIPAC’s efforts to recruit a challenger failed. 

Bush was first elected in 2020 when she beat former Rep. William Lacy Clay in the Democratic primary by less than three points. The win marked a seismic shift in St. Louis politics and the end of the Clay dynasty, which represented the area for a half-century. 

Bowman and Bush’s wins that year grew the incipient Squad from four to six, and, with the victories, progressives’ hopes for building a base in Congress that could work toward policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and criminal justice reforms. 

Bell built his career as a reformer, elected as the first Black lead prosecutor in St. Louis County on a platform of police accountability and restorative justice reforms. He beat a three-decade incumbent who failed to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown in 2014. Some prosecutors working in the office were so enraged by Bell’s win that they joined the police union. 

In a phone call last summer, Bell promised Bush he would not run against her. At the time, he was running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri. As AIPAC beefed up its campaign last fall to oust Squad members over ceasefire calls, Bell abandoned the Senate run and entered the House race. 

As the congressional race heated up, Bell’s critics in Missouri said he had failed to follow through on promises he made while campaigning for prosecutor. Civil rights groups published a report last month criticizing Bell’s office for failing to implement reforms and overseeing a steady rise in the jail population during his time in office. Others noted that while he campaigned on not seeking the death penalty, he let death penalty cases proceed without a challenge. 

Bell’s critics have also complained about comments he made shortly after Brown’s killing in 2014 that downplayed the racial divide in Ferguson. 

The post AIPAC Millions Take Down Second Squad Member Cori Bush appeared first on The Intercept.

“We can confirm that there was a suspected rocket attack on August 5th against U.S. and coalition forces at Al Asad Airbase, Iraq,” a spokesperson with U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, the umbrella organization overseeing the Middle East, told The Intercept by email. “Base personnel are conducting a post-attack damage assessment.”

The latest attack raises renewed questions about the vulnerability of U.S. bases in the region. Since Israel’s war in Gaza began last October, attacks by Iranian proxy forces on these sites have killed or wounded at least 145 U.S. personnel on Middle Eastern bases. 

U.S. and allied forces have been attacked more than 170 times during the Gaza war: 102 times in Syria, 70 in Iraq, and once in Jordan. The latter assault, in January, ignited a round of escalatory U.S. counterattacks against Iranian-allied targets that led Iran to rein in its proxies. As Israel has widened the Gaza war in recent weeks, with more provocative attacks in Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, Iran’s partners have resumed attacks on U.S. outposts across the region.

While America’s enemies have demonstrated, to lethal effect, their knowledge of the locations of U.S. bases in the region, the Pentagon’s public affairs office claims to have no list of such outposts. “I don’t have any inherent information,” Defense Department spokesperson Pete Nguyen told The Intercept earlier this year. CENTCOM refused to comment on the locations of its bases, citing several reasons, including partners’ reluctance to admit to the presence of U.S. troops in their countries. “[O]ur relationship with the host nations is one of the reasons why this information is not made public,” CENTCOM spokesperson Vail A. Forbeck told The Intercept.

Undeterred, The Intercept launched its own investigation and developed a list of more than 60 U.S. bases, garrisons, or shared foreign facilities in the Middle East. These sites range from small combat outposts to massive air bases in 13 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. 

At least 14 of these bases have been attacked in recent years. Since October 17, 2023, alone, a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles have led to at least 145 U.S. casualties — troops and contractors — at regional outposts including three service members killed in a January drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan.

“The indefinite U.S. military presences in Iraq, Syria, and around the region have near-zero genuine strategic value for the American people, but D.C. national security elites still think the risk is well worth it. Those concerned with the well-being of our service members — such as their families — are likely less comfortable with these soldiers being sitting ducks for local militias,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “Americans who are tired of Mideast war should be worried about how these unauthorized hostilities effectively empower regional militias to draw the U.S. into an escalation any time they desire.”

The U.S. has regularly justified maintaining secrecy about bases by claiming that, as CENTCOM told The Intercept last year, “in order to protect our forces and maintain operational security, we will not confirm U.S base locations.” Forbeck — a private contractor from the Red Gate Group working for CENTCOM — refused to provide even a count of U.S. bases in the region. “Numbers. Cannot provide that because opsec,” she said, referring to operational security, while failing to explain how providing a simple tally of bases could jeopardize U.S. personnel.

But America’s enemies, specifically Iranian-backed militias, have had no trouble finding and striking U.S. bases since the late 2010s.

Regular tit-for-tat attacks began in January 2020 when Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, was killed near the Baghdad airport in a U.S. drone strike authorized by President Donald Trump. Trump said the U.S. was “totally prepared” for Iran to retaliate — which they did by firing 22 ballistic missiles at two American bases in Iraq. “All is well!” Trump proclaimed in the wake of the attack, as the U.S. claimed no U.S. troops were killed or wounded. Weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that there were actually 109 U.S. casualties.

Related

Missiles and Drones Among Weapons Stolen From U.S. in Iraq and Syria

Lies by American officials and secrecy surrounding bases in the Middle East has allowed the Pentagon to skirt accountability on several different fronts. U.S. outposts in the region have, for example, become sites of secret sexual assault and a ready source of weapons, ammunition, and equipment for criminals and militants.

Investigations by The Intercept have found, for example, that U.S. outposts in Iraq and Syria are plagued by systematic thefts of military materiel by militias and criminal gangs. Exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems, drones, 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, and specialized field artillery tools and equipment — have been stolen without comment or announcement by the Pentagon.

Beginning in October 2023, an umbrella group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq regularly claimed that attacks on U.S. bases in that country were in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza and were aimed at pressuring the U.S. to remove troops from the region. The attacks dwindled from March to July of this year, but after a July 17 drone attack targeting al-Asad Air Base in Iraq’s Anbar province, where U.S. personnel are deployed, a senior member of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia said that attacks by the “resistance factions” had resumed, following a four-month ceasefire, because a deadline given to the Iraqi government to negotiate the departure of U.S. forces from outposts there had expired. (The Iraqi government reportedly wants U.S. troops to begin withdrawing in September and to fully end their work by September 2025.)

The 64 Middle East bases identified by The Intercept have been active in recent years, according to Defense Department information or credible open-source intelligence. But without corroboration by the Pentagon, it’s impossible to know if all remain active today. What is clear are the sizable ongoing U.S. troop deployments in the region.

Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and a drawdown of forces in Iraq, there were more than 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East in 2023, according to Pentagon figures. 

As of June, there were more than 3,800 U.S. military personnel deployed to Jordan “to support Defeat-ISIS operations” and “to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability,” according to the White House. More than 2,300 U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia to “provide air and missile defense capabilities and support the operation of United States military aircraft.” The U.S. also reportedly has around 2,500 troops deployed to Iraq to “advise, assist, and enable select elements of the Iraqi security forces, including Iraqi Kurdish security forces.” In addition, around 900 troops are stationed in Syria to “conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from” that country. Approximately 75 U.S. military personnel are also deployed to Lebanon to “enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.”

Numbers of personnel deployed to the Middle East regularly fluctuate. Late last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered additional combat aircraft and warships to the region, in response to threats from Iran and its proxies to attack Israel in the coming days to avenge the death of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was assassinated while visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. (Hamas, as well as Iranian and U.S. officials, assessed that Israel, which has not publicly acknowledged its responsibility for the killing, was to blame.)

The Pentagon announced plans to send additional Air Force F-22 fighter jets and additional Navy cruisers and destroyers capable of intercepting ballistic missiles to the Middle East. Austin also directed the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, now deployed in the Pacific Ocean, to relieve the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is already in the region, in the coming weeks.

“When the supreme leader [of Iran] says he’s ‘going to avenge,’ we have to take that seriously. … We got to make darn sure that we’re ready, and we have the capabilities in the region to be able to help Israel defend itself and, quite frankly, defend our own people, our own facilities,” said White House national security communications adviser John Kirby on “Fox News Sunday.”

Nguyen, the Pentagon spokesperson, failed to respond to more than a dozen requests by The Intercept for updated information about attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East.

The post The U.S. Has Dozens of Secret Bases Across the Middle East. They Keep Getting Attacked. appeared first on The Intercept.

While the pick appears to be a bid to unite the Democratic Party heading into a crucial week of campaigning in key states, Harris’s selection of Walz could also signal a shift from President Joe Biden’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Walz offers Harris a strong counterpoint to the Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance. Like Vance, Walz is a small-town Midwesterner, but he has built a political career in the progressive wing of Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. Walz’s matter-of-fact tone in his criticism of conservatives in TV appearances launched the former schoolteacher and football coach to a new level of popularity in recent weeks.

But it’s also worth focusing on what Walz is not, said James Zogby, especially around the war on Gaza and pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, contrasted Walz with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was widely reported to be the other frontrunner for Harris’s running mate, and believes that rejecting Shapiro in favor of Walz bodes well for Harris’s approach to the world.

“What we have is somebody who will do no harm, who is not going to step on the fact that the vice president is trying to turn a corner,” Zogby told The Intercept. “This is not going to be the policy of Joe Biden — she’s made that clear in a number of ways, even though she can’t break from her boss. But we have every indication that she is going to turn a corner, and [Walz] does not impede that corner turn — Shapiro on the other hand would have become an issue.”

Shapiro has received criticism from the progressive wing in the party for his aggressive responses to campus protesters who were advocating for schools to divest from Israel. In some cases, he aligned with Republicans in Congress who were calling for a crackdown on student protesters. Shapiro has also said he would sign a state bill that would withhold state funding to any institution that boycotts or divests from Israel. The Philadelphia and Pittsburgh chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote a pointed letter to Shapiro for failure “to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict” and to “intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza” soon after the war began.

Walz, who has the support of prominent progressive members from his state, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison, showed a softer approach to protesters critical of Israel’s war that aligns more with Harris, Zogby noted.

“With regard to demonstrators on college campuses, [Walz] said that he respected the empathy they’ve demonstrated for the suffering of people in Gaza, which is pretty much what Harris has said as well,” Zogby said. “He didn’t call them ‘KKK,’ right? He didn’t call the National Guard to start arresting people. And he’s been in very close contact with the ‘Uncommitted’ people in the state,” referring to the anti-war movement that protested Biden’s handling of the Gaza war through voting in Democratic primaries.

Several weeks after October 7, Zogby spoke with Harris and urged her to “say some things that would give Palestinians hope.” Days later, during a Hispanic Heritage Month event in the White House Rose Garden, Harris seemingly headed Zogby’s concerns and mentioned the war in Gaza, recognizing Palestinian suffering, as well as their right to self-determination, something even mainstream Democrats, including Biden, had been hesitant to say at the time.

“I didn’t expect her to do it that night,” Zogby recalled. “And she got an ovation from this Hispanic Heritage Month crowd, and it sunk in that this is an issue that resonates with people.”

A March poll from the Pew Research Center showed nearly half of adults under 30 opposed providing military aid to Israel. And half of all Americans were in favor of sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians. 

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders, said the issue of Palestine and Israel continues to divide Democrats, which he said is mirrored by the debate between pro-worker and pro-business constituencies in the party. He also said Harris’s choice of Walz speaks to where she stands on these dividing issues.

“It’s impossible to know exactly what calculations were made and what issues mattered the most,” Duss said, referring to the Walz selection. “But I think it’s clear that there is a growing constituency in the Democratic Party that takes the issue of Palestinian rights much more seriously than in previous years, and it has to be engaged with and its views have to be taken into account.”

By deciding against Shapiro, Duss said, Harris is showing that she is to some degree listening to this movement within the party. Duss also noted Harris’s speech in March in which she pressed the Israeli government for not doing enough to ending the loss of civilian lives and delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, along with her remarks after her July meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as evidence that she is paying closer attention to Palestinians. 

“That gives some evidence that she is someone who has put more value on Palestinian lives, which is unfortunately something that is missing from Biden’s approach — that reflects her own views,” Duss said. Even so, Duss said he still would like to see more from Harris and Walz in the coming months to further clarify their stance on Gaza and Palestine.

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, a progressive Jewish publication, was more hesitant when linking the pressure from the pro-Palestinian movement and the Walz pick.

“We just don’t know how much the pressure from pro-Palestinian folks inside the Democratic Party may have played a role in her decision of Walz over Shapiro,” Beinart said. “But it also may not have, right? It could have been that she just liked Walz better personally, and she feels like he’s got all this momentum, and he’s got this great kind of attack on Trump and Vance.”

While noting that Walz falls in line with the typical Democratic stance on Israel and Palestine, Beinart said he will pay close attention to whether he and Harris would advocate for the conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel, something Biden vehemently opposed in his 2020 campaign. The U.S. pumps billions in military aid to Israel each year, and that support has continued even amid the civilian casualties and charges of war crimes in Gaza. The Working Families Party also called on Harris and Walz on Tuesday to commit to the arms embargo in its support of her pick.

“If they open the door to that, that would be significant, because that’s only recently become a kind of even modestly mainstream policy,” he said. “If that’s the case, then yeah, I think that would contribute to the sense that the politics in the party has somewhat changed.”

Beinart did recognize that even the perception of influence of the pro-Palestine movement in Democratic Party is unprecedented. But he also pointed to opposition against New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who was ousted in June after intense pushback from the pro-Israel lobby over his views on the war, and the ongoing opposition to Missouri Rep. Cori Bush in her own reelection bid.

“I mean we still have a situation where where if you’re a member of Congress running for reelection, you would much, much rather be pro-Israel than pro-Palestine from a political point of view,” he said.

Walz has drawn applause for his progressive record as governor for his pro-labor views and for leading an impressive slate of laws passed through Minnesota’s legislature, including expanding child care, a $2.2-billion boost in K-12 education, increased financial aid for low-income families, as well as an executive order to protect gender-affirming care. Duss said the Walz pick and his progressive record also signals to voters Harris’s willingness to continue the party’s post-neoliberal swing, which started in earnest in 2016 with Sanders’s candidacy and continuing into Biden’s presidency with pro-infrastructure, pro-labor bills. 

Some observers also noted Walz’s antiwar record while a member of Congress, pointing to his opposition to a war in Syria in 2013 and his support of repealing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has given the White House broad powers to bypass Congress to conduct attacks and military operations in other countries. 

“On 16th anni. of 2001 [Authorization for Use of Military Force] passage, we’re reminded it’s Congress’ duty to #VoteOnWar,” Walz tweeted in 2017. “#EndlessWar is not sustainable. Time to debate & vote.”

Update: August 6, 2024, 5:01 p.m. ET
The story has been updated to include a quotation from Peter Beinart.

The post What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Harris, the woman went on, believes in pushing homosexuality, transgenderism, and “people acting like cats and dogs.” At her grandniece’s public school in Kentucky, students identify as animals and come to school on leashes. This, she insisted, is the future Democrats want: lawless, godless, and out of control.

It was late Saturday morning, two weeks since the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The woman from Kentucky, a nurse and preacher’s wife, had driven to Nashville earlier that day with her sisters. Outside the Music City Center, the sprawling convention center where Trump was scheduled to speak, the former president’s face appeared on a digital screen against a bright orange backdrop reading “Bitcoin 2024.”

The sisters knew little about bitcoin and, to be fair, neither did I. As for the conference, all they knew was that they couldn’t afford it. Tickets ranged from the basic festival pass for $699 to a VIP “Whale Pass” for $21,000. But it didn’t matter. They just wanted a glimpse of Trump. And if they didn’t get one, that was OK too: “We’re here for moral support.”

This was not how I typically spent my Saturdays. On weekends, the strip near the convention center known as Lower Broadway is clogged with tourists and bachelorette parties. Scores of mostly white women in cowboy boots fill honky tonks that have become dominated by bro country celebrity venues, from Kid Rock’s Big-Ass Honky Tonk Rock n’ Roll Steakhouse to a new bar by Morgan Wallen, the country star ostensibly “canceled” after dropping the N-word on video.

Nevertheless, I’d come downtown with a certain sense of civic duty. Trump had arrived as Nashville was increasingly attracting right-wing extremists, who seemed to feel too comfortable in the city I call home. Since I moved to Nashville in 2015, the Republican Party had been taken over by the MAGA movement and Tennessee’s politics have taken a hard-right turn.

Nashville has become a magnet for far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, who moved his media company, the Daily Wire, to the city in 2020, bringing a wave of anti-trans activism that has made Tennessee increasingly cruel toward LGBTQ+ people. Meanwhile, Nashville, which is often described as a blue dot in a red sea, has seen aggressive assaults on its political power. A new congressional map recently carved the city in three, obliterating a Democratic district and distributing the pieces to a trio of Republicans. The East Nashville neighborhood where I live is now represented by a Trump loyalist from Cookeville, some 80 miles away.

In recent weeks, things in Nashville seemed to be taking an even darker turn. All throughout July, white nationalist groups had descended upon the city. The neo-fascist Patriot Front marched downtown over Independence Day weekend; a week later, neo-Nazis disrupted a Nashville City Council meeting. The weekend before the bitcoin conference, neo-Nazi provocateurs filmed themselves harassing a group of Black boys who’d been downtown playing bucket drums. The men hurled racial slurs, laughing and jeering when one child erupted in anger. As police officers escorted the kids away, one of the white supremacists gleefully faced the camera, calling them “little fucking monkeys.”

The ladies from Kentucky were unaware of Nashville’s Nazi problem. They had no idea why such people would share Trump supporters’ slogans, like “Let’s Go Brandon” or “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” They questioned whether the neo-Nazis were even real. They had probably been paid by George Soros, the nurse concluded. “I think that anything that’s going against America is paid by George Soros.”

The neo-Nazis were real, of course — certainly more real than students identifying as cats. Seven years after white nationalists marched through Charlottesville and Trump signaled his support for the “very fine people, on both sides,” his supporters were as eager as ever to either embrace or explain away his racism and authoritarianism. Now those supporters included crypto billionaires and bitcoin bros. Like the nurse from Kentucky, they were committed to an alternate version of the world. Why worry about Nazis when you’re forging your own reality? 

Orange-Pilled

The Bitcoin conference is a project of Nashville-based BTC Media, and, I heard again and again, not usually political. Cryptocurrency’s adherents have traditionally envisioned a utopia of free exchange unshackled by the bonds of the state. Yet the conference seemed to have gone full MAGA. On the steps outside the Music City Center, a tax lawyer in khakis handed out white bandages stamped with a red QR code while wearing one over his ear. This year marked a turning point, he said. Many within the crypto community were skeptical of politicians but “anything that pushes the price of bitcoin up, everyone here will be happy about.”

Until recently, that skepticism had gone both ways. Trump used to dismiss cryptocurrency as a “scam,” calling it fake money “based on thin air.” But he’d changed his tune after election donors opened their checkbooks. Fundraising events had been arranged around the conference; a VIP reception with Trump cost between $60,000 and $844,600 a head, while a rooftop meet-and-greet featuring Donald Trump Jr. and former Daily Wire pundit Candace Owens was more modest: $3,000 to $20,000. (Following complaints about her antisemitism, Owens was replaced at the event by Tucker Carlson.)

This year’s event boasted a who’s who of politicians — including four U.S. senators — as well as right-wing celebrities, from former GOP primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to British comedian and accused rapist Russell Brand. Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke remotely, warning the audience, apparently in vain, “Cast your vote but don’t join a cult.”

Outside the convention center, a garishly decorated Cybertruck advertising something called THORChain parked behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tour bus while I spoke to a campaign volunteer who bragged that he refused to vaccinate his children. He said he was drawn to RFK Jr. because of his anti-authoritarianism. When I mentioned the neo-Nazis who had been coming to Nashville, he scoffed. “That’s got Feds written all over it.”

Inside, the line for Trump’s speech stretched from the Nakamoto stage — the main event space, named after bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto — down the hallway and into a yawning exhibit hall, where it snaked through a maze of vendors and crypto displays. There was “mining” equipment, bitcoin-inspired art — a startling amount of which featured Pepe the Frog — and meme-inflected merch, whose tongue-in-cheek references were largely indecipherable to me. One vendor was hawking sports and entertainment memorabilia, along with a framed poster of Trump with his raised fist after the assassination attempt, stamped with the word “FIGHT!” At $500, it was his most popular item.

I found the end of the line across from a booth advertising Moonshot Mining. (Men vastly outnumbered women at the conference, both in the audience and onstage.) Behind me a group of guys discussed Harris. Picking her as their candidate was the worst decision the Democrats could have made, a white man laughed. A younger Black guy said he’d seen on TikTok that she might choose Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly as her running mate. Now that would be smart, the white guy replied. “Mark Kelly’s like an American hero, dude. He’s a fucking astronaut, bro.” In a more somber tone, he warned that if Harris wins, “one of two things is true. Either the electorate are really, really, uninformed or there’s something suspicious about the process.”

The Black man was 25 and a Nashville resident. He wore an orange and black Bitcoin-themed baseball jersey. A finance and economics student in college, he’d been “orange-pilled” years ago, he told me, but he had plenty of other interests. “A lot of bitcoin people are like, ‘If it’s not helping bitcoin, it’s not helping anything,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Uh, the world is much more complex than that.’” Still, he understood why some people felt so passionate about the issue. People see inflation and the doubling of grocery prices and become anxious about their future. “They can’t control what the banks do. So they think, ‘This is the only way I can escape what’s happening.’” Leaders embracing bitcoin made an alternative future feel within reach. Still, he didn’t like the energy Trump brought out in people.

Internalized Victimhood

By 1:45 p.m., the room was at capacity. What remained of the line dissolved as people scattered to the overflow areas in the exhibit hall. I found a spot in front of a stage sponsored by Gemini, the crypto company founded by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. They had recently thrown their support behind Trump while declaring war on Harris, who had declined an invitation to the conference.

A white man in his 50s took a seat next to me holding a rolled-up sign reading “SCAMALA.” The enthusiasm for Trump seemed to strike him as both deeply stupid and very funny. “He’s here to raise money and get votes. It’s that simple,” he said. “Do I really want him to be our president? Not really.” But he was amused at how polarized the country became over Trump’s first term. “To me it was entertaining. And so when he lost the last election, I was bummed, and people are like, why? And I’m like, ‘The television’s gonna suck, it’s not gonna be fun anymore.’ … It’s exactly like the ’30s in Germany. The guy’s a complete narcissist. He says the craziest shit.”

Trump’s speech was detached from reality in the usual ways, veering across unscripted terrain full of exaggerations, insults, and lies. He praised the brilliance of the crowd as well as his own and commiserated over their shared sense of victimhood. “They slander you as criminals but that happened to me too because I said the election was rigged.” He took credit for Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential campaign — “We defeated the worst president in U.S. history” — and said that while he’d recently “won” his classified documents case, Biden, who was “guilty as hell” had been declared “incompetent.” (Biden has not been charged with stealing classified documents, nor has he been deemed legally incompetent for anything.) In short, Trump spun his own reality. And the audience willingly went along.

“This room is amazing, the people in this room — high IQ individuals. I’m running against a low IQ individual,” Trump said. The guy next to me cracked up: “He’s such an asshole.”

By the end, Trump had made some promises that resonated with the crowd. He vowed to commute the life sentence imposed on Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whose crackdown on crypto has made him enemy number one. He promised new ways to fuel bitcoin mining, which currently consumes an alarming amount of energy. “You’ll be begging me, ‘No more electricity, sir, we have enough.’” And he painted a doomsday scenario if he loses in November. “If they win this election, every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious, they will be ruthless, they will do things that you wouldn’t believe. But right now, because of me, they’re leaving you alone. So please say, ‘Thank you President Trump, thank you very much.’”

“Is This 2024?”

Leaving the conference, the vibe was mild disappointment mixed with a shrug. Trump clearly did not understand bitcoin. And he’d ended the speech on a patronizing note: “Have fun with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you’re playing with.”

“He’s like, ‘Go play with your bitcoins,’ like they’re little toys or something,” one man said indignantly. When I asked him and his companions whether they would vote for Trump, they looked at me like I was stupid. Of course they would.

I’d met a handful of protesters outside the venue that day — a solo priest holding up a sign calling Trump “an antichrist”; a trio of young men disgusted by Trump’s misogyny and racism. But I soon realized I’d missed the main demonstration: a Black-led solidarity march in support of the children harassed by the neo-Nazis. Scheduled to coincide with the speech, the group had briefly clashed with Trump supporters. A video clip showed one man angrily shouting at police. “Make it make sense! You’re protecting them, but you won’t protect our kids?”

Outside, I found passersby yelling at another lone protester, a woman holding a handwritten “KAMALA” sign and another reading, “TRUMP = FELON.” Two men from the march were confronting the people harassing her. A white guy in his 20s yelled that Trump had done more for Black people than any other U.S. president. “What are your pronouns?” he screamed in mock fury, slamming his skateboard against the wall. “I’m a skateboard!”

One of the marchers was disgusted to see people reacting so furiously to the woman’s signs. He had not seen the same rage toward the neo-Nazis. Anybody has the right to protest, he told me. But white nationalists had freely intimidated kids from his community with barely a word from the police. “We go form up anything for Black Lives Matter and it’s a damn problem,” he said.

This wasn’t just about Trump. “We understand the dynamics of downtown,” he said. The bars and music venues weren’t designed for people like him. What did it say that white supremacists from out of town could come to threaten Black people who have been here all their lives? It felt like things were moving backward, he said. “This is the South. … Like hold on, is this 2024 or what?”

The post Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality appeared first on The Intercept.

The far right and its fellow gender fascists typically focus their attacks on trans people. When it comes to women’s and girls’ sports — a terrain cherished by anti-trans crusaders — the exclusion of trans women has been a Republican legislative priority, leading even to proposals for abusive genital testing requirements on girls whose assigned sex at birth is questioned. The fact that the latest high-profile case of gender policing is aimed at athletes who were indeed assigned female at birth should, however, come as no surprise.

Right-wing extremists — including Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk — alongside gender-binary zealots like J.K. Rowling are currently hurling vitriol at a cis woman boxer, Imane Khelif of Algeria, following the athlete’s swift defeat of her Italian opponent in an Olympic match in Paris on Thursday. Khelif is a female athlete who was deemed by the International Olympic Committee to be eligible to compete. She is only the latest woman of color in sports to be deemed insufficiently female by a right-wing commentariat obsessed with forging the strictest gender binaries, contrary to social, biological, and medical realities.

Attacks on Khelif — like previous discriminatory treatment of other female athletes like South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya — reveal the right’s gender ideology for what it is: intellectually untenable and racist. Pointing this out will not stop their vile gender policing; it should, however, give pause to anyone who might entertain Republican and trans-exclusionary positions on gender as worthy even of debate.

On the New York Post’s homepage yesterday, a story by Douglas Murray decried Khelif’s fair win as the “tragic result of letting biological men compete in women’s sports.” (The tabloid published at least five articles about the controversy Thursday, showing the eagerness with which far-right media latches onto anti-trans sentiment.) Across social media, thousands of posts echoed, calling Khelif a “male” or a “biological man” and thus unfairly advantaged. Bigots were swift to glom onto the fact that Khelif, along with another female Olympics competitor from Taiwan now facing attacks, had previously been found ineligible to compete by the International Boxing Association — an organization that has been broadly discredited and officially unrecognized by the IOC.

Khelif was assigned female at birth. The controversy stems from biochemical tests by the IBA that resulted in her removal from their competition, likely because either high testosterone levels or some chromosomal variation was found. We don’t know the details about the IBA’s testing, and Khelif is entirely eligible to compete in the Olympics per its rules. More to the point, high testosterone levels and the presence of XY or XXY chromosomes do not make a person male, or biologically a man. This is a right-wing fantasy, aided in these cases by the practice of so-called sex-testing in sports. I say “so called” because these tests in no way actually test for something so dependent on multiple characteristics and determinations as a person’s sex. 

This is worth clarifying only to emphasize the incoherence of the right’s allegedly biology-based sex-gender ideologies, laid bare in the attacks on athletes like Khelif. Firstly, for a political stance so insistent on the capacity to “define woman” in order to distinguish readily, in everyday life, who is and is not a woman, it should be troubling to these gender authoritarians that only the vagaries of sports testing revealed chromosomal or hormonal variations in these adults who had previously lived unchallenged in their assigned sex-gender categories. “​​In many cases, these athletes had no idea they had chromosomal variations until the Olympic gender-verification authorities gave them their results, right before their events, and found them ineligible to compete,” noted Slate’s Christina Cauterucci.

Were such “sex testing” more widespread, Republicans and their anti-trans fellow travelers would perhaps be disturbed to learn that biology is not on their side: People with chromosomal variations outside the XX, XY binary are not extremely rare — around 1 in 100 people, more common than identical twins.

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive feature on “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such practices purport to draw: “Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw.”

Not that this has mattered to numerous regulating bodies and gender conformity zealots. Nor has it mattered that their application of this flawed methodology has a foul legacy of excluding athletes of color.

In what Human Rights Watch calls “practices that violate fundamental rights to privacy and dignity,” sports governing bodies have overwhelmingly selected successful Black athletes for invasive chromosomal, hormone, and genital testing, in order to potentially exclude them from competing. Human Rights Watch reported that the athletes targeted for sex testing are “overwhelmingly women of color from the Global South.” 

The fact that cis women are the victims of this discrimination gives no pause to those committed to trans elimination. In the same vein, women both cis and trans have been attacked in the street by extremists obsessed with identifying and eradicating anyone they feel should not count as women. Strict gender conformity requires expansive authoritarian enforcement far beyond the policing of trans and queer communities and individuals. That it is so often Black and other women of color — the women long excluded from the protections bestowed on white womanhood — who are consistently victims of violent gender policing is not merely a happy accident for the racist far right. Sex-gender exclusions cannot be disentangled from the historically colonialist, white supremacist project of strict sex categorization and gender enforcement. 

It would be foolish to suggest that the far right has ever been interested in either biological sciences or, of course, protecting women and women’s sports. If questions of fair competition were really at stake, the fact that Khelif has lost nine previous career fights against other women, including losing to Irish gold medalist Kellie Harrington in the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, would surely give lie to claims of her indefeasibly unfair advantage. The outcry exposes the illogic and intellectual failures of fascistic gender ideology. This does not mean, however, that such reactionary campaigns are best defeated with better arguments based in science and reason, in the form of political debate. The misogynistic, racist policing of bodies deserves only our contempt and fierce opposition. 

The post The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports appeared first on The Intercept.

The opposition had high hopes when ex-diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia stepped in at the last minute for María Corina Machado, who was barred from running, but the Venezuelan government’s election authority announced a Maduro victory, with a 51.21 percent to 44.2 percent margin. Claiming fraudulent results, the opposition declared its own victory, bringing Venezuela to the brink of a political crisis.

Washington immediately seized on the disputed election. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the government to produce verification of the vote, then issued a statement Thursday declaring the opposition victorious and urging a “respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people.” Prominent members of Congress like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are already doing the media circuit praising the Biden administration’s actions in defense of democracy in Venezuela.

In light of Maduro’s declared victory and the chaotic aftermath of the contested election, however, the case that U.S. policy worked in Venezuela is on shaky ground. Instead, Washington has embraced a policy of intense sanctions — implemented under President Donald Trump and largely continued by President Joe Biden — as a way to pressure the general population to force Maduro out of office. That aim has so far not been achieved, though it has devastated the nation’s economy, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans and forcing millions more to flee — fueling the migration crisis at the U.S. border in the process. 

“How can we blame asylum-seekers fleeing desperation and poverty if we’re contributing to the very desperation and poverty that they’re trying to escape?” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas told The Intercept. “At the end of the day, what we have seen in practice is that we don’t usually get the freedom of press and free and fair elections and transparency that we ask for. What we wind up getting is hungrier everyday people.”

Casar added that the U.S. approach to sanctions means “we just doom ourselves to continuing to strangle other nations’ economies.” We hurt the people in those countries, he said, “it ends up hurting us too because we’re all interconnected.”

As the Washington Post recently reported, U.S. sectoral sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry contributed to one of the most severe peacetime economic contractions ever recorded, significantly more severe than the Great Depression. As a result, more than 7 million Venezuelans have been driven to flee the country, triggering the largest migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere. 

The Biden administration temporarily allowed some sanctions relief, easing restrictions to allow Venezuela to export more oil and gas, in exchange for a promise of “free and fair elections.” In April, Biden reimposed the broader sanctions, while still allowing for licenses to be granted on a case-by-case basis.

“If it had not been for sanctions, Venezuela would have experienced a large economic crisis in the last decade, but it would have been more like other large economic crises in Latin America and even in prior Venezuela history,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist and professor who previously served as the head of the economic and financial advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly. “It wouldn’t have been like what we’ve seen.”

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The famously anti-migrant Trump approved the John Bolton-led sanctions on Venezuela in spite of an array of officials in both the U.S. government and other Latin American countries warning the White House that the region could not handle the ensuing migration wave. Now, Venezuelans compose one of the largest groups of migrants at the southern border and in transit through Central America (under additional sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, on top of the longtime, infamous embargo, the number of migrants from Cuba has also grown). On Wednesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the Biden administration to end the “anti-human” measure, adding that the sanctions only bring more hunger and violence. 

Sanctions have become an increasingly popular tool for U.S. foreign policy because they are perceived to be less harmful than outright war or proxy war. United Nations experts have argued that these coercive measures amount to economic warfare, and civilians harmed by sanctions “deserve the same protections provided by the Geneva Conventions to people in war.”

Venezuela offers a prime example of how sanctions are key to U.S. regime change strategies. Conventional wisdom holds that citizens living under economic decline are more likely to blame their own leaders — whose failings they can see firsthand — than economic analyses showing the impact sanctions imposed by a foreign power have on GDP. This strategy was succinctly articulated in a 1960 State Department cable regarding the purpose of the embargo on Cuba:

If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The only way of “alienating internal support” for Fidel Castro, the State Department argued, was through “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

This holds true for Maduro, who has campaigned against the U.S. sanctions directly but has seen the yearslong economic hardship erode overall levels of support for his government.

Venezuela’s opposition leaders, in contrast, are well aware that the economic sanctions benefit them electorally, as long as they don’t give any sound bites endorsing collective punishment of their own citizens by the U.S. In a June interview, González Urrutia falsely claimed that the U.S.-imposed sectoral sanctions on much of Venezuela’s economy “are not directed against the country” but merely are targeting government officials. Corina Machado, the conservative activist leading the opposition, has also falsely claimed that Maduro is exclusively to blame for the economic crisis.

As Venezuela erupted into protests in the aftermath of the vote, Rodríguez argued that the influence of U.S. sanctions may be hardening both Maduro’s stance and that of the opposition. “The government is also uncompromising, of course, but I think that it’s made finding agreement much more difficult, because the opposition sees itself as backed by the U.S,” Rodríguez said.

Policymakers may feel the urge to intensify sanctions on Venezuela in the coming weeks as Maduro digs in, hoping it will spur the change they seek. But when asked whether U.S.-led sanctions ultimately skew the democratic process in other countries, Casar acknowledged that “it ends up just getting really messy, and it’s hard to see what the mess gets us.”

The post U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela. How Does That Help Democracy? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everything’s quiet until it’s not,” Arab al-Aramshe resident Kareem Suidan told me while we walked through the village in late July. Three months earlier, the apparent calm had been broken when Hezbollah targeted an Israeli command center inside the village, killing one soldier and injuring 16 other people, including four civilians. In the wake of the April 17 drone strike, the targeted building was described in news reports as a “community center,” but according to Suidan and the aftermath of the bombing that I observed, the building was in fact a school.

“It’s an academy for the children, but the soldiers were inside,” the 33-year-old Suidan said. The kids “go there to learn, for activities, and the soldiers during the war go to sleep there.” For the village’s Arab community, the school is incredibly important, as it allows a degree of autonomy relative to sending their children to schools in nearby kibbutzim.

While the Israeli government ordered residents of this and other nearby villages to evacuate last October, Suidan estimates nearly 70 percent of Arab al-Aramshe’s residents have returned as the war drags on. Yet the military has not changed course, continuing to station soldiers in the villages that dot the country’s northern border, putting civilians in harm’s way.

Those risks have intensified over the past week, as Israel accused Hezbollah of bombing the occupied Golan Heights in a strike that killed 12 children and retaliated by assassinating a Hezbollah commander in a targeted strike outside Beirut. The assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday added even more fuel to an already volatile situation.

The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to questions from The Intercept.

The IDF’s practice of embedding its troops among civilians in the north mirrors the alleged “human shields” policy for which it has repeatedly condemned Hamas. “Israel’s engagement with the issue of human shields is double-edged,” said Tamara Kharroub, deputy executive director of Arab Center Washington D.C. “While Israel routinely uses civilians as human shields in its military operations, it employs this very accusation as a primary element in its propaganda operations and in justifying the killing of civilians.”

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Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas’s Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda

Though international law dictates that schools and hospitals have special status as safe havens for civilians, if a military force stations its troops or other military infrastructure inside of the school or hospital, it can then be declared a legitimate military target. This is the pretext Israel has used to destroy Gaza’s health infrastructure in the wake of October 7, claiming, for example, that Gaza’s largest hospital was actually a Hamas command center. The military has also claimed to find weapons in a school building where civilians were sheltered and has released propaganda footage displaying weapons inside of schools in Gaza. Meanwhile, rights groups have documented the IDF’s use of human shields in the besieged enclave — sometimes quite literally. In June, for instance, Israeli troops detained a family in front of their tanks to protect their soldiers from gunfire.

Whether Israel’s decision to station its troops alongside civilians in the north is willful negligence or a conscious decision to create a strategic advantage in its fight against Hezbollah isn’t known. Either way, the fighting in Israel’s north varies significantly from its war on Gaza. Compared to Gaza, the mountainous north is sparsely populated, meaning Israel has ample opportunity to install troops and outposts far away from civilian infrastructure.

“It is evident,” Kharroub said, “that Israel exploits civilians by any means necessary for its goals of expansionism, domination, and ethnic cleansing.”

A Short-Lived Evacuation

Fearing Hezbollah would launch an invasion in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel immediately ordered an evacuation in the north, a district with a population of 1.2 million people, the majority of whom are Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the vast majority live in Nazareth in the center of the region or along the coast, there are dozens of villages that line the Israel–Lebanon border, some within 1 kilometer. About 60,000 residents of those villages were displaced because of the war. Many of them fled to Akka and Haifa, two coastal cities located outside of the evacuation zone but still within 40 kilometers of Lebanon, and others left to live with family in other parts of the country. Yet when they realized there wasn’t an end in sight to the fighting, they started to return.

Families with school-age children who had been forced out of school by the war had been struggling to find suitable replacements for their children. Members of Israel’s Druze and Arab minorities longed for the communities and families they had built in their villages. And then there was the cost of displacement. While Israel offered financial compensation to families who had left home, it was hardly enough, local residents told The Intercept. “We don’t really use much [money], but with children, it’s not enough. And if you have to rent a house somewhere, a place to live, and then to send children to school, I don’t think it’s enough,” said one woman who lives in Mattat, an Israeli settlement just 3 kilometers from Lebanon that was built on the depopulated Palestinian villages of Dayr al-Qassim and Al-Mansura.

“It’s crazy to stay in a motel for six months or seven months. It’s crazy. And they don’t pay you very much money, even if you do leave,” Suidan said. “We [had] a war here in 2006. I think this is worse. It’s dangerous. I mean, Lebanon is right there. You can see it.”

Unlike southern Israel, which is fortified with abundant bomb shelters in case of rocket attacks by Hamas, communities like Arab al-Aramshe have few shelters — hardly enough to protect the village’s 1,100 residents during a time of war. Even after the April strike, which killed a deputy company commander, the IDF maintained its presence in the village. In late July, IDF vehicles were still inside the village, and the military had erected a holding pool for firefighters to use in combating the wildfires caused by Hezbollah strikes. Thousands of acres have been burned since October 7 due to falling debris and missile impacts.

All the while, Israel continues to call up reservists to fight against Hezbollah. The group’s military capabilities have greatly expanded since its last confrontation with Israel in 2006, which lasted only 34 days but left much of Southern Lebanon in ruins. While Israel has criticized Hezbollah for targeting civilians in recent months, including when it killed two Israeli civilians driving in the occupied Golan Heights, the casualty counts tell a different story. Since October 7, 450 have been killed in Lebanon, including at least 100 civilians; in Israel, 23 civilians and 17 soldiers have been killed in the fighting.

Military Buildup

Driving along Route 6 to the north, Israel’s military buildup since October 7 is obvious. Tanks and armored vehicles stream into the Galilee, a mountainous region in the northern part of the country, alongside a steady flow of civilian traffic. Signs reading “No pictures” are ubiquitous. The Israel Defense Forces have installed checkpoints along highways in the north with two soldiers typically stationed at each. While the soldiers aren’t authorized to speak with journalists, many of them spoke to me informally. They shared their reluctance to fight in a war with Hezbollah and hoped that tensions would soon deescalate.

Much of the new military infrastructure — which includes bunkers, concrete walls, sniper towers, and rocket launchers — was installed along the so-called Blue Line: a U.N.-designated line demarcating Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory in 2000. In a video from October 17 that Suidan shared with The Intercept, Israeli tanks standing just feet from homes in Arab al-Aramsha shoot into Lebanon. In the towns of Shlomi and Sasa, both located within 5 kilometers of the border, military outposts line the hilltops along with infrastructure for Israel’s Iron Dome, the country’s missile defense system.

The area’s staunchly Zionist residents view their presence in the north as a way to assert their claim to the land. In the Israeli settlement of Shlomi, just 3 kilometers from the Blue Line, a 77-year-old man named Amitai told me he had no intention of leaving. “What can I do? It’s my land. I don’t go to any other place. No better than this place for me,” he said. “Maybe Hezbollah can kill me, but you cannot make me afraid.” (He and his wife Golani gave me only their first names.)

Amitai and Golani, who invited me into their home to share coffee and pastries, both said that they hadn’t left Israel since their births in 1948 and 1951, respectively. Amitai later said that he had visited Jordan and Syria, but according to him, “they are Israel too.”

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Israel Is Banking on U.S. Support for a Wider War Against the Axis of Resistance

While many Israelis view their war against Hamas as existential, few share the same opinion on escalating tensions with Hezbollah. “I don’t think we can win,” said Rafael, a resident of Mattat who asked to be identified by only his first name. “There is no winning. We occupied Lebanon in the first war, and it was horrible. Nothing good happened there.”

Rafael was hesitant to speak about military activity in Mattat, where the IDF recently had an outpost. He said that after a foreign journalist visited the kibbutz in June to write on the impact of the war on Israeli civilians, the military ordered residents to evacuate, fearing that the journalist might expose their location and draw Hezbollah strikes on the area.

“So we like not to tell how many people are here,” said Rafael. “We don’t even know.” The now-empty outpost is located only feet away from houses that have, according to Rafael, been periodically inhabited throughout the war. 

The post Israel Accuses Hamas of Using “Human Shields” While IDF Embeds Among Civilians at Lebanon Border appeared first on The Intercept.

Bell, who was serving as a municipal court judge and community college professor at the time, said he hoped Brown’s killing would “wake some people up” to get Black residents more engaged in their community and that the real “tragedy” of the situation was that the prosecutors hadn’t shared Wilson’s side of the story with the public, which was fomenting distrust in the process.

In Bell’s opinion, not releasing evidence that spoke to “the officer’s side of the story” was a mistake on the part of the prosecution. “To me that’s the tragedy of it — is that months later, I can’t even tell you whether I believe the officer should be indicted or not, because I don’t have the evidence,” Bell said.

Bell is now running with more than $8 million in backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee against Bush in the Democratic primary next week in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. Bush rose to national prominence as a Black Lives Matter organizer in Ferguson. Bell was elected to Ferguson City Council in the first election following the surge of local protests, beating out a candidate supported by protester groups, and went on to unseat the St. Louis prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, whom he criticized in this interview for his handling of the Brown case.

Bell made the comments about Ferguson in November 2014 on the Nick Taliaferro Show, which went off the air in 2017. At the time, Bell was a municipal court judge in the small St. Louis suburb of Velda City, which was sued in 2015 in a federal civil rights case over running an unlawful bail system. 

Brown’s killing wasn’t unique to Ferguson, Bell said during the radio segment. “These are issues that have been plaguing our country since the beginning of our country. So when I hear, ‘Well it’s just Ferguson, it’s just Ferguson,’ even in this area, it’s not just Ferguson. These issues have been happening all over our region, it’s just this particular one happened in Ferguson and that’s what’s been playing in the media.” 

In the wake of Brown’s killing, there was a sense that the racial divide in Ferguson was comparable to that of Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, Taliaferro said. “That’s just not the case,” Bell said. “In the United States, there is a racial divide. I think we agree with that. I’m saying, relatively speaking, Ferguson is not as bad.” 

Ferguson’s racial divide was “less than normal,” Bell said, notwithstanding issues that still needed work, including diversity in the police force and government. But the need for accountability was “on both sides,” Bell said. “African Americans need to get more involved.” When he ran for a council seat, Black people weren’t involved in the political process, he said. “I’m hoping this wakes some people up.” 

“That quote is pretty astonishing coming from not only a Black man in St. Louis but a Black man who lived in Ferguson and was a municipal court judge,” said Thomas Harvey, a civil rights lawyer who ran the nonprofit law firm in St. Louis that sued Velda City under Bell’s judgeship; Harvey is currently based in Los Angeles. “It’s also an indication of the deep racism in St. Louis that you could look at Ferguson and say, ‘It’s not that bad,’” Harvey said. 

The Bell campaign commented on the 2014 interview in a statement. “Cori Bush and her allies are intentionally mischaracterizing Wesley’s comments,” wrote Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for the Bell campaign. “In the interview, he was criticizing then-Prosecuting Attorney McCulloch for being secretive and not releasing the evidence on Wilson, a criticism he felt so strongly about, that he ultimately ran against McCulloch and beat him.”

Compared to other cities in Missouri at the time, it’s accurate to say that Ferguson was in the middle of the spectrum of unconstitutional practices and racist policing, according to Harvey. “It’s just that they were all so racist, it’s weird to hear someone say Ferguson wasn’t that bad. I think it’s actually indicative of how bad racism is in St. Louis overall and the whole region. What you’re doing is comparing it to the worst, most explicit forms of racism, and saying, that isn’t exactly happening in Ferguson.”

Arrest rates, police violence, stops, tickets, fines, and jailing were overwhelmingly disproportionately targeted against Black people living in Ferguson or passing through, Harvey said. “That is well known,” he added, and at the time, it was common knowledge.

Clients who lived in and near Ferguson would tell him that they wouldn’t travel to see friends and family around holidays because they didn’t want to get arrested and spend Thanksgiving or Christmas in jail, he said. Harvey said he used to work with pregnant women in St. Louis, many of whom didn’t want to drive to get prenatal care for the same reason. They arranged taxis instead. 

“Wesley was a judge in a town where the exact same thing was happening,” Harvey said. The prevailing logic at the time was that it was better to have a Black judge who could empathize with the population even if the system was still operating in a racist way, Harvey said. “I think that just kind of reflects Wesley’s overall politics, which is, the system can still be racist, we can still be jailing people illegally, holding them for $50, exploiting them, destroying their lives, so long as there’s a sort of kinder, gentler person who is able to empathize with them when they come before the court.” 

“That was really surprising to hear, especially that then it was 2014, after Mike Brown was murdered,” Harvey said. “This was common knowledge well before Mike Brown was murdered, and it was especially common knowledge among any Black person I met who lived in or around North County,” he said. “It’s just shocking to hear him say that. He must mean Ferguson isn’t the worst city in that region, and I agree, there are worse,” he said. “It’s hard to understand.”

Bell was elected St. Louis County prosecuting attorney against a three-decade incumbent with close ties to the local police. Bell was lauded as the first Black head prosecutor in the jurisdiction, someone who would champion the progressive reforms St. Louis had been pushing for since before Brown’s killing. Staff attorneys in the St. Louis prosecutors’ office were so angered by his win that they left the prosecutors union to join the local police union, The Intercept reported. 

But Bell later disappointed supporters when he declined to charge Wilson in Brown’s killing after reviewing the case. 

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On the radio in 2014, Taliaferro asked Bell what he thought would happen if the grand jury decided not to indict Wilson. Bell said he didn’t think there was any chance Wilson would remain an officer in Ferguson, but that the “worst-case scenario” from a perspective of safety and unrest was if the grand jury decided not to indict. “There’s going to be some kind of violent response. It’s just a matter of how much. And obviously we’re all praying that it’s not a lot.” Bell said he believed in nonviolent protest “as opposed to violence.” 

Last month as the race against Bush heated up, civil rights groups issued a report claiming that his office had not delivered on the reforms he promised on the campaign trail, and that the jail population had steadily climbed under his leadership.

“Wesley Bell has exposed himself as a fraud,” said Working Families Party spokesperson Ravi Mangla. “He’s running on being a Ferguson reformer, when it’s clear he couldn’t see the deep-lying issues in his own community.” WFP is backing Bush in the race.

Harvey, who was co-counsel on the suit over the bail system while Bell was judge in Velda City, said they would have sued Bell personally if they could have. “If judges didn’t have judicial immunity, we would have sued the judges in those cities,” he said.

“They’re very clearly participants in this system and know what’s happening, and are frequently the reason people are incarcerated,” Harvey said. “It’s ridiculous to think they don’t know. It’s impossible for Wesley Bell or any municipal court judge to say they didn’t know what was happening.”

The post After Michael Brown’s Killing, Wesley Bell Called for “Accountability on Both Sides” in Ferguson Racism appeared first on The Intercept.

Some former Trump administration officials who contributed to Project 2025’s controversial 900-page manifesto seem to have gotten the signal. The Intercept found Project 2025 recently tweaked its list of individual contributors, removing two names entirely and modifying two more to eliminate their employment affiliations with prominent firms.

For weeks, former President Donald Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025. In recent months, some conservative organizations have quietly exited the Project 2025 advisory board, including some that were extensively involved in drafting the playbook.

After the Tuesday ouster of the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, who previously served in the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported that “there had been requests from people to get their names taken off the work.” A campaign spokesperson reportedly threatened to blacklist other Project 2025 affiliates from posts in the Trump administration.

All four individuals identified by The Intercept had been listed as Project 2025 contributors since April 2023, when the Heritage Foundation first put out the playbook. All four changes were made quietly on different dates in July, including three after Trump issued a statement saying he had “no idea who is behind” the project. Heritage did not respond to questions about these changes, including whether other contributors had asked for their names or affiliations to be removed.

“The contributors listed below generously volunteered their time and effort to assist the authors in the development and writing of this volume’s 30 chapters,” reads a disclaimer on the Project 2025 contributors list, which currently includes more than 250 names. “The policy views and reform proposals herein are not an all-inclusive catalogue of conservative ideas for the next President, nor is there unanimity among the contributors or the organizations with which they are affiliated with regard to the recommendations.”

The most prominent name to disappear from Project 2025 is David Moore, dean of Brigham Young University Law School. As recently as July 16, Moore was listed among the contributors, along with his BYU affiliation, but his name was no longer there on July 17.

Before leading BYU Law, Moore served in the Trump administration as acting deputy administrator and general counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Moore, who did not respond to questions, was named dean in June 2023, two months after the Project 2025 playbook’s release.

The second former Trump official whose name evaporated from the Project 2025 list is attorney Sohan Dasgupta, who served as special counsel to the Department of Education and deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security. Dasgupta’s name and affiliation with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, where he is a partner, appeared as recently as July 27. By July 28, it was gone. Dasgupta also did not answer questions about his involvement in Project 2025.

Two other individuals remain listed as Project 2025 contributors, but their entries were recently modified to eliminate their employers.

Earl Comstock, an attorney who served as senior adviser in the Trump Department of Commerce, is now senior policy counsel at the law firm White & Case in Washington, D.C. As of July 27, Comstock’s name appeared along with his employer, but by July 28 the firm’s name was gone.

“White & Case is not affiliated with Project 2025,” said a firm spokesperson. “Earl Comstock contributed to the project as a private citizen. The change was made for accuracy.”

The final tweak on Project 2025’s contributor list was for Joel Frushone, who served during the Trump years as a spokesperson for the Peace Corps and U.S. Economic Development Administration. As of July 2, Frushone was credited as a Project 2025 contributor along with his current employer, the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young. By July 3, only his name appeared. Frushone declined to speak with The Intercept, and Ernst & Young did not respond to questions.

The post Project 2025 Contributors Are Abandoning Ship as Trump Turns Against Them appeared first on The Intercept.

On July 26, Bailey racked up another loss when the Missouri Supreme Court declined to scuttle a hearing in St. Louis County to determine whether Marcellus Williams was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die in 2001. Bailey had implored the court to stop the August 21 hearing and to clear the way for Williams’s execution in September. While the Supreme Court has declined to delay Williams’s execution, it has at least rebuffed Bailey’s entreaty to grease the wheels.

Bailey’s defeat caps several weeks’ worth of legal volleying between the attorney general, Williams’s lawyers with the Midwest Innocence Project, and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who is seeking to vacate Williams’s conviction because he believes it was wrongly obtained. In pushing back against Bailey’s efforts to block Williams’s innocence hearing, Bell and the Midwest Innocence Project argue that Bailey is attempting to rewrite Missouri law to give himself more power.

The flurry of legal activity also underscores Bailey’s apparent determination to fight off claims of wrongful conviction. In the last two months alone, he has not only tried to block Williams from airing his innocence claim at all, but has also sought to keep two recent exonerees, Christopher Dunn and Sandra Hemme, locked up despite court rulings concluding that they should be freed.

Bailey’s opposition to correcting miscarriages of justice is a feature of his tenure as attorney general, but his recent actions have earned new scrutiny and ire from activists, as well as from his rock-ribbed conservative opponent in the attorney general’s Republican primary race.

Speaking at the state Capitol on Thursday, death row exonerees with the nonprofit group Witness to Innocence called on Bailey to reverse course and support the vetting of innocence claims — starting with Williams’s case.

Bailey’s current position is that it is “acceptable to execute an innocent person,” said Herman Lindsey, the group’s executive director. “We’re here to ask for an honest search for the truth. That’s all.”

“This win-at-all-costs mentality does not serve the people of Missouri.”

Shifting Narratives

Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, a beloved former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed to death in her home in a gated community outside the city on August 11, 1998. When her husband Dan Picus found her, the murder weapon, a knife from the couple’s kitchen, was still lodged in her neck. The house was replete with potential forensic evidence, including bloody fingerprints on a wall and a trail of bloody shoeprints. The kitchen had been ransacked, and closets and drawers upstairs had been opened. Still, nothing of great value had been taken.

Despite extensive physical evidence, the investigation stalled. It wasn’t until months later, after her family posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of her killer, that a jailhouse informant came forward with a story about his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, whom he claimed had confessed to the crime. Police subsequently scored a second informant, Williams’s former girlfriend, who also claimed Williams was responsible.

There were ample reasons to distrust the informants’ accounts, including that both were facing prison time for unrelated crimes, and each had a history of ratting on others to save themselves. Many of the details they offered shifted across questioning and others simply did not match the murder. Nonetheless, Williams was tried and convicted in 2001 based primarily on their waffling and contradictory tales.

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Crime Scene DNA Didn’t Match Marcellus Williams. Missouri May Fast-Track His Execution Anyway.

Williams has maintained his innocence and has twice come close to execution. His lawyers requested DNA testing of crime scene evidence prior to his trial, but the court denied it. It wasn’t until the eve of Williams’s execution in 2015 that the state Supreme Court issued a stay and ordered testing of the murder weapon, which ultimately revealed unknown male DNA and excluded Williams as a donor. Still, without considering what impact that evidence might have had on Williams’s conviction, the court reset his execution for August 2017. Again, the execution was halted, this time by then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, who issued an executive order triggering a little-used Missouri law that allows the governor to empanel a board of inquiry to review a case.

Passed in 1963, the law was designed to protect against wrongful executions. The board, made up of five retired judges, was not yet finished with its work the following year when Greitens left office amid scandal and Mike Parson assumed the job. Over the intervening years, the Midwest Innocence Project provided the board with a host of information to aid its inquiry. Then, in June 2023, Parson abruptly dissolved the board before it could report on the findings of its investigation, which by statute it was required to do. Parson said it was time to “move forward.”

The Midwest Innocence Project sued to block Parson from disbanding the board before it had fulfilled its statutory duty, yet the Missouri Supreme Court dismissed the suit earlier this summer. The court ruled on June 4 that the governor had the right to dissolve it as he saw fit.

Sweeping Arguments

While the litigation over the board played out, St. Louis County elected prosecutor Wesley Bell availed himself in January of a relatively new Missouri law that empowers prosecutors to move to vacate a conviction they believe was wrongly obtained. “Public confidence in the justice system is restored, not undermined, when a prosecutor is accountable for a wrongful or constitutionally infirm conviction,” Bell wrote.

The statute directs a circuit judge to hold a hearing and determine whether there is “clear and convincing evidence” of a wrongful conviction. Notably, the law also allows — but does not require — the attorney general’s office to appear at the hearing and question witnesses. To date, three people have been exonerated under the statute, which was enacted in 2021. In each case, the state’s top prosecutor has taken an adversarial stance — and lost. In Williams’s case, Bailey filed a notice in early February that he would be opposing Bell’s motion.

Bell had asked the state Supreme Court to hold off on setting a new execution date until the circuit court has had the opportunity to consider the case. Instead, in June, the court set Williams’s execution for September 24. The attorney general waited until just after the Supreme Court set the execution date to file a motion urging the circuit court judge to dismiss Bell’s motion without a hearing.

Bailey argued that because the state Supreme Court has rejected all of Williams’s previous appeals and has set an execution date, the lower court can’t review the case at all. To do so would “challenge” the authority of the Supreme Court, whose decisions, according to the state constitution, “shall be controlling in all other courts.” Bailey continued, “this Court has no authority to reverse, overrule, or otherwise decline to follow” the high court’s previous rulings, concluding that Bell’s “futile” efforts should be dismissed.

Both Bell and the Midwest Innocence Project responded with briefs arguing that Bailey’s position is absurd. For starters, the law that allows Bell to seek to vacate Williams’s conviction operates separately from the normal appeals process. Importantly, it also doesn’t allow for the attorney general to jump in ahead of a hearing to try and block it from ever taking place. Bailey’s argument is merely an attempt to prevent a hearing before Williams’s execution date, Bell wrote —“an absurd and unnecessary position for the Attorney General to take under the circumstances as a representative of the State of Missouri with a duty as a ‘minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate.’”

Williams’s lawyers took aim at Bailey’s attempt to nullify the statute so that it doesn’t apply to people who have appealed their capital conviction and have been denied (which, practically speaking, is most death row defendants) and have subsequently had an execution date set. “The AG’s arguments are as surprising as they are sweeping,” the Midwest Innocence Project argued in court filings.

If accepted, Bailey’s argument could allow the attorney general to seek an execution date as soon as possible after an appeal is denied, foreclosing any potential future relief from a wrongful conviction.

On July 2, St. Louis County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton declined to take up Bailey’s motion to dismiss the case and instead set the hearing for August 21. Bailey asked the Supreme Court to intervene; it too declined.

“Shock to the Conscience”

Bailey took over as attorney general in 2023, when his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, was elected to the U.S. Senate. Since then, Bailey has aggressively sought to block prosecutors — and judges — from taking action to right wrongful convictions.

He is far from the first top prosecutor in Missouri to try to block a potential exoneration; for at least 30 years the reflexive position of the attorney general’s office has been to oppose innocence claims. And after the law giving the state’s elected prosecutors the right to seek to throw out a tainted conviction passed in 2021, Schmitt was seemingly all-too-eager to oppose the process. Still, as Bailey has been running in a hotly contested Republican primary seeking to secure his first full term in office, he has put those efforts into overdrive.

Sandra Hemme spent 43 years in prison for a murder she did not commit before a state judge in June vacated her conviction and cleared her for release. In response, Bailey launched a monthlong campaign to keep her locked up — including by having an underling call the Department of Corrections and tell the prison warden not to release her, all in violation of a court order. Hemme was finally released on July 19, after Judge Ryan Horsman said that if she was not freed within hours Bailey would have to personally appear in court or face a charge of contempt.

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Missouri’s Attorney General Is Waging War to Keep the Wrongly Convicted Locked Up

In May, a pair of lawyers from Bailey’s office fought St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Gabriel Gore’s efforts to exonerate Christopher Dunn for a 1990 murder he has long sworn he did not commit. The attorney general’s office lost the fight, and the circuit judge vacated Dunn’s conviction last month. Bailey then deployed the same tactics he had in Hemme’s case — including calling the DOC — in an effort to keep Dunn from being released from prison. After the Missouri Supreme Court’s intervention, Dunn was finally released on July 30.

Bailey’s decision to make opposing innocence claims a feature of his office is a bold, if not questionable, choice. Advocates across the state have decried his actions. Peter Joy, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, told CBS News that Bailey’s efforts to keep Hemme locked up were “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being.”

And it appears that Bailey’s stance is also confounding to fellow conservative MAGA Republican Will Scharf, Bailey’s opponent in the state’s GOP primary on August 6. Practically speaking, there isn’t much daylight between Bailey and Scharf. Still, Scharf — a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team representing Donald Trump in his immunity case before the U.S. Supreme Court — told St. Louis’s Spectrum News that he wouldn’t try to block the release of a person who’d demonstrated their innocence in court. “It’s a clear and convincing evidence standard for someone to essentially prove that they’ve been wrongly convicted,” Scharf said. “I think that’s an appropriately high bar.”

The post Despite Missouri AG’s Best Efforts, Man Condemned to Die Will Get Hearing On His Innocence Claim appeared first on The Intercept.

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020, voters elected a reform prosecutor, Mary Moriarty, who promised to prosecute police misconduct and take a restorative justice approach to prosecution. 

The letter to Walz sent Wednesday from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept, asks the governor to remove Moriarty’s office from all past, present, and future police use of force cases. With a former prosecutor as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, this pressure on Walz brings to the fore the split within the Democratic Party over how to handle the demand for continued police and criminal justice reform, as conservatives and law enforcement push to undo the reforms that have been put in place.

The push against Moriarty isn’t unique to Minnesota. Critics of reform have moved to oust or restrict the authority of prosecutors in dozens of states as reformers started winning elections more frequently amid the growing push for criminal justice reform. Between 2017 and early 2023, more than 37 bills to remove or limit the power of reform prosecutors were introduced in 17 states. As of early 2023, that number grew to more than 53 measures in 26 states, including efforts to restrict the power of prosecutors who refused to charge people who sought abortions. 

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In the letter to Walz, MPPOA general counsel Imran Ali wrote that police were concerned about Moriarty’s handling of use-of-force cases and that the association had “deep concerns about the impartiality and bias” from Moriarty against law enforcement. He suggested that Attorney General Keith Ellison could handle the cases “with proper funding.” Ellison built his career on reform and was once an ally of Moriarty’s. Last year, he removed a case from Moriarty’s office in which she declined to charge two teenage brothers accused of murder as adults.

“There is no way County Attorney Moriarty can act without bias and be impartial,” Ali wrote. “A significant number of peace officers have reached out to me and are troubled and fearful of this county attorney handling any use of force matters.” 

Moriarty’s critics in Minneapolis have been pushing to remove her from certain cases and oust her from the office since shortly after her term began in January 2023.

Last week, MPPOA filed an ethics complaint against Moriarty’s office for her handling of murder charges against a state trooper who killed a 33-year-old Black man, Ricky Cobb II, during a traffic stop last year. Moriarty’s office dropped the charges in June after the trooper’s defense team claimed that he was in fear for his partner’s life during the stop. Moriarty said the trooper used lawful force, and that her office couldn’t disprove his defense, but that she was “not backing down.”

Earlier this year, two Minnesota police associations sent a letter to Walz asking him to remove Moriarty from that case. At the time, four Republican members of Congress from Minnesota called for an investigation into Moriarty over the case, and at least one called on her to resign. Walz, MPPOA, and Moriarty’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We expect nothing less from a thoroughly corrupt police union that will do anything to prevent accountability for law enforcement accused of misconduct,” said Michael Collins, senior director of government affairs at Color of Change, a racial justice group. “Governor Tim Walz opened the door to these requests when he sided with the union in the Ricky Cobb II case. His behavior was shameful, up to and including calling the trooper’s defense lawyer to ask if they wanted the case to be reassigned to another county attorney. It’s no wonder the police union thinks he’s their guy. He should denounce the request and stop trying to pander to the right on criminal justice by undermining police accountability.”

Moriarty responded to the MPPOA’s ethics complaint last week, criticizing the police association for lobbying against efforts to hold police accountable and opposing regulations that would ban law enforcement from being involved in white supremacists groups.

The police group objected to Moriarty’s critiques in their letter to Walz this week. “These divisive comments were meant to divide our communities and elucidate her bias and belief that all peace officers are tied to white supremacist organizations,” Ali wrote. “As a person of color, and the general counsel of MPPOA, I find her comments offensive, repulsive and intend to injure and harm law enforcement all over the state, including harming my personal reputation.” 

Walz is not the only vice presidential candidate with a fraught relationship with the criminal justice reform movement. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another pick on Harris’s list, has also backed efforts to strip Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner of his authority to prosecute certain crimes. When Shapiro was state attorney general in 2019, his office pushed the Philadelphia Inquirer to be more critical of Krasner, The Intercept reported. Shapiro also backed a controversial bill passed by Pennsylvania lawmakers to strip Krasner’s ability to prosecute certain gun crimes in the city and give concurrent jurisdiction to the AG’s office. Shapiro’s office later said he would not use the measure to “act unilaterally or go around DA Krasner.” Local activists later pressured Shapiro into saying he would support a repeal of the bill. 

Correction: August 1, 2024, 2:04 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association as a union. The references have been removed.

The post Amid Veepstakes, Minnesota Cops Push Gov. Tim Walz to Back Off Police Violence Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

Yet despite its venture capital bounty and recent military contracts, XTEND has also been asking for charity.

“Join Us in Supporting Israel’s Defense,” read the text on the Xtend-Support-Israel.com website, directly above a large “DONATE” button. All donations would be “used for the immediate production & deployment of life saving systems for our IDF troops on the frontlines.” The site included a dazzling marketing montage of XTEND robots zooming across buildings, smashing through windows, and dropping what appears to be an explosive device from the air, “enabling soldiers to perform accurate maneuvers in complex combat scenarios.”

XTEND’s fundraising page — taken offline shortly after The Intercept raised questions about it — is one of several similar efforts soliciting charitable, tax-deductible donations to bolster Israeli national security. 

U.S. law governing charitable contributions gives wide leeway to nonprofits operating overseas, though questions linger about directing such donations to fund combat.

XTEND did not respond to a request for comment and questions about its Israel Defense Forces fundraising campaign. The Israeli nonprofit AlmaLinks, which was listed on the site as participating in the fundraiser, told The Intercept that upon learning of the campaign it asked XTEND to take it down. A PayPal page for the fundraiser told American donors that tax-free contributions could be sent through the U.S.-based donor-advised fund FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds. FJC disavowed the campaign and said the drone startup was being instructed to cease and desist use of its name. 

XTEND’s drones are flexible, affordable, and outfitted with powerful cameras, making them excellent surveillance tools that can stand in for human soldiers in dangerous situations. Certain models come with a claw, allowing them to drop any manner of item — or weapon — from high above. This functionality has proven transformative in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Even for Israel’s armed forces, among the best-equipped in the world, drones like XTEND’s offer the powerful advantage of an off-the-shelf, somewhat disposable miniature air force.

“Boots on the ground testimonials” included on the site leave little ambiguity about their use. “The best thing to have is drones,” says one uniformed Israeli soldier, his face blurred, in a video set before a house he states was recently cleared of terrorists. “Drones can go inside, do the search, clear the house, put even an explosive, instead of us going in.”

“We have killed dozens of vile terrorists, but we continue to constantly discover more terrorists who are hiding in buildings,” say soldiers in another testimonial video, who explain XTEND’s products are preferable because their radio uplink is not as easily jammed.

In interviews and marketing materials, XTEND tends to argue its drones are a life-saving reconnaissance technology that permit soldiers to hang back from danger while robots lead the charge. But the company is very much in the business of offense too. In December, XTEND told the Wall Street Journal that the IDF is using its robots to “drop grenades” in Gaza. “We were the first drones to enter Be’erik, Faraza, and deal directly (indoors, outdoors, and face to face) with these terrorists,” Shapira explained to the Israeli business publication Calcalist last year. “We learned so much from that.”

Israel’s war on Gaza has been integral to XTEND’s current success and its future, according to local business press reporting. Since the conflict erupted, the company has deepened its ties with the Israeli military. An article in Calcalist announcing the $40 million deal noted that, since the war’s start, “the company has shifted its entire focus in developing systems for the IDF. This new focus has led the company to a decision to upgrade its activity in the military sector.” In the May 10 press release announcing its latest venture capital round, Shapira — depicted in an attached photo dressed as a character from “The Matrix” — explained how the company’s new funds would help refine its drones’ software in part to better serve “Israel’s Ministry of Defense tier-1 units.”

So-called quadcopter drones similar to those manufactured by XTEND have been implicated in a litany of gruesome civilian deaths and injuries. A June 4 report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor described how the IDF has “ramped up” its use of small quadcopters to drop explosives and fire mounted rifles at Palestinians in Gaza.

One Palestinian who spoke to the organization recounted the killing of his cousin: “We were approached by a quadcopter as we went by a side street. I warned him to run and hide as soon as I saw it, but it is likely that his poor hearing prevented him from hearing my call. I told him to hide, as I was doing, when all of a sudden I heard an explosion. When I heard Ibrahim calling, I told him to stay [put] to the right until assistance arrived. I saw him being targeted by a quadcopter bomb.”

On the webpage soliciting donations for its drones, XTEND listed AlmaLinks, a nonprofit network headquartered in Tel Aviv that connects business leaders with a focus on Jewish and Israeli communities, as the organization that would process donations. 

“All donations will be used for the immediate production and deployment of life saving systems for our IDF troops on the frontlines,” the site read. “All donations are kindly processed through the ALMA LINKS non-profit organization. www.almalinks.org We kindly request that you fill out the information here and at the dedicated donation page for tracking purposes.”

Shapira, XTEND’s CEO, is listed on AlmaLink’s website as a member of its board of trustees. AlmaLinks told The Intercept it had no knowledge of XTEND’s fundraiser and that Shapira does not serve in a decision-making role.

“We were not aware of the XTEND website asking for funds in our name, and as soon as we became aware of it we asked them to take it down,” a spokesperson for AlmaLinks said. 

Shapira “is on a purely advisory board of trustees that includes many people and does not have authority to make decisions,” the spokesperson said.

The fiscal sponsor for AlmaLinks is FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds, a nonprofit donor-advised fund based in New York. Founded in 1995, FJC manages over $300 million in assets and has provided over $400 million in philanthropic grants around the world, according to its website. FJC accepts tax-deductible donations on behalf of AlmaLinks, which then passes the money onward to recipients such as XTEND. Because contributions to foreign nonprofits like AlmaLinks are not tax-deductible, a donation to the American fiscal sponsor FJC would allow donors to benefit from U.S. tax laws.

Potential American donors who came across the online fundraiser were directed to a PayPal page bearing a checkmark icon confirming FJC is the recipient of the funds, and noting any contributions would be earmarked for XTEND.

In response to an inquiry from The Intercept about its role in the fundraiser, FJC CEO Sam Marks disavowed the campaign. “FJC has no relationship with XTEND, and that company is not authorized to use FJC’s 501(c)(3) tax exempt status to fundraise for any campaign,” Marks explained in an emailed statement. “They are being instructed to cease and desist any fundraising campaign using FJC’s name.” 

Soon after this exchange, the PayPal page was taken down. Marks did not respond when asked if the PayPal page had been set up without FJC’s knowledge, when FJC became aware of the fundraising campaign, or how much money had been raised to date.

XTEND did not respond to questions about whether it organized the fundraiser without the advance knowledge of AlmaLinks and FJC, and about Shapira’s role on AlmaLinks’ board of trustees.

Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, questioned whether it was appropriate for a nonprofit to use charitable donations to support a war effort, particularly one that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.

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“I’m aware of reports of quadcopters being involved in crimes in Gaza. There is nothing charitable about that,” said Shamas, whose nonprofit legal advocacy group is working on a New York bill to restrict tax-deductible donations to illegal Israeli settlements. “I can’t see this fitting in the New York law definition of charitable purpose, not the IRS definition of charitable purpose.”

Another issue is whether those efforts are supplying equipment being used in violation of international law, Shamas added. “Setting aside the question of charitability all together, there are serious questions of complicity in war crimes here. Even if it weren’t a nonprofit, even if it were just a traditional company, there would be serious legal risks here.”

Legal experts have long warned that charitable contributions cannot be used to support combat, an issue that came up at the height of the war in Ukraine. Charities funding combat against Russia’s invasion faced less scrutiny because of widespread political support for Ukraine, attorney Daniel Kurtz told the Associated Press last year. “You can’t support war fighting, can’t support killing people, even if it’s killing the bad guys,” he said at the time. “It’s not consistent with the law of charity.”

Henry Dale, director of New York University law school’s National Center on Philanthropy and the Law, said that U.S. tax code — and an extreme lack of oversight by the Internal Revenue Service — affords a great deal of latitude to efforts like those of XTEND. Even though XTEND’s fundraising page made clear that the money was for drones, specifically its “Human Extension Platforms” that aid soldiers in combat, the fact that donated funds were advertised as being directed to FJC, whose PayPal site did not mention drones, likely legally insulates the campaign overall, Dale said.

Though the IRS has the ability to strip organizations of their tax-exempt status for engaging in efforts contrary to public policy, “the edges of that doctrine are completely unclear,” Dale said.

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Lawmakers and nonprofits experts have long criticized the network of U.S. nonprofits that funnel millions of tax-deductible dollars to settlements in the West Bank that the international community recognizes as illegal. Those concerns have come back with new urgency amid the surge of U.S. fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces during Israel’s war on Gaza.

Pending legislation in New York targets nonprofits that facilitate such donations by making it easier to sue the groups for civil penalties. Lawmakers expanded and reintroduced the “Not on Our Dime” bill in May to include charities in New York fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces amid Israel’s destruction in Gaza. The role of any nonprofit taking part in the XTEND fundraising operation is the kind of activity the legislation seeks to target, said Shamas of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of the campaign backing the bill. FJC’s work includes fundraising for a number of groups that responded to aid Israel after the October 7 attacks, including Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. As recently as 2021, the group has also directed contributions to the Jewish National Fund, which has long financed activity in Israeli settlements. 

New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who introduced the bill, said the measure would allow the state attorney general to fine groups funding the genocide, including FJC.

“The purpose of tax breaks is to encourage charitable activity: feeding the poor, clothing the needy, and funding the arts — not to support war crimes and genocide,” said Mamdani. “Funding Israeli war crimes is inconsistent with a charitable purpose.”

XTEND’s fundraiser is just one of many ongoing drone crowdfunding efforts pegged to the war, a review by The Intercept found.

The Israeli Resilience Association, which describes itself as “a group of experienced professionals, and officers from the IDF Special Forces, Secret Service (Shin Bet), and the special forces of the Israeli Police,” has to date raised over $287,000 to send small hobbyist drones into Gaza. Noting that the “current crisis in Israel has put every community throughout Judea and Samaria on high alert,” the One Israel Fund, meanwhile, has raised over $160,000 to furnish illegal settlements in the West Bank with surveillance drones “in cooperation with the regional and local security personnel.”

Even without the legislation, genocide is illegal under international law, Mamdani added. “Fundraising for IDF units carrying out what has been called a plausible genocide in federal and international courts should merit inquiry. Advocating to end tax deductions for these crimes is to call for the bare minimum.”

The post The Crowdfunding Campaign for Deadly Israeli Military Drones appeared first on The Intercept.

AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush. Its recent mailers, reviewed by The Intercept, show images of Bush with distorted features that make her forehead look bigger and elongate her features.

Bush condemned the ads as part of a trope of using racist caricatures to target candidates based on their ethnicity.

“It is shameful that, in 2024, our communities are still being targeted with such blatant racism.”

“It is shameful that, in 2024, our communities are still being targeted with such blatant racism from political campaigns, let alone in a Democratic primary,” Bush said in a statement to The Intercept. “The people of St. Louis deserve better than to see their first Black Congresswoman racistly distorted into a caricature — I shouldn’t have to ask my opponent to condemn his biggest funders for putting out an ad like this and to apologize to the people of this district.”

AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group, has been one of the single largest outside spenders in an election cycle that’s broken records for the most expensive House primaries in history. According to Sludge, AIPAC helped raise two-thirds of the campaign funding for Bush’s Democratic opponent, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. (Neither United Democracy Project nor Bell’s campaign responded to requests for comment.)

The photo of Bush used in the AIPAC mailers was taken from a Missouri Independent article. In the mailers, part of Bush’s forehead has been photoshopped and appears sloped. The photos are also color altered.

The Missouri Independent said AIPAC’s use of the photo violated its site rules.

“As a nonprofit news organization we do not allow campaigns or political groups to use our photography,” said Jason Hancock, the editor-in-chief of the Missouri Independent. “We would never give a PAC permission to use our photos, and doing so without our knowledge or permission violates our terms of use.”

Ads With Racist Tropes

The mailers are the latest in a long history of ads that have distorted candidates’ skin color and facial features in line with stereotypical racist tropes. Bush’s campaign said ads from her 2020 opponent, former Democratic Rep. Willian Lacy Clay, also darkened her skin. In 2022, a Democratic firm working for Bowman’s opponent ran ads that darkened Bowman’s skin.

Republican ads run during the 2020 Georgia Senate race darkened Raphael Warnock’s skin and enlarged Jon Ossoff’s nose.

With its attacks on Bush, the lobby group is looking to oust a second member of the progressive Squad. The group spent more than $17 million to unseat Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., last month.

Since toppling Bowman last month, AIPAC has shifted its focus toward the upcoming primary in St. Louis. It’s dropped $3 million on the race against Bush in less than a month.

AIPAC has long been known for its behind-the-scenes lobbying but expanded its electoral presence and started giving directly to candidates in 2021. The group launched two new political action committees that year, including a regular PAC and its super PAC, United Democracy Project. The new electoral investment has gone largely toward ousting progressive members of Congress.

AIPAC has grown to one of the single largest outside groups spending in primaries this cycle and flooded Democratic primaries with millions of dollars, drawn largely from Republicans, right-wing billionaires, and megadonors.

AIPAC’s infusion of cash into Bowman’s race made the election the most expensive House Democratic primary in history. And AIPAC isn’t just spending on ads — it’s paying for phone banking and get-out-the-vote calls as well.

Justice Democrats, a progressive group backing Bush, called on Bell’s campaign to denounce the ads.

“In Wesley Bell’s name, AIPAC is peddling racist caricatures to attack Missouri’s first Black Congresswoman in a disgusting new low even for them,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “Bell should immediately condemn these racist pieces of mail and apologize to the people of St. Louis for allowing his biggest financial backers to promote outright racism in this Democratic primary.”

The post AIPAC Used Distorted Photo of Cori Bush in $7 Million Negative Ad Blitz appeared first on The Intercept.

McDonald’s yesterday reported that its global sales declined for the first time since 2020, with its net profit declining 12 percent compared to the same period last year. Starbucks announced Tuesday that sales in North American stores dipped 2 percent, and sales in the rest of the world dipped 7 percent. It also reported that its total international profits dropped by 23 percent.

Although the companies point to currency fluctuation, slowdown within the Chinese market, and consumer reaction to rising menu prices to account for the change, the chief executives of both corporations cited the conflict in Gaza when discussing problems the businesses face.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — a Palestinian-led movement to oppose Israel’s occupation and apartheid in Palestine — celebrated the dip in McDonald’s earnings on their social media accounts, writing, “#BDS is working!” While McDonald’s is not a part of the group’s list of targeted economic or consumer boycotts, they have endorsed it as an organic, grassroots movement that started shortly after October 7, when the chain’s Israeli franchises supported the Israeli military in its incursion on Gaza.

“McDonald’s Israel provided free meals for Israel’s forces during #GazaGenocide against 2.3 million Palestinians, and the company with its dozens of branches has for decades fed apartheid Israel’s war chest,” the group said, using the hashtag #BoycottMcDonalds.

During a quarterly earnings call on Monday, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said “several markets … continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East.” The company had previously warned of low earnings in Middle Eastern countries and Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which have Muslim majorities. On the earnings call, Kempczinski also noted that sales in France were down, and attributed that decline to the country’s large Muslim population.

Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan also invoked the conflict in the company’s quarterly call on Tuesday, indirectly pointing to boycott efforts in the same regions as McDonald’s international trouble spots.

“Headwinds persist in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, parts of Europe driven by widely discussed misperceptions of our brand,” said Narasimhan. Earlier this year, the company reported a “significant impact on traffic and sales” in the Middle East and the U.S. markets, which it also attributed to “misperceptions” about its brand.

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Shortly after October 7, Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents more than 10,000 of the chain’s employees, expressed solidarity for Palestine on its X account in a since-deleted tweet. The union’s post read “Solidarity with Palestine!” and quote-tweeted an image of a bulldozer breaking through the fence encircling Gaza. Starbucks retaliated, suing the union for damaging its reputation and misleading consumers to think the company itself supports Palestine. News of the lawsuit went viral online, along with calls to stop buying from the chain.

Calls to boycott McDonald’s also began days after October 7, when the fast food giant’s Israeli franchisee announced on social media it had “donated and continues to donate tens of thousands of meals to IDF units, the police, hospitals, residents around the strip and all rescue forces,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. 

Kempczinski defended his company amid the McDonald’s boycott in a January LinkedIn post, blaming hits to stores internationally on “the war and associated misinformation.” Seemingly drawing distance between Israel and its other markets, he noted that McDonald’s international stores are owned locally, “including in Muslim countries.”

Residents and rights groups, namely in Muslim-majority nations such as Pakistan and Kuwait, started to boycott the chain, prompting the Pakistani franchisee to distance itself from the issue. In April, McDonald’s was forced to buy back its 225 restaurants in Israel after the boycott tanked sales in the Middle East, according to reports.

The post Boycotts Against Israel Are Hurting Starbucks and McDonald’s Sales Worldwide appeared first on The Intercept.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s book, titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” sparked a media frenzy last week because it features a foreword written by J.D. Vance. As interest in the book rose following Trump’s pick of Vance as his vice president, a digital version of the text vanished from a website where publishers share advance copies with book reviewers.

The Intercept has reviewed a proof of the book’s acknowledgments page. In it, Roberts thanks Heritage Foundation colleagues, including Roger Severino, who wrote a Project 2025 chapter urging further abortion restrictions, shouts out prominent conservative media personalities, and praises Vance by name.

“And to Sen. J.D. Vance, thanks for inspiring me and millions of Americans with your story, and now with your leadership,” Roberts writes. “I’m so grateful that you wrote the foreword.”

The acknowledgments page isn’t the only part of the book made public on Tuesday. The New Republic published Vance’s foreword, which quotes John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” character, compares American politics to weeding gardens, and praises the book for “articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.” Vance praises the Heritage Foundation for being “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

But the meat of what Vance endorsed in Roberts’s book — which one commentator called “the popular narrative version” of Project 2025 — remains under wraps.

It has been a rough few days for the conservative braintrust behind Project 2025, as organizations that helped draft the document have quietly backed away. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who served as Project 2025’s director, stepped down. The Trump campaign wasted no time in putting out a jubilantly sinister statement on X. 

“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” reads the statement. 

Roberts released a more upbeat statement praising Dans’s leadership and suggesting Project 2025 will “continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local.”

Roberts hasn’t commented on the status of his book, which vanished last week from NetGalley, a website publishers use to share advance copies with book reviewers. The Intercept requested a NetGalley copy on July 25; within hours, the request function for that title had been disabled on the website. The book no longer shows up in search results on that platform. 

Publishing giant HarperCollins and its Broadside Books imprint, which “specializes in conservative nonfiction,” did not respond to questions about the book’s status or why review copies were taken offline.

The book “identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save,” according to HarperCollins. Roberts’s list includes federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Education, both targets of Project 2025, plus an array of cultural institutions like the Ivy League and the Gates Foundation, “to name a few.” 

In recent weeks, the book’s title and cover were subdued to remove literal inflammatory language. The book jacket previously featured a matchstick and the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” according to archived pages on Amazon and the HarperCollins website. “Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions if we’re to preserve the American Way of life,” read a sentence from the book description which has been nixed.

At the same time, HarperCollins leaned into the controversy surrounding Project 2025. At some point, the Amazon page was updated to note that Roberts is the “Project 2025 head” and allude to his controversial comments about a “Second American Revolution.” 

HarperCollins did not respond to questions about when these changes were made and why. 

In the uncorrected proof of the book’s acknowledgments section reviewed by The Intercept, Roberts thanks “friends” like Tucker Carlson and Newt Gingrich for “reviewing the draft and for writing some excellent blurbs,” which are also on the current Amazon page. 

Roberts praises one of Trump’s former national security advisors, K.T. McFarland, who also wrote a blurb on the book’s Amazon page.

The acknowledgments thank Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, for writing a blurb, but hers has not been published on the site.

On Tuesday, Hemingway blasted the Trump campaign’s dig at Project 2025. “Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration,” she wrote on X. “Interesting.”

Along with Vance, Roberts expresses gratitude to several other conservative politicians. “A few elected officials were vital to this book,” Roberts writes in the acknowledgments, singling out two more by name: his “friends Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Mike Lee, with whom I’ve had long and esoteric discussions about conservatism.” 

Roberts and the Heritage Foundation did not immediately return requests for comment. 

The post Project 2025’s Mastermind Personally Thanked J.D. Vance in His New Book appeared first on The Intercept.

Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia group loosely allied with Hamas, has been in a low-level war with Israel since the conflict in Gaza began last October. Hezbollah, which is believed to have an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, has repeatedly emphasized that attacks will continue as long as the war persists.

Over the weekend, a rocket attack that the U.S. and Israel said originated in Lebanon killed at least 12 civilians in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights. The Israeli foreign minister said that the attack “crossed all red lines,” and said “the moment of all-out war against Hezbollah and Lebanon” is approaching. Hezbollah denied responsibility for the strike.

On Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken cautioned Israeli President Isaac Herzog about ramping up its war with Hezbollah in response on a call, according to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.

But the conflict has been escalating for weeks. Israel has increased airstrikes aimed at the group. Current and former Israeli officials have also spoken publicly about shifting their attention from Hamas to the more powerful Hezbollah.

After Israeli officials warned of the possibility of launching a war that would send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age,” the Biden administration intensified diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions and forestall a conflict that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said could have “terrible consequences for the Middle East.”

The low-level war has created a tinderbox that could explode into a regional conflict involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and, to an even greater extent than now, the United States.

Lebanon and Israel are both U.S. allies, and America has poured billions of dollars in military aid into Lebanon, trained tens of thousands of its troops, and operated a proxy commando unit run by U.S. Special Operations forces there for years.

After all that aid and billions of dollars in support, Hezbollah remains Lebanon’s dominant military force and a quasi-“state within a state” that wields significant influence in Lebanon’s government. Israel’s war on Gaza has only bolstered the group’s support, according to some metrics.

While Hezbollah’s popularity is centered in Lebanon’s south and east, the group has gained support among non-Shiite Lebanese across the country since the outbreak of the war in Gaza due to its resistance to Israel, according to a survey by the Arab Barometer.

The U.S. has also contributed to the group’s sway, says Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “U.S. support for the mass killing of Palestinians is so indefensible that it is actually strengthening groups like Hezbollah, who are able to capitalize on their firm but relatively restrained opposition to U.S.-Israeli actions,” he told The Intercept.

In Lebanon’s south, the conflict with Israel in the past year has left towns and villages deserted and destroyed. More than 1,900 casualties, including 466 deaths, have been reported and almost 100,000 residents have already been displaced, according to the United Nations.

Last month, Human Rights Watch released a report chronicling Israel’s widespread use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon. The use of the incendiary agent, which ignites when exposed to oxygen and can cause gruesome lifelong injuries or death, may be a violation of international law and is, according to the rights group, “putting civilians at grave risk and contributing to civilian displacement.”

But as grave as their suffering has been to this point, a wider war between Israel and Hezbollah would be “catastrophic” for the people of Lebanon, said Seth Binder of the Washington-based Middle East Democracy Center. “A war would only make things exponentially worse,” he told The Intercept. “For the region, it risks a further conflagration, likely at enormous cost to the people of the region and U.S. national security interests.”

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Lebanon has been in crisis since well before the Gaza war began, having been overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic; the largest refugee population per capita in the world; systemic corruption; and the 2020 explosion of a warehouse full of fertilizer at Beirut’s port that killed more than 200, wounded another 6,000, and demolished significant portions of the capital, causing billions of dollars in damage. Since then, Lebanon’s economy has collapsed, with its GDP shrinking from $55 billion in 2018 to $31.7 billion in 2020 — one of the steepest depressions in modern history. About 80 percent of the population is now estimated to be living in poverty.

The Senate Armed Services Committee recently summed up the situation in a report: “Lebanon was already assessed to be on the precipice of being a failed state prior to the [Gaza war], which is negatively impacting the stability of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and their capabilities, to counter and deter regional threats including violent terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah.”

Earlier this month, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to attack new areas in Israel if its military does not stop killing civilians in southern Lebanon. “The resistance missiles will target new Israeli settlements that were not targeted before,” he warned. “If Israeli tanks come to Lebanon, they will not only have a shortage in tanks but will never have any tanks left.”

The Biden administration has reportedly warned Israel against launching a “limited war” in Lebanon. “Restoring calm along the Blue Line remains a top priority for the United States and must be of the utmost importance for both Lebanon and Israel,” a State Department spokesperson, referring to the border between the countries, told The Intercept. “The conflict along the Blue Line between Israel and Hezbollah has gone on for long enough. It’s in everyone’s interest to resolve it quickly and diplomatically. We continue to believe a diplomatic resolution is both achievable and urgent.”

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At the same time, the U.S. has also assured Israeli leaders of continued military support, even in the event of a full-scale war with Hezbollah. Since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, the U.S. has called out Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing and pressed its ally to “implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm [and] humanitarian suffering.” Its support has nonetheless been almost unwavering despite the fact that the conflict has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, injured more than 89,000, displaced 90 percent of the population, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble.

“The nearly unconditional support that the United States has provided Israel over the past nine months has not only resulted in horrific tragedy in Gaza and extended the war in Gaza, but it has also allowed Israel to continue to escalate against Hezbollah, further risking a wider regional conflict,” Binder told The Intercept.

The U.S. has also cautioned Lebanese officials that it cannot prevent an Israeli invasion. This mirrors Biden administration policy in regard to the Gaza war where the U.S. has kept arms flowing to Israel despite the administration’s own assessment that U.S. weapons were likely used by Israel in violation of international humanitarian law.

“Biden’s efforts to avert a wider war in Lebanon are plagued by the same failures as his policy towards Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Israeli generals acknowledge that Israel cannot survive without U.S. diplomatic and military support, and as a result, the U.S. could force Israel to change policy at any time,” said Sperling of Just Foreign Policy. “Biden is reluctant to employ this leverage, however, because he doesn’t want to alienate the pro-Israel constituencies in the U.S. who have appreciated his steady support for the biggest mass killing of Palestinians in history.”

The U.S. has a long and checkered history in Lebanon, including a 1958 intervention by U.S. Marines to forestall an insurrection there. In 1983, during a civil war that lasted 15 years, bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut killed more than 300 people. The United States blames Hezbollah for both attacks and has long designated the group as a terrorist organization. (Israel invaded Lebanon, during this same war, in 1982 and only left in 2000.)

For years, the U.S. has poured funds into the Lebanese Armed Forces to provide a counterweight to Hezbollah. A recent State Department report called the United States “Lebanon’s paramount security partner.” Since 2006, America has provided more than $5.5 billion in foreign assistance to Lebanon, including $3 billion in military aid.

The U.S. government has facilitated almost $2 billion in Lebanese purchases through the Foreign Military Sales program, including light attack aircraft, helicopters, and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. separately provided Lebanon with 130 armored and tactical ground vehicles. From 2016 to 2021, the United States also authorized the export of more than $82 million in U.S. military equipment to Lebanon, including $12 million in “firearms and related articles.”

“U.S. security assistance to Lebanon has been quite extensive — one of the largest assistance programs in the world,” said Binder, noting that the U.S. has even rerouted tens of millions of dollars withheld from Egypt due to human rights concerns to Lebanon. “Despite the assistance, however the country remains incredibly unstable and its security forces remain unable to respond to Hezbollah’s domestic or regional operations.”

In addition to pumping military aid and arms into Lebanon, the U.S. also maintains its own small military presence in the country.

For years, the U.S. has waged a “secret war” in Lebanon against Sunni terror groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, according to retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former four-star commander who oversaw the effort; declassified documents; former special operators with knowledge of the program; and analysts who have investigated U.S. Code Title 10 § 127e — known in military parlance as “127-echo” — which allows Special Operations forces to use foreign military units as proxies.

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Through 127e, the U.S. arms, trains, and provides intelligence to foreign forces. But unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are sent on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims. The 127e program in Lebanon — code-named Lion Hunter — supported an elite unit known as the G2 Strike Force and was in operation as recently as 2019, according to a formerly secret Special Operations Command document obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act.

Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the greater Middle East, did not respond to questions about Lion Hunter and the number of U.S. troops who have been, and may still be, involved. But in a June “War Powers” report to Congress, President Joe Biden noted that approximately 75 United States military personnel are deployed to Lebanon to “enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.”

In a joint written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, Christopher P. Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, and SOCOM’s commander, Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, also noted that U.S. commandos are “postured to prepare for a wide-range of contingency operations in Israel and Lebanon.”

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in March, Fenton called out Iran as “a longtime malign actor [that] leverages its proxies … to sow instability in the Middle East,” specifically citing Hezbollah. But Special Operations Command refused to talk about America’s own proxy force in Lebanon. “Unfortunately, we cannot provide comment on … whether the U.S. has continued to work with the G2 Strike Force,” James Gregory, a SOCOM spokesperson, told The Intercept.

The U.S. has trained more than 32,000 Lebanese troops, including 6,000 schooled in the United States since 1970.

Requests for comment about U.S. military assistance sent to Lebanon’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were not returned. 

The post U.S. Poured Billions of Military Aid Into Lebanon. Now Israel Threatens to Invade. appeared first on The Intercept.

The plan — which comes after a string of terms in which the court’s conservative supermajority preached judicial restraint while gutting landmark precedents — is entirely unattainable in the short term. And it’s thin on details. Among the open questions is whether some of the proposed reforms could withstand efforts by the Supreme Court itself to strike them down.

“We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power and restore faith in the Supreme Court,” Biden said in a speech Monday afternoon in Austin, where he rehashed his proposals without fleshing out the logistics.

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Yet the move signals a key shift in the political discourse: Once the stuff of progressive pipe dreams, now even staunch centrists like Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee who quickly co-signed the president’s proposals, want to address the court’s outsized power.

Though Biden stopped short of proposing to expand the court to even out its ideological imbalance, which a slight majority of Americans have endorsed in recent polling, the announcement marks a course change for the president. Biden, an institutionalist who defended the filibuster until the Dobbs decision in 2022, has finally started playing checks-and-balances chicken with a judiciary that continues to consolidate its own authority while pretending to be above the political fray.

As previewed in an op-ed for the Washington Post, Biden’s plan has three basic proposals. First is to override the court’s recent decision about far-reaching presidential immunity by amending the Constitution itself. Although fanciful given the difficulty of the constitutional amendment process, this is also Biden’s most concrete proposal. Unlike his other proposals, this one includes a specific mechanism of binding the court to 21st-century realities about presidential power, instead of cherrypicking from the musings of Alexander Hamilton and his fellow founders.

So far, Biden hasn’t proposed how he might accomplish his other two proposals: an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, and an enforceable ethics code. Both provisions implicate Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been on the country’s highest bench since 1991 and who refused to recuse from cases stemming from the January 6 insurrection this term despite his wife’s deep involvement in Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts to reverse his loss in the 2020 election.

There are serious debates about whether these two measures would require constitutional amendments or if Congress has the authority to enact them in some fashion through legislation. The cross-ideological commission Biden appointed in 2021 — before the Supreme Court tossed Roe v. Wade and other bedrock doctrines — produced almost 300 pages of collective, heavily footnoted shrugs on such questions.

Many Democrats are eager to at least try the legislation route, even if court reform bills will just wind up before the Supreme Court upon inevitable challenge.

“It’s time for Congress to take significant action on Supreme Court ethics and term limits reform,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., wrote on X following Biden’s proposal. “I’ve got legislation to get it done.”

Whitehouse’s bill, which would create a process to disqualify justices from particular cases and require the Supreme Court to draft its own ethics code, among other provisions, has dozens of co-sponsors and passed favorably out of the Judiciary Committee but is unlikely to pass the full Senate.

Setting aside, again, the moonshot logistics and the unresolved particulars, Biden’s announcement is significant for its frank, if belated, diagnosis: There aren’t meaningful checks on the Supreme Court.  

The post Now a Lame Duck, Biden Finally Floats Supreme Court Reforms appeared first on The Intercept.

This story was originally published by Invisible Institute, IPM Newsroom, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop

Sean Grayson, the former Sangamon County, Illinois, sheriff’s deputy now facing murder charges in the death of Sonya Massey, left a previous agency following allegations of inappropriate conduct with a female detainee. Grayson was also accused of retaliating against the detainee’s boyfriend after she filed a complaint.

Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop obtained new records from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, where Grayson worked for 11 months prior to Sangamon County, that show department officials concluded Grayson ignored internal policies during a high-speed chase, fielded at least two formal complaints about his behavior, and told him directly that they had considered firing him.

These records also include audio recordings from a November 2022 interview between Grayson and Logan County’s chief deputy which suggest the department — as well as other police departments that had employed him — were previously aware of issues with his performance and integrity as an officer.

Grayson’s relatively short law enforcement career, during which he moved between six Central Illinois police departments in just four years, has come under scrutiny in the weeks since he shot and killed Sonya Massey on July 6, 2024. Body-camera footage of the incident shows that Grayson shot at Massey three times after entering her home and telling her to drop a pot of boiling water. He has since pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct.

Daniel Fultz, Grayson’s defense attorney, declined to comment about the allegations contained within Grayson’s file from his time at Logan County, the mostly rural county of about 28,000 people between Springfield and Peoria.

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Logan County Sheriff Mark Landers said Grayson was not under investigation when he left the department but declined to comment further. Grayson resigned from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office to take a position with the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. He remained there until he was fired after the killing of Sonya Massey in July 2024.

An undated report announcing Grayson’s resignation from Logan County reads that he left the sheriff’s office “in good standing.”

Jeff Wilhite, the spokesperson for the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, wrote that the sheriff’s office was “not provided any such information from any of Grayson’s former employers, nor from any crediting agency.”

“We cannot comment on whether the information is accurate, nor why it was not shared by another agency,” Wilhite wrote in a statement.

Dropped Charges

By the time he applied to be a deputy at the Logan County Sheriff’s Office in March 2022, Grayson had four different policing jobs across Central Illinois: three part-time gigs and one full-time post. “My communication, people-centric nature, and compassion have afforded me excellent critical thinking skills,” Grayson wrote in his application.

But when Logan County officials called his current employer, the Auburn Police Department, they received mixed reviews. Auburn Police Chief Dave Campbell said that, while Grayson was an eager officer who showed up for his shifts early and had never been disciplined, he struggled with report writing and had raised concerns that he was “too aggressive.”

“Very aggressive with getting drugs,” the interviewer wrote in their notes. “He’s a bragger.”

The Auburn Police Department declined to answer any questions about Grayson’s previous employment or evaluations.

Despite this official background, he was hired full-time at the agency — the largest department he had worked for thus far. In his own interview, Grayson said he hoped to have a long law enforcement career in Logan County. “Would like to retire here,” officials noted of his aspirations.

But it quickly became apparent that he may not have been the best fit for the agency.

The first sign of trouble in Logan County came just months after his hiring. According to department records, while on patrol around 1:41 a.m. on September 22, 2022, Grayson spotted a woman in a parked truck, who seemingly crouched down in the driver’s seat in an attempt to avoid being seen by him.

When the woman drove away, Grayson followed her and eventually attempted to pull her over for allegedly rolling through a stop sign — prompting Grayson to initiate a high-speed chase during which he struck a deer. In reviewing the incident, department officials found that, in a number of instances, the details of Grayson’s written report did not match the dash camera footage from his vehicle and that he had violated a number of policies during the chase.

In the interview, Grayson appears to admit to initiating the traffic pursuit, which reached speeds of 110 miles per hour, for potentially illegal reasons, claiming that the woman who he attempted to pull over looked suspicious. His supervisors ultimately recommended he receive training for “high-stress decision making.”

In a lengthy interview about the chase in November 2022, Logan County Chief Deputy Nathan Miller and another department supervisor made clear that Grayson had not been operating up to their expectations and that they were aware of issues with arrests he had made while at his previous departments — issues that pointed to questions about Grayson’s accuracy and honesty in writing reports.

“I know that you had a lot of cases presented in other jurisdictions, correct?” Miller asked Grayson in the interrogation.

“So, all my cases in Auburn were dropped after I left,” Grayson said.

“But even prior to that,” Miller pushed. “There was some agitation because cases were not prosecuted.”

“Yes, there was two —”

“Sean, I’m going to have a hard, straight-up conversation with you right now,” Miller said. “I have a strong feeling I know why they were dropped. … I don’t want you to take offense to this: They dropped your cases because of what I’m looking at right here.”

As the interview continued, Miller brought up concerns with Grayson’s professionalism and honesty, and revisited the September chase.

“What was the stop for?” Miller asked.

“Well, initially it was just for rolling the stop sign,” Grayson said. “It was a simple little traffic thing. My initial, what I was gonna stop ’em for, was the behavior in the vehicle, was what originally caught my attention. I just needed to wait for them to start the vehicle.”

“You were gonna stop them for just their behavior in the vehicle?” Miller asked.

“No, I mean, I was gonna wait for a traffic violation, but in my mind, that was the whole reason why I was gonna see what they were doing, was the reaction of the female in the truck,” Grayson said.

According to Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who directs the school’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, this was a “classic pretext stop” — one without any other reason to exist other than to pull the person over.

“Seeing someone look at you and then slouch doesn’t create reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person has committed a crime, so there’s not a legal or lawful basis to stop. He does admit his plan was, ‘I’m going to follow and then stop her as soon as I can find any reason to do so,’” Futterman said. “It’s the classic, there will be some traffic violation I can come up with that will provide a basis to stop after the fact.”

After asking Grayson whether he had checked his report about the chase for accuracy, Miller went over the locations in Google Maps, showing the officer that he had in fact been on a different street during the incident than he had written in his report — and that it would have been impossible for him to have seen the woman in the truck based on where he had written they were both sitting.

“If I allowed this report to go over, and you pushed wanting to get a warrant and you get the warrant,” Miller said, “just me asking you those questions, you got a report writing violation for policy. You got an accuracy violation for policy. You got a standard of conduct violation for policy, and we’re 48 seconds into this. If I allowed this report to go over, an attorney’s going to ask you exactly what I just asked you. Do you trust in the fact that you just Giglio’d yourself?”

Miller was referring to a U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over evidence that could show a pattern of dishonesty by law enforcement officers involved in a criminal case to defense attorneys.

“We have never had a deputy Giglio’d,” Miller said. “We have never had a problem with our state’s attorney on integrity.”

Miller referred to a previous conversation the two had, in which he ordered Grayson to review the video from the case and make sure his report was accurate, something Grayson said he didn’t know had been possible. During that conversation, Miller said, “I even made the comment that your memory is failing you. Others will say that you have no integrity and you’re lying to get to that traffic stop. I have told you that I have zero tolerance for stretching the law.

“When you have officers that stretch the law, they will get caught. They will get prosecuted, and they will handcuff the rest of law enforcement in this state, this nation, behind the back.”

Miller went on to tell Grayson that he was considering terminating him.

“This is an agency that represents the Constitution and policies. Forget the other policies, it’s the Constitution. Lawful stops. Integrity. I’m getting goosebumps. Everybody likes you. I gotta be able to trust you,” Miller said.

He then asks directly: “Was this a purposefully-done lie?”

“No,” Grayson responded.

Even with this extended line of questioning, Miller’s final report never accuses Grayson of dishonesty nor recommends anything beyond training. Instead, he writes, “Deputy Grayson appeared to be honest during his interview and definitely acknowledged his inability to recall from memory alone.”

Miller only recommended additional training, including classes for “high-stress decision making” and training on understanding the department’s own policies.

“Deputy Grayson acknowledged he lacks experience,” Miller wrote in his report.

Reached by phone, Logan County State’s Attorney Bradley Hauge said that his office had not received any notification of potential credibility issues with Grayson and refused to answer additional questions. A representative with the Logan County public defender’s office refused to comment. The Sangamon County state’s attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, and the public defender’s office hasn’t returned multiple requests for comment.

Allegations of Harassment

But traffic stops and report writing — and his related credibility questions — weren’t the only issues Logan County Sheriff’s Office supervisors fielded about Grayson’s conduct as an officer. In December 2022, just a few weeks after the chase, a woman whom Grayson had arrested on drug possession charges filed a complaint with the Logan County Sheriff’s Office.

The woman alleged that, as she was being processed at the jail that October, she told deputies that she had inserted drugs inside herself. In response, she claimed, Grayson instructed her to remove them in front of him and another male deputy. “I went to do as he instructed me to do feeling very afraid and forced to do such action,” she wrote. She alleged that a female deputy stopped her and “informed Officer Grayson that I was not to do that in front of them because they are male officers.”

The woman was then brought to Lincoln Memorial Hospital to have the drugs removed. While she was lying on a hospital bed in a gown, she alleges that Grayson swept open the curtains around the bed, leaving her “completely exposed” to him and two other male officers. She wrote that the doctor “immediately shut the curtain and told the officers not to come in again while I was exposed.”

“I felt very violated on both occasions and was unsure how to handle this matter until now,” she wrote in her complaint to the department, later adding: “Officer Grayson was out of line and used his title to act inappropriately with me.”

A Memorial Health System spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment.

A couple weeks later, just after the new year, a man identifying himself as the woman’s fiancé, also a detainee at the Logan County Jail, filed a complaint accusing Grayson of “abusing his power and harassing me” in retaliation for his fiancée’s complaint.

During the conversation, the man alleged that Grayson asked him if he was aware that his fiancée had been bailed out of jail by another man and was now living with him. “Well I thought you guys were getting married,” Grayson allegedly told the man, continuing: “That’s pretty fucked up don’t ya think?” In response reports, Grayson wrote a narrative confirming that he did ask the woman to remove the drugs herself, but denying by implication that he had done anything improper, and argued that, upon entering her hospital room, he observed her on the bed with the curtains already drawn. He entirely denied harassing the man, saying that he had only asked him some basic questions through the jail cell door in the presence of the Logan County jailor.

Chief Deputy Miller ruled the woman’s complaint “unfounded,” writing that Grayson was “trained on best practice” in a note dated January 24, 2023. The man’s grievance form simply reads that it was referred to Miller on January 10, but does not show a resolution. The sheriff’s office did not provide any report showing Miller’s investigative steps in either case.

Neither the man nor the woman who filed complaints against Grayson could be reached for comment. Despite the fact that the sheriff’s office released their names, they are not being published here as the identities of complainants of police misconduct are not public under Illinois public records law.

Army Discharge for Serious Misconduct

Previous reporting from Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop revealed Grayson was also hired at six Central Illinois police departments, including the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, despite a discharge for serious misconduct while stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas as a soldier in the U.S. Army.

Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell has said that the department understood this misconduct to be a reference to Grayson’s previous arrests in 2016 and 2015 for driving while intoxicated, which records show the officer also disclosed to Logan County at the time of his hire. Anthony Ghiotto, a former Air Force prosecutor, said it was unlikely that a misdemeanor-level DUI would result in such a discharge.

In an email to the Logan sheriff sent two weeks after he was hired, Grayson explained that his first DUI came in 2015 when he was 21 years old and on leave from the military following his grandfather’s death. The second one, he wrote, occurred the following year after he was pulled over while driving himself and a friend home from the bar.

“I was young and made very poor decisions,” Grayson wrote. “I have since matured and have changed my life around. I have been a police officer for almost 2 years now.”

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Grayson’s employment by six police departments in just four years has connected the killing of Massey to the national issue of “wandering officers”: those who commit misconduct at one department and are fired or forced out, only to find employment at another.

Grayson’s official record at the state and department level shows that he wasn’t terminated from any department, and was let go by only one, Kincaid, for refusing to move within a 10-mile radius of the city. However, experts say that the official record could obscure past misconduct, as in Logan County.

Until 2021, Illinois had no comprehensive system to prevent these officers from simply being rehired unless they were criminally convicted of a felony or a small handful of misdemeanors. That year, reforms were put into place to expand the state’s power to strip officers of their certifications, and better track officers who left departments after being terminated or while under investigation.

However, according to a May 2024 report by the Chicago law and policy nonprofit Impact for Equity, progress on the new decertification system has “stalled.” The state Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board has yet to use its new powers, which went into effect in January 2022, despite receiving hundreds of complaints from departments and residents.

In addition, the tool for tracking officers who leave departments after being terminated or under investigation, called the Professional Conduct Database, was made secret under the reforms enacted in 2021. Before, the state training board would release copies of the list, which was inconsistently used, to the public in addition to other law enforcement agencies. Now, even though nearly all of the underlying misconduct records are public in Illinois, the public can’t access them from the central location where they’re held.

A request for submissions made to the Professional Conduct Database by the Logan County Sheriff’s Office is pending. But the decertification system and the Professional Conduct Database are both still heavily reliant on departments policing their own and accurately reporting information about misconduct up to the state.

To civil rights attorney Amanda Yarusso, the Logan County Sheriff’s Office’s decision to only recommend training for Grayson after supervisors clearly indicated they thought he had lied on an official report, and had a history of doing so, serves to protect not only Grayson but also the reputation of the Logan County Sheriff’s Office.

“If someone wants to dig deeper into the paper trail, they’re not going to realize the seriousness of the problem,” she said. “That’s how we get to this point of having officers carrying weapons who are a complete danger to people of color and the sort of people who officers are always targeting.”

If the Logan County Sheriff’s Office failed to report the serious questions about Grayson’s credibility to the state and his next hiring agency, that would be a violation of the reforms passed in 2021, said Amy Thompson, a staff counsel at Impact for Equity.

But even though the reforms that were put into place should have made an impact on Grayson’s career, she said, the accountability systems “can always be strengthened,” she said. The decertification system has yet to result in any officers who were not convicted of a crime being stripped of their police powers, and the restrictions about what types of cases should be reported to the Professional Conduct Database could mean that none of the allegations about Grayson were reported to the state — and that absence could be fully in accordance with the rules.

The state board exists to ensure the Illinoisans who live in jurisdictions without robust local law enforcement oversight still receive the same level of accountability. “People with smaller agencies deserve the same accountability as people who live in areas with large agencies,” she said. “If there’s an agency not responding to allegations of misconduct, that’s a problem.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an independent nonprofit newsroom affiliated with American University in Washington, D.C. Farrah Anderson is an Investigative Reporting Fellow with Invisible Institute and an intern with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Sam Stecklow is a journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Additional reporting by Illinois Times Senior Staff Writer Dean Olsen.

The post Past Employers Questioned Integrity and Conduct of Deputy Who Killed Sonya Massey appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly two weeks after the July 13 shooting, the public remains in the dark about some basic points along the timeline, including when rally attendees alerted law enforcement to the gunman climbing onto a nearby roof and how federal, state, and local officers coordinated once he opened fire. Recordings of calls to emergency services could help shed light on what happened.

Soon after the shooting, The Intercept submitted a request to Butler County for copies of recorded 911 calls under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law. On Monday, the county denied that request, citing part of the statute that generally exempts 911 recordings from disclosure. 

“It is the policy of Butler County only to release 911 audio under court order or by subpoena,” a county public records clerk wrote in an email. “Therefore, the request is denied.” 

A crucial provision in state law, however, gives Butler County the ability to release these recordings. Pennsylvania agencies and courts can release 911 recordings if they determine that “the public interest in disclosure outweighs the interest in nondisclosure.” 

As The Intercept wrote to the county, if the attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential candidate does not qualify as an overwhelming public interest, it’s not clear what ever could. 

The county did not respond to The Intercept’s requests to release the 911 recordings under this carveout. On Friday, The Intercept filed an appeal to the state Office of Open Records.

Other press outlets trying to get 911 recordings from the Trump rally have also gotten the runaround, according to Melissa Bevan Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. 

“The carveout is there for situations where the public interest in the recordings is high, a situation like this,” Melewsky told The Intercept.

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“Obviously there is huge public interest — legitimate, compelling public interest — in hearing these recordings,” said attorney Joy Ramsingh, who previously adjudicated Office of Open Records appeals. “Potential embarrassment to the agency is not supposed to be part of the test.”

Ramsingh said Butler County’s refusal to address the public’s interest in these recordings was “impermissible.”

“At a minimum, they need to be articulating to the public why they won’t release them,” Ramsingh said. “My gut tells me it has something to do with potential embarrassment to the agency.” 

The post Why Won’t Authorities Release 911 Recordings From Trump Rally Shooting? appeared first on The Intercept.

On June 28, 2009, democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a military coup. In response to Zelaya’s push for a poll to gauge public interest in constitutional changes, the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest him. He was then sent to Costa Rica in his pajamas.

The coup led to nearly 13 years of right-wing rule, marked by collusion with drug trafficking organizations, widespread privatization, violence, repression, and a significant migrant exodus. During this period, the Honduran left organized a strong resistance movement. In 2022, Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife and a leader of the anti-coup resistance, was elected president, signaling a major shift in the country’s history.

In this episode of Deconstructed, Zelaya sits down for an exclusive interview with journalist José Olivares to discuss the 15th anniversary of the coup, the ensuing resistance movement, the right-wing and drug trafficking organizations’ control, and the U.S. government’s role and influence. Host Ryan Grim and Olivares delve into Zelaya’s interview, recent developments in Honduran history, and present the full Spanish-language interview with Zelaya.

Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site News. This program was brought to you by a grant from The Intercept.

Transcript

Ryan Grim: Welcome back to Deconstructed.

I’m Ryan Grim and, as I mentioned in the last two podcast episodes, Jeremy Scahill and I have left The Intercept, and have launched a new independent news organization with some support from The Intercept called dropsitenews.com.

I’m joined today by former Deconstructed producer José Olivares, who is now working with us over at Drop Site News. He’s going to be talking to me today about a fascinating interview that he was able to land down in Honduras with the former Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya — Who, as some of you may recall, was ousted In a 2009 military coup, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time immediately recognizing the new military government, or at least recognizing the pathway to keep that military government in power until there were new elections put into place. It is often referred to — and, I think, accurately — as a U.S.-backed coup, though it is still quite murky how much involvement the U.S. itself directly had, and whether it was purely driven by the right-wing in Honduras, which then took power for the next 12 years.

Since then, Zelaya’s wife Xiomara Castro has come back to power on a democratic socialist platform, bringing Zelaya kind of back into the presidential fold. The left in Honduras is still surging and is likely to maintain the presidency in the next election.

Recently in Honduras there was a celebration of the reconquest of power by the left in Honduras 15 years after the coup; it was a ceremony to mark the 15th anniversary of that coup. José Olivares was in Honduras for it, and there he was able to interview former president Zelaya.

So, José, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this interview, and we’re going to play a whole bunch of clips from it.

José Olivares: Awesome, thanks for having me.

RG: So, José, tell us a little bit about this celebration. Why was it held, and who was there?

JO: Right. So, the celebration was held in Tegucigalpa, which is the capital of Honduras, and it was commemorating the 15-year anniversary of the 2009 coup. There were government officials from Cuba, from Venezuela, from Mexico, as well as social activists, trade union activists, trade union leaders, activist leaders from around Latin America, as well from Argentina to Mexico, all over Honduras. And it was organized by the party, by Libre, it was a select social event, but the event really was commemorating the 15-year anniversary of the coup — and not just the anniversary of the coup, but also the years of struggle that the Honduran people were engaged in, in response to the right-wing kind of reaction that came out of the 2009 coup.

I think what’s important to recognize here is that during these 13 years that the right wing was in power, they were fully supported by the U.S. government. There was a lot of repression, a lot of reaction that came from the government. There were killings of activists and land defenders throughout the country. Also, a lot of right-wing neoliberal policies that were put in place. Essentially, the country was sold off; I think, about a year after the coup happened, they even had an event that essentially was saying, hey, all these international companies, come on in, Honduras is for sale. [It] really ended up putting a lot of secretive policies in place, a lot of right-wing privatization policies in place, in tandem with the reaction, with the repression against the activists and the resistance movement.

So, this event, this 15-year anniversary was a really, really fascinating event. I mean, you could really feel the energy when you were walking through the halls of the hotels where the events were held, and even at the event itself, which was commemorated in the space where the resistance movement was organized — you know, the same day that President Zelaya was taken to Costa Rica by the Honduran military. That space, that event, the energy was electric. There were people chanting and yelling, chanting and saying, “they’re never going to return, these coup-plotters, these right-wing coup-plotters, they’re never going to return,” and really just kind of recognizing the sacrifices that the Honduran left was engaged in during these 13 years of struggle before Xiomara Castro was elected in 2021.

RG: Before we get into some more of the interview, he talks to you about the way that narcotraffickers effectively took over significant parts of the state. And so, from an American perspective, I see at least two obvious ways that what the U.S. has been doing to support the kind of right-wing elements of Honduras have directly blown back to the United States. One of them is, of course, with the rise of narcotrafficking there, and then the other is the complete collapse of the Honduran economy, which resulted in surges of migrants streaming north, from Honduras through Mexico, then down to the southern border, and further then kind of polarizing and radicalizing our own politics around immigration.

What was the overall posture that the people there had towards either Democrats, or Republicans, or the U S. government? Do they feel like they have anybody that they can potentially work with? Or do they see themselves in a straight up adversarial situation with the U.S. administration, no matter who’s in power?

JO: I think, publicly, the Libre party very much express that they’re willing to work with the U.S. government. And still, to this day, there still are some links that were established from these 13 years of the right-wing governments with the U.S. government that still continue to this day.

You know, Xiomara Castro has only been in power for two years now, and a lot of what members of Libra say, they say, a lot of these right-wing policies, right-wing links, we’re not able to get rid of them as easily, especially [with] 13 years of right-wing policies and this relationship with the U.S. government. We’re not able to do away with them, just in two years.

And the relationship with the U.S. really does go back for decades, over a century. In the late 1800s, the U.S. government started getting involved in mining, and then, in the 20th century, the U.S. government was getting involved in banana farming and agriculture, and that’s where the term “Banana Republic” comes from, right? That’s what Honduras was called, because, essentially, Honduras was the staging ground, the U.S. government’s main location for their influence in Central America.

After World War II, when the U.S. government is really railing against the threat of communism spreading throughout Latin America, Honduras was the main place, the main location where right-wing paramilitaries were trained, where right wing armies were trained, in order to combat these revolutionary movements, or to fight alongside in these civil wars, to try to root out any sort of leftist opposition that was spreading in Central America.

Honduras was so much of a place where the U.S. government could really just go in and rely on it. Some government officials back in the day even called it “U.S.S. Honduras,” right? It was essentially what they called the country.

So, there’s a long history of the U.S. government being involved in Honduras’ internal affairs. Even though Honduras never really had a revolutionary movement or a civil war, in the 80s there was a dirty war. There was a lot of repression, a lot of funding from the U.S. government, and a lot of repression against left-wing activists, trade unionists, etc., that were either disappeared or killed by the armed forces that were trained by the U.S. government.

So, now we’re looking at the 21st century and, in an interview, you’ll hear Zelaya essentially say, the Democrats and the Republicans, they’re essentially both the same, right? They both serve the same imperialist interests for the transactional companies, just looking out for their own interests. And so, to us, it doesn’t really matter who is in office, whether it’s a Republican president or a Democratic president. Essentially, they both are looking out for U.S. corporate interests and transnational company interests, so they’re going to do whatever they want in order to maintain that power and maintain that hold.

He makes an appeal to the working class in the U.S., essentially, saying, it’s up to you. It’s up to the working class in the U.S. to really put up a struggle and put up a fight against these pro-capitalist, pro-corporates politicians.

RG: I noticed he did say that the one exception to that would be, he’d actually be happy if Bernie Sanders or Noam Chomsky were elected president of the United States. Not much risk of that happening anytime soon, so I think his answer probably stands.

But there’s also an interesting phenomenon that Central and South America have a significant Palestinian population. And so, you asked Manuel Zelaya what the progressive Honduran government’s posture toward the ongoing slaughter in Gaza was, and what did you make of his answer?

And what we’re going to do here, by the way, because the interview was conducted in Spanish, we will post a full English language translation of the interview over at The Intercept, and also over at Drop Site. We’ll go through the questions and answers here. You can highlight some of the most interesting parts of at the end. For listeners who do speak Spanish, we’ll play the entire thing so you can hear Zelaya. It’s a rare interview, and I think it’s a fascinating one, but if you want the English language version, you can pop over to either one of those websites to get it.

So, what did he have to say about the war in Gaza?

JO: I can read some excerpts from his answer. When I asked him about the his perspectives on Palestine, essentially, he condemned the genocide, and he said, “We consider, and Xiomara,” who is his wife, and the current president of Honduras herself, “And Xiomara herself has said that, in international forums, that this is a truly unprecedented fact that in the 21st century, it is incredible that, in the eyes of the world, without respecting international law, by violating all treaties and all concepts about peace and coexistence between nations, and about respecting the United Nations’ resolutions, Israel carries out a ground invasion with tanks, with bombs, with the effects of violence on the civilian population of Palestine. Because when an army fights an army, that is a war. But this is not a war, this is a genocide, because of the extreme brutal response from Israel that is exceeding all limits, even those of the laws of war.”

And then he goes on and continues, and says, “The first condemnation that the Xiomara Castro government made was against the bombing that affected Israel, which caused deaths within Israel. People were killed within Israel.” He’s talking, of course, about the October 7 attacks. That was condemned. That was the government’s first action. “But then the terrible response from Israel is one that totally exceeds any limits and has the world outraged. Do you know who has lost a lot of prestige? The United Nations Security Council. I mean, you see the Security Council of the United Nations, it’s remained simply a rhetorical representation of the interests of the powerful. They’ve not been able to stop this aggression, they’ve not been able to achieve a permanent ceasefire. They have not been able to recognize the two states — the Palestinian and Israeli states — which was one of our main positions.”

And then he goes on to say, “To solve this problem, because the problem must be solved, we cannot live under the crushing boot of fascism which, in this case, is being imposed on the Palestinian people.”

RG: And so, how big a topic was Palestine at the conference?

JO: It was quite big. Most government officials who got up and gave speeches were speaking about it, were denouncing the genocide. There were people walking around wearing keffiyehs. And then, if you exited, and went around to the downtown area and kind of walked around the town a little bit — which we were able to kind of see a little bit — you did see graffiti and spray-painting along the walls, essentially calling for a ceasefire, calling for Israel to stop the genocide.

During this whole process, because of the political context that a lot of Latin America finds itself in, some of the more left-wing officials that were there were also pointing the finger at the U.S. government, at the Biden administration, for arming Israel and for perpetuating the genocide.

So, even though it wasn’t the central question there, obviously it was very much present there during a lot of these conversations and a lot of speeches that were being given at this event.

RG: You mentioned at the top that he said that, in general, Honduran government doesn’t see much difference between Republicans, Democrats. But you asked him about the upcoming election and politics in the United States, and I thought his answer was interesting. It’s interesting to hear how a kind of leftist leader in Central America views our two-party system. Do you mind reading a little bit of that?

JO: Of course. So, he says, “We have no preference in these elections between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. We believe that, in the end, they act the same. They act in the interest of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the interest of a global elite that, through capitalism, has already taken over all the assets of wealth: the rivers, the seas, the forests, oil. The world elite manages it all through their speculative financial system. The planet’s main resources of raw economic goods are those that influence the U.S. government.

“So, in the end, you can vote for a democratic president. We would have preferred — we would have wanted Bernie Sanders to be president, for example, or Noam Chomsky to be president, for example — but the people in the U.S., they organize their own parties, and the parties choose their candidates. So, that’s important to point out.

“And we would like the North American people first to make clear that the U.S. government should not be an aggressor empire against other societies, regardless of who takes office. The North American people should make clear that the U.S. should not have intelligence agencies planning coups or interfere in other countries, and that should be clear. That we must at least respect — and listen carefully — the planet, so that we all have air, to ensure that climate change does not continue to be as aggressive as it is now.”

And then he goes on to say, “What people want is to eat, what people want is to be clothed, to quench their thirst, to have a roof over their heads, and shelter, and warmth. What kind of a crime is that for human beings? And to think that the great powers, once they solve their problems, they forget about the suffering in Africa, in Latin America, and in many countries in Asia, as well.”

Then he goes on to say, “So, we must demand humanity in the face of the world order. And the United States is co-responsible for the current world order. Therefore, we must call on them, the American people, to reflect on that.”

RG: Yeah. So, you can see in that answer, I think, both why the Honduran people elected him president and, also, why he was couped as president. And you asked him about that coup 15 years ago, and he gave a rather, I thought, striking answer that still resonates quite deeply with him.

Why did he get couped out of office? And what had he been able to accomplish before that happened?

JO: So, Zelaya is a really fascinating character in Honduran history, he’s a bit of a contradictory character as well. When he was elected in 2005 — he entered office in 2006 — but he kind of came in and he would campaign on this almost center-right campaign, a very liberal politician. But, once he was in office, he began shifting to the left.

Now, he wasn’t calling for the nationalization of industries or anything like that, but he did raise the minimum wage, he did implement some modest land reform. Extreme poverty, he did kind of reduce a little bit. But what really upset the right-wing in Honduras and the U.S. government was that he joined ALBA, which is the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America, which is a trade and intergovernmental organization that was organized and founded by Cuba and by Venezuela. So, the fact that he was growing closer to Cuba and Venezuela and that he was putting forward some modest reforms really started shaking up the political situation in Honduras.

In 2009, we had elections in Honduras — or elections were slated to take place — and in the Honduran constitution, which was written in 1982; again, going back to 1982, this constitution was written partly with the help of the U.S. government. It is a pretty right-wing, pro-military constitution that was written amid this context of military disappearances, killing left-wing activists, etc.

In the lead up to the 2009 elections —presidents were only, at the time, allowed to run, to be in office for one term — the 2009 elections, Zelaya started considering and started listening to calls for establishing a constituent assembly which would rewrite the 1982 constitution, but he began receiving some pushback from the right. So, what he did is, in early/mid-2009, he proposed, let’s have a poll. A poll that would say whether the Honduran people wanted to include a referendum or a new ballot measure in the 2009 fall elections. And then, that ballot measure would be to see if people wanted a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.

So, it was several steps away from actually writing a new constitution. He wouldn’t be the president of Honduras when that new constitution was written but, because he was pushing for this constituent assembly, the U.S. government and the right-wing in Honduras, they accused him of trying to write a new constitution so that he could consolidate his power and stay in office, and be able to be reelected in those 2009 elections, which logistically [just] wasn’t true, right?

RG: Right. It’s hard to see how you could do both of those at once.

JO: Exactly. Exactly. He forcibly tried to push forward the poll for Hondurans to vote to see whether they wanted this ballot measure in the elections later that year. And, on the morning of that poll when that poll was supposed to be introduced, military officers stormed into the presidential palace. They arrested him while he was still in his pajamas, they put him on a plane, and they sent him to Costa Rica while still in his pajamas.

Now, at this time, the U.S. government was slow to denounce the coup, but the Organization of American States, the United Nations, they very much denounced the coup, and said, this is not allowed, Zelaya needs to come back into office. And then, the Obama administration finally said, OK, well, this coup is not right.

But, behind the scenes, they were working with the coup-plotters and the right-wing opposition that organized the coup to make way for the 2009 fall elections, so that the question of Zelaya’s coup would just be moot, right? And this is something that is not just speculated, but this is something that Hillary Clinton — who was Secretary of State at the time — she writes about it in her autobiography, “Hard Choices.” She talks about how they were really trying to make way for those fall 2009 elections so that the coup would just be a moot point. And then they have this veneer of, oh, we’re going back to democracy, we had these elections, we’re good to go.

In 2009, the elections take place, the fall elections take place, and a right-wing president, Porfirio Lobo, was elected. He took office in January 2010, and then the right-wing reaction came.

So, when I asked Zelaya about the coup, he gave almost a bit of an emotional response, right? I mean, it’s been 15 years since the coup but, obviously, it’s very much present, it’s front of mind. He’s asked about it almost everywhere that he goes; not just by journalists, but also by his friends, by his family members.

And then, this is what he said to me, he said, “A coup is violent; well, the way that it was here in Honduras was violent. Because this was not a soft coup, it was a military coup d’état. The human heart hurts so much and bleeds so much that many decades will pass and people will continue to talk about it. For me, logically, my heart breaks talking about the topic, because there’s pain, there’s suffering, there’s tragedy, and I never thought that in the 21st century — and in Honduras, which is a neighboring country to the United States — they could plan an attack to break the country’s institutions.”

Then he goes on to say, “A coup is a war. It is a breaking of a social contract. It is the breaking of the established order for the coup-plotters to prevail. And you see in Honduras who prevailed: the elites that already existed. But they became organized, and it was organized into a mafia. They became gangsters, they destroyed the state’s finances.”

Then he goes on to say, “Those governments enriched themselves. They plundered, they stripped the country of its wealth. That was the result of the coup. Who benefited? The transnational companies, the elites. So now,” and then he goes on to talk about his wife Xiomara Castro’s presidency, “So, now a progressive government has arrived, a democratic socialist government. We have found that the elite is protected by constitutional laws, by free trade agreements, they’re protected by everything. So we have a bourgeois state facing demands from a democratic socialist state. That’s what we have here. That is the result, the disastrous result, of a blow to the heart of the Honduran people. Shameless murderers, reactionaries whose crimes have still gone unpunished.

“Here, the coup-plotters don’t even get a traffic ticket, not even a slap on the wrist. Instead, they’re offered political parties, as if they are a democratic option. It’s so absurd, the Honduran rights, which put the generals in office who carried out the coup, proclaimed themselves to be a democratic alternative. Those who murdered, those who looted, are democratic alternatives. It’s totally absurd.

“But that is what I can tell you in a few words about the tragedy that we experienced, something that Xiomara, with her popularity, with Libre, with the resistance reversed. But the body of the dictatorship continues to be here. It is alive. As they say, ‘The head of the dictatorship may be gone, but his body, with death rattles, is still kicking and shooting.’”

RG: So — and we’ve covered this here before — what policies the right-wing government was able to put into place, and the way that they were kind of able to link them to treaties, particularly with the United States, has left their dead hand still hanging over the new democratic socialist government in Honduras? That, even though it has a mandate from the people, it’s difficult for them to accomplish as much as they would be able to otherwise.

And what’s so remarkable — and people would think we were making this up if they haven’t been following this closely — is that the president that wound up eventually getting into office, he was president of the National Assembly when Lobo was first elected and then became president, Juan Orlando Hernández, is now sitting in federal prison in the United States for his role in narcotrafficking. A role that you asked Zelaya about, because we now know, because the U.S. prosecutors have said so and have admitted publicly, that the United States had knowledge of his role in drug trafficking, going back many, many years.

So, what was your conversation about Juan Orlando Hernández like with Zelaya?

JO: You know, the question of Juan Orlando Hernández is one that continues to kind of linger, and it was very much present there in this event in Honduras. The day before, the day that we were all flying into Honduras for this event, he was sentenced in a New York federal court to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking.

Going back to 2013 when Orlando was elected, he was elected under questionable circumstances. I mean, there were a lot of allegations that that the elections were fraudulent. And then, once he was in office, he continued the far-right policies, the privatization policies, but he continued to consolidate power to an even more extreme degree.

He had his own police force and he engaged in intense repression, but he was also able to consolidate power within the government. He was able to restructure the supreme court and put his own friendly Supreme Court justices in power. And then, what he did, which is a very hypocritical move, in 2016, he was able to change the constitution to allow him to run again.

RG: Isn’t that nice? Gee, I thought that was the whole thing that the U.S. and the Honduran right were so concerned about with Zelaya.

JO: Exactly.

RG: How nice.

JO: How nice, how nice. Yeah.

So, in 2017, he runs again for office, he moves the non-reelection clause from the constitution, and then he wins, right? But these 2017 elections—

RG: And “wins” is in quotes. Right.

JO: They were extremely, extremely difficult. What was interesting is, the day that the election was taking place, the computer systems were showing that the opposition candidates — who were linked to Xiomara Castro and Zelaya — they were in the lead, they were slated to win. But then, mysteriously, the computer system shut down. Then, when the computers come back up, Juan Orlando Hernández is in the lead.

RG: The words that news outlets use for the election is “marred by irregularities.”

JO: Marred by irregularities.

RG: Ah, well, nevertheless.

JO: Nevertheless, reelected.

But what is interesting is that, days after the election, the United States’ State Department, they came out and they said, you know, we respect the elections, we recognize Hernández’s election. He wins. Please stop the demonstrations.

RG: And this was the Trump administration, which was really feeling its oats when it came to boosting the right throughout Latin America.

So, for all the folks who say that, hey, “Trump may be awful but, at least he’s kind of non-interventionist and isolationist around the world,” certainly, that was not the case for the Trump administration in Central and South America, where they did a lot to intervene in the politics of most of those Latin American countries to elevate the right.

JO: Absolutely. And so, after the state department, they say, we respect the elections, we recognize Hernández’s election, years later, when Orlando Hernández is extradited to the U.S. for drug trafficking — this was a couple of years after his brother was convicted of drug trafficking — and then the United States justice department years later say that the 2017 elections were fraudulent.

And, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read an excerpt from one of the filings from the Justice Department. This is what the U. S. prosecutors from the Justice Department write in one of their documents, they say: “In 2017 during Juan Orlando’s reelection campaign, Juan Orlando’s drug trafficking coconspirators again provided millions of dollars of drug money to Juan Orlando’s campaign, to ensure that Juan Orlando would remain in power, and their massive cocaine operation would remain protected, just like in 2013, Juan Orlando used that drug money to bribe election officials and manipulate the vote count to fraudulently win the election, including by shutting down the computer system of the agency responsible for counting votes.”

So, this is an election that the U.S. State Department said they respected, that they recognized. And then, years later, the Justice Department comes out and says, no, these elections were fraudulent, Hernández’s win was due to drug trafficking money and corruption.

RG: And not that many years later, we still talk a lot about the open questions about the U.S. government role in drug trafficking in the 1980s, and supporting governments that were linked with drug trafficking, or supporting rebel groups that were linked with drug trafficking. Here we are in 2017, with the U.S. administration basically solidifying an obviously stolen election that puts into power or reelects a narco-president.

So, just to underscore, we’re not talking about ancient times here.

JO: Yeah, this was very, very recent. I mean, 2017. And, obviously, the effects of it are still being felt today in Honduras.

And I asked Zelaya about the 45-year sentence that Orlando Hernández received — you know, he was convicted, and then he was sentenced to 45 years in prison — and I asked him, because I said, you know, in one of these Justice Department documents, prosecutors claim that Juan Orlando Hernández was receiving bribes from organized crime since back in 2005, but the U.S. still continues to support Hernández. And I asked him what the role of the U.S. in Latin America was, with this context. And this is what he answered.

He said, “History always repeats itself if conditions don’t change.” And then he goes on to say, “How did they get here? How did drug trafficking enter? Noriega, for example was a CIA collaborator.”

Noriega was the dictator of Panama, who was a CIA asset. Later, he was trafficking tons and tons and tons of cocaine through Central America. But he says, “Noriega, for example, was a CIA collaborator. And then the United States — after they were Noriega’s main ally — brought in 20,000, 30,000 Marines, helicopters, and they overthrew the government and tried him.”

“Then he goes on to say, “So, who understands them? That’s why I’m telling you, who understands these North American policies? Juan Orlando was their main ally, but not since 2005; according to these investigations by the DEA, the Hernández cartel begins in 2002.” Then he goes on to say, “And there are reports that the DEA itself has published where the drug traffickers say that, and they’ve said this in their statements. I don’t have to believe them. Why believe them? But they’ve clearly stated that they financed my overthrow, and that they gave money to my adversaries to contribute to my overthrow.

“Because they didn’t let me finish my presidency; I had seven months left. And when the national party takes power, they made a statement there in that trial in New York saying, ‘we will never again leave power,’ and they practically swear an oath. So, of course, perhaps what your underlying question is, a cartel was formed. Not just bribes, but they formed a cartel within the state itself. And they remained in power for 12 years and seven months until the people united. They consciously, responsibly, placed Xiomara — a leader who emerges from the resistance — and makes her president.”

Then he goes on to say, “I should say he was convicted, but the sentence downplays his conviction. Because he was convicted for three crimes, and the prosecution asked for the maximum sentence for those crimes, and he was given the minimum sentence for those crimes. For me, I mean, as politicians, we’re not worried about that. Absolutely not at all. Because we believe that justice should be applied in our countries.”

Then he goes on to say something interesting. He says, “As a politician, I’ve said it before, we’re not worried about Juan Orlando being punished. I want them to take more time away from his sentence, so that he can return to Honduras soon, and we can defeat him again in the polls. Because the people no longer want that type of sickly, harsh sectarianism, of dictatorship, of repression, that has subjected Honduras to 12 years and seven months of dictatorship. The people no longer want it, so we’re not worried.”

RG: So, there you have one more moment of the way that the Latin American right, the U.S. government, and drug trafficking, just have gone hand in hand, policy-wise. And then, we wonder later, why do we have this drug problem and why do we have this migration problem? Never once wondering, well, maybe it has something to do with the constant destabilization and allying with narcotraffickers that we’ve done.

Now, obviously, the critics of the left throughout Latin America will say, it’s not just the right that traffics and drugs. And that’s certainly true, and there have certainly been some left-wing organizations, particularly in Colombia, who evolved, basically, into narcotraffickers.

What’s your overall analysis of how the narcotraffickers fit politically into the political economy of Latin America?

JO: That’s an excellent question. And I think we have to recognize that, yes, of course. Especially in Colombia, we see the FARC, right? The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, right? This left-wing guerrilla movement that kind of began in the ’60s.

When the DEA and when the U.S. government and the Colombian military took out the major cartels in the ’90s in Colombia, there was a vacuum, and the demand for cocaine still was high. And who filled that vacuum? Well, the FARC, and the right-wing paramilitaries, right? And so, it’s an extremely profitable venture, it’s an extremely profitable business, and that’s how the FARC was able to finance a lot of their operations, was through drug trafficking.

But I think what’s important here is that these organized crime groups and cartels, they behave like businesses, right? And so, they’ll work with whichever politician is going to help them, regardless of political party, right? If we see the history of drug trafficking throughout Southern America, Central America, and Mexico, we see how drug traffickers were collaborating with the military, regardless of political party, with federal police, regardless of political party. And, essentially, they act like businesses. They have their own lawyers, their own lobbyists, etc., that are able to kind of work with politicians in order to finance their own operations, and just make as much money as possible, right?

And I think that’s an important context, that’s an important way of thinking about narcotrafficking, is that this is a business, you know? And, like every business within the capitalist system, they’re going to be appealing to certain politicians, it doesn’t matter if they’re right-wing or left-wing, in order to just try to make as much money as possible, as any business would within a capitalist economy.

RG: And, finally, you asked him about what his sense was about the kind of political direction of Latin America. You’ve always got Javier Milei with his upset in Argentina, the eccentric libertarian. But then you have the left holding on to power and maintaining dominance, really, in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia.

And it led to some flowing, flowery rhetoric, that was actually, I thought, pretty impressive at times. We don’t need to go through the whole thing; he gets into Hegel and Jose Marti, and you can check that out over at either The Intercept or Drop Site, if you want to read that.

But there was a fun part that he ended with that involved Mike Tyson. Was curious if you’d be able to read that.

JO: Yes, of course. He says, “Look, I’ve always placed a lot of trust in people’s common sense. You may have an illiterate person who is unable to read or write, but he will have a greater sense of justice than the most intellectually developed person. He has more of a sense of power. Power is a human instinct. Power is like food. People can be peasants and know what power is for, and how power is used. That is something in a person’s mind. Power, will, justice, and the most sacred thing: freedom.

“But it’s not the freedom of Mike Tyson, and I admire Mike Tyson. It’s not the freedom of a boxer like Mike Tyson, who gets in the ring and challenges you, and you know he’s going to kill you with one punch. That’s not the type of freedom I’m talking about, that we are all equal. We are all equal according to our capabilities and according to our needs. To create fair governments in a better world, that is still possible. We have not lost our faith. And I think that’s what keeps us standing.”

RG: Any final thoughts on President Zelaya? What did you make of him as a person?

JO: Yeah, I thought it was a really interesting interview. I was kind of nervous. You know, he’s, I want to say, maybe six-two and six-six? He’s a very tall, towering figure, with this kind of booming voice, and this very thick mustache. And he walks very slowly, and he has just this presence around him. And maybe it was the context — you know, he was surrounded by his supporters, etc., that was really interesting — but he was kind of a bit of an intimidating figure. But he was very relaxed, very calm. He came in, and he was eating an empanada. I think we had kind of taken him from his lunch when he came in to do this interview — but he did express a lot of hope in the people. In the power of the people. And a lot of hope, obviously, in his wife’s government.

What’s important to mention is that Xiomara Castro’s government is not quite perfect, right? There are still a lot of links and a lot of training from the U.S. government that is flowing into the armed forces in Honduras. And, you know, you ask Hondurans and you ask people within the Libre party, you say, “hey, what about some of these policies? Or what about some of the criticisms?”

There’s a lot of criticism coming from land defenders and from indigenous groups throughout the country, saying that not enough has been done in order to protect them, in order to protect their lands. And you ask members of the Libre party, what do you make of these criticisms? And they say, well, it was 13 years of a narco-dictatorship, is what they say. We’re not going to solve the damage that was done within those 13 years in only two years of Xiomara Castro being in office, right?

There are elections coming up next year, so we’ll see how those go.

RG: And she’s back to not being able to run. How did that happen?

JO: That’s a good question, that’s a good question. We’ll have to ask the Juan Orlando Supreme Court about that.

RG: Term limits for the left, but not for the right, is the basic policy, it seems like.

JO: Exactly, that’s exactly it. What’s interesting is that her government, they have put forward also some modest reforms. You know, they’re not nationalizing industries or nationalizing land or anything like that, they’re putting forward some modest reforms.

But what’s interesting to see is that — and they highlight highlighted this during the 15-years commemorative event — a lot of members of her cabinet were activists, and they’re very young people who were active during the resistance movement after the 2009 coup. And they put up this video where it shows young student leaders and activists getting beaten by the police. And then, right next to it, they show an image of that same student leader, who is now the secretary of immigration, for example, or different cabinet positions.

So, it’s really interesting. It’s a very young government, who are literally young. I mean, they’re very young people who are in the cabinet. And I think they’re still trying to get their bearings and figure out what to do after 13 years of this right-wing reactionary period.

RG: All right. Well, thank you so much for that, Jose. I wish I could have been there, but glad that you could make it, and thanks for doing this for us.

JO: Yeah, thanks so much, Ryan. And next time we’ll be in Honduras together.

RG: All right. And then, here is Jose’s entire interview, unedited in Spanish, with former president Manuel Zelaya.

Translated Interview with Manuel Zelaya

José Olivares: Thank you very much. Well, to start — you have spoken publicly about the conflict in Palestine, with the war that continues today in Gaza.

There are almost 40,000 dead in Israel’s war. There are people who say it is a genocide against the Palestinians. Can you give us your opinion on how Hondurans see this conflict, and how the international community should respond to this conflict, and the massacre we are seeing in Palestine?

Manuel Zelaya: Look in Honduras, a large part of the ruling class was originally from Palestine. So you have to imagine that there is discomfort, even among the Honduran elite, about the crimes that Israel’s military invasion is causing within Palestine.

We consider, and Xiomara herself has said this in international forums, that it is truly an unprecedented fact in the 21st century, it is incredible that, in the eyes of the world, without respecting international law, by violating all treaties and all concepts about peace and coexistence between nations and about respecting the United Nations’ resolutions, Israel carries out a ground invasion, with tanks with bombs with the effects of violence on the civilian population of Palestine. Because, when an army fights against an army, that is a war. But this is not a war. That is a genocide, because the extreme brutal response from Israel exceeded all limits, even of those of the laws of war.

We have strongly condemned it. We believe that Palestinian children, young people, women, the elderly, should be treated responsibly, in the way— Look, the blockade against the Gaza Strip has already exceeded the limits of the global community’s humane consciousness. It stretches decades, it is a prolonged blockade, the one at the Gaza Strip. And now with this terrible aggression, solidarity with Palestine, from different sectors and different countries, is immense.

We have condemned terrorism. We condemn terrorism of any form, because terrorism violates all types of legal rules and social agreements. However, we are not limited to only condemning terrorism. The first condemnation that the Xiomara [Castro] government made, was against the bombing that affected Israel, which caused deaths within Israel, people were killed inside Israel. That was condemned — that was the government’s first action. But then the terrible response from Israel is one that totally exceeds any limit, and has the world outraged.

Do you know who has lost a lot of prestige? The United Nations Security Council. I mean, you see the Security Council of the United Nations; it has remained simply a rhetorical representation for the interests of the powerful. They have not been able to stop this aggression. They have not been able to achieve a permanent ceasefire. They have not been able to recognize the two states, the Palestinian and the Israeli states — that was one of our main positions.

So, not only are the people of Palestine directly affected, but also our entire global conscience. It is affected by this type of aggression, and the United Nations Security Council has been terribly discredited by its inability— Well, not even to respond to the resolutions of the assembly, because there have already been more than, I think, three resolutions of the assembly to demand a ceasefire. And that’s where the collateral effects come from, because the bombing leads to displaced people, it produces orphans, it produces widows, it produces abandoned people, children who are being raised in shelters, who are in camps, who do not have enough food. There is also a humanitarian tragedy there.

And where is the world’s conscience? Where is the conscience of Europe, the conscience of civilized countries? The conscience of the American people? I have seen that they have protested, but to solve the problem — because the problem must be solved — we cannot live under the crushing boot of fascism, which, in this case, is imposed on the Palestinian people.

JO: Thank you very much, President. The U.S. elections are coming this year. Polls indicate that Trump may return to the presidency. What do you think of the upcoming elections? What do you think of what we are seeing right now, in the country with the most powerful army in the world? What do you think about what’s coming this year?

MZ: Well, we believe in the democratic system, and we believe that elections are an instrument — they are not the end-all-be-all of democracy. Democracy is the power of the people. People have the power. And the people should have a holistic vision, beyond elections. I hope the people start practicing the concept of plural, solidarity-driven, humane democracy in the United States, with whichever government is in power.

We have no preference in these elections, between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party — we believe that, in the end, they act the same. They act in the interest of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the interest of a global elite that, through capitalism, has already taken over all the assets of wealth: the rivers, the seas, the forests, oil — the world elite manages it all through the speculative financial system. The planet’s main resources, of raw economic goods, are those that influence the United States’ government.

So, in the end, you can vote for a Democratic president. We would have wanted Bernie Sanders to be president, for example, or Noam Chomsky to be president, for example. But the people, in the U.S., organize their parties, and the parties choose their candidates.

So that is important to point out, and we would like the North American people, first, to make clear that the United States should not be an aggressor empire against other societies, regardless of who takes office. [The North American people should make clear] that the United States should not have intelligence agencies planning coups, or interfere in our countries, and that that should be clear, that we must at least respect — listen carefully — the planet, so that we all have air; to ensure that climate change does not be as aggressive as it is now.

First of all, we should agree with the United States on that. The second thing is in the concept of humanism, because people don’t ask for much. What people want is to eat. What people want is to be clothed, to quench their thirst, to have a roof over their heads, and shelter and warmth. What kind of a crime is that, for human beings? And to think that the great powers, once they solve their problems, forget about the suffering in Africa, in Latin America, and in many countries in Asia as well.

So, we must demand humanity, in the face of the world order. And the United States is co-responsible for the current world order. Therefore, we must call on them (the American people) to reflect on that.

JO: Fifteen years ago, the Honduran military launched a coup here in Honduras. Soldiers entered your bedroom. They took you, while you were in your pajamas, to a military base, then to Costa Rica.

Tell us a little about what happened in that coup d’état, how the Honduran people responded to the coup, and what has happened in these last 15 years.

MZ: Look, it’s really been 15 years, as you say, and every day, that question arises. Not only from journalists, but in my house, during our after-dinner conversations, during meals, when we go out on the street with the people. That question is a constant.

A coup d’état is violent — well, the way it was here in Honduras — because this was not a soft coup. It was a military coup d’état. The human heart hurts so much and bleeds so much, that many decades will pass, and people will continue to talk about it. For me, logically, my heart breaks talking about that topic, because there is pain, there is suffering, there is tragedy. And I never thought that in the 21st century and in Honduras, which is a neighboring country to the United States — Did you know that in an hour and fifteen minutes, you can be in Miami? — they could plan an attack to break the country’s institutions.

When you break with institutions, what you do is throw out the social contract, and return to a rule by force. Because [in a social contract], by living under institutions, humans relinquish the use of force to defend ourselves. So, with these institutions, you forfeit your right [of using force] and say: well, now you defend me, and I subject to you. But when you destroy institutions that are supposed to be the “rule of law,” when you destroy the structure of the state — which they call a coup d’état — when one of those powers falls, then the people, citizens, everyone — including business owners — are left defenseless, they are subject to whoever has the most— There’s a Sandinista expression, because “pinol” is used a lot in Nicaragua: “He with the biggest throat, swallows more pinol.” That’s what awaits when the force arrives. And brute force, eh?

Well, the history of humanity — if you study the history of humanity — the history of humanity is the history of war. And the history of war is the history of religious conflicts and of conflict for the nationhood, for land, for goods.

Now they fight for other resources: for technology, for oil, but it is the same history. A coup is a war, it is the breaking of a social contract. It is the breaking of the established order, for them [coup plotters] to prevail. And you see in Honduras who prevailed: the elite, that already existed, became organized. And it was organized into a mafia. They became gangsters. They destroyed the state’s finances. They created 80 government entities in different bank trusts — 80 small governments. They destroyed the single treasury account, which is a reserve. In the constitution, there is a law that no state income can go to different sources, but rather to a single treasury account, and then the state distributes from there. They made 80 unique boxes, and, paradoxically enough, 80 governments.

And those governments enriched themselves. They plundered, they stripped the country of its wealth. That was the result of the coup. Who benefited? The transnational companies, the elite. Exonerations, concessions — the rivers, the sea, forests — they have it all. So now, a progressive government has arrived, a democratic socialist government, and we have found that the elite is protected by constitutional laws, by free trade agreements. They are protected by everything.

So, we have a bourgeois state facing demands from a democratic socialist state. That’s what we have here. That is the result —the disastrous result — of a blow to the heart of the Honduran people. Shameless murderers, reactionaries, whose crimes have still gone unpunished.

Here, the coup plotters don’t even get a traffic ticket — not even a slap on the wrist. Instead, they are offered political parties as if they are a democratic option. It is so absurd: the Honduran right, which put the generals in office who carried out the coup, proclaim themselves to be a democratic alternative. Those who murdered, those who looted, are democratic alternatives — totally absurd.

But that is what I can tell you, in a few words, about the tragedy that we experienced — something that Xiomara, with her popularity, with Libre, with the resistance, reversed. But the body of the dictatorship continues to be here. It is alive. As they say, the head of the dictatorship may be gone. But his body, with death rattles, is still kicking and shooting.

JO: Thank you so much. This week, a federal court in the United States sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández to 45 years in prison. In a document that I reviewed, U.S. prosecutors stated that Juan Orlando Hernández was receiving bribes from organized crime since back in 2005. Regardless, the United States supported the Juan Orlando Hernández government.

What does this tell us about the role of the United States in Latin America, in our countries, and during this period of — as Honduran companions here call it — the “narco-dictatorship?”

MZ:  History always repeats itself if conditions don’t change.

What happened, for example in ’54 with the invasion — listen to me, it was launched from here, in Honduras — to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, because he had started an agrarian process in Guatemala? 1954. The CIA directs — those are public documents, you can see them in all the archives, on the entire internet or on Wikileaks, they are public documents.

The CIA planned a coup against Jacob Arbenz. A reformer, military man. Reformist because at that time, when that wave came — listen to me — ’54 was before the Cuban revolution. And before the Cuban revolution, before Jacobo Arbenz, a Nicaraguan military sergeant had already been protesting. Protesting against imperialism, protesting against the invasion of Nicaragua, protesting against the oppression by the system. That was Augusto Cesar Sandino. And listen closely — that was in the first half of the 20th century. There was already the example of the Bolshevik Revolution. The October revolution, of the Soviet Union, had already taken place. And there were demonstrations, rebellions, protests in all countries. It was a very dark, very terrible time that I remember that in Argentina they trained the military to apply the national security doctrine. They instigated the types of situations, that in all honesty, generated an entire process that we can’t ignore, just as we cannot ignore what has been happening in Honduras, with the repercussions that this process has had.

You told me that — in this question, there was a detail that caught my attention. What happened, what were you telling me in this question?

JO: That since 2005, U.S. prosecutors—

MZ: How did they get here? How did drug trafficking enter?

Noriega, for example, was a CIA collaborator. And then, the United States, after Noriega’s main ally, brought in 20,000, 30,000 marines, helicopters, and they overthrew the government, and tried him. He spent 20 years in a prison in Miami, then another year, a couple of years in France, and then they sent him to die in Panama. They sent him the last year of his life, just so he could die in Panama. And he was convicted of drug trafficking. Pay attention, I’m only giving you general information. But you asked me something specific.

Here in the, in the first years of this century, in the, more or less, in the second decade of the 21st century, a Honduran Air Force general shot down two unidentified planes that carried drugs. They sanctioned and fired him, precisely at the request of the United States, because they said that two infiltrated DEA agents were there. And the general was violently removed. No, not with weapons and not as an impeachment, but it was a violent action, performed through a resolution.

So, who understands them? That’s why I’m telling you — who understands these North American policies? Juan Orlando was their main ally. Not since 2005. According to these investigations by the DEA, the Hernández cartel begins in 2002, when— Look, I’m going to give you the facts.

Ricardo Maduro from the National Party won the election, following the government of Carlos Flores from the Liberal Party. And the president of Congress started a political campaign, and his congressional secretary, and his campaign coordinator, is Juan Orlando. Essentially, I am going to specify that— If Flores enters in ’97 in ’98, ’99— OK, Ricardo Maduro’s government is here. And according to the DEA, that’s where the cartel begins to form. Of course, when Juan Orlando is the congressional secretary.

That time is when I also began my political fight for the presidency, during the government of Ricardo Maduro. Then, I replaced Ricardo Maduro. I replaced him as President of the republic. And there are the reports that the DEA itself has published, where the drug traffickers say that — they have specifically said it in their statements – I don’t have to believe them, why believe them? But they have clearly stated that they financed my overthrow. And that they gave money to my adversaries to contribute to my overthrow. Because they didn’t let me finish my presidency, I had seven months left. And when the National Party takes power — they made a statement there, in that trial in New York, saying: “We will never again leave power.” And they practically swear an oath.

So, of course, perhaps what your underlying question is: A cartel was formed. Not just bribes. They formed a cartel within the state itself. But there is an interruption for the cartel: They are in government, they lose the elections, and from there they overthrow me, and then they take over again. And they remained in power for 12 years and seven months until the people, united they consciously, responsibly, placed Xiomara — a leader who emerges from the resistance — and made her president. So yes, it began a little further back than 2005. It was a process.

Today, the United States, which supported them the most — the ones who supported the execution of electoral fraud, the ones that remained silent — the State Department, never made a statement regarding human rights, against an allied government like [Juan Orlando’s]. Simply because the Honduran government supported Juan Guaidó. If this Honduran government supported Juan Guaidó — who is a spurious president; who is not a president, he emerged from the street and proclaimed himself the only president. So, the United States did not touch the government. Under this concept, Honduras did suffer a blow to its economy, to its public finances. Debt, misery, poverty, violence and, therefore, corruption, increased. How can you judge the behavior of the United States with this sentence?

I should say — he was convicted, but the sentence downplays his conviction. Because he was convicted for three crimes, and the prosecution asked for the maximum sentence for those crimes — and he was given the minimum sentence for the crimes. For me, I mean, as politicians, we are not worried about that, absolutely not at all. Because we believe that justice should be applied in our countries. We shouldn’t try to influence the American justice system, in any way. They have their own way of acting.

They recently freed General Cienfuegos, from Mexico. They arrested him, then the State Department released a statement and the prosecutor’s office withdrew the accusations and said our relationship with a brother country like Mexico is more important than capturing General Cienfuegos. So there is your general. And they returned him to them. So, what is our perspective, at these heights, as Honduras, a small country, which is not nearly the size of a small city in the United States? What is our perspective? We see that there are agreements that allow this, according to the laws of the United States, negotiations. And that is, as a politician, I said it before, we are not worried about Juan Orlando being punished. I want them to take more time away from his sentence, so that he can return to Honduras, soon, and defeat him again at the polls. Because the people no longer want that type of sickly, harsh sectarianism, of dictatorship, of repression, that has subjected Honduras to 12 years and seven months of dictatorship. The people no longer want it. So we are not worried.

And now they sentenced him to 45 years. I already said that the sooner they bring him back, the sooner the United States, itself, will realize that there is a people here, empowered by their independence and their sovereignty, who are willing to seek compromises, because we are peaceful. We do not carry out clandestine or subversive acts, nor do we use weapons, much less do we use terrorist activities. We are a peaceful people who want to defend ourselves at the polls, but we want the United States to respect us, just as we have to respect them.

JO: Thank you so much. Can we do one more? One last question?

MZ: Yes Yes.

JO: Well, this year, in 2024, Latin America is a state of many contradictions: We have several progressive presidents in Latin America — Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the election of Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico — several countries with progressive leaders. But we also have the threat from the right: Javier Millei in Argentina, perhaps Trump’s return to the presidency in the United States. And, at the same time, there is also the power of multinational companies, and the threat of American imperialism.

What is your perspective, personally, about the future of Honduras, the future of Latin America? How do you see the future of our countries?

MZ: One thing is to have hope. And another thing are the challenges you have to confront, in order to not lose hope. We have faith in ourselves, in humanity. One honest person can save many others who could be destroyed. That’s biblical. When the Lord in the Bible appears to the one who asks him to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and says:‘Look, these cities are rotten, there is corruption here, there is selfishness, vanity; you must destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

And is there anyone honest?’ The man asks him. ‘Is there anyone?

Yes, there is one.

Well, that’s why the others should be saved. That’s why I shouldn’t destroy it, then. 

There are honest people in the world —  there are honest people, who have hope to find solutions.

We are not concerned about the coming and going of history, which swings to the right then left. People react based to the type of government, or circumstances, that afflict them. When progressive parties govern and continue to maintain the neoliberal model, then people go against the progressive party and get rid of them at the polls and remove them.

Now, when you have parties, mind you, from the right, as in this case — you are mentioning to me the various right-wing phenomena that exist in Europe and here; the emergence of fascism is evident. But those parties come to power, and what do they do? Instead of giving the people what belongs to the people, instead of respecting Lincoln’s great slogan that democracy should prevail on this earth, what does the right do? They worsen their extreme measures of exploitation and cruelty of the people, of the working class.

Then the people take them down again. So it is a dialectical cycle, as Hegel said; there is the idea that contradicts the other idea [thesis and antithesis]. And, as José Martí said: “the trenches of ideas are stronger than the trenches of weapons.” So, we don’t have to be afraid of what is happening. Those of us who believe that we must defend justice, and the integrity of people — to not let them die, and to alleviate suffering, give them the greatest degree of happiness — we believe in that. Every day we are stronger, because our martyrs fuel our forces. If someone is able to sacrifice themselves and give their life, then why can’t I do it? We are only in the world temporarily.

Other generations will raise those flags, and they will do it with closed fists; a sign that their collective consciousness will strengthen. Life is an accident. You must give it meaning, and the meaning has to nourish you; you don’t have to serve it. Otherwise what use would it be, then? That is, you have to think that we are beings with emotions, we are not stones. Nature and the creator of the universe managed to form this entity of cells that suffers, that cries, that laughs, that enjoys, that can enjoy music, enjoy the chirping of a bird, the sound of the waves — this state of being, we must preserve it. And this being, of course, there are two perspectives: The first is that we must preserve the human being and humanity. And for that, we have to develop science and technology. We agree that’s the way to preserve it. But not by creating an apocalyptic system, like libertarian neoliberalism, that they are sustaining in this moment. This is an apocalyptic system. That is not going to solve humanity’s problems.

We need, above all, consciousness and to agree on the value of life, not the value of material items. We believe there is a significant development in the ideas that have been developed this past century. The 20th century was the century of enlightenment. But in the 21st century, in the century of communication through the internet, consciousness is spreading to the last corner of the earth, about what is happening. Today we are the global village, which was spoken of at the end of the century. Today, yes, we feel that unity is becoming stronger. So I have faith in that.

Look, I have always placed a lot of trust in people’s common sense. You may have an illiterate person – unable to read or write. But he will have a greater sense of justice, than the most intellectually developed person. He has more of a sense of power. Power is a human instinct. Power is like food. People can be peasants and know what power is for, and how power is used. That is something in a person’s mind: Power, will, justice and the most sacred thing, freedom.

But it is not the freedom of Mike Tyson, and I admire Mike Tyson — it is not the freedom of a boxer like Mike Tyson, who gets in the ring and challenges you, and you know he is going to kill you with one punch. That is not the type of freedom I am talking about, “that we are all equal,” no. We are all equal according to our capabilities and according to our needs. To create fair governments in a better world, that is still possible. We have not lost our faith. And I think that’s what keeps us standing.

JO: President Zelaya, thank you very much for your time.
MZ: Well, same, same. Thank you for coming here. Thank you so much.

Credits

RG: That was Manuel Zelaya, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site. This program was supported by a grant from The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn and José Olivares. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And I’m Ryan Grim, cofounder of Drop Site.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Deconstructed wherever you listen to podcasts, and please leave us a rating and a review, it helps people find the show. Also, check out our other podcast, Intercepted.

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The post Honduras, 15 Years After the Coup: An Interview With Ousted President Manuel Zelaya appeared first on The Intercept.