World
Joe Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim That He Saw Pictures of Beheaded Babies
On October 11, four days after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel, President Joe Biden addressed a group of Jewish community leaders in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Biden said. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
It was a jarring statement. And it was false.
Biden had seen no such pictures, nor received any such confirmation. He made those comments after Nicole Zedeck, a journalist for Israel’s i24 News, reported that 40 babies had been decapitated, citing Israeli soldiers at the scene of the attacks at Kfar Aza. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently stated that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated.”
Three hours later, Biden promoted the claim to the world and asserted he personally saw pictures of the horrifying scene, giving the story supreme legitimacy.
Hamas denied the allegation, and other Israeli journalists at the scene began reporting they had not seen evidence such beheadings had occurred nor had they been told it had happened by any of the Israeli soldiers they spoke with. Zedeck, the reporter from i24 News who was first to spread the allegation, later tweeted that “soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”
An anchor at the network defended the reporter and said that three separate Israel Defense Forces officials had told i24 News “that around 40 babies & small children were murdered in Kfar Aza, some burned, some beheaded.” CBS News and CNN also spread Israeli assertions that babies and toddlers had been decapitated.
Eventually, the Israeli government was forced to admit it had no evidence to support the claim, though it continued to imply that it might be true. A military spokesperson said that the IDF would not further investigate the beheading charges because it would be “disrespectful for the dead.”
White House officials then “clarified” what they claimed Biden was actually referring to. “U.S. officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” reported the Washington Post. “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel, according to the White House.” The purpose of such graphic descriptions, according to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, was “to underscore the utter depravity and the barbaric nature with which these terrorists murdered and butchered innocent Israeli civilians.” Kirby, who dodged direct questions about whether Biden had personally seen any photos, added, “And that further underscores why — and this is what the President’s specific point was yesterday — that we got to stay with Israel. We’ve got to continue to make sure they have the support that they need.”
Biden has never publicly retracted the incendiary claims. And the Washington Post reported that the president had been urged by staffers not to make that allegation in his speech on October 11, “because those reports were unverified.”
Despite the Israeli government’s comments, warnings about the veracity of the claims from his own advisers, and the extensively documented lists of people killed on October 7 during the Hamas raids, Biden has inexplicably and repeatedly doubled down on the claim that he saw pictures of decapitated babies.
At a November 16 press conference in Woodside, California, after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden first promoted another debunked charge, that Hamas had what amounted to its own version of a Pentagon under Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. “Here’s the situation: You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact. That’s what’s happened,” Biden said. He then declared, “Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burn — burning women and children alive.”
The allegation that Hamas beheaded babies continues to spread across the internet and social media. In a post on Israel’s official X account, readers were invited to “Listen to the eyewitness accounts of the 8 burned babies and one beheaded baby which were butchered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.” It featured a video of Israeli Col. Golan Vach purporting to describe what he witnessed. On November 26, an Israeli journalist posted an interview with an IDF soldier who claimed that babies had been hung from clotheslines. The reporter later apologized to his readers and said the story was false. “Why would an army officer invent such a horrifying story?” he wrote. “I was wrong.”
There is evidence to suggest that Biden, in addition to absorbing the most sensational claims made in Israeli media in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, was fed other unverified claims directly from Netanyahu, his close friend of many decades. Israel released a video of phone call between Netanyahu and Biden on October 11, the first time Biden publicly made the beheading claim. “We were struck Saturday by an attack whose savagery I can say we have not seen since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu told Biden. “Since we last spoke, the extent of this evil, it’s only gotten worse. They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them, and executed them.” He added, “They’re even worse than ISIS and we need to treat them as such.” Significantly, Netanyahu does not appear to have alleged that Hamas beheaded babies, though he did claim that soldiers were decapitated. In an appearance with Biden on October 18 in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu made no mention of babies being beheaded. “They beheaded soldiers,” he said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was shown extensive graphic images of the aftermath of the attacks during a visit to Israel, also did not mention any beheaded babies.
There is no doubt that widespread atrocities and war crimes were committed during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and that children were killed. Yet in many narratives, the burned or beheaded babies story still forms one of the most harrowing details of the October 7 massacres. According to major Israeli media outlets that have worked diligently to identify all of the victims of the October 7 attacks, there was one infant killed that day: a 9-month-old named Mila Cohen who was shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri as her mother held her in her arms. Cohen’s mom, who was shot in the arm, survived.
None of these facts have altered Biden’s commitment to making the debunked beheading claim a key detail in his impassioned defense of the legitimacy of Israel’s mass killing campaign, during which more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 7,000 children. On December 12, at a reelection campaign event at the Salamander hotel in Washington, D.C., Biden said, “I saw some of the photographs when I was there — tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman.”
Israel’s War on Gaza
Biden is the president of the most powerful nation on Earth, not a random poster on social media. He supposedly has access to the best intelligence in the world. If he actually has evidence to support this beheading claim — apparently evidence that his closest advisers have not seen — then he should produce it.
This allegation is one of the most gut-wrenching and horrifying charges to be made about the events of October 7. It is not some insignificant detail that can be explained away by Biden’s age or his tendency to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes. It was a detail that fueled the rage and quest for revenge, and was cited when Biden declared that Israel is fighting subhumans in Gaza. “They’re animals. They’re animals,” Biden said on December 12 when he repeated the beheading claims. “They exceeded anything that any other terrorist group has done of late that I — in memory.”
The verified facts, as we currently understand them, are horrifying enough. So why does Biden feel the need to bolster his defense of Israel’s indiscriminate war against Gaza by spreading debunked allegations? The latest estimations of the death toll on October 7 are as follows: Israel has officially identified approximately 1,200 Israelis or Israeli residents killed. Of these, 274 were soldiers, 764 were civilians, 57 were Israeli police, and 38 were local security guards. Among the civilians killed, in addition to 9-month-old Mila Cohen, 12 of them were between the ages of 1 and 9 years, and 36 were between the ages of 10 and 19. There are reportedly still bodies that have not been officially identified.
It also must be noted that multiple Israeli media outlets have reported on “friendly fire” incidents in which Israeli military forces responding to the attacks killed Israeli citizens, though there has been no definitive calculation of the number of such deaths and may never be one.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has done extensive work trying to confirm the actual events of October 7 and published an important story debunking some of the most shocking false claims made in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. Biden should read it.
The post Joe Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim That He Saw Pictures of Beheaded Babies appeared first on The Intercept.
This Is Not a War Against Hamas
Palestinians cry beside the bodies of their family members at Nasser Hospital after Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Dec. 10, 2023.
Photo: Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images
The events of the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. On Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing congressional review to ram through approval of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10. A month later, with the death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood.
Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S. news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his “great, great friend” Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.
The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has suggested they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that unverified allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes.
Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.
Injured children receive treatment on the floor at the Shuhada Al-Aqsa hospital following an Israeli bombardment on Az-Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip on Dec. 10, 2023.
Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Israel’s Dystopian Game Show
The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period. Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”
If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been “justified” in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in “self-defense” as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily.
Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1, Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic language website, it encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that is terrorizing them.
Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases, the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One such message read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.” Blinken attributed the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I think the intent is there,” he said. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians. “It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people. It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said. “But it’s not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not doing that.” One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby believes the IDF’s intent to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, death, or flight.
Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative report by the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander. “Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.
Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity. Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is otherwise.
Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down their alleged rifles.
Israel’s War on Gaza
Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping detainees. “Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News. “We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially suicide bombers with explosive vests.” Regev was asked about this clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos of prisoners of war. “I’m not familiar with that level of international law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said.
Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz reported that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.
So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.
Bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks are placed in a mass grave in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Nov. 22, 2023.
Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images
No Path of Resistance
It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.
Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s 75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify war crimes. “You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently told Intercepted. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”
Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return, killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers, they are killed or sent into military tribunals. Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead. Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to address the grave injustices imposed on them.
You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support. One aspect of this should certainly probe Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up Hamas and facilitating the flow of money to the group. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud comrades in 2019.
But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza. Israel’s president said as much on October 13. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. “Look, this could be over tomorrow,” Blinken said December 10. “If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.” That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles.
Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass” in Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.
The post This Is Not a War Against Hamas appeared first on The Intercept.
TikTok Influencer Recruiting for Secret U.S. Bases in Israel
Twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army infantry veteran Thomas Latham is one of countless young people on TikTok, but he’s used it for a different purpose than most: recruiting veterans to staff secret U.S. military bases in Israel.
“Being a contractor is lit, in America this view would be $4,000 a month,” says the superimposed text on a TikTok post by Latham. His phone camera pans across the view from a high-rise in the Israeli town of Beersheba. In 2017, the Israeli military celebrated the construction of a U.S. military base in the town — a presence the Pentagon tried to downplay.
The video is one among many on Latham’s feed, where he frequently extols life as a military contractor. Latham regularly posts job opportunities to help veterans trying to find work after the military, he said in an interview with The Intercept. At first, the TikTok posts came as part of his work as a recruiter for the private security contractor Triple Canopy. Since leaving Triple Canopy, he’s recruited for other firms too, but sometimes he just posts.
Thanks to the job listings and other commentary, Latham’s TikTok account provides a rare glimpse into the secretive world of national security contracting.
“People like me because I don’t gatekeep information.”
“I think what makes it work so well is it’s an industry clouded in mystery,” Latham told The Intercept. “People like me because I don’t gatekeep information.”
Amid all the self-serving talk in the military contracting world about service and honor, Latham’s honesty stands out, especially when it comes to companies’ real motive: their bottom line. “Private defense companies after seeing another conflict on European soil,” says the text on one TikTok, as a camera zooms in on a tuxedo-clad man opening his arms and grinning.
“Private contracting, regardless in which realm — you need conflict you need things to guard. You need things to protect,” Latham said. “Without anything going on, contracts are not going to pay as much.”
For critics of U.S. defense spending, however, the contracts speak to a bloated military budget that outsources its own security, creating a windfall for private security firms to do what used to be a government job.
“It really speaks to our priorities that the Pentagon has divested from essential functions like base security,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information, who noted that defense priorities seemed to be tailored to contractors.
Latham worked as a recruiter for Triple Canopy until March, before taking up a recruiting contract for a smaller firm, which he declined to identify. (Though Latham still posts contracting opportunities, he said he now works for the U.S. Forest Service.)
Many job listings of the sort posted by Latham require government security clearances, meaning that potential candidates will frequently be military veterans or those who have already worked in the private security world. Both communities, and the significant overlap between them, can be insular and are known for informal sharing networks.
“As mysterious as the defense industry is, I managed to open a gate for Triple Canopy,” Latham wrote in a LinkedIn post, “to a direct market of qualified individuals.”
A TikTok Thomas Latham posted from Beersheba, Israel on March 14, 2023.
Photo: The Intercept
Younger Recruits
With companies needing to reach a younger candidate pool for contracting gigs, Latham is at the vanguard of recruiting. He is using TikTok, the China-based social media giant that allows for sharing short, often informally made video clips, as a new vein for tapping into the networks of qualified potential applicants. TikTok is especially popular among young users who, like Latham, peruse and post on the platform to engage with everything from entertainment to news.
William Hartung, an expert on defense contracting with the Quincy Institute, said companies like Triple Canopy may be taking the novel approach to expand their reach among candidates. He said, “It may be as simple as seeking platforms where they are more likely to reach younger potential recruits.”
After leaving the army in 2021, Latham was approached by Triple Canopy about a job in Kuwait. He was so excited, he took to TikTok to post a 15-second video letting people know how much they could make working there. The post quickly went viral. Triple Canopy took note — and offered him the recruiter job. (Constellis, which owns Triple Canopy, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“The reason why I got into this was to help veterans land jobs in a field that they’re already familiar with,” Latham said. “I understand how it is to be a veteran, how hard it is to find a job in a bunch of different industries you never really fit in.”
The golden age of private security contracting, Latham said, was during the Iraq War. In the era following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration sought to privatize its global war effort, handing companies contracts for everything from logistics to providing security. In the first 10 years of the Iraq War, the U.S. spent nearly $140 billion on contracts with businesses, private security contractors among them.
The most notorious of the private security firms was Blackwater, which massacred 17 Iraqi civilians in a single notorious incident and kicked off a national discussion about contractor accountability — and a lengthy legal fight.
In one TikTok post referencing the Iraq era, Latham makes light of a 2014 merger between Triple Canopy and Academi, Blackwater’s successor. A TikTok user asked Latham in a comment, “Isn’t Academi formerly known as Blackwater?” Latham refers to the firm in a response as “a company that shall not be named.” He cracks, “I’m unsure; I’ve never heard of that company before and neither have you.”
Whatever the companies’ names, the post-September 11 wars were a windfall for the industry — and for the cohort of veterans and other security personnel who found new, if sometimes dangerous, employment. At the height of the security contractor boom, Marine veterans could make as much as $200,000 a year.
“I’ve met people that were veterans. They were like, ‘Yo, dude, I have no money, I have nothing.’ Now they’re making money that they would never even imagine.”
“I’ve met people that were veterans. They were like, ‘Yo, dude, I have no money, I have nothing.’ Now they’re making money that they would never even imagine,” Latham said. “You kind of feel good after being a part of that.”
Hartung said the jobs offer veterans opportunities to make an income that might not otherwise be available to them. “Many veterans struggle to find adequately paying jobs when they leave the service, especially those with families to support,” he said. “Working as a private security contractor can be relatively well paying, and it uses skills that ex-military personnel learned during their time of service.”
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, fewer employment opportunities became available, though Latham said newer conflicts might change that. In January, he posted a listing on TikTok for a Triple Canopy gig in Germany, where the Pentagon’s European Command runs much of its effort to support Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.
A screenshot of a TikTok Thomas Latham posted on July 13, 2023.
Photo: The Intercept
“A Lot More in Play With Particularly Israel”
“Ever since Hamas invaded Israel,” Latham said in a TikTok two days after the attack, “there’s been chatter about if we’re gonna get out there and expand within Israel.” The chatter, he explained, was coming from “a lot of my buddies in the private sector.” In the TikTok, Latham superimposes himself in front of a screengrab of a contract listing for a security detail in Jerusalem. The job listing doesn’t disclose who the work is for, and Latham, using his expertise, sorts through some possibilities.
He says in passing that “there are contracts that have dropped” to support U.S. Special Operations Forces, the military’s secretive elite units, which the Pentagon has acknowledged are operating in Israel.
Latham concludes that the job listing is likely for a position with SOC, a Virginia-based security firm, to work for WPS — or World Protective Service, which does security for the U.S. State Department around the globe. After naming a few of the listing’s requirements, he said, “So it just makes sense that it’s a WPS contract and it’s SOC’s WPS contract — if I was a betting man.”
“There’s a lot more in play with particularly Israel that not a lot of people know about. We have military bases there.”
The video is typical, with Latham explaining to both potential security recruits and laypeople about how the contracting jobs work, but also delving into the geopolitics that drive the industry. The short video about the Israel posting offers Latham’s explanation why assignments are cropping up there in the aftermath of the Hamas attack: because U.S. installations there were “taken completely off guard by all this.”
“There’s a lot more in play with particularly Israel that not a lot of people know about,” Latham says. “We have military bases there, multiple military bases there.”
Latham is referring to the web of bases the U.S. quietly maintains in Israel. In August, the Pentagon awarded a $38.5 million contract to build facilities for housing troops at a secret base in Israel, The Intercept recently reported.
Other bases include weapons stockpiles the U.S. military has maintained in the country since the 1980s, originally intended for use by the U.S. in the event of a regional war but which Israel has increasingly drawn on for its own purposes over the years. (President Joe Biden recently asked Congress to remove nearly all restrictions on Israel’s ability to access the stockpiles, as The Intercept reported last month.)
Israel’s War on Gaza
Last year, the U.S. Army awarded Triple Canopy a $21 million contract for armed security guards at an undisclosed and not previously reported communications site in Israel, according to procurement records. The work requires a secret-level security clearance.
Latham’s TikTok account, with some 17,000 followers, appears to drive significant numbers of people to private security job opportunities. Data Latham posted on engagement with links on his social media postings show over 1,000 people clicking through to each one of three security job postings in Israel, Kuwait, and Germany — the countries he has said he recruits for.
The conflict between compensation and undesirable locations is a recurring theme in Latham’s posts.
“When you thought you were done with international contracts, yet the offer though,” another TikTok is captioned.
“6 figures take home is cool and all, but what’s the living conditions lol?” a user replies. “A tent for 175k? Nah.”
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Secret Indian Memo Ordered “Concrete Measures” Against Hardeep Singh Nijjar Two Months Before His Assassination in Canada
The Indian government instructed its consulates in North America to launch a “sophisticated crackdown scheme” against Sikh diaspora organizations in Western countries, according to a secret memorandum issued in April 2023 by India’s Ministry of External Affairs. The memo, which was obtained by The Intercept, lists several Sikh dissidents under investigation by India’s intelligence agencies, including the Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
“Concrete measures shall be adopted to hold the suspects accountable,” the memo says. Nijjar was murdered in Vancouver in June, two months after being named as a target in the document, a killing the Canadian government said was ordered by Indian intelligence.
The memo addresses India’s growing concerns about its reputation due to activism from Sikh dissident organizations and portrays its political enemies as extremist or even terrorist organizations. Titled “Action Points on Khalistan Extremism,” using the name Sikh activists use for a separatist state, the document lists several Sikh activist organizations it blames for engaging in “anti-India propaganda,” as well as acts of “arson and vandalization” targeting Indian interests in North America.
The document instructs officials at its consulates to cooperate with Indian intelligence agencies to confront the groups Sikhs for Justice, Babbar Khalsa International, Sikh Youth of America, Sikh Coordination Committee East Coast, World Sikh Parliament, and Shiromani Akali Dal Amritsar America. It suggests that Nijjar and several other “suspects” are affiliated with one of these groups, Babbar Khalsa International. Babbar Khalsa International is proscribed as a terrorist organization in the U.S. and Canada, but the other organizations named in the document are considered legal in both countries.
A leader of one of another of the listed groups, Sikhs for Justice, was the target of an Indian assassination plot, according to federal prosecutors in the U.S. The indictment, unsealed last week, accused Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, of working with Indian officials to kill Sikhs for Justice general counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen based in New York.
The leaked April memo from India’s Ministry of External Affairs does not explicitly order the killings of Sikh activists. Instead, it calls on Indian consular officials operating in the U.S. and Canada to work in cooperation with India’s Research and Analysis Wing, a foreign intelligence agency; the National Investigation Agency, a counterterror police force; and the Intelligence Bureau, an internal security agency akin to the FBI. Aside from Nijjar, a number of people accused in the document of having ties with BKI are believed to be based in Pakistan or currently incarcerated in India.
The Indian government did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication of this story. Following publication, the Indian government released a statement saying “there is no such memo.” “We strongly assert that such reports are fake and completely fabricated,” Indian spokesperson Shri Arindam Bagchi wrote. “This is part of a sustained disinformation campaign against India,” the spokesperson continued, also questioning The Intercept’s previous reporting: “The outlet in question is known for propagating fake narratives peddled by Pakistani intelligence. The posts of the authors confirm this linkage. Those who amplify such fake news only do so at the cost of their own credibility.”
While the U.S. and Canada have both now charged India with orchestrating assassinations against Sikhs in the West, the secret document obtained by The Intercept is the first public evidence showing that the Indian government was targeting these specific Sikh diaspora organizations and dissidents.
Those involved in Sikh diaspora advocacy said that the Indian government frequently characterizes any political activity by Sikh separatist organizations as militant or extremist in nature.
“The Indian government and media consistently aim to manufacture a narrative that describes any type of political advocacy for Khalistan or Sikh sovereignty as ‘Sikh extremism’ as a pretext to justify a repressive security-based response,” said Prabjot Singh, an activist and editor of the Panth-Punjab Project, a digital platform focusing on Sikh politics and sociopolitical issues. “It’s important to recognize that this is a strategy that India employs in Punjab to justify crackdowns on Sikh political organizing, while misusing diplomatic resources abroad to try and enlist other countries as partners in this effort.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi lays a wreath at the Air India Flight 182 monument in Toronto on April 16, 2015.
Toronto Star via Getty Images
Reputational Harm
India’s crackdown on Sikh activists comes in response to an ongoing campaign advocating for the creation of an independent Sikh state in the Indian province of Punjab. During the 1980s and 1990s, a conflict over separatism in Punjab claimed the lives of thousands of Sikhs and others before the insurgents were crushed by the Indian military. The counterinsurgency involved widespread human rights abuses by Indian security forces, as well as acts of terrorism by separatist militants, including, most notoriously, the deadly bombing of an Air India flight in 1985.
While Sikh separatism has largely been suppressed inside India, the cause has continued in the diaspora as a political movement that organizes protests and lobbies against the Indian government with the aim of holding referendums in Punjab. The Indian government has complained about the activities of diaspora Sikh activists to the Canadian and U.S. governments, often accusing these groups of terrorism.
The secret Ministry of External Affairs memorandum focuses its justifications for the crackdown against Sikh dissident groups on perceived reputational harm from their activities, as well as concerns about the influence of Sikh organizations in Western politics. Under a section labeled “Khalistan Extremism,” the document blames Sikh diaspora organizations for “defaming Indian government of so-called torturing, murdering and disappearing thousands of Sikhs” and “attempting to degrade India’s international image.”
Sikh activists have held major protests at Indian diplomatic missions in Western countries in recent years, some of which have involved provocative denunciations of Indian government officials and vandalism of diplomatic buildings. India has criticized the alleged failure by Western governments to defend its consular staff from perceived threats and harassment during such demonstrations. The document notes with concern the impact of these protests, while suggesting that the Khalistan activist movement is being assisted by public officials in Western countries.
“The pro-Khalistan organizations have become obviously more extreme,” the document says. “Their strategy has gradually shifted from narrative building to street protests, and inputs from our missions indicate that top officials of pertinent countries have provided a guiding hand in pro-Khalistan campaign which has posed a grave challenge to our global interests.”
Ties between India and Western countries have warmed in recent years, owing to a shared interest in containing China. Yet suspicions and tensions in the relationships remain, as the memo indicates. The document expresses the belief that Western politicians may be refusing to crack down on Sikh activists to exert pressure on India on other subjects, including its neutral stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Notably, we have raised our concerns about those elements to the U.S. and Canada constantly. But they keep using human rights and freedom of speech as pretexts, asserting that these organizations have not committed any crime within their territories,” the memo says. “Although the relation between India and the West continues to gain momentum, the Khalistan issue has become a subtle leverage. While depicting India as a strategic partner to contain China and Russia, the West keeps utilizing Khalistan as a geopolitical tool to squeeze India amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”
The classified memo is signed by Vinay Kwatra, India’s foreign secretary, and listed for distribution to several Indian consulates in North America. Kwatra’s signature was analyzed by a forensic handwriting expert and found with high confidence to match records of his signature in other, publicly available documents reviewed by The Intercept.
U.S. and Canadian officials have issued statements indicating that shared intelligence, including intercepted communications of Indian government officials, allowed them to determine that India was involved in Nijjar’s murder. Unsealed court documents in the murder-for-hire plot targeting Pannun likewise indicate significant U.S. government interception of electronic communications between Indian officials and people working on their behalf in the U.S.
A man stands on a burning cutout of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a Sikh rally outside the Indian consulate in Toronto on Sept. 25, 2023.
Photo: Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images
Global Assassination Program
The Indian government’s targeting of Sikh diaspora activists made global headlines with the brazen killing of Nijjar, who was shot to death in a hail of bullets outside a Sikh temple near Vancouver in June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused the Indian government of involvement in the gangland-style murder, leading to an ongoing diplomatic crisis.
In the months since Trudeau’s accusation, more details on what appears to be a broad-based Indian targeted killing campaign have become public, including the U.S. Justice Department indictment alleging that Indian intelligence agents also tried to assassinate Pannun, the New York-based American citizen and counsel for Sikhs for Justice. The assassination plot targeting Pannun was thwarted, a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York said, when an person working at the behest of the Indian government hired an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent to carry out the killing.
The indictment against Gupta, the 52-year-old suspect, who has a background in organized crime, includes statements alleging that more people in the U.S. were intended targets. According to documents from the case, Gupta, who is described in court documents as working in close cooperation with intelligence handlers in India, told the undercover DEA operative that India had “so many targets,” including individuals in New York and California, promising “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman after Pannun was killed.
Sikh diaspora activists have alleged Indian government involvement in the mysterious deaths of other dissidents, including, most recently, a 35-year-old British citizen named Avtar Singh Khanda, who died this year in what his family claims to be a case of poisoning. Khanda had reportedly been harassed and threatened by Indian intelligence in the lead up to his death in a British hospital just days before Nijjar’s murder. The Intercept reported this September that the FBI had also visited Sikh-American activists after the Nijjar’s murder to warn them of intelligence showing that they were at risk of assassination.
An assassination campaign against diaspora Sikh dissidents also appears to be underway in countries outside the West. A Sikh activist in Pakistan named Lakhbir Singh Rode, along with another unnamed dissident, were reportedly targets, according to classified Pakistani intelligence documents previously reported by The Intercept. The Pakistani documents said Rode and the other activist were being surveilled and deemed to be at imminent risk of assassination by India’s Research and Analysis Wing. (Rode reportedly died in early December, with press accounts attributing his passing to illness.) At least two other Sikh dissidents in Pakistan have been killed in recent years. According to Pakistani intelligence assessments, “anti-state activists and local criminal networks” working under the direction of RAW were behind the plots and planned to commit more killings of both Sikh and Kashmiri separatists based in Pakistan.
While India has a hostile relationship with Pakistan spanning decades, the revelation that Indian officials have been carrying out offensive intelligence operations in friendly Western countries has become a source of embarrassment for the Indian government. India responded to accusations by Canada that it assassinated Nijjar by halting visa service for Canadians and accusing Canada of acting as a safe harbor for terrorists. In public pronouncements toward the U.S. since the revelation of its alleged involvement in the targeting of Pannun, India has been more conciliatory, promising to conduct an internal inquiry to discover the facts behind the case.
Tensions With the West
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs document obtained by The Intercept expresses considerable alarm about the growing influence of Sikh diaspora movements in the West. Several prominent Sikh politicians in Western countries have a tense or hostile relationship with India, including Jagmeet Singh, a Canadian parliamentarian and major opposition party leader who was barred from entry to India in 2014 over public comments about its human rights record.
“There are about 1 million Sikhs in North America alone,” the Indian memo says. “The growing anti-India activities and propaganda by pro-Khalistan elements are of great concern for India.” The document goes on to say that members of diaspora Sikh organizations have “penetrated the mainstream politics in the U.S. and Canada,” and are working to “manipulate the countries’ policy towards India.”
In addition to calling for a targeted crackdown on Sikh diaspora organizations, the memo advises Indian authorities based in the West to build closer relationships with local law enforcement agencies and “think tanks,” while monitoring Sikh activists own contacts with government officials. The memo also calls for the recruitment of the Indian diaspora in this campaign. “Indian diaspora needs to be mobilized,” it reads, suggesting outreach to a number of low-profile groups.
“These organizations could be cultivated as vital force in the street confrontation with Sikh extremists,” it says. “Special efforts should be paid to establish cooperation with moderate Sikhs, so as to integrate the neutral Sikh community.”
The fallout from Nijjar’s killing and the attempted murder of Pannun continues to impact Indian ties with Western countries. According to Indian press reports, the U.S., Canadian, and British governments reportedly expelled senior RAW officials working at Indian consular offices in response to Nijjar’s assassination, with the U.S. blocking India from replacing its station chief in Washington. The moves have left RAW with no official footprint in North America for the first time since its founding in 1968.
“The chilling effect on speech that Sikhs are experiencing today is real. Some people who would otherwise speak out against [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi are nervous, some who would otherwise organize and protest over the recent foiled assassination plot are staying home for fear that they themselves could be surveilled, harassed, or experience violence of some kind,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University. “Many Sikhs left India seeking to seek refuge in North America, and it is unacceptable that some of those same people now fear that the India government could target them on Canadian or American soil.”
“Sikhs who speak out for Khalistan, which today is a political movement, who speak out to criticize India, or who speak out generally, could be caught up in the crossfire.”
Update: December 10, 2023, 1:40 p.m. ET
The story has been updated with the Indian government’s denial of the existence of the memo, received after publication.
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For Palestinians Who Just Left Gaza, Witnessing the War From Afar Evokes Helplessness and Grief
A 3 a.m. call startled Walaa AlAbssi awake. It was nearly a week into Israel’s retaliatory bombing of the occupied Gaza Strip. Just two months earlier, AlAbssi, 26, had left Gaza for the first time to attend graduate school in Dublin. When she picked up her phone and saw her sister’s name, her heart fell. A call at this hour could only mean tragedy.
“Everyone was screaming,” AlAbssi said. “‘May God never let you live my terror,’ she told me, ‘Pray for us, pray for us.’” The call disconnected.
Panicked and crying, AlAbssi redialed her sister over and over until, on the 10th try, she got through. An Israeli airstrike had just hit the house neighboring their family in Gaza City, her sister said, and a piece of shrapnel entered her younger brother’s wrist.
“All the windows were broken, and the doors flew in their faces,” AlAbssi said. “My brother was bleeding, everyone was screaming and did not know anything, and the world was dust.” The phone disconnected again, and AlAbssi was alone, shaking and sweating in her dorm room thousands of miles away.
“Everyone was screaming and did not know anything, and the world was dust.”
Since the bombing, AlAbssi has had a headache that won’t go away. She’s struggled to sleep and fallen behind on her coursework — all she can think about is what might happen to her family. She says she wakes up every night and scrolls through Telegram for images or names of her family members.
“I get drunk on the news and fall back asleep,” she said. “I feel so guilty.”
The Intercept spoke with several Palestinians who left Gaza in the months before October 7 to pursue opportunities for work or higher education. Like AlAbssi, they are racked with anguish and helplessness as the Israeli military attacks their families and destroys the homes they grew up in. They described the dissonance of witnessing from afar the familiar scenes of death and destruction while trying to cope with distress and grief in Western countries where daily life continues uninterrupted. Whether they will ever return to Gaza — and who will still be there if they do — is for now uncertain.
“When I first left Gaza, I just wanted to get a master’s in public health because the health system was so bad, and I wanted to help the fresh graduates to get jobs,” AlAbssi said. “But now everything has changed in Gaza. All my plans have changed.”
As journalists and others flood social media with images and videos from Gaza, psychologists have cautioned about the secondhand trauma people can experience from regularly consuming distressing content. For Palestinians who are from Gaza, the mental health impacts are compounded by survivor’s guilt, said Iman Farajallah, a California-based psychologist who grew up in the coastal enclave.
“We will have excessive worry, depression, stress, fatigue,” she told The Intercept. “We’ll have our trauma activated, and we will feel loss of control.” In the past two months, 11 members of Farajallah’s family have been killed in Gaza, and her 85-year-old father is displaced after his house was bombed.
“You are seeing in front of your eyes that your family is suffering and might be killed,” she said, “but you can’t do anything about it.”
Left/Top: Walaa AlAbssi, left, and her siblings Reema and Ahmed, who are still in Gaza, are seen on AlAbssi’s cellphone screen. Right/Bottom: Walaa AlAbssi poses for a portrait in her room in Dublin.
Photos: Molly Keane for The Intercept
Repetitive Trauma
It was hours before AlAbssi heard from her family again. Her parents and brother had run to Al Shifa Hospital as missiles fell around them. The doctors determined that the shrapnel had cut four tendons in her brother’s wrist, but because the hospital was overwhelmed with more urgent surgeries, they told him to come back in a week.
AlAbssi’s family could not wait. Two days later, they walked three miles to a different hospital where they learned that her brother’s arm was on the brink of gangrene and his nerves had been damaged. Doctors operated on him for two and a half hours and removed the shrapnel.
“Imagine that there is a fragment in your hand, and you do not know what it’s made of,” AlAbssi said. “That day was literally the worst day of my life.”
Before she left Gaza, AlAbssi had been first in her class of aspiring dentists and worked as an assistant teacher at Al-Azhar University’s dentistry school. She had received a scholarship to continue her education at University College Dublin. But since the attack near her family’s home, she has postponed exams and gotten extensions on assignments, including her graduate thesis — accommodations she has never needed. “This is not Walaa,” she said. “My real academic performance is not like this.”
According to Farajallah, Palestinians from Gaza are more likely to experience mental illness living under conditions of conflict, siege, and occupation since Israel implemented the blockade 16 years ago. After an Israeli military attack on Gaza in 2021, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that 9 out of 10 children suffered from conflict-related trauma. According to findings from Save the Children, in 2022, 4 out of 5 children in the Gaza Strip reported feeling depression, fear, and grief.
Israel’s War on Gaza
Farajallah said that Gazans’ experiences run deeper than trauma from the current war. “What’s been happening is a repetitive trauma over 75 years, and it’s 24/7,” she said, referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral lands in 1948.
Because of the dire circumstances in Gaza, thousands of Palestinians seek work or schooling outside the Strip. Palestinians who The Intercept spoke to expressed mixed feelings about leaving home: a gratitude for freedom of movement but bitterness at having to go elsewhere for opportunities.
“There’s nothing like Gaza. It’s the best place despite everything.”
Growing up in the village of Beit Lahia, Mohammed Dawas, 24, would gaze over at the Israeli villages just on the other side of the border wall.
“I used to say, Israel is lit up while Gaza was always in complete darkness. I used to say they are so lucky — their life is totally different than ours,” he said. “I constantly thought about leaving Gaza to a country without a siege.”
In 2019, he traveled to California and got married. Not long after, he moved to a rural town in Utah, where he found work in a factory to send money to his family.
Homesick, he quit his job in March and returned to Gaza but reluctantly came back to the U.S. in May to find work. “There’s nothing like Gaza,” he said. “It’s the best place despite everything.” The trip would be the last time he would see his family’s house standing and many of his relatives alive.
Walaa AlAbssi looks at photos of her family in Gaza on her phone in her dorm room in Dublin, on Dec. 6, 2023.
Photo: Molly Keane for The Intercept
“You Die a Thousand Deaths”
On October 14, Dawas woke up to a call that 25 of his family members had been hit by an airstrike on their home; 15 of them were killed, including his cousin and best friend, Yousef. The bodies of some of his family members remained under the rubble for two days before neighbors and rescue workers were able to pull them out.
“I still can’t believe I won’t see Yousef again,” Dawas said. “I’ve lost the joy of life. I still can’t express the horror of the shock.”
Just hours later, his own home in Beit Lahia was bombed. Unable to reach his mother or any of his six siblings, Dawas worried they might have died. Hours later, he called again and his mother picked up — they had all fled to the homes of other relatives in Beit Lahia, she told him, and survived two more bombings.
“I didn’t expect to hear my mother’s voice again,” he said. “We spent the whole call crying. It was like I was born again, as if I heard her for the first time in my life.”
Dawas told The Intercept that the war has triggered fear, anxiety, and depression within him — emotional responses accumulated from living through six Israeli attacks on Gaza.
“I haven’t been able to sleep well since then. I read all day and night, which made me sick. I was scared to death about my family,” he said. “I didn’t expect to lose anyone because I hadn’t lost anyone before.” He began to imagine the worst-case scenarios — one of which came true.
Mohammed Dawas, left, with his brother Saleh.
Photo: Courtesy of Mohammed Dawas
On December 1, the last day of the weeklong truce between Hamas and Israel, Dawas was working a day job removing fallen leaves in a backyard when his sister who lives in Egypt called. She told him that an Israeli airstrike hit the shelter in northern Gaza where Dawas’s 32-year-old brother Saleh was staying. Saleh was injured and had no access to medical treatment; his sister said that he seemed to have developed an infection and showed signs of kidney failure.
“I didn’t expect to lose anyone because I hadn’t lost anyone before.”
Dawas felt numb, except for a pounding pain in his chest. He said a quick prayer. Being close to God was the only way he could withstand the heartache.
“When someone is injured,” he said, “you start to imagine how he will die, and you wait, and you die a thousand deaths.”
The next day, Saleh died. Dawas was having trouble calling Gaza, so his relative in Amman called him and his mother on separate phones, and put them on speaker.
“I had broken down, and she was comforting me,” Dawas said. “She told me, ‘God chose him to be a martyr. Thank God Allah gave us strength in our hearts.’”
Walaa AlAbssi looks at a bulletin board at her university in Dublin, on Dec. 6, 2023.
Photo: Molly Keane for The Intercept
Coping With War
Everyone in AlAbssi’s family has been displaced by the war, leaving their homes to stay with neighbors and other relatives. Neighbors told AlAbssi that her family’s house had likely been bombed during Israel’s ground invasion into northern Gaza.
To cope with her family’s plight, AlAbssi spends time with a Palestinian friend and goes to protests alongside thousands of others in Ireland, where solidarity with Palestinians is widespread. But at the end of the day, she spends most of her time alone and at home.
The truce had alleviated some of her worry, and she was able to finish some assignments. Her professors have been sympathetic and accommodating, she said, and she’s gone to talk to her university’s well-being officer. But she still plans to spend Christmas break studying.
“Before the war, I was expecting to achieve high grades, but now I just want to succeed and pass,” AlAbssi said. “Thinking about there being no home in Gaza puts me under a lot of pressure.”
Dawas also struggles with the reality that the family and home he once knew are no more.
One of his sisters, her family, and his mother are staying in a United Nations school in the south and living off UNRWA donations, while his other brother and his family are stuck in the north. He feels helpless that he can’t even send money to his family — the main reason he returned to Utah — because they cannot receive it, and there’s nothing to buy.
Dawas has also found living in the U.S. distressing. Coming across posters of Israeli hostages and watching biased news coverage fills him with anger and fear. He said some Americans have gotten upset at him when he’s defended his family and Gaza.
He finds relief in driving long distances while reciting the Quran, listening to Hans Zimmer and Ivan Torrent, and walking through Utah’s Maxwell Park. But he has stopped going to the gym and has no appetite; he struggles to find steady work and put his plans to study computer engineering in the spring on hold.
“Every time I want to eat, I feel guilty. Everything is available to me, but my family cannot even drink water,” he said. “I constantly live with feeling humiliated and oppressed. It makes me not want to live. Life feels worthless.”
Correction: December 12, 2023
A previous version of this story stated that Mohammed Dawas’s cousin Yousef and Yousef’s two children were killed in an airstrike. In fact, the children were also cousins of Dawas.
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As U.S.-Funded Wars Rage in Israel and Ukraine, Pentagon Watchdog Warns of Military Failures
As calls grow in Congress to condition aid to Israel and halt funding to Ukraine altogether, the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General issued a report that details widespread failures in the Pentagon’s operations.
In a semiannual report to Congress, the watchdog found a breakdown in the process to provide care for sexual assault survivors, damaged artillery earmarked for Ukraine, and continued failures to monitor the Defense Department’s single most expensive program, the scandal-ridden F-35 fighter jet. Taken together, the inspector general’s findings paint a picture of a sprawling military-industrial complex that, while providing billions in aid to foreign militaries, has failed to solve long-standing issues that result in extreme levels of taxpayer waste.
“While we constantly hear from DOD officials and politicians backed by major weapons manufacturers that an ever increasing military budget is essential for our national security, the inspector general’s office consistently demonstrates that this is not the case,” Erik Sperling, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Just Foreign Policy told The Intercept. “Whether failing to ensure adequate oversight on the weapons we have spent billions sending to Ukraine, or the failed fighter jets we finance and send to Israel, our increased defense spending comes at a tremendous and wasteful cost to the American taxpayer and to the innocent civilians on the receiving end of our weapons.”
In October, President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve $75 billion in combined security assistance for Israel and Ukraine. The request would add to the $44 billion in security assistance already pledged to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, and the tens of billions of dollars in security assistance delivered to Israel over the past five years. Over the summer, Israel finalized a deal to purchase 25 new F-35s, financed with $3 billion in defense aid from the United States.
Just last month, the Department of Defense failed its sixth straight audit, underscoring the lack of oversight of the funds that Congress forks over to the armed forces every year. Among the rationales for its failure, the Pentagon unconvincingly offered that there is “progress sort of beneath the surface of a pass-fail,” and that “we keep getting better and better at it.” The Pentagon has also flubbed its oversight of the money it sends to U.S. allies; in June, the military found that an accounting error overstated the cost of Ukrainian defense aid by $6.2 billion.
In July, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to force the Department of Defense to clean up its act by proposing that any part of the agency that fails to complete a clean audit be forced to return 1 percent of its budget.
“From buying $14,000 toilet seats to losing track of warehouses full of spare parts, the Department of Defense has been plagued by wasteful spending for decades,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote in a statement at the time. “Every dollar the Pentagon squanders is a dollar not used to support service members, bolster national security or strengthen military readiness.”
Under the Inspector General Act, agency oversight officials are required to send reports to Congress every year summarizing their activities and findings. The most recent Defense Department report covers the period from April through September and was published on November 30. It includes summaries of investigations, updates on compliance with oversight actions, and unresolved issues still plaguing the department.
It contains over a dozen advisories and evaluations regarding programs supporting the war in Ukraine, many of which remain classified.
Among those issues made public, the inspector general found that heavy artillery howitzer cannons and dozens of Hummers destined for Ukraine required significant repairs and had not been properly maintained. The report noted that the contractors paid by the government had failed to provide upkeep on critical military equipment that could have just as easily been used by the U.S. military.
The inspector general also found that Pentagon officials did not always explain the payments they made when terminating contractors’ projects, potentially overpaying contractors to the tune of $22 million.
Most egregiously, the Defense Department failed to report inventory for its $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program — an issue that dates back to the program’s launch in 2006.
According to the report, “the DoD OIG has identified the F-35 JSF program as a material weakness impacting the DoD’s ability to achieve a clean audit opinion.” Despite its price tag, this weapons system often fails to function and was recently found to be less efficient than its predecessor for providing close air support in combat.
Beyond financial breakdowns, the inspector general also reported that the Defense Department’s protocols for protecting its employees are not routinely followed. The Pentagon’s medical treatment facilities failed to consistently triage and record care administered to survivors of sexual assault, with the lack of documentation creating barriers for access to medical care after an assault.
According to the report, holes in the Defense Department’s documentation process could lead to sexual assault victims not being prioritized for emergency care, receiving a forensic exam to document their assault, or being given access to a victim advocate. The finding comes after sexual assault reports have risen across multiple divisions of the military.
In the report’s introduction, Inspector General Robert Storch hinted at part of the problem of reining in the Department Defense: recalcitrance on the part of the officials being audited.
“During this period, we encountered difficulties with timely responses from the DoD, specifically regarding provision of information and security reviews of our reports,” Storch wrote. By way of example, he added, “A Navy command initially refused to provide requested records to DoD OIG evaluators based on its misunderstanding of the DoD OIG’s jurisdiction and authority to have access to all information available to the DoD.”
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Rand Paul Wants to End Undeclared War in Syria
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul plans to force a vote this week on a joint resolution to remove all U.S. troops from Syria within 30 days, according to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with his plans.
“The American people have had enough of endless wars in the Middle East,” Paul told The Intercept by email. “Yet, 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria with no vital U.S. interest at stake, no definition of victory, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization to be there.”
The U.S. conflict in Syria is just one of several forever wars — including conflicts in Niger and Somalia — that continue to smolder more than two decades after 9/11 and more than two years after President Joe Biden declared that, for the first time in 20 years, the United States was “not at war.”
Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for militarism and human rights for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, welcomed Paul’s effort as a necessary check on the executive branch. “A debate really needs to happen about ‘why are we in Syria?’ and ‘what threat to the U.S. homeland do the groups we are fighting pose?’” she told The Intercept. “The U.S. has been engaged in these wars for two decades and Congress has been derelict in its duties while the executive branch has vastly expanded these wars. So Sen. Paul’s War Powers Resolution is one of the few vehicles that serves to force Congress to take a vote.”
The U.S. military has been conducting operations in Syria since 2014. America’s bases there and in neighboring Iraq ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” despite the fact that the Pentagon concluded in 2021 that the Islamic State in Syria “probably lacks the capability to target the U.S. homeland.” A recent inspectors general report to Congress noted that “ISIS capabilities remained degraded” and that the group now operates in “survival mode” in both Iraq and Syria.
War in the Shadows
For almost 10 years, the U.S. has battled a rotating cast of enemies in Syria, including the Syrian Armed Forces and pro-Syrian government forces; terrorist organizations such as ISIS; Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Iranian-backed militias; the Russian-backed Wagner Group; and the armed forces of Turkey, according to Paul’s bill, which notes that Congress has not declared war against Syria or any group in that country.
“The United States cannot fix Syria. Yet we still have 900 troops in eastern Syria for eight years, going on nine,” said Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria for the Obama administration, in a briefing to congressional staffers this week. “I’m puzzled that we haven’t had a national debate on what U.S. troops are doing in Syria four years after they captured the last territory from ISIS. We need to have that debate about the authorization of military force. There needs to be a definition of the mission of U.S. forces. There needs to be a set of metrics to measure their success or failure. And there need to be benchmarks and timelines. Otherwise, you’re in a forever war.”
Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, bases in both Syria and Iraq have come under regular attack as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.
Between October 17 and December 4, U.S. forces on these bases have been attacked at least 76 times — 40 times in Syria, 36 in Iraq — according to figures provided to The Intercept by the Pentagon. The strikes have been conducted by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, and close-range ballistic missiles. The U.S. has increasingly responded by targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran-affiliated militant group facilities and personnel.
U.S. military outposts in Syria and Iraq are also plagued by thefts by criminal gangs and militias, according to an Intercept investigation. The losses of “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including Javelin guided missile launch systems, drones, high-explosive grenades, and armor-piercing rounds — from 2020 to 2022 were detailed in exclusive documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
Paul’s resolution, introduced on November 15, cites the 1973 War Powers Resolution — which was “designed to limit the U.S. president’s ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad” — and directs the Biden administration to remove the U.S. military from hostilities in Syria since there has been neither a declaration of war nor any other specific authorization from the legislative branch.
Paul’s current legislation follows his October effort to require the U.S. to withdraw its troops from another long-running, undeclared quasi-war in Niger. That effort failed, as did another proposal earlier this year by Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz directing the removal of U.S. troops from Syria. Gaetz’s War Powers Resolution to withdraw most U.S. forces from Somalia received bipartisan support in the spring but did not garner sufficient votes. New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman has also failed in repeated attempts to limit the U.S. military presence in Syria and restore congressional war powers in regard to the U.S. conflict there.
“Some Automatic Pilot Policy”
The Intercept contacted the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — both of whom pledged in 2019 to help bring the forever wars to a “responsible and expedient” end — as well as Rep. Bowman to inquire if they supported Paul’s bid to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. None provided answers in time for publication.
The Biden administration claims that U.S. military personnel are deployed to “strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from Syria.”
Ford questioned this supposed strategic significance, ticking off the names of Syrian towns and asking if the congressional staffers had heard of them. “There’s a reason you haven’t: because they’re not vital to U.S. national security interests. I simply fail to understand why we have U.S. troops there,” he said. “Troops should be the last resort. It should not be some automatic pilot policy that you carry over from year to year — especially not when these troops are being fired at.”
Paul echoed those sentiments. “If we are going to deploy our young men and women in uniform to Syria to fight and potentially give their life for some supposed cause, shouldn’t we as their elected representatives at least debate the merits of sending them there?” he asked in his statement provided to The Intercept. “Shouldn’t we do our constitutional duty and debate if the mission we are sending them on is achievable?”
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Members of Israel’s Ruling Likud Party Once Planned to Assassinate Henry Kissinger
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at the age of 100 — though if the predecessors of Israel’s ruling Likud party had their way, he may not have made it even halfway to the century mark.
Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.
In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.
“A die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers has put out a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported in 1977, citing senior State Department officials. When reports of a possible hit on Kissinger first came out, it was believed to be the work of Palestinian militants, but senior officials told the paper that they were certain that the threat was emanating from the Likud party.
The Likud hard-liners who put up the money — described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc” — were reportedly upset at Kissinger’s diplomacy around the end of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. Kissinger had been instrumental in disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria that saw Israel withdrawing from territories it had conquered. On the Israeli side, Likud’s rival Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to agree to the compromises.
The 1973 war had also led to a damaging oil embargo by Arab states against the U.S., and Kissinger was said to be willing to cut any deal necessary to turn the spigot back on — which the 1974 disengagement deals accomplished.
Of the hit, the Daily News reported, “The motive was said to be revenge against Kissinger for allegedly selling out Israel during his Mideast shuttle diplomacy.”
The Likud strongly denied the allegation at the time, as did the State Department. (The reported plot to assassinate Kissinger is just one of several instances in which Israelis displayed intense hostility toward their strongest ally, including a 1967 attack on an American spy ship and an espionage operation in the 1980s.)
While Kissinger succeeded in his short-term goal of ending the oil embargo and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, his efforts at statesmanship intentionally obstructed efforts to find a long-term solution to the permanent occupation of Palestine.
As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote today, Kissinger went against Richard Nixon’s own directive to find a way for lasting peace when everything and anything was on the table. Kissinger believed that a constant state of conflict and instability granted America an upper hand in the Middle East. “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best,” Kissinger told his subordinates at the onset of the Yom Kippur War.
Despite his Jewish heritage, Kissinger showed little regard for the Israeli state or Jewish people beyond their utility to the American empire. Helping Soviet Jews escape to the United States to avoid the Russian crackdown was “not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1973, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
Whatever animosity once existed between the Likud party and the former secretary of state was long past them. Today, the party is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first elected to the post in 1996. (That election was prompted by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who many believe was the last great hope for enduring peace in Israel.)
Netanyahu has taken a page out of the Kissinger playbook, using unending conflict to cling to power and inviting ever more extremist politicians into the Likud coalition. In September, just weeks before Israel launched its all-out war on Gaza, the pair had an affectionate meeting in New York.
Israel’s bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip in recent weeks rivals the concentrated bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia that Kissinger oversaw decades ago.
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Henry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100
Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.
There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.
The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.
Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.
As National Security Adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.
In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”
“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.
Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”
North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.
As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.
In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans. In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.
Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”
Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.
“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”
“He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”
Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”
Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.
In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.
Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.
“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”
Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.
Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.
To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.
“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.
When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”
“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”
“Come on now.”
“No, no, no, were particularly —”
“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”
When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”
“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war.”
Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”
Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.
“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”
Correction: December 1, 2023
An earlier version of this article included a pre-publication title for Carolyn Eisenberg’s book. The story has been updated to reflect the actual title.
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India Accidentally Hired a DEA Agent to Kill Sikh American Activist, Federal Prosecutors Say
On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had filed charges against a man allegedly working for the Indian government to orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. citizen earlier this year. An Indian government official allegedly instructed Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, to coordinate the murder of a Sikh separatist living in New York.
The indictment alleges that Gupta, after being recruited by the Indian government official, hired a hitman and paid him a $15,000 advance to carry out the murder this past summer. The hitman was actually an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to a report on the indictment in the Washington Post, the intended target of the killing was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikh activist group Sikhs for Justice. In the DEA’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said investigators had “foiled and exposed a dangerous plot to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”
“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil.”
The alleged assassination plot against Pannun was in the works around the same time as the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was also a leader in the Sikh separatist movement. Nijjar was murdered outside Vancouver in June; the Canadian government has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence in his death.
The Indian government has come under scrutiny over an alleged transnational assassination program targeting its opponents in foreign countries. In addition to the murder of Nijjar, The Intercept has also reported on alleged FBI warnings to Sikhs in the U.S. as well as alleged plots by India to assassinate Sikh activists in Pakistan. Both the Nijjar killing and the Gupta plot came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the U.S. in June.
“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil, coinciding with Modi’s White House visit,” said Pritpal Singh, a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee who was among the Sikh American activists who were contacted by the FBI after Nijjar’s killing.
The details in the indictment reveal a murder-for-hire plot gone awry. Gupta, 52, described as being tied to the international weapons and narcotics trade, was alleged to have worked as a co-conspirator to an Indian government official with a background in security and intelligence. Along with others based in India and elsewhere, Gupta helped plan the murder of Pannun over his advocacy for an independent Sikh state and criticisms of the Indian government. In return, the government official indicated he would help secure the dismissal of criminal charges against Gupta in India, including during a meeting in New Delhi to discuss the plot. The Indian government official provided Gupta with details about Pannun, including his address, associated phone numbers, and his daily routine, which Gupta then gave to the DEA agent working undercover as a hitman.
According to the indictment, the Indian government official told Gupta that he was targeting multiple people in the U.S. In communications, the Indian official told Gupta that he had a “target in New York” as well as another target in California. Gupta replied: ”We will hit our all Targets.” The indictment also indicated that Pannun was surveilled in New York using a cellphone application that tracks GPS coordinates and enables the user to take photographs. The Indian official allegedly agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder of Pannun, with a $15,000 advance paid to the undercover agent around June 9, according to the indictment. Nijjar was fatally shot less than 10 days later outside a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburbs.
According to the indictment, Gupta instructed the DEA hitman to kill Pannun “as soon as possible,” but not when high-level meetings were expected to take place between U.S. and Indian officials. Modi was scheduled to visit the U.S. on an official trip between June 21 and 23. On June 18, the day of Nijjar’s murder, the Indian government official sent Gupta a video of the Sikh leader slumped dead in his car. The next day, Gupta allegedly contacted the undercover DEA agent to tell them that Nijjar, like Pannun, had also been targeted for his opposition to the Indian government, telling the agent, “We have so many targets.”
Gupta also allegedly promised “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman, referring to more assassinations that would be carried out in the future. In a video call with the DEA agent, roughly a week before the killing of Nijjar, Gupta and a group of men dressed in business attire and seated in a conference room allegedly told the agent, “We are all counting on you.”
There is mounting evidence that India is running a transnational targeted killing program against dissidents. Documents reported by The Intercept last week alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing was coordinating the murders of individuals in Pakistan, using local criminal networks and assets based in the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. A slew of Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in Pakistan have been killed over the past few years, the pace of which has picked up in recent months. Such killings may be taking place in the West as well. In addition to Nijjar, in recent years a number of Sikh activists have died in mysterious circumstances in the United Kingdom and Canada, prompting accusations from family members and others of Indian government involvement.
According to the indictment, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in late June. He is charged with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Gupta is currently “in jail waiting to answer to these charges,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.
The accusations against Gupta expand the scope of what is publicly known about India’s alleged assassination campaign in Western countries.
“These revelations are deeply unsettling and have shocked our community,” said Singh. “The Indian rogue regime must be held accountable, and the perpetrators must face justice.”
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