Favorite When vacuum cleaners first showed up outside the cells at Guantánamo Bay, the men being held there were amused. Some of the detainees, poor farmers from Afghanistan or Yemen, had never seen such devices, and they started to joke that they resembled women. “This is a very fine-looking lady!” one man remarked, according to Mansoor…
Favorite The biggest Al Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no Al Qaeda. Instead, the vague, implausible threat by a group of construction workers in Florida to blow up U.S. buildings, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, was mostly the making of…
Favorite Faheem Qureshi was 13 years old when the war on terror came crashing into his life. Faheem lived in the village of Ziraki, in the tribal regions of northwestern Pakistan. He was coming home from a long day of errands and prayers when the missile struck. Flames ran up the left side of his…
Favorite Geoff Golberg watched his own face flicker across the screen in disbelief. A short video clip posted to YouTube and Twitter this March characterized him as a mortal enemy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The narrator, Hussain al-Ghawi, alleged Golberg’s “entire work aims at smearing Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE” — the…
Favorite New data obtained by The Intercept adds considerable detail to what we already know about former President Donald Trump’s relentless campaign against whistleblowers and leakers in the intelligence community. The Trump administration referred far more media leaks for criminal investigation each year than any of the previous 15 years, with the CIA accounting for…
Favorite The missiles that killed Salim bin Ahmed Ali Jaber and Walid bin Ali Jaber came in the night. Salim was a respected imam in the village of Khashamir, in southeastern Yemen, who had made a name for himself denouncing the rising power of Al Qaeda’s franchise in the Arabian Peninsula. His cousin Walid was…
Favorite Numerous federal agencies, including several branches of the military, buy video surveillance equipment that can’t legally be used in U.S. government systems and that is made by Chinese companies sanctioned on national security grounds, records and products reviewed by The Intercept indicate. The agencies purchased blacklisted hardware through a network of American resellers that…
Favorite More than a quarter of the ex-Colombian soldiers currently suspected in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse received U.S. military training, The Intercept confirmed Friday, with some of the alleged attackers participating in programs as recently as 2015 that ranged from vehicle maintenance and professional development to counterterrorism and drug war operations. Courses…
Favorite In the latest phase of her record sentence for whistleblowing, former National Security Agency linguist Reality Winner is a short drive to the blazing hot summertime beaches on Texas’s Gulf coast. But she can’t get near them. She can’t even go into the yard of a neighbor who invited her to aid in his…
Favorite Of the many mysteries surrounding the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, few have been more confounding than the connections between former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and Trump’s #StoptheSteal campaign. Most media outlets treated Flynn’s videotaped oath last summer, in which he uttered a well-known QAnon slogan, as a sort…
