Jeremy Scahill's Blog, page 11

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I have spent most of my adult life reporting from war and conflict zones around the world and on the front lines of social justice struggles in the United States. As a young journalist for Democracy Now! in the 1990s, I reported from Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Nigeria. After 9/11, I knew the Bush administration was going to target Iraq, and I began reporting regularly from Baghdad. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I came across Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans, prompting a de...

Exclusive: Julian Assange Strikes Back at CIA Director and Talks Trump, Russia, and Hillary Clinton

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is hitting back at Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo following a speech last week in which Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a “hostile nonstate intelligence agency” operating outside of the protections of the First Amendment. “We can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for,” Pompeo decla...

Rep. Jan Schakowsky Calls for Investigation Into Trump’s Ties to Blackwater Founder Erik Prince

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the most dogged opponent of Blackwater founder Erik Prince in the U.S. Congress, is blasting the Trump administration for using Prince as a shadow emissary for the White House. “He is the kind of unvetted, unscrupulous person that seems to fit very nicely, especially into the kinds of operations that they want done,” Schakowsky said in an exclusive interview for the Intercepted podcast. “This is exactly the kind of person who should be excluded from having anything to do...

Exclusive Premiere: Hip-Hop Artist Narcy Confronts Steve Bannon and Muslim Bannin’ in Auto-Tune

The Iraqi-Canadian hip-hop artist Yassin Alsalman, aka Narcy, first made a name for himself in 2003 when the U.S. invaded his family’s home country of Iraq. He was the frontman of The Euphrates, and quickly became a prominent voice for the young Arab diaspora in North America just as the “war on terror” — the torture at Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites, the shipping of prisoners to Guantanamo Bay — was kicking into high gear. His subsequent solo albums and collaborations have conveyed the reali...

Former Senior FBI Counterterrorism Agent Slams Trump on Torture and Muslim Ban

A veteran U.S. counterterrorism agent says that President Donald Trump’s executive order banning people from seven majority Muslim countries will harm the fight against terrorist organizations and make it more difficult for intelligence agencies to maintain partnerships with foreign partners in the battle against ISIS and al Qaeda.

“Any kind of blacklisting countries like this will probably ruin effective local partnerships that are already in place,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI special age...

Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts.

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill speaks with Seymour Hersh at his home in Washington, D.C. two days after Donald Trump’s inaugu...

Blackwater’s Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, and Brokering Mercenary Services

ERIK PRINCE, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to brokermilitary services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.

What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to selldefense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of a...

A Secret Catalogue of Government Gear for Spying on Your Cellphone

THE INTERCEPTHAS OBTAINED asecret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rareinsight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States.

The catalogue includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, as well as Boeing “dirt boxes” and dozens of more obscure d...

How Somalia’s Al Shabaab Turned Against Its Own Foreign Fighters

U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM AGENCIEShave long been preoccupied with the threat posed by the recruiting successes of the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab in Western countries. The group has managed to lure hundreds of foreign fighters — including some 40 Americans — to Somalia through online propaganda videos and word-of-mouth in disaffected immigrant communities.

In recent years, however, al Shabaab has turned on the foreign fighters in its own ranks, waging a brutal campaign to purge the perceive...

Documents: Green Beret Who Sought Job At CIA Confessed To Murder

On September 14, 2011, the CIA sent an alarming message to the Pentagon: a decorated U.S. special operations commando admitted during a job interview with the agency to hunting down and killing “an unknown, unarmed” Afghan man.

The claim triggered an investigation that spanned years and saw U.S. Army Major Mathew L. Golsteyn stripped of his Silver Star. While the admission has been reportedin the press, the Army’s investigation into the alleged killing has been largely conducted in secrecy.

T...