07 October 21
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Plus, Frances Haugen's testimony was written so even senators and elderly bloggers could understand.
I mean, even Senator Marsha Blackburn, the ranking Republican member on the Senate Commerce Subcommittee taking Haugen’s testimony, managed to keep herself relatively tethered to planet Earth during the festivities. This counts as something of a legislative miracle.
For her part, just as she was on 60 Minutes on Sunday night, and just as she must have been when she was funneling documents to the Wall Street Journal for its groundbreaking series on Facebook, Haugen was clear and strong and precise about the reckless, morally corrupt practices of the company at which she once served as product manager for civic misinformation. From CNBC:
"I saw that Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety," Haugen said in her written testimony. "Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism and polarization — and undermining societies around the world.”
Haugen made her case in such a lucid way, blessedly free of too much tech jargon, that it seemed designed to make senators (and elderly bloggers) understand easily the threats to the civic order to which Facebook was arguably willfully blind.
"I came forward because I recognized a frightening truth: almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook," Haugen said in her written remarks. "The company's leadership keeps vital information from the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world.”
Haugen said a turning point that convinced her of the need to bring information outside of Facebook was when the company dissolved the civic integrity team after the 2020 U.S. election. Facebook said it would integrate those responsibilities into other parts of the company. But Haugen said that within six months of the reorganization, 75% of her "pod" of seven people whom had mostly come from civic integrity left for other parts of the company or left entirely. "Six months after the reorganization, we had clearly lost faith that those changes were coming," she said.
Haugen was unsparing in her description of how the amoral algorithm driving Facebook and its platforms, especially Instagram, heedlessly causes damage as a matter of course to everyone from middle-school students to the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Much of the hearing was taken up by testimony regarding the deleterious effect that Facebook and Instagram have on young people, especially preteen and teenage girls.
Facebook has said that in a survey, eight out of 10 teen Instagram users in the U.S. said the platform made them feel better or had no change on their feelings about themselves. But Haugen testified Tuesday that the other 20% remaining is still significant on a platform boasting billions of users worldwide.
"In the case of cigarettes, 'only' about 10% of people who smoke ever get lung cancer," Haugen said. "So the idea that 20% of your users could be facing serious mental health issues and that's not a problem is shocking.”
The prevailing image of Facebook from both sides of the committee, and certainly from the witness table, was that of a faceless Borg-like collective, feeding and refueling itself on the grist it makes out of the lives of people it will never see. And beneath the questioning, you could hear a subtext that may indicate that the political institutions may slowly be coming to a bipartisan reckoning with the dangers to the republic inherent in corporate monopoly. If Facebook winds up as the gateway to that reckoning, it may be the greatest service the company ever will provide.
Protesters take part in the Women's March and Rally for Abortion Justice at the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Saturday. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty)
The department sought the preliminary injunction just days after it sued Texas over its new abortion law. Known as SB 8, the law bans almost all abortions in the state after about six weeks of pregnancy, even in cases of rape, sexual abuse and incest.
In his 113-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman said that from the moment SB 8 went into effect last month, "women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution."
He added: "[O]ther courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide. This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right."
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the court's decision "a victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law."
"It is the foremost responsibility of the Department of Justice to defend the Constitution," Garland said in a statement. "We will continue to protect constitutional rights against all who would seek to undermine them."
Pitman's ruling blocks enforcement of the Texas law on a temporary basis, and it's unclear how long it will be in effect. Texas has already filed notice that it will appeal Pitman's ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the state is expected to seek an immediate stay from the circuit court on Wednesday's order.
The DOJ's argument
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit against Texas last month, arguing that SB 8 is unconstitutional. It says the bill violates the Supremacy Clause as well as the equal protection afforded under the 14th Amendment. It also says it violates U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
It also takes aim at the bill's novel means of enforcement: It allows private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who helps a woman get an abortion, and to collect at least $10,000 in damages if they prevail in court.
The department says the enforcement mechanism is really an unconstitutional attempt to sidestep judicial review to prevent women and providers from challenging the law in federal court.
Judge Pitman agreed in his decision Wednesday night.
"A person's right under the Constitution to choose to obtain an abortion prior to fetal viability is well established," he wrote. "Fully aware that depriving its citizens of this right by direct state action would be flagrantly unconstitutional, the State contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme to do just that."
When he announced the department's lawsuit, Garland warned that the Texas bill and its enforcement scheme, if allowed to stand, could provide a model for other states to pass a similar law to restrict abortion or other constitutionally protect rights.
On this point as well, Judge Pitman appeared to agree. He said that by stepping in and issuing an injunction now, he could head off such a possibility.
"Had this Court not acted on its sound authority to provide relief to the United States, any number of states could enact legislation that deprives citizens of their constitutional rights, with no legal remedy to challenge that deprivation, without the concern that a federal court would enter an injunction," he wrote.
Texas has defended the constitutionality of SB 8, and had urged the court to deny the federal government's motion and dismiss the case.
Reaction from both sides of the issue
In a statement, the anti-abortion rights group Texas Right to Life called Pitman's decision "wildly broad" but added: "We are confident that the Texas Heartbeat Act will ultimately withstand this legal challenge and succeed where other states' heartbeat bills have not."
Abortion rights groups cheered the ruling.
"While this fight is far from over," said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in a statement, "we are hopeful that the court's order blocking S.B. 8 will allow Texas abortion providers to resume services as soon as possible."
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer walk out of a budget resolution meeting. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
On Wednesday, the gloves came off.
Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and leader of the progressive movement, took direct aim at Manchin’s statements and positions on the wide-ranging legislation that would invest in climate change, expand and shore up health-care programs, and overhaul the nation’s social safety net.
In particular, Sanders targeted Manchin’s view on the role that the government should play when it comes to health care, child care and other programs, criticizing the senator’s comments uttered hours earlier that he “did not believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society.”
“Is protecting working families and cutting childhood poverty an entitlement?” Sanders asked. After rattling off similar rhetorical questions, he concluded: “Perhaps most importantly, does Senator Manchin not believe what the scientists are telling us, that we face an existential threat regarding climate change?”
Sanders later insisted that “I’m not here to disparage Senator Manchin.” But the 15-minute news conference at the Capitol spilled into the open some of the private frustrations that Democratic senators have had for weeks about Manchin (W.Va.) and his conditions on the $3.5 trillion package — a price tag that Democratic leaders from Biden on down have conceded will shrink dramatically.
Also clearly irritating Sanders was the opaqueness of Manchin’s various demands related to the spending package, which Democratic leaders want to pass using a special budget procedure in the Senate called reconciliation that lets them avoid a Republican filibuster.
“Senator Manchin has been extremely critical of the $3.5 trillion proposal that many of us support,” Sanders said. “The time is long overdue for him to tell us with specificity — not generalities, but beyond generalities, with specificity — what he wants and what he does not want, and to explain that to the people of West Virginia and America.”
He later added that “it’s not good enough to be vague” and that a few outliers in the Democratic caucus should not have such power to sway what most Democratic lawmakers and what Biden want.
“I could, in five minutes, go to Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and say, ‘Chuck, I can’t support this bill unless you have a Medicare-for-all provision.’ But I’m not going to do that,” Sanders said. “It is wrong and it is really not playing fair that one or two people think that they should be able to stop what 48 members of the Democratic caucus want, what the American people want, what the president of the United States wants.”
He added: “Two people do not have a right to sabotage.”
Responding to Sanders, Manchin said in a statement, “Respectfully, Senator Sanders and I share very different policy and political beliefs. As he and I have discussed, Senator Sanders believes America should be moving towards an entitlement society while I believe we should have a compassionate and rewarding society.”
Sanders also said he would “absolutely” like to see more specific demands from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the other pivotal moderate who has perhaps been more secretive in public about her views on the reconciliation package. But the bulk of Sanders’s frustration was clearly reserved for Manchin.
In his news conference Wednesday, Sanders also made clear that he was not willing to concede that the agreed-upon top-line spending level of $3.5 trillion would have to come down, even as Biden has been telling Democratic lawmakers in recent days that the package will have to shrink to about $2 trillion.
Members of the Oath Keepers militia in Ferguson, Mo in 2015. (photo: Robert Cohen/St. Louis Dispatch)
“I have a wide variety of law enforcement experience, including undercover operations, surveillance and SWAT,” one wrote on the membership application.
"Communications, Weapons, K9 Officer for local Sheriffs office 12 years to present," another wrote.
“ I am currently working as a deputy sheriff in Texas,” a third typed.
These men, who had sworn to uphold the law, signed up to join an armed, extremist, anti-government group.
The Oath Keepers trade in conspiracy theories and wild interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. Its members have been involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. Some face charges in connection with their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The statements are part of a massive trove of data hacked from the Oath Keepers website. The data, some of which the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets made available to journalists, includes a file that purportedly provides names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of almost 40,000 members.
A search of that list revealed more than 200 people who identified themselves as active or retired law enforcement officers when signing up. USA TODAY confirmed 21 of them are still serving, from Alabama to California. Another 23 have retired since joining the Oath Keepers.
One man who filled out the form claimed he was a federal police officer and worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
These men are probably a small fraction of the law enforcement officers who joined the militia over the years, since the majority of people listed did not volunteer information about their employment. The leaked data does not indicate whether the people on the list are dues-paying members.
Founded after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Members issue a conspiracy-laden declaration of orders they will refuse to enforce, including disarming the American people.
Rhodes has long claimed that the group, which experts said is the largest unauthorized militia in the country, is made up primarily of active and retired law enforcement officers and military personnel.
Just one Oath Keeper serving in a police or sheriff's department is too many, said Daryl Johnson, a security consultant and former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Oath Keepers subscribe to anti-government conspiracy theories, so the fact that officers belong to an organization that believes in this type of stuff really calls into question their discretion and their ability to make sound judgments,” Johnson said.
More concerning is the fact that the Oath Keepers make their members swear an oath of allegiance, much like the police and military, Johnson said. That creates a dangerous conflict of interest.
“They look at the U.S. government as an enemy,” he said. “When it comes down to a crisis situation or an investigation involving other militias, where is this person’s allegiance? Most likely with the Oath Keepers and not the police department.”
Scott Dunn, who left the Oath Keepers board of directors in 2019 after disagreements with Rhodes, said the group's membership form asked people to list their relevant skills.
Rhodes "wanted to use that information as a searchable database, so we could punch in Oklahoma, and it would show us all the different specialties around Oklahoma, or we could search for a specific type of skill, and it would show which members had that skill," he said.
James Holsinger, a lieutenant with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland, is on the list. Holsinger is running for sheriff in the county, where Hagerstown is located.
He did not respond to several requests for comment.
On the form, Holsinger purportedly wrote that he “designed and implemented tactical rescue drills” and had “experience with an assortment of weapons (lethal and nonlethal).”
Officers joined the Oath Keepers
USA TODAY contacted dozens of active-duty and retired officers to ask why they joined the Oath Keepers. Most didn't respond; nearly everyone who did said they were no longer members. One retired Marine and correctional officer said he supports the group.
In 21 cases, law enforcement agencies or the men themselves confirmed they were still employed. Among the law enforcement identified on the membership list are:
- Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco, who told USA TODAY he paid for a year's membership in 2014.
- An officer at the Louisville Metro Police Department who was involved in a shooting in 2018.
- A former U.S. Army member who joined the New York Police Department and a former U.S. Army captain who joined the Chicago Police Department. Both are still police officers there.
- An 80-year-old, part-time officer at the Ashley County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas.
- A corrections officer in Riverside, California.
Maj. Eben Bratcher, operations chief with the Yuma County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, is one of them. Bratcher told USA TODAY he received newsletters from the group for "some time."
"I may have signed up many years ago but do not recall any specifics," Bratcher said. "I do know that I unsubscribed some time ago due to the sheer volume of email I received."
A note attributed to Bratcher on the sign-up list reads, "We have 85 sworn officers and Border (of) Mexico on the South and California on the West. I've already introduced your web site to dozens of my Deputies."
Bratcher said he didn't recall writing that. "It is probable that I spoke to numerous people about the new organization," he said.
Constable Joe Wright of Collin County, Texas, said he joined in 2012, when he was running for office for the first time.
"To be honest, I felt pressured to join it in this county for political support," Wright said. "The Oath Keepers, if you didn’t support them, you were going to get bad reviews."
Wright said he didn't know much about the group at the time. He said he remembers receiving a box of Oath Keepers paraphernalia, including brochures and stickers, after signing up. He said he threw it in the trash and hasn't engaged with the group since being elected in the county northeast of Dallas.
"I don’t support them," Wright said. "I’m not into radical. I’m into doing my job."
Officers say they're no longer members
Several officers admitted signing up but claimed their membership expired long ago.
Michael Lynch, an officer with the Anaheim Police Department in California, said he joined the Oath Keepers many years ago, but he didn’t renew his membership when he learned more about the group.
"I didn't get anything out of it," he said in an interview. "There was no local chapter or anything, so when it came time to renew, I was like, I'm not sending another $40."
Lynch was the officer who boasted of his undercover, surveillance and SWAT training.
“Obviously, we had no knowledge of this,” said Sgt. Shane Carringer, an Anaheim spokesman. “We will look into what options we have as a department while considering what rights our officer has."
Other departments have suspended or investigated officers for associating with the group.
Always an extremist group, but lately more extreme
It’s unclear from the hacked data exactly when the officers in question signed up. Experts on the Oath Keepers said the group has changed since its founding in 2009.
What started during the Obama administration as a group to fight what it saw as federal government overreach developed into a more hateful and paranoid organization, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She has tracked the Oath Keepers since their inception.
“Rhodes and company have become much more radical,” Beirich said.
The Oath Keepers was always an extremist group, she said, founded in nonsensical and hateful conspiracy theories, and it's always had an anti-government bent.
She and other experts said they were concerned about law enforcement officers who joined the Oath Keepers at any point.
“I don’t think police officers should be involved with extremist groups,” Beirich said. "You are a part of the government, you represent the full, whole community as a police officer, and there’s obviously a problem when you’re in a group that’s questioning the government’s right to do the things that the government has the right to do.”
J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said she understands how law enforcement officers could have joined the Oath Keepers years ago without knowing much about it.
Lynch, the officer in Anaheim, said he joined in 2016 after talking to recruiters at a booth at a gun show in Las Vegas. He said he thought they were an alternative to the National Rifle Association.
"People join stuff all the time without doing any due diligence," MacNab said. "And for years, the only due diligence you could have done was on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, and most police officers would immediately dismiss that as biased."
For most Americans, joining the Oath Keepers is an act protected by the First Amendment. But several Supreme Court cases have established that police departments can place broad limits on what their employees may say or write and what organizations they belong to.
Most officers are under the false impression that the First Amendment gives them the right to say just about anything on social media or in public, said Val Van Brocklin, a former federal prosecutor who trains police departments on using social media.
"The vast majority of cops in the country don't understand this," Van Brocklin said. "A public employer does not have to pay you for your insubordination or dishonorable conduct that sullies the badge and the uniform."
Protesters march during a Black Lives Matter demonstration for racial justice. (photo: Jason Whitman/Getty)
As homicides surged across the US last year, the number of Black females killed increased sharply as well
The FBI recorded at least 405 additional murders of Black women and girls last year as homicide surged across the country, and experts caution that even that stark number probably represents an undercount.
To families of victims and local activists, the release of the data is just the latest reminder that violence against Black women and girls often goes ignored, and should be made a more urgent public priority.
“What’s sad is that a lot of cases aren’t taken too seriously. It’s just another Black girl,” said Jennifer Redmond, whose 19-year-old daughter Sarayah Jade was killed last September.
Sarayah Jade was sitting in a Sacramento, California, apartment with friends when someone started shooting through the windows and walls. She tried to dodge the bullets but was hit, and later died at the hospital.
Since her death, Sarayah’s parents and siblings have fought to keep focus on her loss. They have held marches and passed out flyers, and have urged police to keep investigating the case.
“For them to get recognized, we the parents have to go out there, make the noise, let people know, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on. Pay attention,’” Redmond told the Guardian.
More vulnerable to violence
The increase in murders of Black women comes as the overall US murder rate rose nearly 30% during the pandemic, the biggest jump in six decades. The number of people murdered increased sharply across racial groups, and in cities big and small. Most of America’s homicide victims remain men, and Black men and boys continue to face the highest overall risk of homicide, with at least 2,400 additional Black men and boys killed in 2020 compared with 2019, according to homicide data reported to the FBI.
The rising murder rate has affected Black women across the country. Baltimore, Maryland, recorded the highest-ever number of women killed in 2020, with at least 48 women murdered throughout the year, many of them Black.
It’s not yet clear how much of the increase in killings of Black women last year was related to domestic violence, and how much might be caused by rising community violence or other factors, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St Louis, who studies murder trends.
But advocates and experts said the stark rise makes it clear it’s time to address the factors that have long made Black women face a three times higher homicide rate than white women, as well as why their risk of being murdered increased sharply last year.
“There’s never been a moment in our society where there’s been a reckoning with the particular kinds of violence that’s meted out against Black women,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black feminist legal scholar.
There are many factors that make Black women more vulnerable to violence, including widespread access to firearms, and barriers to access of preventive services and mental healthcare, factors that probably worsened during the pandemic, Crenshaw said.
And the intensely unequal way that coronavirus affected Americans of color almost certainly played a role in worsening violence against women, she added.
Many Black women are essential workers who had to continue working outside their homes during the pandemic.
“Does the loss of employment force them into circumstances that put them at greater risk of violence and death?” Crenshaw asked. “Does the fact that Black women are disproportionately the head of household and chief economic resource mean that they had to risk everything in order to just survive?”
Rosa Page, the founder of the advocacy group Black Femicide US, said the increase in murders of Black women in 2020 did not surprise her. In her work as a nurse, Page listened for years as Black women and girls described the history of abuse they had experienced, or knowing someone else who was abused or murdered.
“Black women and girls have been indoctrinated to believe everyone matters but themselves,” Page said.
When things “get rough, Black women are the first to be harmed”, said Ori Monroe, an organizer with Black Femicide US and co-founder of Black Women Lead/Black Femme Fund.
‘It feels like nobody cares’
Before the pandemic, Black women were twice as likely as white women to encounter an offender armed with a handgun, according to statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey, Rosenfeld said.
And homicides of Black women appear to have been on the rise, even before 2020’s murder spike, according to data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Coffy Davis, an activist from Little Rock, Arkansas, said she had noticed a rise in the murders of Black women and girls in Arkansas going back to 2018, but that she felt that “nobody in the community was paying attention, or noticed.
“It makes you feel invisible, or like nobody cares,” she said.
In June, Davis organized a march in Little Rock to draw attention to the toll of Black femicide. Similar demonstrations were held this year in Chicago, Illinois, and Atlanta, Georgia.
At the march, Davis read aloud the names of 92 murdered Black women and girls. Most of the women were killed by an intimate partner, the rest typically by someone else they knew, Davis said: a friend, an acquaintance, someone else’s boyfriend. One 10-year-old Black girl was shot this spring after her mother’s boyfriend got into an argument in a public park, Davis said. Another 13-year-old Black girl, Arianna Staggers, was killed in a drive-by shooting while inside her home in North Little Rock this spring.
There are signs that the higher rate of fatal violence against Black women is continuing this year. Through 29 September, Black Femicide US had tracked 1,068 Black women murdered across the US this year, Davis said.
Focusing on the murders of Black women can be difficult, several activists said, because it requires reckoning with the violence perpetrated within communities, and within families.
Activists and survivors had a range of views on the roles they thought law enforcement or new criminal sanctions should play in preventing homicides of Black women and girls.
Crenshaw, who helped found the #SayHerName campaign to highlight Black women killed by the police, said that calls to respond to Black women’s murders with more policing “don’t take into account the way that police themselves don’t make Black women safe”. “Many of the Black women whose names we say were killed when the police were called to help them.”
But all agree that intense efforts are needed to in order to prevent the killings of Black women.
There needs to be a “fundamental paradigm shift” towards addressing violence “as a public health issue”, said Tanya Sharpe, the director of the Centre for Research & Innovation for Black Survivors of Homicide Victims at the University of Toronto.
Acknowledging the way violence can spread in communities like a virus, and intervening in more comprehensive ways, could help people who want to reduce the killings “gain some traction”, she said.
Davis, the Little Rock activist, said she hoped for more prevention programs, and more support in particular for Black women who are experiencing domestic violence.
‘They’re not gonna get away with this’
Sarayah Redmond, the 19-year-old murdered in Sacramento last fall, was the youngest of three children. Her parents, Jennifer and Clifford Redmond said she loved her family, friends and Jordan tennis shoes fiercely.
The Redmonds said they had responded differently to their daughter’s passing. Clifford’s still angry, he said, especially when packages with shoes or equipment for the nail business Sarayah hoped to start arrived in the mail. “It’s hard to raise a baby from birth, spoil it, have it become your best friend and then have it end abruptly,” he said.
For Jennifer, photos and items for Sarayah bring a mix of comfort and sadness. She’s since held weekly marches in honor of her daughter and started a Facebook page to keep her memory alive. “I keep her name and face out there because I want everybody to have her face embedded in their head and have her name ringing in their ear,” Jennifer said.
Sarayah’s parents said they are troubled by the deaths of other Black women who lose their lives to gun violence. “It seems like more of the Black young girls are dying over things that have nothing to do with them. They may not be the intended victim, but the game has changed now and you can get a gun anywhere,” Clifford said.
There has yet to be any arrests made in Sarayah’s case and her mother says the lack of accountability for her daughter’s death has ramifications beyond this case. “They’re not gonna get away with this,” Jennifer said. “It’s not fair to my daughter and the other Black women and girls out there that are getting killed by their peers. It’s not fair that all these people are losing their lives.”
Afghans hoping to gain entry to the Hamid Karzai International Airport are contained by fighters from the notorious CIA-backed paramilitary unit known as 01, in Kabul on Aug. 24, 2021. (photo: Andrew Quilty/The Intercept)
The agency prioritized the evacuation of Zero unit members and their families even as many vulnerable U.S. employees and human rights activists were left behind.
But in the hectic, violent weeks between the Taliban victory and the U.S. military withdrawal, fighters belonging to a Zero unit known as 01 — and other linked militias known collectively as National Strike Units, or NSUs — helped the Americans secure Hamid Karzai International Airport. Firing warning shots day and night, 01 fighters sought to corral and search crowds of Afghans and foreigners trying to enter the airport to board evacuation flights, much as Taliban fighters struggled to maintain control at other airport entrances around the same time.
One evening in late August, an Afghan 01 commander whose fighters were guarding the airport’s northwestern gate asked an Intercept journalist taking photographs to identify himself to the fighter’s American handler. The handler, who was wearing a baseball cap and had a pistol strapped to his waist, suggested that if the journalist wanted to leave on an evacuation flight, he should do so immediately. Soon, the man said, he’d be evacuating “my guys,” referring to the 01 fighters. After that, the gate would be closed for good. The American then turned to the 01 commander and explained the value placed on a free press by citizens of the country to which he and his fighters would soon be flown.
The CIA prioritized the evacuation of Zero unit members from Afghanistan, flying out as many as 7,000 of the former commandos and their relatives even as thousands of vulnerable former U.S. government and military employees, human rights activists, and aid workers were left behind. NSU commandos refused to allow a former U.S. government interpreter through the airport gates unless she gave them $5,000 each for herself, her husband, and their three children, Al Jazeera reported. The woman, who said she and her relatives were beaten by NSU members at the airport, could not afford the bribe. Two former members of a different U.S.-trained military unit, the Afghan National Army’s KKA, or Afghan Special Unit, told The Intercept from a safe house in Kabul that no formal effort was made to evacuate them and that unit members who were able to board flights did so through personal connections. The two former members themselves had been turned away by 01 militiamen after approaching the airport’s northwestern gate. Since then, they said, at least four KKA members have been tracked down by Taliban fighters and killed.
The CIA’s ability to evacuate its allies appears to have far outstripped that of other U.S. government entities and signals its pivotal role in the war. The agency evacuated as many as 20,000 Afghan “partners” and their relatives, the Washington Post reported, nearly one-third of the 60,000 Afghans the U.S. has taken in overall. The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.
Most coverage of the CIA’s efforts has been laudatory. But the Zero units were known for deadly night raids that killed an untold number of civilians across Afghanistan. The Intercept documented 10 raids conducted by 01 in Wardak Province, southwest of Kabul, in which at least 51 civilians, including children, were killed — many at close range, in execution-style assaults. Most 01 missions were led by a small number of CIA “advisers,” as their Afghan fighters knew them, or U.S. special forces borrowed from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.
“The U.S. should not be offering safe haven to those who committed war crimes or serious human rights abuses,” said Patricia Gossman, associate director for the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, who wrote a report on the units’ abuses. “In Afghanistan, these forces were never held accountable for their actions, which included summary executions and other abuses. The U.S. and any other countries resettling members of these units should screen arrivals and investigate any for their possible involvement in human rights violations.”
Most of the Zero unit members were flown to Qatar, where CIA paramilitary officers worked to get their former Afghan colleagues sent to the U.S., according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of the operation. The former Afghan commandos are being housed on U.S. military bases, including two in Virginia and New Jersey, and at Ramstein Air Base in Germany while they await resettlement, according to the former senior U.S. official, two former senior Afghan intelligence officials, and a former commando from a different Afghan unit who was evacuated to the same U.S. base as some Zero unit members. Another small group of Zero unit members is in the United Arab Emirates, but they are expected to come to the U.S. within weeks, one of the former Afghan officials told The Intercept. Both former Afghan officials said they have spoken with relatives who previously belonged to the Zero units and are now in the United States.
Once known within the U.S. government as the Mohawks, Zero units started as an irregular commando force controlled by the CIA. The intelligence agency trained the teams to serve as guerrilla fighters out of small U.S. outposts, mainly in the north and east of the country, near the Pakistan border. Much of the original purpose of the program was to enable the CIA to conduct cross-border raids into Pakistan, a politically fraught and rarely approved activity for U.S. personnel.
The Zero units allowed the U.S. to conduct deniable operations and avoid accountability and were similar in some respects to the CIA’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War. For that program, the agency created Provincial Reconnaissance Units comprised mostly of South Vietnamese guerrillas led by American commanders. Like the Afghan Zero units, the PRUs gathered intelligence and assassinated suspected Viet Cong.
In 2010, the Afghan government signed an agreement with the CIA to turn the NSUs into a joint program with Afghanistan’s former intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, according to the two former senior Afghan officials, who were involved in the arrangement. While the missions would be jointly run, the units continued to be funded exclusively by the U.S. government, the two former Afghan officials told The Intercept. The change allowed the CIA to claim plausible deniability against accusations of human rights abuses or war crimes.
But in 2019, Afghanistan’s most senior defense official, then-Afghan national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib, told The Intercept that 01 was controlled by the CIA. “Quite frankly, I’m not fully aware … of how they work,” he said at the time. “We’ve asked for clarification on how these operations happen, who are involved, what are the structures of this. When they were set up, why are they not in Afghan control?”
Just after President Joe Biden took office in January, the CIA gave the NDS one year’s budget and said the agency would no longer support Zero units or continue funding them, one of the former Afghan intelligence officials told The Intercept.
Eagle Base, the sprawling CIA and 01 compound on a hillside northeast of Kabul, used to be off-limits to all but America’s closest allies.
From the highway, passersby could see a shooting range cut into the side of the hill and a narrow road snaking up to a cluster of beige structures. Less visible was the complex of helicopter hangars, ammunition depots, and barracks as well as the former CIA black site known as the Salt Pit, where interrogations and torture were carried out in the earliest years of the war.
Perimeter security was extreme, even by Afghanistan’s standards. A ditch ringed an earthen wall 6 feet high. Next came concertina wire, faded red bollards linked by steel cables, and a 10-foot mud and concrete wall topped with more concertina wire, with elevated guard posts every 300 feet. Floodlights illuminated the entire circumference at night.
Before 2019, 01 fighters left Eagle Base in vehicle convoys for nighttime missions. That changed when convoys on two Wardak missions were ambushed, according to a former NDS counterterrorism officer who used to accompany 01 on raids in the province. Thereafter, almost all 01 missions were flown into Wardak aboard American Chinook helicopters. Residents living near Eagle Base told The Intercept in 2019 that they heard the distinct thwap of the dual-rotor helicopters several times a week, departing early in the evening and returning before dawn. Otherwise, 01 fighters were rarely seen.
But the Taliban knew who occupied Eagle Base. On July 25, 2019, a suicide car bomb targeted CIA officers traveling in unmarked Toyota Land Cruisers arriving at the gate, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in an interview that year. Local residents confirmed that a bombing took place against white Land Cruisers at the compound gate that day. The incident attracted little media attention. A spokesperson from Resolute Support, the now-defunct U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, told The Intercept that he was unaware of any foreign military casualties in Kabul that day. The CIA declined to comment.
Taliban fighters have occupied the expansive facility since parts of it were destroyed by fire and explosives in the final days of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August. In early September, a week after the last U.S. military aircraft had departed Kabul, Taliban fighters clad in a darker version of fatigues with the same tiger-stripe pattern worn by 01 escorted journalists through the ruins of Eagle Base, leading them through areas they said had been cleared of land mines and booby traps left by the Americans and their Afghan partners.
The fighters were from the Taliban’s “Badr” 313 Brigade, an elite commando unit named for the Battle of Badr 1,400 years ago, when the Prophet Mohammad is said to have overcome enemy forces with just 313 men. They were led by an English-speaking Taliban member in his 40s wearing traditional clothes, sunglasses, and a surgical mask.
Nearly two weeks earlier, at dusk on August 26, a suicide attack at the airport and subsequent gunfire had killed about 170, including 13 U.S. service members. Kabul residents were on edge. When another huge explosion was heard across the city before midnight, many feared that there had been a second deadly attack. But that explosion was a controlled detonation, one of several that destroyed ammunition depots, armories, and vehicles as well as various facilities inside Eagle Base that the CIA didn’t want to leave for the Taliban once the agency finally abandoned it. Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser for arms and military operations and a former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer, said The Intercept’s photos from the site suggested “a very hasty and messy withdrawal.”
Constellations of bullets, mortars, and grenades littered the charred foundations of ammunition depots destroyed by fire. In the burned-out shell of what appeared to be an armory, the barrels of Kalashnikovs, belt-fed PKM and DShK machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and mortar tubes lay in piles like pick-up sticks.
Inside a dormitory building, the Zero units’ trademark tiger-stripe uniforms hung from hooks and littered the floor. In a steel locker, amid the discarded packaging of tactical gadgets and passport photos of a young family, a military patch in the shape of a pentagon read “The Shield & Swords of Afg, NSU (01).”
Karin Vardaman, the director and founder of Working Circle, looks over the landscape in far northwest Colorado. As of last year, the area was home to the state's first wolf pack in nearly a century. July 12, 2021. (photo: Sam Brasch/CPR News)
There, sunken into the mud near the Wyoming and Utah borders, was a broad wolf print.
“Maybe there’s one,” she said. “It gives hope.”
For nearly two years, Vardaman has visited the Moffat County rangeland every few months to track wolves for Working Circle, a nonprofit she founded to help ranchers live with the predators. The patchwork of public and private land is already a riot of animal life. Forested mountains overlook broad valleys, where elk and cattle scare badgers from their dens beneath the sagebrush.
In the winter of 2020, Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced the area also appeared to be home to the state’s first wolf pack in almost a century. The arrival marked a milestone in North American predator conservation. The pack’s rapid disappearance reveals the extent of Colorado's challenge as it seeks to become a safe haven for the species.
Only months after its discovery, state wildlife officials learned hunters likely killed three members of the pack just across the border in Wyoming. The news came amid a rising tide of anti-wolf sentiment across the Rocky Mountain West.
In the last year, conservative states like Montana and Idaho have taken aggressive action to cut their wolf populations. Wildlife advocates anticipated the possibility, which is why many lined up behind a Colorado ballot measure to force the state to reintroduce the animals by the end of 2023. The proposition narrowly passed last November.
While Vardaman wants wolves to return to Colorado, she’s concerned the animals won’t succeed without a greater acceptance of the predators in rural communities. For years, her nonprofit has worked with ranchers in northern California and southern Oregon to protect livestock from predators. She’s now trying to adapt the model for Colorado.
“We got to be able to protect what we have before we should be bringing other critters in,” she said.
Her work has confirmed part of the task likely remains in Moffat County. A few weeks after she found the paw prints, a single wolf triggered one of Vardaman’s camera traps near the same watering hole. The device’s white flash lit the eyes of a silver wolf, possibly the lone survivor of Colorado’s first pack after an 80-year absence.
From eradication to reintroduction
The federal government is a central character in the story of the disappearance and return of wolves to Colorado.
In the early 20th century, hunters and trappers eradicated the species from Colorado and most other parts of the lower 48 states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recorded evidence of Colorado’s last known native wolf, which the government captured and killed in Conejos County in 1945.
Fifty years later, the federal government led an effort to reintroduce the species in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. The packs bred and expanded across the northern Rockies over the next few decades, but the southbound journey to Colorado proved difficult.
Only a handful of lone wolves ever made it to the state, where survival was far from a guarantee. A driver killed one wolf on Interstate 70 in 2004. A hunter mistakenly killed another near Kremmling in 2015, thinking it was a coyote.
Signs of trouble in Moffat County
While it’s unclear exactly what happened to the Moffat County wolf pack, the first signs of trouble reached Colorado Parks and Wildlife in May 2020. As CPR News reported, that’s when a local resident told area wildlife manager Bill deVergie about killing two wolves just across the state border in Wyoming. The agency later learned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigated a third potential wolf killing in the same area.
Colorado wildlife officials declined to identify the hunter since the wolves were killed outside its jurisdiction. It’s also perfectly legal to hunt wolves in most of Wyoming, which has defined a “predator zone” outside the Yellowstone ecosystem where anyone can kill a wolf on sight.
The legal distinction meant the Moffat County wolf pack was never far from danger. In Colorado, anyone who kills a wolf faces a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison. The federal Endangered Species Act also protected wolves in Colorado until earlier this year. Both protections disappeared if wolves wandered north across an invisible state line.
Throughout 2020, Colorado state biologists continued to monitor wolves in the area. Its findings are detailed in a report CPR News obtained through an open records request that shows a steady decline in wolf sightings.
In March 2020, a member of the public reported seeing seven wolves, including a video that captured five animals at a distance. By December, reports from the public and agency staff only found clear evidence confirming a single wolf.
Vardaman said she personally submitted many of the observations included in the report. As she tracked fewer and fewer wolves, she grew concerned both Colorado Parks and Wildlife and other wolf advocates had lost interest in the Moffat County pack. Rebecca Ferrell, an agency spokesperson, said state wildlife authorities are ready to enforce protections for any species classified as endangered in Colorado.
Vardaman is skeptical.
“We had a whole pack here. We only have one now. We need to do what we can to keep them safe,” she said.
How much information to share about the wolves is a tricky decision
Vardaman hopes speaking about the Moffat County wolf publicly will help protect it, but said it wasn’t an easy decision. One July morning, she walked from a campsite where she once heard wolf howls to a green gate dividing Colorado from Wyoming. She’s concerned a hunter could now have a reason to wait on the other side of the line with a rifle and “finish the job.”
“If someone does take matters into their own hands, I do think the public has a right to know,” she said.
Meanwhile, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has not shared any information about wolves in Moffat County in nearly a year. Ferrell, the agency spokesperson, said the reason is simple: Staff biologists have not confirmed Vardaman’s wolf sightings.
“We have not been able to independently see that animal at a staff level,” she said. “We are certainly continuing our normal efforts to verify if the animal is continuing to stay in Colorado.”
If officers do confirm a wolf, Colorado now has the sole responsibility to protect it.
On Jan. 4, the Trump administration removed federal protections for gray wolves across the country. The decision gave authority over the species to state and tribal governments, which had already occurred in Wyoming after a 2017 court decision.
After Colorado gained authority over wolves, Eric Odell, the species conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said biologists attempted to attach tracking collars to any Moffat County wolves in February. He said aerial flights failed to turn up anything in the area.
“That pack has pretty much dissolved and we don’t think that they’re present anymore,” Odell said in July at a public meeting about wolves in Steamboat Springs.
Nevertheless, the state has been careful not to reveal too much about any wolves in far northwest Colorado. State wildlife officials have carefully redacted all geographical information from public documents. While CPR News has learned the details independently, it is honoring the agency’s request not to pinpoint the wolf’s location to avoid tempting anyone to harm or harass the animal — or interfere with legal hunting in an effort to protect it.
Other wolf advocates have applauded the state’s wolf protection efforts. Mike Phillips, the director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and a science advisor for the 2020 reintroduction campaign, said Colorado has embraced its legal responsibility to guard the species.
“There's this tendency for people to imagine gray wolves will demand something new of a state fish and game agency,” Phillips said. “In fact, they really don't. They just demand that they continue to do their jobs well, and I have no doubt that CPW can and will do that.”
Without tracking data, the Moffat County pack's fate is a mystery
While attempts to collar a wolf in northwest Colorado failed last winter, state biologists were successful further east. In February, wildlife officials announced they had attached a tracking device to a gray wolf first observed in Jackson County.
The animal had been seen traveling with another black-furred wolf, known as F1084, which had migrated into the state from Wyoming’s Snake River Pack near Yellowstone National Park. Biologists know its origin because its long worn its own tracking collar.
Since the U.S. government started reintroducing wolves in the 1990s, collars have helped biologists study and monitor wolf movements. The decision to track the Jackson County partners quickly revealed another Colorado wolf milestone. This spring, wildlife officials said the pair had given birth to a litter of pups, marking the first clear evidence of wolf breeding in Colorado since the 1940s.
Dan Prenzlow, the director of Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said he wishes the agency also collared wolves in Moffat County but cautioned his staff simply lack the resources to track every Colorado predator.
“We’re not going to create a perception around the state where we are going to know, minute by minute, where every wolf is,” Prenzlow said.
The lack of any tracking data means the fate of the Moffat County wolf pack will likely remain a mystery. Vardaman, the wildlife advocate monitoring the remaining wolf, said it’s possible the wolf isn’t from the original group. It may have come to the state all on its own.
No matter its origin, Vardaman thinks the animal deserves more attention from the state. If wildlife officers confirm it, she thinks they should tell people it’s being monitored and protected under state law.
“I know CPW is torn in a thousand directions, but if we are going to reintroduce wolves, we need to step up our game with the packs that are already here,” Vardaman said.
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