Ken Klippenstein

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Exclusive: ICE Glasses

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:32:42 GMT

Federal agent wearing smartglasses

The Department of Homeland Security is developing specialized smart glasses that will allow federal agents on American streets to automatically identify “illegal aliens” from a distance, budget documents reveal.

These new ICE Glasses, building on available glasses that allow video recording and heads-up data display, will be able to pulse vast federal holdings of biometric data — from facial recognition to walking gait — to identify people in real-time.

Per the budget document:

“The project will deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field.”

A Department of Homeland Security attorney who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity said of the ICE Glasses project, “It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets, but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors.” The official also says that the technologies and algorithms behind the smart glasses are as applicable to general government surveillance as they are to the current immigration war.

Commercial smart glasses are already facing major hurdles regarding privacy, ethics, and data security — and ICE Glasses will only deepen those concerns. They presumably will be two-way, not only able to detect, and with the help of AI, match to suspects already in databases, but also to secretly record people to add them to new domestic watchlists.

When Google introduced its own smart glasses in the early 2010s, dubbed “Google Glass,” the public backlash was so fierce that it led to a nickname for users: “glassholes.”

The intelligence community and classified enclaves of the military have been experimenting with smart glasses for years, and such displays have been used to help special operators to find and identify high-level targets that are on various terrorist kill lists.

Such specialized glasses enable the fusing of “identity intelligence (I2)” to include biological, biographical, behavioral, contextual, and reputational attributes “to identify and assess threat individuals and networks, their capabilities and capacity, centers of gravity, objectives, and intent,” according to a leaked document I reviewed.

ICE Glasses will presumably benefit from this research, providing federal agents with real-time awareness of the identities of anyone within sight and who is on one of homeland security’s various watchlists (the existence of which I’ve reported here).

The budget document says that the ICE Glasses should be available by September of 2027.

Biometrics are automated methods of identifying or verifying a person’s identity based on unique physical (or behavioral) characteristics. Fingerprints, facial features, iris patterns, even voice prints are analyzed by technology for border control or access.

Following 9/11, biometrics — and later identity intelligence — became a core tool for identifying and keeping track of terrorists.

From the original terrorist watchlist, the U.S. military developed its own “Biometrically Enabled Watchlist” (BEWL), a repository of identifying information of virtually everyone it came in contact with in the Middle East — detainees, prisoners, suspected terrorists, travelers, contractors, etc. BEWL is the military equivalent of the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), a civilian agency biometric database that tracks international travelers. ABIS grew to hold more than 15 million biometric submissions in its first decade of operation, according to a 2015 report.

In ten years, ABIS more than doubled in size, and according to homeland security data, contains about 75 million biometric records today. The system’s prime contractor, Leidos, says that the system is able to process on the order of 45,000 biometric submissions per day, with surge capacity up to roughly 100,000 during major operations.

During the global war on terror, handheld devices like the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, or HIIDE, became the collection workhorses that collected biometrics and fed ABIS and, eventually, BEWL. HIIDE is a rugged, battery‑powered device about the size of a small camcorder, with built‑in sensors for iris scans, fingerprints, and facial photos.

Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan used HIIDE to enroll people encountered at checkpoints, on patrols, or in raids — capturing their fingerprints, iris images, and faces, tying that data to a name or alias and basic biographical details, and then syncing those records back to the intelligence community. Once a person’s biometrics were in ABIS and analysts decided that they might merit closer tracking, the identity was promoted onto the BEWL, turning a scan on a handheld device into a watchlist “hit” that tells a soldier this is someone the U.S. military is actively looking for.

ICE Glasses eventually will do all of that in a more compact way. The secret recesses of the government already collect what are literally called “non‑cooperative biometrics,” where the data is captured without a subject’s consent. (The Defense Department sometimes prefers the more euphemistic term “non‑obtrusive biometrics” for collection that is silent, standoff at a distance, or otherwise invisible to the person being recorded.)

That’s the world of ubiquitous surveillance that the Department of Homeland Security is looking to reproduce here on American soil.

FBI Director Kash Patel hinted at the enormity of the biometrics effort in a social media post last December saying the Bureau “undertook a project earlier this year to vastly expand our overseas biometrics program,” adding: “We’ve worked with partners across the federal government at @DHSgov @CBP and more … to implement improvements at every level.”

Then in January, Patel announced that the FBI had “doubled intelligence production at our threat Screening Center” — which maintains the domestic terrorism watchlist — pointing to “sharply increased biometric matches…”

The ICE Glasses project is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development arm, called the Science & Technology Directorate.

Though Congress has been notified of the project, no members have said anything publicly, including Homeland Security Committee leaders Bennie Thompson, Rand Paul, Andrew Garbarino, and Gary Peters.

When that federal agent near an ICE protest in Maine said, “We have a nice little database,” he wasn’t kidding. The only joke here is Congress.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

You Do Not Hate The IRS Enough

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:11:47 GMT

The Internal Revenue Service, everyone’s favorite tax collector, is facing deep budget cuts — but don't get too excited. The agency has a bold new plan to audit more of the little people while hiring as few of them as possible.

The agency plans to replace the nearly 30,000 employees it lost to Trump administration cuts with a new army of auditors, one that doesn’t sleep. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, which the IRS has identified as a top priority in its new budget request.

Documents I obtained show that the IRS already has a powerful set of tools to force compliance, from undercover agents to wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. The collaborates with ICE to monitor the travel of American citizens through. But now, thanks to AI, the IRS’s ultimate goal is for “minimal human contact,” as one document put it.

The centerpiece is Palantir software that allows IRS investigators and auditors to conduct "near real-time data analysis" through a custom tool called the “Selection and Analytic Platform,” or SNAP.

What that means in practice is that millions of middle-income Americans who once fell below the threshold of what scarce human auditors could manage are now within reach. The little guy just became a lot easier to monitor at scale.

The big guy? Not so much.

The budget cuts gutting the IRS's human workforce were largely engineered by Elon Musk and his DOGE crusade. The beneficiaries are obvious: billionaires who use entirely legal means — offshore trusts, shell companies — to pay little or nothing in taxes. These structures are largely impervious to the IRS’s tools, AI or otherwise. Your cash tips and side hustles are not.

Happy Tax Day!

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Luigi-Inspired Arsonist Threatened “Our Way of Life,” Feds Say

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:25:53 GMT

Fire engulfs the Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California

A 29-year-old California man has been arrested for allegedly causing $500 million in damage when he set fire to a Kimberly-Clark warehouse to protest the cost of living and the Iran War.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the Justice Department’s indictment alleges he said in video posted to Instagram. “[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days … stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off … fucking wars.”

In a press conference, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli went out of his way to stress that the defendant had “compared himself to Luigi Mangione” in a comment to a witness.

No one was injured in the early morning fire, but Justice wants to make a point: Chamel Abdulkarim’s target was the system of capitalism itself.

Arson, and admittedly a serious case (if the government is correct); and politically motivated, given the remarks Abdulkarim made.

But Mangione? The FBI and the national security machine is going to jump on this, affirming for them that a “copycat” terrorist points to a bigger trend lurking in society.

That fact is at the very center of NSPM-7 — national security presidential memorandum 7 — signed by President Trump last September, that identifies “anti-capitalism” as a so-called indicator of domestic terrorism. The directive opens with a section that mentions “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive” — i.e. Luigi Mangione — as indicative of a growing threat.

Take a look at what the federal indictment focuses on, alleging Abdulkarim said:

“[S]hould have paid us enough to fucking live.”
“1% is a fucking joke.”
“If you’re not going to pay us enough to fucking live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this shit.”
“Billionaires profiting off of war ...”
[Y]ou know, we may not get paid enough to fucking live, but these bitches dirt cheap”
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the share holders picking up a shift.”
“[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days, [unintelligible] stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off [unintelligible] fucking wars.”

Federal indictment

898KB ∙ PDF file

US Attorney Essayli goes on to cast the arson attack as a sign of anti-capitalist sentiment, promising to “aggressively” pursue anyone who attacks capitalism — or “our way of life,” as he put it:

“Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.”

Get used to stuff like this. As I reported in January, a leaked draft copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s upcoming annual Homeland Threat Assessment introduced a new “extremism” threat category: “class-based or economic grievances.”

Screenshot of leaked Homeland Threat Assessment

By contrast, state authorities did not portray the crime as some sort of threat to capitalism. In fact, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson seemed to not understand it at all.

“Arson, to me, is a real head scratcher; I do not understand that somebody who is suspected of arson does something where they get no value out of it,” Anderson said at the press conference.

They still don’t get it.

While reporting on this, when I tried to figure out what exactly the suspect’s job entailed while working for Kimberly-Clark — the company whose 1.2 million square foot facility he allegedly set on fire — I realized that he didn’t actually work for them, but for a third-party contractor, something called “NFI Industries.”

The dreary name reminds me of reporting on Amazon warehouses and hearing one worker after another bitterly refer to its much-hyped $15 minimum wage as not applying to them because they worked for similar subcontractors. This two-step is also how Amazon can claim it’s not them but rather the contractors responsible for the infamous practice of workers having to pee in bottles to meet their punishing quotas.

NFI has been accused of similar practices and was sued in 2015 by New Jersey port and warehouse truckers who said the company systematically misclassified them as “independent contractors” while exercising full employer‑style control. In 2022, a federal judge ruled in the driver’s favor, ordering NFI to pay them over $5 million in a class action settlement.

The obscene price of gasoline as a result of the Iran war (part of our hallowed “way of life,” which allows oil companies to price gouge even in emergencies) has once again thrust the cost of living into the spotlight. Millions of Americans resonate with Mangione and Abdulkarim.

Isn’t anyone in power curious why that is?

As a friend told me today when I brought up the Kimberly-Clark fire: Who that’s worked a shitty job hasn’t fantasized about burning it all down? (This is literally the plot of the cult classic movie Office Space!)

Democrats and Republican politicians alike mouth “affordability” but do nothing. Civil government is also starved, bled of resources by our national security colossus that devises more and more ways to spy on anyone opposed, or drowns out their voices by flooding the media with security-speak.

There are basically two ways the government can respond to things like the Kimberly-Clark fire: (1) treat them as national security threats to be monitored and preempted forever; or (2) address the underlying grievances causing them.

Sounds like a real “head-scratcher.”

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Pre-Teen Terrorists: FBI’s New Target

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:11:12 GMT

The FBI has designated an online group, many of its members adolescents or children younger than 13, as an “extremist” threat.

Called “764,” the FBI has labeled the group “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” a new classification for domestic terrorists created by the Bureau last year, as I first reported.

Publicly, the FBI casts these investigations as a crusade to protect the children from predatory adults. What they rarely mention is that many of the suspects are children themselves. To obscure this ugly reality, law enforcement portrays itself as merely focused on social media and gaming platforms — ones that just so happen to be popular among children, like Roblox.

The focus on child gamers is so great that law enforcement are privately employing Gen Z slang like “clout chasing” and “aura farming” in its intelligence reporting (see below).

Screenshot of Connecticut Intelligence Center bulletin. Credit: Daniel Boguslaw

Connecticut Intelligence Center bulletin

1.43MB ∙ PDF file

Because minors’ identities are not disclosed in court records, we have no idea how many children the FBI is investigating. (The Bureau has not responded to my request for comment at the time of this writing.)

One rare acknowledgement of the presence of children in these groups came from the FBI’s Boston Field Office, which in February issued a statement referring to 764’s “juvenile predators”; another FBI public service announcement described a similar group’s (“The Com”) members as “between 11 and 25 years old.”

Screenshot of FBI PSA

The Com — short for “the community” — is an umbrella term for the decentralized online networks like 764, known for coordinating harassment, extortion, and the coercion of minors into producing violent or sexually explicit content.

Sick stuff, obviously. But with much of it carried out by minors themselves (some originally victimized by the groups before joining them), is this really terrorism?

The FBI thinks so.

The Bureau defines Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs) as those inspired by “a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” This represents a departure from not just past FBI counterterrorism categories, but from the dictionary, which defines terrorism as politically-motivated and nihilists as not believing in anything, politics or otherwise.

Strange as it may seem, this is not some fringe program. The FBI has seen a 300% increase in domestic terrorism investigations, “a large chunk of which are nihilistic violent extremism,” as Director Kash Patel testified to Congress last year.

The FBI also says that all 56 of its field offices are involved in investigating 764 alone, of which it is investigating at least 350 members in the United States. The group was founded in 2021 by then 15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead of Texas.

The reticence of the government to speak openly about all of this is partly constitutional. In the United States, the First Amendment sharply limits the government’s ability to target people based on ideology, association, or demographic characteristics — including age.

Federal counterterrorism law requires a nexus to violence or material support for it; “being a radicalized child” is not a crime. So rather than acknowledging that it is effectively targeting a juvenile population, the FBI routes its investigations through platforms where they congregate. Gaming platforms — Roblox, Minecraft, Discord — have become the main target of government scrutiny. The FBI says it isn’t investigating children; it’s investigating violent criminal networks that happen to recruit on children’s platforms.

The distinction is real obscures the truth: the domestic terrorism apparatus is being trained on pre-teens.

The gulf between how the U.S. government describes its targets became concrete in April 2025, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging two 764 leaders — Leonidas Varagiannis, known online as “War,” and Prasan Nepal, known as “Trippy.”

The affidavit listed five co-conspirators identified only by their online aliases. One of them, listed simply as “Slain764,” was named in the document as a key participant in the network. Swedish investigative reporting by SVT subsequently identified Slain764 as a 14-year-old boy from a Stockholm Suburb.

In other words, the FBI was investigating a 14-year-old for terrorism.

U.S. court filing

The U.S. government’s court filing made no mention of his age. To read it, you would have no idea that one of the named co-conspirators in a federal “terrorist” indictment (or how many of the other co-conspirators are as well).

The FBI’s public tallies of NVE investigations — 350 subjects, 56 field offices, a 300% increase in domestic terrorism cases — tell you almost nothing about how many of those subjects are children. The government is simultaneously claiming a massive juvenile victim crisis while running a parallel investigative apparatus targeting minors that it is, by law and by practice, almost entirely shielded from public scrutiny.

But that’s not the case in other countries that have no First Amendment.

The Five Eyes — the intelligence-sharing alliance comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — in 2024 issued a statement titled, “Young people and violent extremism: a call for collective action.”

The statement is possibly the only example in which the U.S. government plainly links terrorism with “minors,” warning even of cases in which the suspect is “not carrying out an attack.” It singles out “seemingly innocuous social media and gaming platforms” like “Discord, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok” as particularly concerning.

Per Five Eyes:

“ … the development of online content and environments has facilitated the entry of minors and young people into violent extremist pathways. This is concerning, as minors are particularly vulnerable to online radicalisation. Online environments provide an avenue for first approaches to minors, including through seemingly innocuous social media and gaming platforms, such as Discord, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok.”

Five Eyes statement

1.71MB ∙ PDF file

The Five Eyes statement goes on to include several case studies in different member countries.

In the United States, there’s the case of a 14-year-old arrested by local police in Arizona on state terrorism charges. In New Zealand, another case exists where “The individual made racist, misogynistic and anti-authority comments.” And in Canada, “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) received information that a social media user had been promoting involuntary celibate (incel) ideology online.”

That last example gets sad fast.

“Through judicial authorizations and subsequent interviews, the RCMP located the minor who had no documented history of violence and no criminal record,” the Five Eyes statement says of the incel case. “The parents stated their son suffered from a developmental disorder, but noted no other health concerns.”

The numbers in these other countries are striking. In Australia, the domestic intelligence agency ASIO reported that one in five of its priority counterterrorism cases now involves a minor — and in the most recent annual reporting period, every single disrupted terrorist attack or plot involved a minor or young person. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess put it plainly: “As a parent, the numbers are shocking; as an intelligence officer, the numbers are sobering.”

Since 2020, Australian Federal Police and their partners have investigated around three dozen counter‑terrorism cases involving minors. The youngest subject was just 12 years old.

Europe tells a similar story. Europol’s 2025 terrorism trend report found that of the 449 people arrested for terrorism-related offenses across EU member states in 2024, 133 were between the ages of 12 and 20 — nearly one in three. The youngest was 12, arrested for planning an attack. Belgium’s intelligence service reports that roughly one in three individuals in its recent terrorism cases is a minor. A cross‑national analysis drawing on the 2026 Global Terrorism Index concludes that youth and minors accounted for 42% of all terror‑related investigations in Europe and North America in 2025, a threefold increase since 2021.

Seamus Hughes, a senior research faculty member at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, says that even many federal agents in the U.S. are uneasy with the shift.

“Interviews with FBI agents around the country reveal a recurring theme: They feel they can’t arrest their way out of this problem, and, even if they could, they didn’t join the counterterrorism section of the FBI to lock up confused kids for decades.”

Pre-teen terrorism is what Europe and the commonwealth have embraced; and it’s what the Trump administration has signed onto with its war on Nihilistic Violent Extremism.

What’s next, toddler terrorism?

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Trump's Biggest Iran Fear

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:33:48 GMT

“A whole civilization will die tonight,” Donald Trump announced today, threatening to rain down hell on Iran.

Don’t let the bravado fool you: he’s scared.

On Monday, the president made a rare show of submission, bowing not to Washington or Wall Street, but to the people.

“Unfortunately, the American people would like to see us come home,” Trump said of the Iran War on Monday, visibly irritated. “If I had my choice, I’d keep the oil; but I also want to make the people of our country happy.”

The Iran war is deeply unpopular with Americans, basically every poll finding a majority opposed since the war began on February 28 — an extraordinary fact that media have largely glossed over. It is virtually unprecedented not to see a spike in popular support when Washington launches a military operation, so much so that political science has a term for it: the “rally around the flag” effect.

In the case of the Iran War, it’s not that the spike in support was small or short-lived. It never happened at all.

I do not pretend to know what the president will decide at 8pm ET, his deadline for Iran. I doubt even he knows. But the unprecedented public skepticism is clearly on the top of his mind. And it’s very likely on the Pentagon’s mind, too. When the commander-in-chief demands “a plan” (as Trump has), the military obliges; but in fraught situations like these, it exercises some discretion in how those plans are briefed, filling it with low percentages and high risks to send a message to the bomber-in-chief that it isn’t the preferred option.

And the polling could not be more clear that this isn’t the preferred option.

“Even in the most controversial wars, like Iraq, when the war initiates, people tend to rally around the flag … this is remarkable that at the very beginning of the war, there’s overwhelming opposition not only from liberals and the left, but … from much of Trump’s base as well,” politics professor Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco says.

CNN’s data guru Harry Enten made this point in greater detail in a segment this week, crunching decades of data about rally around the flag effects across every major U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. The numbers are stark. During the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter’s net approval jumped 32 points. George H.W. Bush saw a 31 point surge in the first month of the first Gulf War. George W. Bush got 14 points out of the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Trump? One month into the Iran War, he is down four points — making him the only president in the modern era to lose ground after launching a war.

Enton compared it to the one recent precedent he could find: Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, which cost him six points and, as Enton put it, effectively ended his presidency politically. Biden never recovered.

Whether the Iran War is the death of Trump and Trumpism remains to be seen, but the picture looks grim. The war started 12 points underwater in public polling and has since dropped another 10 — and only 29 percent of Americans say it’s worth the cost, compared to 59 percent who said the same about the 2003 Iraq War at a comparable point.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is 30 points net unfavorable, versus Donald Rumsfeld’s plus 48 at the equivalent moment in Iraq — a nearly 80-point gap. Dick Cheney was plus 62 during the Gulf War, a gap of over 90 points.

Trump’s approval on the economy has hit 27 points underwater; on foreign policy, 25 points underwater.

The dumb guy explanation for all of this is — incidentally, the explanation you’ll find in basically all the major media coverage — is that Americans are just feeling the pinch of gas prices. But that doesn’t explain the immediate opposition to the war from day one, before any of the economic effects started to kick in. And I don’t think Larry in Wisconsin is worrying about oil futures and the Strait of Hormuz.

What makes Americans’ quiet skepticism all the more incredible is that it exists despite a tsunami of propaganda they’ve been bombarded with about the war. This week has been dominated by glowing media accounts of the made-for-Hollywood heroics involved in the rescue of the American pilot downed in Iran, the CIA’s role, their escape training, the evasion of IRGC military dogs and hunters, and on and on.

Trump has pushed this personally, trying to desperately associate himself with something, anything popular.

Before the shoot down and the rescue, the American public was saturated with media coverage that mostly highlighted the excellence of our weapons systems, the exquisite intelligence, and how perfectly it’s all being carried out — the surgical strikes, the careful target selection, the assurances that civilian casualties are being minimized, the retired generals nodding along on cable news about the operational brilliance on display.

This is a war of the future, relying overwhelmingly on the acceleration of decision-making fueled by AI with again the message that air power provides minimal U.S. casualties. Check the news coverage on any day though: there is hardly a word about what is actually being bombed and why. It’s all 90 percent destroyed here, ahead of schedule there, practically ignoring the fact that civilization is being strangled in the routine.

This is exactly the kind of ostensibly low-stakes war that the national security system has been perfecting for decades now, not so much because it is manipulating the public on purpose but because it wants to reduce the friction of public (and presidential) opinion and interference, thereby minimizes opposition.

And then there’s the massive social media blitz the Trump administration has run, a spectacle that even a grizzled internet veteran like myself had never seen anything like. The Pentagon and its allies have been posting polished strike footage — bombs finding their targets, infrastructure vaporizing in infrared — with the cadence of a TikTok influencer. It is war as spectacle, war as highlight reel, designed for maximum virality. The administration has essentially been its own embed, cutting out the journalistic middleman entirely and pushing combat footage directly into the feeds of millions of Americans. By any historical standard, the propaganda infrastructure behind this war is without parallel.

And yet it hasn’t moved the needle. At all.

Americans just aren’t buying it anymore, this idea of fully automated luxury warfare. And the president knows it.

Just about the only group that doesn’t know it is the major media, which treats every event as contingent on Washington (always the protagonist in its reality), or what the Europeans or international community say, or the price of oil and the state of the stock market.

I see a civilization here at home that is bigger than any of those things, one that’s gaining the confidence to question the national security state. Trump again sees it, too (though he also sees the roughly 70 percent of his own party who support the war).

Will he listen?

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Exclusive: FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:52:21 GMT

FBI Director Kash Patel

President Trump's budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.

The new center and funding boost represent the implementation of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the sweeping federal order I’ve been covering since it was signed last September.

Though public opposition to ICE succeeded at forcing the administration to back down in Minnesota — even firing both Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino — the FBI is doubling down its domestic terrorism obsession.

Now, Trump’s budget request reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center”; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy “proactively” identifying domestic terrorists motivated by any of the following beliefs:

“anti-Americanism,”
“anti-capitalism,”
“anti-Christianity,”
“support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,”
“extremism on migration,”
extremism on “race,”
extremism on “gender,”
“Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,”
Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on “religion,” and
Hostility towards those who hold traditional views on “morality.”

Graphic depicting FBI budget request

In other words, if your political views are practically anything other than MAGA, you’re on notice, courtesy of the FBI.

The new center combats these supposed threats “by integrating intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis,” the budget request says.

Its creation appears to be inspired by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — an event that reportedly precipitated the formulation of NSPM-7 in the first place — according to the budget request, which alludes to “heinous assassinations” having “dramatically increased.”

The budget request also singles out social media as some kind of breeding ground for domestic terrorism, saying:

“Domestic terrorists exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications. They use these platforms to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

Good thing millions of law-abiding Americans don’t use those!

In his testimony to Congress, FBI Director Kash Patel said that he would investigate every single person on the Discord channels used by accused killer Tyler Robinson. But leaked screenshots of those same Discord chats that I obtained, as well as interviews I conducted with its participants, made clear that these chats were about gaming, not politics.

This was far from Patel’s only overreach. Shortly after Kirk’s death, he announced the Bureau was investigating “the possibility of accomplices,” vowing to run down all “theories and questions” about outside involvement — including a possible foreign nexus.

Patel would later conclude that there was no evidence for any of it, but by then, baseless theories about an Israeli government role in Kirk’s death had proliferated across social media. Joe Kent, Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director until his resignation last month, reportedly tried to investigate these claims while in government, and has since echoed them publicly.

Maybe these guys should’ve taken their own advice about the perils of social media.

It’s hard to overstate how much the FBI is focusing of domestic terrorism under Patel and the Trump administration. Yet the media have barely covered NSPM-7, let alone the FBI shift.

Shortly after Kirk’s death, FBI Director Kash Patel testified to Congress that he was overseeing a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations.

And in the first months of the administration, the FBI replaced the 9/11-inspired Terrorist Screening Center with the “Threat Screening Center.” As I reported at the time, the new mission broadened the scope to include “all national security threats,” which ostensibly was expanded to accommodate increased focus on transnational criminal organizations. Now the threat screening center oversees multiple terrorist watchlists that separate international terrorists, transnational criminals, and purely domestic “threats.”

Then there’s the fact that the FBI’s domestic terrorism watchlist is growing, as I reported last year.

Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.

The public might have won the battle of Minneapolis, but the White House hasn’t given up on its domestic terrorism fixation, even after virtually every official has walked back claims that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.”

— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Iran War You’re Not Hearing About

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:19:27 GMT

Boys training for Iran’s Basij paramilitary forces

“Our objectives here from the very beginning had nothing to do with the leadership,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera yesterday, denying once again that the Trump administration is seeking a change in governments.

It’s a pretty weird thing to say given that the opening salvo of the now month-long war was to target the leadership in Tehran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and numerous others at the top level.

“Would we be heartbroken if there was a change in leadership?,” Rubio asks. “Absolutely not. If there’s something we could do to facilitate that, would we be interested in participating? Of course.”

So is Rubio's insistence that they're not seeking regime change a lie? Yes and no. Though regime change is not an official objective, there's a covert war running alongside the overt one, and its whole purpose is to usher in regime change, sources tell me.

It’s been something that Israel has been explicitly pursuing since the beginning. But not the Pentagon; not officially, anyway.

Rubio repeated to Al Jazeera the commonly cited four objectives of the war: destroying (1) Iran’s air defenses, (2) its ballistic missile and drone capacity, (3) Iran’s navy, and (4) Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors in the future. The administration is happy to talk about its progress on these objectives, constantly bragging about destroying this target, eliminating that capability.

But there is a sub rosa war, one that is being fought in the shadows, and it is beyond the kinds of special operations that would carry out a raid on targets like Kharg Island, as I reported yesterday. They are even more secret, involving the “black” special ops forces and the CIA and the Israelis.

There are several reasons that the operations are secret: to keep “conventional” war within the bounds of the law and what is indeed conventional, to hide special capabilities (like exploding pagers), to protect Iranian insiders who might be helping but might govern tomorrow, and to ensure that a very difficult to achieve objective not be the standard by which the war is judged.

That there is a “white” side and a “black” side to these operations is never well explained because of secrecy, and the media does a terrible job of clarifying. This has led to all kinds of confusion and speculation of a massive ground invasion that bears little resemblance to the actual war, as I’ve reported.

In contrast to the U.S., Israel has been quite open about attacking the fabric of domestic control in Iran. It has even acknowledged targeting internal security forces at a granular, so-called “hyperlocal” level, right down to police departments and even security checkpoints.

From the first moments of the war, the IDF has been striking Internal Security forces headquarters (ISF or FARAJA), the national police, as well as Basij headquarters, the paramilitary militia of the regime used to suppress protests and enforce social control. On March 4, for example, IDF spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said that beyond military targets, “we also struck the regime’s repression mechanisms. These include the Basij, the Internal Security Forces, and the notorious intelligence headquarters.”

Since then, the list of security targets includes daily strikes on headquarters in Tehran and the provinces, as well as the IRGC and its intelligence elements, special units, the Tehran Revolutionary Court, Law Enforcement Command, the Basij and other police offices and posts. Headquarters, command centers, units, and supporting infrastructure have all been struck, moving to lower and lower echelons as top-level elements are destroyed.

On March 10, a dedicated protest-suppression command center run by the IRGC was attacked. On March 17, a high-impact strike reportedly on a “makeshift headquarters” in Tehran killed Basij Organization Commander Brigadier General Khalam Reza Soleimani and his deputy, Ghassem Ghoreyshi. Some reports claim that approximately 300 Basij commanders and field officers were eliminated.

Around this time in mid-March, the U.S. military joined the effort, a well connected military official tells me.

“For now,” the Intelligence Community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment stated on March 18, Iran “retains the ability to … suppress internal threats to the regime’s hold on power.”

The next day, President Trump stated that the Iranian regime was “failing from within” and said his “biggest problem” was having no clear leadership left to negotiate with after the elimination of high-ranking Iranian officials.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that same day that “we are seeing defections at all levels as they’re starting to sense what’s going on with the regime … The regime will probably collapse within itself.”

Those indiscretions weren’t followed up, and the media interpreted their statements as refuting Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony, but in reality, the president just slithered back into safer territory focusing on conventional military targets, declaring on March 20:

“We won. We’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait [of Hormuz]. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.”

On the “white” side, the U.S. was bombing the IRGC (and intelligence) at lower and lower echelons, directly and indirectly supporting the “black” efforts to facilitate a change in regime or foment an uprising. It’s normal for the U.S. and Israel to deconflict their attacks, but what I’m describing goes beyond that. More than just the indirect support (e.g. provision of targeting intelligence) to Israel, there are also occasional direct U.S. attacks on Iran’s internal security forces, including cyber and space attacks.

So what effect is this all having? It’s difficult to know what’s happening on the ground inside Iran with any confidence, especially with the Internet being suppressed. The regime has also long suppressed independent media, and the current conflict has only tightened that information environment — dissidents and journalists don’t speak publicly in a police state, particularly one in the middle of a war. But there are indicators.

One of the more striking ones emerged this week: Iran’s IRGC announced a recruitment campaign for civilian volunteers called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” setting the minimum age to 12, as Human Rights Watch has observed. In other words, Iran’s premier ideological military force is apparently desperate enough to recruit children to help staff the exact kind of checkpoints and security posts that have been systematically targeted in the strike campaign described above.

And on Monday, a top IRGC commander in charge of internal security of the capital, Brig. Gen. Hassan Hassanzadeh, was reportedly killed. (The claim comes from an Iranian opposition outlet, so treat it with a grain of salt; but Iranian authorities have not disputed it, and these are exactly the sort of people Israel and the U.S. are targeting.)

As Rubio says, overthrow, regime change, change of government, revolution is not the official purpose of Operation Epic Fury. That tracks with what military officials have described to me: the CIA working with whomever it can find that might provide intelligence and support covert operations, the U.S. sharing intelligence and targeting data with Israel, and the supporting U.S. bombing that weakens the IRGC’s control over the country. The strikes on internal security forces, a campaign of Starlink smuggling — these are consistent with creating conditions for internal change without formally owning that as a goal.

(The Trump administration has reportedly smuggled thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran ever since its brutal crackdown on protests last year to facilitate internal and external communications. Iran is apparently worried about this, with state media organs announcing periodic arrests and seizures of the Starlink devices.)

All of this is echoes Donald Trump’s call, on the first day of the war, for the people of Iran to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Trump, having launched his first presidential campaign bitterly critical of the Bush administration’s regime change wars, has found a version he can live with, which is no stated goal. (Note that in Desert Storm in 1991, the official position of the first Bush administration was that it was not pursuing regime change against Saddam Hussein even as bombing and other operations were undertaken to find the silver bullet that might achieve that very goal.)

All eyes might have shifted to the Strait of Hormuz and escalation threats, and a supposedly looming large-scale ground “war,” but amidst it all, the bombing continues. An increasing thrust is attacking the apparatus of state control, sources have made very clear to me.

Will it work? As Rubio would say, what “it”?

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Trump Goes Commando

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:17:22 GMT

Most Americans are bracing for a massive ground invasion of Iran, one that military sources tell me will not happen. That’s because there’s another plan entirely.

What’s in store is a “raid,” all of these sources agree.

Of course, it all depends on what Donald Trump orders, and sources say they don’t know what that might be on any given day. So they offer the White House different alternatives, highlighting the cost for operations that they don’t want to undertake and focusing on the epic, derring-do nature of those that they would prefer.

Planning for small raids onto Iranian soil has taken over as the favored outcome, I’m told, operations that would be carried out by commandos rather than conventional soldiers.

Those missions include taking Kharg Island as leverage to use it as a bargaining chip since it dominates Iranian oil and gas exports, or a similar island raid in the Strait of Hormuz to help open up shipping, or, most spooky and Maduro-like, a “black” operation to seize Iran’s nuclear materials.

And what do the American people think? Millions are afraid of what won’t happen and largely unaware of what could. This is reflected in a recent poll by Reuters/Ipsos finding 65 percent of Americans believe Trump will order troops into a large-scale ground war in Iran, though only seven percent support such a scenario.

Seven percent! In other words, Americans want a ground war like they want to give a hug to Congress (which enjoys a slightly higher approval of 10 percent, per Gallup).

Tucked away in the Reuters poll is another question that no other pollster seems to be asking": whether Americans “support deploying a small number of special forces for targeted operations?”

The results? Some 34 percent of Americans say yes — including 63 percent of Republicans. That is roughly in line with American opinion on the Iran war in general, which clearly hasn’t deterred the White House so far.

Reuters/IPSOS poll

In other words, though a full-scale ground invasion is not politically viable, a special operations raid is.

A full-scale ground invasion isn’t even logistically feasible (at least for now). The U.S. troop presence in the Middle East has increased just 20 percent since the beginning of mobilization two months ago, The New York Times reported Sunday. And most o of those people are not “boots on the ground” types of forces, but are augmenting operations, logistics, maintenance, air defenses, etc.

When the Marines aboard the USS Tripoli group arrive and the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division are deployed and ready, there will be some 5,000 troops at the “ready,” but even here, we’re talking about some 2,500 actual “boots,” fighters with guns.

That’s a significant number of course, but it is hardly the numbers you’d need for an Iraq War-style invasion or occupation. In 2003, for context, 466,985 U.S. personnel were deployed for the Iraq operation using the same count that includes air, ground, and naval forces across the region. Today, there are some 50,000 personnel in the region, roughly 10,000 of which are part of the increased ships and aircraft, etc.

What none of this fiddling includes are the number of special operations forces which are not officially disclosed. This includes special operators from Army special forces groups, Army Rangers, Army aviation from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Navy SEALs and “special warfare” personnel, Air Force “special tactics” fighters, Marine commandos, the Joint Special Operations Command that spearheaded the Maduro operation, and supporting intelligence, transport, communications, as well as CIA paramilitaries, clandestine intelligence collectors and others.

These are exactly the kinds of forces that would carry out the various limited raids.

When I reported last week on the unlikeliness of a conventional ground invasion, it created a flurry in major media which had been starved of any actual reporting on the ins and outs of actual deployments and readiness.

This weekend, CNN broadcast a segment about our story, with anchor Michael Smerconish practically tugging at his collar in discomfort over having to cite me in the absence of someone more mainstream.

“I read something online from a guy who writes provocatively, admittedly, his name is Ken Klipperstein [sic],” Smerconish said, putting to his guest, retired Admiral James Stavridis, my point that a major ground invasion of Iran was simply not in the cards at this time.

Screenshot of CNN segment about my story

A clearly flustered Stavridis, who like other cable news retired military brass was making coin off hyping the war, replied: “It’s not inevitable, obviously,” adding: “inevitable, no; possible, yes.”

That’s what four stars and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year buys you: ‘Well, this could technically happen.’ Admiral, it’s technically possible that an asteroid wipes us all out, or the sun doesn’t rise. Yet you still bother to get out of bed and show up for these cable hits because you know there’s a difference between possible and probable.

What we should focus on is the probable that is the raid(s). Like with the raid that deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January, or the killing of the Ayatollah, or even the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in 2011, we will likely just wake up and find out it happened after all. In these types of operations, the government has developed a remarkable capacity to evade public scrutiny and make them feel inevitable, like the weather.

Partly that is done through “messaging” and disinformation which encourages the media and even the experts to look in one direction, in this case, a “boots on the ground” invasion. The confusion is stoked by messaging like the letter (embedded below) written by Lt. Gen. Leonard F. Anderson IV, head of the Marine Corps Reserve, which blithely says that “a mass mobilization could become reality.”

With millions of Americans already nervous about a ground war and even a possible draft, one wonders what Gen. Anderson knows that we don’t. I asked and the answer I get from reliable sources is: nothing. There are no preparations for any kind of mobilization and there is not any thought of some draft.

So, see how it works? Boots on the ground, a months-long ground war that smells like Iraq (or even Vietnam for the seniors), a mass mobilization, a draft, such stories fill the media and social media and in the end when the special operators come to the rescue, people are not only relieved but they “support” such an operation.

Support, of course, when it’s all over, if it’s successful. The cycle of disinformation and secrecy ensures that your only job is to discuss what happened after-the-fact, not whether it should have happened at all.

It’s a style of warfare perfected for decades that limits public involvement and consent because a combination of remote air and drone warfare and the favored clandestine special operators make the war machine impervious to true debate. As the deliberations continue regarding the mythical ground war, or as Donald Trump continues to babble about destroying this or that, the bombing continues. The Pentagon is saying practically nothing about what is being bombed or how much, or what the assessed impact is, and certainly what it is saying is so exaggerated and fact-free that it’s hard to determine what the true effect is.

Meanwhile the media has nothing much to say. Organizations with dozens of reporters on the case focus on every Trump utterance while the actual war “on the ground” is referred to in passing. Retired cable news generals and admirals with conflicts of interest that would make the Wolf of Wall Street blush have nothing to say either.

Bolstered by the “success” of the Maduro raid, Trump will inevitably fall in love with the next seductive briefing involving some slickly produced video that shows jumping and rappelling and shooting all coming together in a cinematic ending.

The only question is if the American public approve of these operations — assuming the media bothers to report on them.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

FBI Director Kash Patel's Emails Hacked by Iran

Ken Klippenstein — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:47:13 GMT

Kash Patels sniffs a cigar in hacked photo

There’s a joke among cybersecurity geeks that they changed their password to “incorrect” so whenever they forget it, the computer reminds them: “Your password is incorrect.” Evidently FBI Director Kash Patel did something similar because the Iranians managed to hack his personal email.

Patel, who is fond of jogging and other workout routines with new Bureau employees to demonstrate discipline, should exercise some when it comes to computers. The FBI more than any agency knows that they are a target of these hacks. Today, Iranian actors, perhaps even Iranian intelligence itself masquerading as the Handala Hack Team, released a slew of emails and photos that it says were hacked from the top lawman in America’s email.

The FBI has confirmed that Patel’s email had been targeted, with spokesman Ben Williamson saying in a statement: “We have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity.”

Can a pooh-bah of national security, the very Cardinal of all things cybersecurity, be so stupid? Looks like it!

The FBI loves to lecture people, from teachers and parents to corporations and government workers, about the virtues of cybersecurity.

FBI public service announcement

Cybersecurity hygiene — those annoying (and largely pointless) training sessions your employer gives you, for example — is apparently only for the little people.

Something always bugged me about “See something, say something,” the post-9/11 government urging of the public to pay attention to and report suspicious activities. It’s not just the creepiness of deputizing everyone into the national security state and whipping up a vibe of paranoia. It’s the shamelessness of a multibillion-dollar agency telling us to do its job for them for free. A job they don’t even do themselves, judging from the Patel hack.

Speaking of not doing their jobs, the news media (or at least Reuters) seems to have gotten the leak, and there was a link to the documents, but it has since been taken down. So much for digging into Patel’s life and views to see if there’s anything newsworthy.

Below are the materials I could find.

Oh, and the FBI has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Handala hackers. Guess we’re all paying for the FBI’s fuckup.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Is a Ground War With Iran Imminent, or Inevitable?

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:06:44 GMT

13th Marine Expeditionary Unit

If you watch or read the media, you would think that a “ground invasion” of Iran is “imminent” — either to land on Kharg Island, a five-mile speck that processes 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, or to take some coastal strip adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.

It is not imminent and not even inevitable.

Military sources tell me that for weeks, the Pentagon has exaggerated the readiness and potency of the Marines, setting in motion a media frenzy that is part stupidity, part disinformation to spook Tehran, and part manipulation to please Donald Trump.

“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island [Kharg],” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News Sunday. “We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”

Sounds scary, right? Here’s the reality.

On March 13, headlines blared that the “three-ship” USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, carrying the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was ordered from Japan to the Middle East. Over the next week, news outlets across the globe literally tracked the supposed 2,200 Marines making their way moving west through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean.

In actuality, one of the three ships, the USS San Diego, never left Japan and is still there. And the other two ships, carrying just 1,500 fighters, are sitting at Diego Garcia, roughly 4,260 kilometers from Iran’s coastline.

And that second Marine Expeditionary Unit? Contrary to some reporting that said that the USS Boxer Group left Hawaii on March 19, it departed San Diego. It will have to cover approximately 22,200 kilometers to reach the region and wouldn’t be able to arrive until mid-April at the earliest. Navy sources in San Diego say it is still unclear to the unit itself whether it is headed for the Gulf or just moving to the Pacific to cover the departing Tripoli group.

Not exactly imminent!

And yet here’s NPR, implying an ominous military buildup:

“Between 2,000 and 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have received written orders to deploy to the Middle East … The deployment, combined with two Marine Expeditionary Units already moving toward the Persian Gulf, could bring 6,000 to 8,000 U.S. ground troops into close proximity to Iran.”

CBS went even further, linking the 82nd Airborne explicitly to the “Iran war.”

CBS headline

The 82nd is just a light infantry battalion. The idea that we’re going to parachute the 82nd for a ground invasion is absurd. We didn’t even do that at the height of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a good part of the entire U.S. Army was poised to strike Saddam. (And the 82nd made a near-identical movement in January 2020 after the assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.)

The 82nd has a quick reaction brigade to serve exactly as a “ready unit” to quickly deploy anywhere in the world, but CENTCOM sources tell me that with the majority of the brigade is in training in Louisiana and the battalion ‘on its way’ is going to perform a force protection role in the interim, waiting for you know who to decide to do something stupid.

Then there’s the “increase” in U.S. forces constantly being referred to, as if ground troops are building up in the Gulf or more and more aircraft are constantly flowing. But the truth is that almost all of what has augmented the forward deployed forces are maintenance, ordnance, and logistics to sustain a bombing campaign that started as a quick strike and is now extended to a weeks-long campaign for who knows how long.

That augmentation, if you believe the news media, includes a “Third Aircraft Carrier” on its way. “Third US aircraft carrier heads to region as Trump signals long war with Iran and demand for surrender,” YNet news reports.

There is a third carrier that is potentially ready, the USS George H.W. Bush, which could go to the Gulf, especially to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln, which is well overdue for rotation, but it is sitting in Virginia, with a liberal leave policy over Easter Week.

And even a second carrier? The USS Gerald Ford — the carrier that’s been bombing Iran from the Mediterranean Sea, has been in port at Souda Bay on Crete in Greece this week, not for combat operations but because it suffered a significant non-combat fire that originated in the ship’s laundry spaces. The blaze rendered more than 100 berthing spaces unusable and displaced several hundred sailors. The Ford isn’t projecting power toward Iran; it’s getting its laundry room repaired.

If you squint, an invasion seems inevitable. But look closer at the actual state of each force being cited, and a very different picture emerges. How is it possible, for instance, that every news organization from the New York Times on down, can report three ships leaving Japan with the Tripoli group when there were only two? Secrecy. Sloppiness. Sops.

With Trump in charge, one never knows. But even if there were a ground operation against Kharg Island, it would most likely involve Army Rangers and special operations forces, Green Berets and Navy SEALs — not some conventional ground assault à la Normandy. The idea of the U.S. Marines storming the beaches while the 82nd Airborne drops on parachutes from above is a cable news fever dream.

This frenzy echoes the panic after Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was arrested in January, when breathless coverage of military movements convinced many that a conventional U.S. intervention was hours away. It wasn’t.

The panic has even reached active-duty service members, several of whom have contacted me worried they were heading into ground combat.

It also reminds me of another media freakout Iran’s mining of the strait of Hormuz, giving the impression that Tehran had mined the entire passage. It later became clear that Iran either hadn’t mined anything at all or had only planted a few as a signal.

Which is what all of this is about, signaling to Iran. From the beginning of the bombing, signaling that the U.S. is serious this time, that the enemy will be given no quarter, etc. Then came the Marine and then the 82nd Airborne, and a third aircraft carrier, and threats of hell and damnation coming from the mouths of Trump and Hegseth.

It’s the White House’s prerogative to scare the shit out of the Iranian government. But does the media need to do that to the public?

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Exclusive: ICE's Bounty Hunters

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:24:58 GMT

While ICE agents are temporarily confusing things even more at airports, behind the scenes the Trump administration is paying a posse of local police to carry out its immigration war.

An internal ICE financial ledger I obtained shows how the agency is turning local police departments across the county into a vast, decentralized immigration army. This includes payments if cops sign up to be deputized, reimbursements for transportation, salary supplements for cops who process migrant children, and per-arrest-style incentive payments.

All of this is taking place under an ICE program called 287(g), part of a 1996 law that granted the Attorney General (and later the Secretary of Homeland Security) the authority to enter into written agreements with state and local governments on immigration. The first agreement under the law was signed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after 9/11; as of last year, the number of agreements has swelled past 1,000.

Today, the program employs a “task force model” under which local police are deputized as ICE agents with the authority to carry out federal immigration law. So despite the broad public backlash against ICE, the agency has a way to carry out its mission without drawing attention to itself.

An internal ICE diagram I obtained shows that local officers only become eligible for stipends and salary reimbursements after making their first arrest. The document labels that first arrest as the moment a participant becomes “OPERATIONAL.”

Leaked ICE diagram

The ledger lists over 400 police departments where ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations is currently negotiating new or expanded cooperation agreements with local police departments, including the amount of money currently allocated to buy their cooperation.

The largest payouts are to Florida law enforcement. In addition to earlier awards, ICE has set aside an extra $89 million in incentive funding for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ Division of Highway Patrol, which already has 1,803 “task force officers” credentialed under the program. Then there’s roughly $5 million for the 719 task force officers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’, and nearly $4 million for the 503 task force officers of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

ICE 287(g) payouts

2.55MB ∙ PDF file

In addition to Florida, other red states (and they are mostly red states) are taking ICE’s money to become bounty hunters to arrest supposed immigration law violators. Arkansas State Police is receiving a base award of $4,225,025 covering 550 task force officers, with an estimated $8,250,000 more in incentive funding to come. Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety is getting a $5,380,025 base award covering 704 officers, a $1,650,000 salary modification on top of that, and a staggering $38,220,000 TBD line item still pending. Louisiana State Police is receiving a base award of $880,025 for 104 officers, plus an additional $45,000 salary modification.

The money flows well beyond large state agencies, to small and obscure agencies most people (including myself) have never heard of. The Point Comfort Police Department in Texas — a town of fewer than 700 people — has a base agreement of $167,525 to supply nine task force officers, plus an additional $5,000 salary modification. The Key Colony Beach Police Department in Florida is getting $119,000 for a single officer once you add its $107,500 base award to an $11,500 salary supplement. The Coward Police Department in South Carolina, also serving a town of roughly 700, has a base award of $107,520 for one officer, with another $15,000 modification layered on top.

Then there are the departments whose payouts have exploded between their initial agreements with the federal government and the later Trump modifications in 2025 and 2026. Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina started with a base award of $542,525; now it has a pending modification that tacks on nearly $3 million more in incentive payments. Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Florida received $385,015 upfront, and is now slated to receive an additional $2,835,000 in a later modification. Most jarring is Bradley County Constable District 7 in Tennessee: a single officer received a base award of $107,525, followed by a $11,500 salary bump — and now a further modification appears to add $1,820,550 in new funding for that one cop.

An ICE source provided me with a screenshot of some of the disbursement categories, which included salaries and benefits for task force officers “conducting enforcement activities” and incentive payments for those “conducting immigration enforcement activities related to the locations of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Child].”

Leaked ICE document

The ICE source told me that the program had grown so large that simply administering it is taking up a significant amount of the agency’s time.

Absent from the list of bounty payments to states and localities are new payments to California, New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, and Massachusetts as well as other “blue” states. The reason? The money is being doled out to cooperative pro-Trump states and departments, affirming that these are political payoffs and hardly a pure national program.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Leaked Document: Iran War Meets Little Brother

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:33:05 GMT

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth poses next to Jeff Bezos

The Pentagon has quietly dictated to spy satellite companies what to say about the Iran war, exercising censorship over what the American public is allowed to know.

Military sources tell me that the level of secrecy surrounding the specifics of the Iran war is unprecedented, with barely any data being released about the level of bombing, the targets being attacked, or the assessed effects. Now the Trump administration is trying to further control what private companies say in a behind-the-scenes effort not been previously reported.

As the American and Israeli bombing of Iran commenced on February 28, the military promptly issued guidance to satellite operators of what “language and terms to avoid” when describing damage caused by Iran to American bases in the Middle East, according to a copy of the guidance leaked to me.

“Avoid language that implies battle damage assessment (BDA) or operational conclusions,” one slide produced by U.S. Space Force says. It goes on to warn against using phrases like “Target destroyed,” “Target eliminated,” and “Structure rendered inoperable.”

The guidance includes the following examples of what to say and what not to say.

Incorrect Example: “Strike successfully destroyed the facility.”
Correct Example: “Imagery shows the structure largely collapsed with debris covering the building footprint.”

Leaked Space Force guidance

About 100 American companies are licensed by the U.S. government to operate their own reconnaissance satellites, a $6-7 billion a year industry that serves military and commercial customers with everything from methane detection to bomb damage assessments. Most of the revenue of these companies comes from the military services and the federal government. The “big four” — Maxar Intelligence, Planet Labs, BlackSky Technology, and Spire Global — operate some 350 imaging and interception satellites.

While the Pentagon “guidance” to the commercial companies is framed as an advisory, the companies comply because their contracting relationships with the government make them afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. As a result, private companies are increasingly becoming a controlled and auxiliary Little Brother to the U.S. intelligence machine, a trend I reported on last year.

Space Force has issued the guidance I obtained to virtually all commercial satellite companies in the form of written requests, sources say. This includes not just companies in the classified space but even those that work on the collection and dissemination of public or “open source” materials that inform the news media, academia, think tanks, and other groups.

“While there’s a case to be made that they [the companies] should fight it, almost everyone makes the vast majority of their revenue from government contracts in this industry and after Anthropic, nobody is interested in putting up a fight,” a source familiar with the guidance told me. “I think it’s also another layer of trying to make things [about the war] seem less bad than they are.”

Since February, Anthropic has refused to allow its AI model, Claude, to be used for certain missions involving mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon in response has threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company’s cooperation.

Pentagon pressure has already yielded results.

Planet Labs, one of the largest commercial satellite imaging companies in the world, has blocked public access to imagery of the entire Iran war theater by imposing a 96-hour delay on February 28, then extending it to a 14-day blackout on March 10. The company claims the decision was its own, made after consulting military and intelligence experts.

This kind of soft censorship is not unique to the Trump administration, nor is it a partisan phenomenon. When I first reported on the rise of Little Brother as articulated in a little-noticed intelligence community directive on coordinating with “Non-State Entities,” it was Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines who signed it.

The directive ordered spy agencies to “routinize” and “expand” their partnerships with private companies, and even authorized these relationships in cases of greater “risk” to the government due to security or legal concerns.

Whether it is in artificial intelligence, cyber security, unmanned vehicles, and now remote sensing by satellites, corporations have grown so powerful that they are starting to rival nation states in terms of resources. But Little Brother is happy to cooperate with Big Brother.

Sources: Market caps from Motley Fool (data as of March 23, 2026, citing company earnings filings); GDP figures from IMF World Economic Outlook.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Kristi Noem’s Replacement Bows to Protesters

Ken Klippenstein — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:47:49 GMT

Markwayne Mullin gets emotional during confirmation hearing

Senator Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s next homeland security chief, testified before his colleagues this week and apologized.

He’s sorry about the ham-fisted conduct of the department. He’s sorry about warrantless searches. He’s sorry about the labeling of protesters as terrorists.

In his confirmation hearing, Mullin sounded like a disgraced politician begging for a second chance.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said. It was an obvious reference to the mountain of bad publicity regarding ICE, Border Patrol and other homeland security agencies the past several months.

The media won’t admit it, but the anti-ICE protesters in cities across the country like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, won big. And as a result, Mullin had to roll over and show his belly in a humiliating display of submission to the popular will. During his testimony, he couldn’t seem to stop apologizing for the reign of Kristi Noem. Mullin offered up one concession after another, the exact opposite of Noem’s unyielding, my-way-or-the-highway rhetoric.

“Those words probably should have been retracted,” Mullin said about his echoing of Noem’s smearing of Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti as a terrorist immediately after he was killed by federal agents. “I went out there too fast. I was responding immediately without the facts. That’s my fault. That won’t happen as secretary.”

Asked directly if he regrets his statement, he said flatly: “Yes, sir.”

Ask yourself: when have you ever heard the Trump administration apologize like this before? It was an extraordinary act of surrender to the public.

On the practice of warrantless “forcible entries” into homes, Mullin committed to a stricter standard, saying: “A judicial warrant will be used to go into houses and places of businesses unless we’re pursuing someone that enters … that place.”

On Noem’s ignoring her own Inspector General and failing to hand over documents to Congress, Mullin promised to scrap the policy requiring the Secretary to personally approve small grants, calling it “micromanaging” that botched disaster response.

The Trump administration has spent months treating blue-state elected officials — governors, mayors, attorneys general — as enemy combatants. It threatened to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. It sent federal agents into states whose leaders explicitly said they weren’t welcome.

Mullin apologized about that as well. He promised blue Senators that he’d lower the temperature, saying, “I respect every one of you guys... You were elected by your state and I respect that.”

Mullin decried “the partisan bickering that we have.”

None of this is the language of a government on offense. It is a meaningful departure from how homeland security and ICE has been operating. It is a retreat dressed up as humility. Mullin watched Noem turn DHS into a meme account and get pushed out. And he’s calculating that the only way to survive this job is to stop acting like the agency is at war with the American public.

But the bigger picture is that Noem is gone and Mullin is adopting this new way because public pressure forced it.

Despite all the media coverage of the confirmation hearing, virtually none of it acknowledges that the protagonist here is not Mullin, Noem, Trump, or anyone in Washington. It’s the people.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Joe Kent Isn't the Hero. The Public Is

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:21:03 GMT

Joe Kent campaigning for Congress in 2022, before joining the Trump administration

The American revolution against Donald Trump can claim another victory. The president’s top counterterrorism official has resigned, issuing a blistering condemnation of the Iran War. He did not resign in some scandal. Not under pressure. Not to spend-more-time-with-my-family or whatever BS is usually given.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent said in a powerful letter today. He adds: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

Kent resignation letter

It’s definitely a bracing statement for say-nothing Washington.

But it’s also another victory in the ongoing American upheaval I’ve been documenting for weeks now. From Mamdani’s election to the Epstein files disclosures to the victory in Minneapolis to the firing of Kristi Noem, the Trump administration is increasingly being beaten back. That’s not the result of anything that the courts have done, and certainly not Congressional action (what action?). It’s the result of the public pressure—people power, first and foremost.

Kent’s letter, for all its patriotic rhetoric, seems a lot like an insider coup against a declining president; and an attempt to capture the leadership of an increasingly unhappy MAGA. Kent is, after all, a politician who has run for Congress twice and seems all but certain to do so again. A cynic might even call this a campaign launch.

For all of his supposed truth-telling in his resignation letter, Kent is hardly anti-war. The letter praises Trump for “killing Qasem Solamani” and for “defeating ISIS,” a naked appeal to the president’s vanity (and to his supporters). Kent is just more a doctrinaire isolationist, the very kind of ideologue that Trump hired when he was in his “I won’t go to war” phase.

He does, however, now echo the same concerns about the Iran war that have been expressed by a majority of Americans since the February 28 airstrikes that killed Iran’s leader.

The majority of Americans oppose the Iran War, as seen in virtually all of the dozen or so available polls. It is striking to behold, not only because there has been no “rally around the flag” effect, as I’ve written, but also because the opposition is so broad based.

So when Kent says this war isn’t serving America, he’s echoing the view of a clear majority of the country. A majority so clear that politicians like Kent want to tap into it. And that’s a good thing.

But there’s a cynicism to his letter and its insistence that the president of the United States is some defenseless lamb being led astray by Israel.

The obvious conclusion here, that President Trump has chosen to ignore the popular will of Americans, is somewhere Kent isn’t willing to go. He instead offers the questionable explanation that the nation of Israel is somehow calling all of the shots. It is a clever ploy for a politician who is clearly looking to gain the support of MAGA without criticizing their standard bearer.

Kent has a tone that speaks directly to Trump and MAGA, assuring them that their blameless leader has been hoodwinked. Israel is to blame, he says, and thus he can argue that the true path of the Trump revolution can be preserved. Just stop the war.

But when the news cycle is done focusing on Kent, the war in Iran will still be there. It will have the same lame salad bar of objectives, and targets will continue to be struck with perfect and obscene precision. Congress will do nothing. Wall Street will focus on their bottom line. Washington will fight about the spelling of some word. But the Pentagon? It will continue, continue with a level of efficiency and preparedness that has come to characterize “war” in the current era, an industrial efficiency that no president can seem to resist.

People who read his letter might be spurred to action against Israel but about the U.S. military they will have nothing much to say because Kent gives them nothing.

The ease with which the military can now, aided by modern technology and AI, rapidly put together a plan of attack, bomb with relative impunity, and destroy lots of “targets” is the lingering problem for the future. Barack Obama was similarly seduced by the ability to kill with drones, and then undertook assassinations from the air driven largely by the seeming “success” and buoyed by the low-risk enterprise.

It is true that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agitated for war, but the Israeli military is operating more and more of one mind with the U.S. military. The two countries have shared a common war plan against Iran since the Biden administration. That level of cooperation has solidified under Trump, driven more by a true affinity and affection for the technologically and operationally sophisticated friend than anything Donald Trump (or Benjamin Netanyahu) has ordered.

A senior intelligence officer tells me that rather than Trump, it is Hegseth, a self-described “warrior,” who is most susceptible to Israeli influence.

“For a Hegseth who only wants the ‘warrior’ answer, Israeli swagger and combat competence is catnip,” the officer says.

The source adds that while Trump loves a winner, and he loves action, it is Hegseth and his “impetuousness” that pushes the relentless destroy-the-target, no-rules. no-quarter style of warfare that has unfolded.

That reality—the ease of warfare I’m describing—is the enduring problem that we will need to address long after Trump is gone and Kent is a Senator, or the next Charlie Kirk or MAGA-darling. (Axios reports that the White House is already prepping for a Tucker Carlson interview of Kent.)

So Kent is right in decrying that Israel’s objectives hold too much sway over what America sees as its interests, but he too easily lets Trump (and the Pentagon) off the hook, portraying them as helpless victims. The buck stop over there.

“You hold the cards,” Kent says to President Trump in closing.

Now turn them over to me, he means.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

The TV Generals Have Something to Sell You About Iran

Ken Klippenstein — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:42:53 GMT

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (ret.) on CNN

For all the fears about militarism creeping across America, the generals are already in command —on cable news. The Iran war is the TV generals’ new battlefield. But their real service is to their clients and themselves.

Ever since the first Gulf War in 1991, every one of the big networks has hired some retired general or admiral to appear on air as an “expert” to explain the complicated matters of war (and behind the scenes, to smooth matters over with the Pentagon). In reality, it’s all business. As one of those TV generals once told my editor, “I should be paying NBC to appear on the air; that’s how much business it drums up for me.”

Given how tightly Hegseth’s Pentagon controls information about the conflict, these retired generals-turned-pundits have rushed in to fill the information vacuum. I’ve watched them so you don’t have to. The latest has produced some of the most farcical war coverage one can imagine. Three retired generals dominate the airwaves: David Petraeus, Jack Keane, and Mark Hertling.

They have nothing to say. But they all have something to sell.

The Investor

Retired Army four-star General David Petraeus and former head of the CIA — whose greatest strategic victory was either marrying the daughter of a four-star general or avoiding jail time after leaking classified information to his mistress — has become one of cable news’s most sought-after Iran analysts.

He speaks in a torrent of words that sound authoritative until you notice they contain no information. At points he sounds like John Madden calling a game he’s barely watching.

Here he is with Katie Couric on how the war ends:

“I think the way it ends, how it ends, is President Trump makes the decision that it’s over. And then the question is, will the Iranians go along with it? Or do they continue to retaliate which would bring about, again, a new escalation in this war?”

Stunning. Someone alert the CIA.

This is the Petraeus method: restate the situation in simplistic terms, add a conditional, and nod gravely. On CNBC he assured viewers that “you can’t take down a regime through the air in most cases,” then days later went on Bloomberg to say Trump’s objectives in Iran are “very achievable” from the air so long as they’re defined as “creating conditions for a possible political transition.”

Get it? He managed to say both everything and nothing.

He fills the dead air with phrases like “missile math,” explaining that Israel struck when “the missile math was starting to get a little bit uncomfortable.” It sounds technical but tells you absolutely nothing about the picture, big or small.

And then there’s Petraeus’ love affair (or, well, his other one) with the word strategic. In his universe, there is only “strategic leadership,” “strategic judgment,” “strategic depth,” “strategic posture.” Once he’s labeled something “strategic,” he can hover safely above the details.

Television can’t get enough of this because television doesn’t actually want clarity. It wants the uniform, the bearing, the four stars. Petraeus provides all of that, and the networks provide him a platform to do something TV never bothers to disclose: pitch his investments.

Petraeus has for years worked for KKR, the private‑equity giant, and last year was appointed chairman of KKR’s Middle East business. In that role he has helped drive billions into Gulf energy, infrastructure, cyber, and data‑center deals — including a multibillion‑dollar partnership with Gulf Data Hub to build AI‑hungry data centers throughout the region.

Here he is in the Charlie Rose show last week, sounding more like someone in a mahogany paneled boardroom:

“We have an investment team now in the region… In fact, we just did a major investment there… In fact, we’re a major investor with Gulf Data Hub. They’re putting data centers up and down…”

He is not analyzing the Gulf. He is a stakeholder in it.

When Petraeus goes on television to explain why Iran’s attacks on Gulf Arab neighbors were such a “big miscalculation,” as he’s put it, he’s also boosting the very Gulf clients his fund is invested in.

In the same interview with Charlie Rose, Petraeus rhapsodized about the “visionary” Gulf monarchs, insisting their success is “not just the result of lots of petrol dollars; it’s a result of visionary leadership, and true vision.” Can anyone fit more stars up their asses?

He had just one sentence to say about the tyranny of these regimes: “ Yes, there is an authoritarian system; but it is a pragmatic, authoritarian system and it has really done very, very well for its people.”

Petraeus is not a disinterested analyst of this war. He is a salesman for the region the war is reshaping — and he is doing his sales pitch on national television while being introduced as a neutral expert.

The Mannequin

Jack Keane

At 83, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane resembles a wax mannequin. His analysis does too.

Just one day after Operation Epic Fury commenced, Keane had already declared it a “brilliant military operation” and a “historic day of tremendous significance.” The White House’s official website lists Keane’s commentary — he called it a “well-thought-out campaign” — in a section collecting praise for Trump’s decision.

The on-air handjobs were so flagrant that Fox News anchor Will Cain felt compelled to attempt a critical question, though he required a full runway of deference to get there:

“I want to ask a couple of critical questions, and I hope you know how much respect I have for your service, and, I think, it goes without saying, to anybody watching, how much respect I have for the men making these decisions …”

The display was so embarrassing that Keane cut him off, barking: “You don’t have to patronize me, just ask the question.”

The exchange is more revealing than anything either man said about the war. The journalist defers so completely to the general that the general has to tell him to stop. This is the entire problem with TV war coverage in one excruciating exchange. Keane retired from the military two decades ago — talk about fighting the last war— but cable news treats him like he just stepped out of the situation room, and so Cain prostrates himself before asking the mildest possible question, and Keane, to his credit, finds it embarrassing.

Oh, and they also pay him hundreds of thousands a year, network sources tell me.

What Cain didn’t ask, and what no anchor ever asks, is why viewers should trust the analysis of a man who sits on the board of General Dynamics — one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world — and chairs AM General, the company that makes Humvees. War is good for Keane’s portfolio. He has never been asked to explain why that doesn’t color his analysis. He never will be.

Keane is also chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, which sounds like an academic outfit but has received funding from Raytheon, Palantir, General Dynamics, and other contractors with enormous financial stakes in the conflict it analyzes. This is analysis that is made for TV, that is, “facts” that reduce it all down to a version of war porn.

And this is the ecosystem: a general leaves the military, joins the boards of companies that profit from war, chairs a think tank funded by those same companies, appears on television as a neutral expert, and the anchors thank him for his service. Round and round it goes.

The Bimbo

Hertling

Then there’s Mark Hertling, the retired Army three-star who resembles a more handsome Mike Pence, with a spray tan — exactly the kind of airbrushed, authoritative-looking screen presence television news loves. The imposing general (he says he’s 6’4”) holds forth in a sonorous tone with an air of complete command.

There’s just one problem: he has nothing to say.

Hertling’s favorite line about this war is that “Iran has a say in this.” It’s a callback to the shopworn cliché “the enemy gets a vote.” It sounds like something a colonel tells a staff officer in a Tom Clancy novel. In reality it means: Iran can respond.

Such insight!

In his NPR breakdown of the first week of bombing, Hertling praised the strikes as “tactical excellence” but warns they “should not be mistaken for strategic clarity.” That’s the entire Hertling oeuvre in a sentence: a nice turn of phrase in service of the stunning revelation that short‑term military success doesn’t automatically equal victory or political accomplishment.

Pressed on what the actual U.S. objectives are, he had this to say on CNN:

“I can’t answer that question… what I’ve seen is multiple end states that keep switching back and forth… I don’t see where it’s going and that’s the part that concerns me.”

Ten years at CNN, a doctorate in leadership, a career culminating in commanding U.S. Army Europe — and when asked the most basic question about a war, his answer is: I don’t know.

Hertling’s big theme in print and on air is “bombing Iran is easy, what comes next is not,” the title of a Bulwark piece he’s been flogging in interviews and on LinkedIn. It’s true. But it was also true in 2003, and 2011, and even in 1999, and every other time anyone has ever dropped a bomb on anyone. It’s a lesson so obvious that it barely qualifies as a lesson.

He also likes to emphasize that “external strikes alone rarely produce democratic changes,” another line that is both correct and utterly uncontroversial in 2026.

But his real skill is the pivot. Ask him a concrete question and he’ll slide into something broader and safer. He will tell you “war is politics by other means” and that planners are surely thinking about “second‑ and third‑order effects,” without ever saying whether those effects justify what’s being done. It’s the strategic shrug: this is all very complicated, and if you knew what I know, you’d understand.

Unlike Petraeus and Keane, Hertling isn’t sitting on defense‑industry boards. His conflicts are more political and reputational. Obama appointed him to the President’s Council on Fitness and the American Battle Monuments Commission; Biden later elevated him to chair that commission. He then spent a decade as CNN’s in‑house general before decamping to The Bulwark, where the brand is explicitly Never‑Trump.

He has migrated from ostensibly “neutral military expert” to exactly what he always was: a political actor with a brand to protect.

There may well be people who want to hear the sorts of things these generals say. But the media should at least be upfront about who they’re working for.

It’s not us.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Trump Declares Iran War Over

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:30:10 GMT

There’s a lot of confusion over whether Donald Trump’s statement that “the war is very complete” signals an end to the war in Iran. The reason why is obvious: the attacks persist, with the U.S. military pinballing between the ever-changing objectives of the day, the hour, the moment.

Defense sources tell me that the military is able to operate so frictionlessly because of technological advances made and experiences gained over the last 25 years. Aircraft, weapons and capabilities in space and cyberspace have evolved, some over decades, to a level of Instacart delivery. As a result, the administration can change missions — destroy the internal security apparatus, eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, regime change, missile and drone defense, destroy the industry behind all of that, sink the navy, unseat the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, kill the next leader — and the military can keep up.

Hitting targets is what they do, and because they have become so good at it, they can do it pretty much anytime and anywhere. Some call that endless war, others perpetual war. I prefer to call it what it is: World War III, a state of modern-day war that doesn’t necessarily involve armies slugging it out on the ground, nor even a finish line. World War III is unbound by time and increasingly even borders, with at least 18 different countries directly involved in the Iran war, by my count.

18!

So when President Trump said yesterday that “the war is very complete,” he is referring to killing Khamenei and the other objectives they’ve so far accomplished. This version of the Iran War as an example of the global World War III does not mean fighting to the last Iranian drone or missile because there is no beginning and no end. Donald Trump’s version of an arbitrarily defined “end” hopes to settle the stock market and stabilize the price of oil and not upset the midterms. The latest objectives can be pursued at the Pentagon’s leisure. The hope is that the media in the US and the West move on to treating Iran like it treats Syria, Yemen, or Somalia, not in paying attention to the blow-by-blow, but in reporting on page 18 that another strike occurred today. Operation Epic Fizzle.

“We could call it a tremendous success right now,” Trump said at his press conference. “Or we could go further, and we’re going to go further.”

Their version of going further is adding more orders to the Instacart: disabling Iran’s propaganda and cyber capabilities, or more visibly, using the Navy to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

“If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far,” Trump said this morning.

“We are delivering twice the airpower of shock and awe [in 2003] and seven times the intensity of Israel’s 12-day war [last year],” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said on Friday, using the President’s same scorecard mentality, as the military aims for a higher and higher score to please the pinball wizard in chief.

For a winning-obsessed president, the modern military offers a game that never ends, that can be won again and again and again. If you eliminate the ruler of Venezuela, there’s always that cartel leader in Mexico to bump off. And once you’ve done that, there’s always the new leader of Venezuela you can bully. And after that, there’s Iran’s ruler. Then the new ruler…and on and on.

“We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” Trump said at his press conference yesterday. “We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory.”

Win, win, win, like a junky chasing a high. In fairness to the president, World War III in general and the Iran war specifically does provide positive coverage in the news media, which can hardly contain its awe at the technical precision of the operations. Even John Bolton, the former national security advisor whom Trump is trying to send to jail, can’t help but give him kudos.

As we move into the future, the terms like “forever war” seem quaint while at the same time ignoring the real qualities of undertaking such an operation as we see in Iran. This is the rise of everywhere, all the time war. And it didn’t start with Trump. In 2024, under Joe Biden, I reported that the U.S. military had been involved in combat for 226 of 365 days. Not only is that proportion doubtless higher today, it’s spread like a virus to a long list of countries.

Since the killing of Khamenei on February 28, the following 18 countries have become involved in the war:

Azerbaijan: Iranian Shahed drones struck Razzi (Nakhchivan) International Airport and nearby infrastructure on March 4, injuring 4 civilians.
Bahrain: Iran/proxies hit a hotel and residential buildings in Manama with drones/missiles; U.S. Naval Support Activity Bahrain hosted forces intercepted some.
Cyprus: Hezbollah-linked drones struck RAF Akrotiri base on March 1, damaging runways; UK responded, drawing EU/NATO focus.
Greece: Deployed FDI frigates and F-16s to defend Cyprus post-Akrotiri; hosts U.S. forces at Souda Bay.
Iran: Central belligerent; struck by U.S./Israeli airstrikes on nuclear sites, IRGC bases, and fuel depots since Feb 28.
Iraq: Iranian missiles/drones hit U.S. positions and Kurdish areas (e.g., Erbil); Iran-aligned militias attempted to storm U.S. Embassy Green Zone in Baghdad.
Israel: Central belligerent; launched initial strikes on Iran, faced Hezbollah rocket/missile barrages.
Jordan: Iranian ballistic missiles/drones struck U.S. radar bases; Jordanian defenses intercepted others.
Kuwait: Early Iranian drone/missile strikes hit Kuwait International Airport fuel tanks and government facilities (e.g., towers), causing fires; site of first 6 U.S. combat deaths in a drone strike on a port/makeshift base.
Lebanon: Hezbollah fired rocket/missile/drone salvos at Israel; Israel responded with airstrikes nationwide and renewed southern ground incursion.
Oman: Iranian missiles/drones targeted a port and shadow tanker in Gulf of Oman; Muscat mediates while denying full involvement; Iran claims false-flag.
Qatar: Drones struck major LNG facilities halting output; Qatari jets intercepted Iranian aircraft.
Saudi Arabia: Intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles/drones targeting Riyadh diplomatic quarter.
Sri Lanka: U.S. submarine torpedoed Iranian navy warship (likely frigate) off coast in Indian Ocean, killing ~87.
Syria: Israeli airstrikes on IRGC/militia assets (e.g., fuel supplies, logistics to Lebanon).
Turkey: Blocked airspace for anti-Iran strikes; NATO intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles near/over territory (e.g., March 4 Mediterranean). Condemned Azerbaijan attack, sent 6 F-16s to Northern Cyprus.
United Arab Emirates: Hit with missiles/drones on Dubai, data centers.
United States: Central belligerent with 7 troops KIA and around 140 injured.

This isn’t even counting murky cases like the explosion in front of an American Embassy in Norway or the role that Pakistan and Djibouti are playing in hosting US forces and combat search and rescue. So far, the Houthis in Yemen have been silent but they’re probably involved as well, or will be.

There’s every reason to believe that this is just what war looks like these days. Though it’s scarcely been noticed, Iran updated its military doctrine this year to conduct what they call “heterogenous warfare,” that is, targeting the U.S. (and Israel) wherever they operate, even if that is in regional countries. And so we see towers in Dubai ablaze.

Many in the media imagine World War III as a nuclear war or a Second World War-like ground battle. But in our era of drones and airpower, that’s just not what it looks like. And so you have Congress opposing a hypothetical boots-on-the-ground war that hasn’t happened, instead of the war that actually exists. It’s not just generals that make the mistake of fighting the last war, as the saying goes. The political opposition protests bygone eras of warfare, too.

One of the most disturbing aspects of all of this is how casual the media is about what is, again, a new breed of warfare. When Israel and Iran fired ballistic missiles at each other in 2024 — the first such incident between states since Saddam Hussein fired SCUD missiles at Israel in the 90s — comparisons to World War III were commonplace. The media momentarily recognized how not normal it all was. The phrase also appeared when Iran’s nuclear facilities were struck in Operation Midnight Hammer.

But now, reference to World War III has declined. The news media, it seems, have accepted this new reality (not even consciously realizing they have done so).

Yet there’s one party that hasn’t accepted World War III as normal and even rejects it: the public.

A remarkable thing happened here with the Iran war. There was no rally-around-the-flag effect, the tendency of a president’s approval rating to spike during military operations.

This unprecedented public skepticism that I’ve called a quiet revolution has received virtually no attention in the mainstream media despite its role in fomenting the Epstein battle, the anti-ICE protests in major cities like Minneapolis, and the elections of candidates like Zohran Mamdani whom the expert class insisted could never win.

The “impossible” just keeps happening.

Unlike the Iraq War, when broad public opposition did not emerge until caskets of American soldiers started piling up, the current skepticism is already a majority and isn’t coming from fair weather types who just want to be on the winning side. It’s principled. And it is American. Polls of Israelis find overwhelming support—as high as 90 percent among Jewish Israelis—astonishing given that they’re literally facing the consequences in the form of ballistic missiles.

The American opposition can only be principled in nature, given the lack of concrete stakes to them (that is, except for the billions that they are paying for). The Trump administration sees this shift in public opinion and worries about it, in practically every speech debating the semantics of terms like “regime change”—a striking turnabout for a group that normally prides itself on unapologetic bluntness. But tomorrow? Some new objective will appear.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Document: Homeland Security Warns of Iranian “Fatwa”

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:13:50 GMT

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

The Department of Homeland Security is circulating a “critical incident note” warning that Iran has issued two “fatwas” for Muslims to avenge the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, orders that the department sees as predicting a terrorist strike on America.

The DHS report we obtained — titled “Iranian Religious Leaders Issue Fatwas Calling on Muslims to Avenge Supreme Leaders Death” — says the fatwas label the U.S. and Israel as “the most wicked enemies of humanity” and that it “urges followers worldwide to take revenge.”

On March 2, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also threatened the U.S. directly, issuing a proclamation that “the enemy … will no longer have security anywhere in the world, even in their own homes.”

Iran, however, is not the only country framing the Iran war in religious terms. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is invoking God as being on the American side, while claiming that Iran is “hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions.”

Leaked DHS report

Leaders of the right-wing Christian community in America, meanwhile, have overtly tied the Iran war to end times theology.

Televangelist John Hagee and chairman of Christians United for Israel delivered a sermon at the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio earlier this month, standing in front of a banner reading: “God’s coming…Operation ‘Epic Fury’.” In his sermon, he thanked Trump for having “crushed the enemies of Zion,” saying the attack on Iran will trigger biblically prophesied events including the invasion of Israel by a Russian-led army and Jesus’s defeat of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon.

John Hagee delivers sermon at Cornerstone Church

The religious fervor has permeated much of the military as well.

The nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation put out an alarming statement on March 3 saying such, and that the organization was “inundated with complaints of gleeful commanders telling troops [the] Iran War is ‘part of God’s divine plan’ to usher in the return of Jesus Christ.” The organization reported over 200 calls from more than 50 military installations reporting similar remarks from U.S. military commanders.

One said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to MRFF.

On Sunday, Hegseth told 60 Minutes correspondent Major Garrett that the “providence of our Almighty God is there protecting those troops” in the Iran war.

When asked directly if he saw the war in religious terms, Hegseth basically said yes, preaching at length his own version of a militarized Christian doctrine.

PETE HEGSETH: The providence of our Almighty God is there protecting those troops. And we’re committed to this mission.
MAJOR GARRETT: You made that reference to the providence of Almighty God. Is there any part of you, Mr. Secretary, that views any of this in a religious context?
HEGSETH: I mean, obviously we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order to, for some religious harm. Again, but from my perspective, I mean obviously I’m a man of faith who encourages our troops to lean into their faith, rely on God. There’s no atheists in foxholes. Your mortality’s right in front of you.
I remember prayer for me on combat missions, how important that was. That’s why we’re making the Chaplain Corps great again and active again, making sure we’re pouring into the faith of our troops. My Christian faith, faith in general, is important to the president. It’s important in our fighting ranks to give him perspective, you know, on human nature. On their own humanity, on our own mortality.
And we lost a lot of that with sort of self-help, self-esteem nonsense, which is not what troops need. They need a connection with their almighty God in these moments. And I’m proud of how our troops are conducting themselves, and I pray for them every day.”

Perhaps this is not surprising for a figure like Hegseth who literally published a book in 2020 titled “American Crusade,” and has “DEUS VULT,” which he described as a Crusader battle cry, tattooed on his arm.

“That entire regime is led by radical clerics who don’t make geopolitical decisions,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio adds. “They make decisions on the basis of theology, their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one that has to be taken very seriously.”

The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor (and pastor) Mike Huckabee also casts the war in deeply religious terms. In an interview with Tucker Carlson last month, Huckabee said that Israel has a religious right to much of the Middle East, remarking: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

“This is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of President Trump’s and the most vocal advocate for military action in Iran, said last week.

In February 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of British author Salman Rushdie for his book “The Satanic Verses.” Iran went on to cut off diplomatic relations with the UK over Rushdie’s book. We all know how that subsequently turned out.

In August 1996, Osama Bin Laden issued his own 11,500 word “fatwa” and declared holy war against US forces in the Arabian peninsula. “Your blood has been spilt in Palestine and Iraq, and the horrific image of the massacre in Qana in Lebanon are still fresh in people’s minds,” he said. The declaration followed the June 25^th truck bomb attack at Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, where 19 US military personnel were killed and over 500 were injured.

That November, the still obscure bin Laden was interviewed and asked why there hadn’t yet been attacks in response. He replied, “If we wanted to carry out small operations, it would have been easy to do so after the statements, but the nature of the battle requires qualitative operations that affect the adversary, which obviously requires good preparation.”

Two years later, in February 1998, bin Laden issued a second fatwa, calling on Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world, a shift from focusing solely on Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. This fatwa inspired a new generation of fighters, including the generation that undertook the 9/11 attacks.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Public Fires Kristi Noem

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:38:15 GMT

Kristi Noem at a better time in her life

Donald Trump today announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, the first cabinet level official firing of his second term.

The media will credit her fall to some shady no-bid contract she was behind, her use of a private jet, or administration rivals like Stephen Miller and whatever boring DC drama. But the real reason is obvious: public activism.

The revolution is here, as I wrote last month, and the people of Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles deserve credit for forcing Donald Trump to reassess the nature of his immigration war, and creating a massive shift in public opinion.

Yet the major media, which sees Washington as the main character in every story, remains oblivious to people power. Just take a look at The New York Times’ story on Noem’s departure. It solely ties it to her Congressional testimony about a shady border security ad campaign contracted out to former homeland spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s husband. It finally mentions Minneapolis for the first time in the seventeenth paragraph(!)

The first cabinet member ousting of his administration—before Hegseth, Bondi, or Kash Patel—is a big deal.

One senior ICE official I asked about Noem’s firing attributed it in large part to the Minneapolis protests, saying the whole episode has been devastating for ICE and its morale. The evidence for this seems overwhelming, with Congress repeatedly raising the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good repeatedly throughout Noem’s Senate hearing yesterday.

Trump seemed to hint at his frustration with Noem’s my-way-or-the-highway arrogance in his announcement on Truth Social. Touting her replacement, Senator Markwayne Mullen, Trump said: “Markwayne truly gets along well with people.”

Ouch.

Something tells me Americans were more incensed by the flagrant and needless killing of two American protesters than some sketchy contract award or incomprehensible Trumpworld beef that the media will point to.

The real story here is the political revolution that led to the fall of ICE Barbie. This is the same revolution that led to Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City, deemed impossible (until it wasn’t) by the news media and expert consensus. It's the revolution that just produced the biggest Senate primary turnout in Texas since 2008—with Democrats Talarico and Crockett both outpolling their Republican opponents (again, in Texas). It is the same revolution that has shifted public opinion regarding “ironclad” support for Israel in its many wars, and is skeptical about Trump’s war in Iran.

And the revolution isn’t a partisan phenomenon. Just look at the Epstein transparency movement, an everything-bagel of American politics that seems to run the gamut of public opinion, from liberal feminists and Me Too advocates to Evangelical and QAnon anti-human trafficking warriors. If this motley group seems weird to you, well, America is weird, so democracy will reflect that. Gone are the days of politics being the exclusive hangout of the silver-haired blue bloods, solemn statesmen and A-students.

Maybe that’s why Congress is seeing a record-shattering number of incumbent politicians who are not seeking reelection, while a strikingly high number of gubernatorial races are also up for grabs. The House of Representatives is on track to break a record, with some 32 Republicans and 21 Democrats not seeking re-election. The Senate is in a similar retreat, an effect not only of a tired and distrustful public that is sick of the status quo, but one precipitated by earlier clamoring for the gerontocracy to step away.

Unlike the Tea Party or the so-called Democratic Tea Party, the punditocracy keeps missing the point by framing this as a partisan battle when it's really just people who are fed up and getting louder.

It’s a revolution against what is supposedly possible, practical, or plausible—cudgels Washington uses to get ordinary people to check out because they don’t have the right credentials to have an authorized opinion and this is all just more complicated than you can understand. The message is to be happy with what they’re given, with what’s doable. People are done with these limp dick excuses for inaction.

The protests I’ve covered this year like No Kings make it clear that people are done waiting for change to come from Washington. They laugh at the notion that meaningful opposition might come from the Democrats, or the notion that the Republicans might stand up to Trump.

When I first read about Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas allegedly pressuring a married female staffer into having a relationship, leading to her committing suicide by setting herself on fire, my first thought was how quickly they were going to sweep this under the rug. But staffers in his office—conservative Republicans, mind you—got the word out and kept the pressure up enough that now other congresspeople (including Republicans) are calling for his resignation, which seems inevitable at this point.

If only such energy were acknowledged and encouraged by the media.

This fall, the Democrats will win at least one chamber of Congress and the “story” will be that it’s all about Trump and the renewal/resurgence/recovery of the Democratic Party. From day one, the media will focus on the next horse race, the 2028 presidential elections, and the sage will talk about the “fight” for the future. In my mind, this is a people-powered, anti-incumbency uprising aiming to kick out far more than just Donald Trump—or Kristi Noem, for that matter.

On that note, Trump has appointed Noem to be Special Envoy for “The Shield of The Americas”—whatever that is. The people won this fight.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Congress to America: What War?

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:58:10 GMT

Senator Lindsey Graham discussing the Iran war

The White House refuses to call its war in Iran a war, instead labeling it “major combat operations” — a maneuver to keep Congress out of the picture. And believe it or not, Congress is going along with it.

Setting aside the absurdity of the question of if killing a head of state is an act of war, there’s a deadly serious question here: what even is war anymore? Does last month’s killing of a Mexican cartel leader like El Mencho count? Or how about the kidnapping of Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro the month before? The U.S. has gotten extremely good at decapitation operations like these, as I’ve written; so good that it could become a standard instrument of statecraft very soon. It’s a more important time than ever to decide what counts as war and who gets to wage it.

Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, to their credit, have introduced a war powers resolution designed to reassert the constitutional authority of Congress over a declaration of war. But despite the profound evolution of warfare in the past decade alone, much of the rest of Congress seems little interested in updating the definition.

"I don't know if this is technically a war,” Senator Lindsay Graham said of the un-war in Iran on Meet the Press on Sunday.

Graham, it turns out, was repeating White House talking points circulated to Republican members of Congress instructing them to push back on the question, “Is the U.S. at war with Iran?” by instead calling it “major combat operations against Iran…”

White House talking points circulated to Congress (red lines added for emphasis)

The messaging strategy devolved into farce today when Senator Markwayne Mullen insisted, “We haven’t declared war,” shortly after saying, “This is war.”

“I misspoke,” Mullen said when a reporter pointed out the contradiction.

But it is not just Trump loyalists who are playing word games. Democrats also have a hard time calling this what it is, with the party’s top officials using terms like “Military attack,” “military operation,” “military assault,” and the like.

Sen. Chuck Schumer says the strikes are “risking wider conflict”; Rep. Hakeem Jeffries says the operation has “brought us to the brink of a possible war.” Comments like these imply we aren’t already at war.

“Donald Trump has launched a large-scale military operation against Iran,” Mark Kelly of Arizona also flubs, he a retired Navy Captain who is otherwise willing to go to war with Hegseth to protect his honor.

So the question remains: What even is war in 2026? It’s a vital question that needs to be resolved.

First, it needs to be resolved because the public has been completely cut out of any involvement in the debate. It has been sold a bill of goods over the past decade that has conditioned them to think that ground armies (e.g. “boots on the ground”) and tanks slogging their way forward a la World War II is the only thing that qualifies as war. Thus today everyday war — what my editor calls ‘perpetual war’—persists without interference. The steady state remains untouched and is always there making the “decision” to go to war moot. Syria, Yemen, Somalia and more, mostly it just happens and few even notice.

Second, we need to make the 1973 War Powers Resolution more relevant to today. From Bill Clinton to Trump, successive presidents have used a variety of euphemisms – “air campaign,” “combat operations,” “kinetic military action,” “overseas combat operations,” “operations other than war,” “discrete strikes”—to avoid Congressional control over their use of the US military.

There are the very few members of Congress who have boldly labeled the Iran war a war, but their arguments also need to be updated for today’s decapitation realities and the nature of the majority of American conflicts.

“Gambling with American lives,” Bernie warns, an admonition that is questionable in an airpower-only conflict. The war will result in “increased instability in an already dangerous world,” Sanders adds. Wars of this sort that rely on air power just don’t pose as much risk to American service members as wars of the past. That isn’t an argument for the war, but for honesty about why this style of war has become so attractive to the decision makers.

Bernie finishes with his signature appeal:

“The people of our country, no matter what their political persuasion, do not want endless war. They want decent-paying jobs, and health care and housing that they can afford. They want their kids to have an excellent education.”

We’ll never get to the country Bernie imagines—one that invests in its people instead of its wars—if we don’t tackle the war machine itself. Not when the bombs start falling, but every day.

Because, again, something has fundamentally changed. The U.S. can now remove heads of state with terrifying ease, involving minimal troops, minimal risk, and minimal public awareness. That capability isn’t going away—it’s going to become routine. And a Congress that can’t even bring itself to call a war a war has no chance of governing the quieter, permanent killing that defines American power now.

The War Powers Resolution was written for a world where war had a beginning. We don’t live in that world anymore.