The Trump administration has been working steadily to remove protected status for asylum seekers that even Trump admits are deadly “shitholes.” Trump makes claims about countries that seem to indicate they’re too dangerous to live in, but then insists there’s no reason we shouldn’t be allowed to deport migrants to places where they’re likely to be tortured, killed, or just maybe starve to death.
When justifying his war with Iran (which he still won’t officially state is a “war” because that means he’d have to start seeking permission from Congress to engage in future military action), Trump often pointed out how poorly the radical Islamist government treated its own citizens. In fact, he borrowed language from multiple presidential executive orders (including ones not composed by his second presidential administration) to justify doing whatever the fuck he wanted in terms of military attacks on Iran.
For example, Executive Order 13553 of September 28, 2010 (Blocking Property of Certain Persons With Respect to Serious Human Rights Abuses by the Government of Iran and Taking Certain Other Actions), took additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 12957, including authorizing the blocking of property to address serious human rights abuses against persons in Iran.
That was included in Trump’s February 2026 Executive Order, which introduced tariffs to long-standing sanctions against the country of Iran.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged Iranians to keep protesting and remember the names of those abusing them, saying help is on the way, as Iran’s clerical establishment pressed its crackdown against the biggest demonstrations in years.
[…]
[Trump] said he had canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the “senseless killing” of protesters stopped and in a later speech told Iranians to “save the name of the killers and the abusers … because they’ll pay a very big price.”
So, Trump knew things were dangerous for Iranian citizens who opposed the same government he was now threatening to wage war on. And for years, the United States government (no matter who’s been running it) has opened its doors to dissidents and others facing persecution and death by the hardline Islamic government.
But Trump no longer cares about Iranian refugees, even as he continues to wage war on their former homeland. Now that’s he’s fully engaged in a conflict he can’t seem to win, Trump’s government is working directly with the enemy to allow the Iranian government to pick and choose which asylum seekers will be sent back to face almost certain punishment.
Hundreds of emails spanning from May to November of last year show ICE officials, operating under the orders of then-Acting Director Todd Lyons, scrambling to put together plans for three controversial charter flights to Iran in the clearest picture yet of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes planning for the trips.
The flights delivered more than 100 people to an uncertain fate in Tehran just months or weeks before the U.S. and Israel launched their current devastating war, which has to date killed thousands of Iranians.
To say the fate of those being ejected from the US was “uncertain” is The Intercept being about as diplomatic as it can be, given the circumstances.
The fate was clear for most, who had already seen the Trump administration decide former Iranian citizens were no longer deserving of seeking to better their lives, much less simply given the chance to stay alive, by fleeing Iran.
Each flight arrived in Tehran carrying at least a dozen deportees, including political activists and ethnic and religious minorities who had good reason to fear persecution upon arrival. Many of the people flown to Tehran were transported against their will, including one man who later told the New York Times that he attempted suicide before the flight and ICE agents physically forced him onto the plane.
That would be cruelly gruesome enough if it was just the Trump administration doing its casually racist white nationalist thing. But, as the emails shared with The Intercept make clear, ICE was allowing the Iranian government to guide this specific deportation program, presumably in hopes of forcing refugees and dissidents to return to Iran where they could be punished.
The emails show steady escalation since Trump’s return to office, even as he was composing Executive Orders condemning Iran for its constant human rights violations and telling Iranian protesters to keep the faith because the US was riding to rescue. Meanwhile, on ICE back channels, the administration was letting the Iranian government generate packing slips (so to speak) for ICE deportation flights to Iran.
This disturbing program that deliberately allowed Iran to “reclaim” people the government wanted to punish was brokered by Qatar. And the Qatari government’s only concern appeared to be that deportation flights to Iran weren’t quite as packed as it had been told they would be.
For reasons that are not made clear in the emails, the Iranian deportees numbered fewer than half the 120 Iranian nationals that Qatar and Iran were expecting. The Qataris were not happy.
“We would like clarification on why the number of passengers has been reduced from 120 to 54, as this directly affects our internal operations,” wrote a representative of the Qatari Ministry of the Interior in an email to ICE officials. “Last-minute changes are not welcome, especially since we are an intermediary with the Iranians.”
The only reason we aren’t deporting more Iranians now is because the Trump administration blew that all up by deciding to start bombing Iran. That doesn’t mean ICE and the DHS are still scooping up Iranians and getting them prepped for a return to a country that only wants them back so it can kill or torture them. It’s pretty difficult to talk anyone into doing anything when you’ve violently severed anything that might resemble diplomatic communication lines.
But what’s most disturbing is that the Trump administration was doing this at all. For nearly 50 years, Iran has been cut off from the US and considered to be dangerously untrustworthy. But when this administration decided it wanted to get as many brown people as possible out of the US, it approached a government no one else in the world trusts and asked known (and acknowledged!) human rights abusers which humans they’d like back first. That’s fucked up. And no amount of war is going to change that nasty fact.
If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has shown over the years, it’s that he will get his most sycophantic MAGA loyalists to insist there are perfectly obvious reasons why whatever he’s about to do is absolutely necessary… and then Trump will do the opposite, and all those hangers-on will magically change their story within minutes.
The excellent reporter Laura Jedeed has been tracking all of the excuses Trump and his team have been giving for why we absolutely had to go to war with Iran, and the very top one: eliminate their ballistic missile capability. Next: eliminate their nuclear program entirely. There was also some talk of “regime change.”
When Trump went to war with Iran, I watched every speech anyone in the administration gave and made a chart of every reason given for going to war"Eliminate ballistic capability" was the #1 reason given: more even than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon
Now that Trump has signed the surrender agreement at Versailles (the traditional place to sign a total surrender agreement), the scorecard looks like this: no eliminated missile program, no eliminated nuclear program, no regime change. Also: no actual deal.
What Trump signed is a one-page memorandum of understanding with a 60-day time limit. After that, another deal needs to happen — one that may or may not actually get signed. The thing being called a historic peace agreement is, in legal terms, a note on the back of a napkin that expires in two months.
With that established: here’s what he gave away to get it.
The US backed down on everything to get the Strait of Hormuz only partially opened, in a situation where Iran still seems likely to come out of this way stronger and way more powerful than before Trump started this illegal war. Remember, before this war, the Strait was open. So with this deal we only get partially back to where things were before the war, but with a huge draw down of US military stock, over a dozen dead US soldiers, and tons of unnecessary Iranian casualties, including a school full of young girls.
Iran retains their ballistic missiles and MAGA officials have to pretend that makes sense.
KAITLAN COLLINS: Are you okay with Iran having missiles?SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I prefer that they not, but they have to defend themselvesCOLLINS: You think Iran needs to be able to defend itself?MARSHALL: I do, otherwise we turn this into a forever war
Also, remember how the Trump world insisted that Obama’s JCPOA was one of the worst deals of all time?
That’s Donald Trump tweeting in 2015 about the JCPOA:
The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!
The “deal” Trump just made is a complete capitulation, a loss on every point, and way, way, way worse than what was in the JCPOA, which, in retrospect, was a genuinely good deal — carefully negotiated by actual experts — and briefly a real win for peace in the Middle East before Trump tore it up.
And remember how MAGA spent years misleadingly talking up all the money that the US supposedly “gave” Iran with the JCPOA? Or the deal Biden did to extend a Trump-era policy to unfreeze some of Iran’s frozen assets, which even Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed was Biden “giving” Iran money?
“We don’t have to give them anything. But some people may want to invest. Like, what are you going to do to say ‘you can never ever invest in a country,’ I mean, it’s pretty tough.”
So: MAGA spent years insisting that financial flows to Iran — even unfreezing Iran’s own assets — would fund its military and get soldiers killed. Trump just opened Iran to hundreds of billions in new investment while leaving both the missiles and the nuclear program intact. The threat, apparently, only counts when a Democrat is president.
Obviously, ending this war is a good thing. But it never should have happened in the first place. Trump launched it without congressional authorization, in clear violation of the War Powers Act — and once it started, Congress should have stopped it cold.
The final accounting: Trump tore up the JCPOA, which he called “one of the most incompetent deals ever made.” He started an illegal war. He drew down US military stockpiles, lost over a dozen American soldiers, and killed Iranian civilians — including a school full of young girls. And he came away with a memorandum of understanding that expires in 60 days, leaving Iran with everything it had before the war started, plus full knowledge of exactly how hard Trump will push before he folds.
Trump’s own verdict on the JCPOA was: “The U.S. lost on virtually every point.” He was describing this deal.
Trump has loved “travel bans” since his first term in office. It has nothing to do with making America safer or better and everything to do with making America whiter.
People were opposed to Trump’s blanket bans all the way back in 2017, when the heads of tech companies managed to collectively grow enough spine to push back against Trump and his bigoted take on immigration.
Well, it’s now Trump’s second term and for damn sure US tech companies aren’t going to be riding to rescue. The post-truth administration continues to welcome white migrants while doing everything it can to eject non-whites, even if it means repeatedly arresting and jailing actual US citizens.
The thing is that migrants actually make America greater than it would ever be if it was just a nation of white people pretending they’re actually the “native” Americans. Migrants break fewer laws, pay more taxes, and avail themselves of fewer social programs than naturally-born citizens.
This administration is fully engaged in Manifest Bigotry. It has stripped temporary protected status from thousands of people who fled from war-torn countries, abject poverty, and nations known for their perpetual human rights abuses. Those still being allowed to access this particular privilege are the kind of people this administration loves: whites fleeing imaginary “persecution” in a nation where Black people have finally been given the same rights as white people.
While it may seem plausible to extend a travel ban now that Trump has picked an unwinnable fight with a nation capable of destroying the world’s economy for the next several decades, it doesn’t explain why Trump feels the need to strip rights and privileges from so many people who’ve already made their way into the United States.
That US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy has blocked work permits and green cards for people from countries deemed “high risk” by the government including Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela—even though they were already present in the US. That’s led many to lose jobs and put their lawful status in jeopardy as the benefits pause has continued.
As the court notes in its ruling, this targeting of so many migrants is retroactive. Rather than treat the new policy as something that only effects everyone moving forward, the administration treats every new anti-migrant policy as retroactive, clawing back protections awarded them by previous administrations.
All of this is being done by executive order. At no point has Congress passed any laws in support of these executive declarations. And while far too many judges (especially those in certain appellate courts and the Supreme Court) seem to feel they’re incapable of reining in executive power, lower courts are more than willing to lay down a few roadblocks, even when it’s almost inevitable the higher courts will have them removed as soon as fucking possible.
And the administration continues this assault on non-white people, practically daring courts to do anything about it. This court — one that is currently entertaining the thought of sanctioning DOJ prosecutors — is trying to do something about it. And the Rhode Island court — represented here by chief judge John McConnell Jr. — points out the government has sabotaged its own reputation repeatedly while engaging in what appears to be blatant bigotry.
McConnell also found evidence—including derogatory statements about immigrants by administration officials after the National Guard shooting—of pretextual reasons behind the policies.
“The Government effectively invites the Court to shut its eyes and ignore the strong evidence of anti-immigrant animus before it,” he wrote. “Doing so would require profound naiveté on the Court’s part.”
This government wants courts to pretend they’re stupid. It wants the sort of deference handed over to despots, even as it pretends it’s still the leader of the Free World. And so the courts that respect the rule of law get this sort of bullshit from administration officials, who choose to present everything as some sort of liberal conspiracy against the Great Morbidly Obese White Hope:
The administration’s critics on the left have been “running the same gambit with so called ‘animus’ claims since 2017,” James Percival, general counsel for DHS, said in a statement.
“It is sabotage dressed in legal clothing,” he said.
Cause and effect, you racist idiots. If you’re seeing more anti-immigrant animus claims since Trump’s first term in office, it’s because the Trump administration (both versions) is deeply steeped in anti-migrant animus. Correlation and causation. That fewer judges ruled against the Biden administration on animus claims isn’t evidence of judicial activism. It’s nothing more than judges responding to stimuli.
Just a few days ago, I wrote a post about how Bill Cassidy had been primaried out of returning as a senator for Louisiana and how all of this bootlicking of the Trump administration obviously didn’t do the job he hoped it would do. As a result, he has been left as a lame duck senator with a legacy that will be primarily about his decision to belay his own moral stances generally and his heavy hand in RFK Jr. leading HHS under Trump 2.0.
The point of that post was two-fold. First, I wanted to highlight just how damning to his legacy the appointment of Kennedy to HHS has become to his legacy. Second, I wanted to highlight that this supposedly serious senator was perfectly willing to give up on his principles the moment he thought, incorrectly as it turns out, that it would be politically expedient to do so.
And if you need a bow to put on that second point, you can get it now that Cassidy has flipped his vote on the Senate bill to end America’s involvement in the war with Iran until the Trump administration gets authorization from Congress.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who just lost his primary for renomination over the weekend after he faced opposition from Trump, voted “yes” to advance the measure, the first time he has done so after having repeatedly voted “no.”
“While I support the administration’s efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, the White House and Pentagon have left Congress in the dark on Operation Epic Fury,” Cassidy said in a statement. “In Louisiana, I’ve heard from people, including President Trump’s supporters, who are concerned about this war. Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified.”
It’s amazing how post-election-loss clarity can assist someone in rediscovering their own spinal cord. Now, you can read Cassidy’s comments about how Congress has been left in the dark and that he’s hearing from people worried that maybe this whole warlord routine by Trump isn’t so great and believe that Cassidy came to all of these epiphanies in the last couple of days… if you want. But I’m going to point at you and laugh in your face if you do.
Now that Cassidy has nothing to lose, he’s decided to do the right thing. That isn’t some feather in his cap. It’s a self-indictment of all of his actions leading all the way up to his primary loss. If Cassidy thought this vote was the right thing to do today, what made it the wrong thing to do a week ago? The answer is nothing.
Even if a vote is taken and the bill passes, it would still need to get through the Republican House and survive a presidential veto. There is little chance of either happening. But that isn’t the point.
The point is that Bill Cassidy could have been a patriot over the past year and a half since Trump’s reelection, but he chose not to until he didn’t have a Senate seat to defend. And that makes him a coward.
In case you’ve been asleep, what appears to be an increasingly mentally unstable Donald Trump has further destabilized the middle east with a war nobody asked for or wanted. Most U.S. media coverage of Trump’s disastrous Iran war hasn’t been great, but they’ve still occasionally managed to communicate the pointlessness of the endeavor to the electorate (which speaks more of the unpopularity of the war than their reporting chops).
Some news outlets, like CNN, simply reported directly on what Iran had claimed. This, as you might expect, upset Donald Trump and his top FCC censor Brendan Carr, who are now threatening an “investigation” of CNN for simply repeating what was publicly stated:
The President, White House, and FCC's Brendan Carr are calling for action — and implying a criminal investigation — against CNN for… accurately reporting what Iran's state media shared as a statement from Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
Trump later would issue another statement over at his right wing propaganda website, calling for criminal action against CNN (and CNN only), while making up a whole bunch of nonsense (he may or may not believe is actually true):
Trump’s sensitivity here suggests they’re well aware that a massive, superior military has been getting dog-walked by Iranians because Trump and his advisors were too stupid to understand modern, cheap drone warfare and how shipping in the Straight of Hormuz actually worked. The shipping logjam is driving up gas prices and making life difficult for Republicans ahead of the midterms.
There is, of course, absolutely zero basis for any meaningful criminal action against CNN here of any kind that wouldn’t be laughed out of court on free speech grounds. As we’ve seen with corporate media that doesn’t mean they won’t still capitulate embarrassingly, but so far CNN is standing its ground. As it should, since again, all it did was report on an Iranian statement in a very basic way alongside dozens of other news outlets.
At which point, Trump will move on to threatening any remaining U.S. corporate media outlets that haven’t either embarrassingly capitulated or been purchased by a right wing billionaire. This is, as I keep repeating, an exact copy of Victor Orban’s autocratic media policy in Hungary, which involves having party-loyal oligarchs buy up all corporate media outlets and pummel the public with propaganda while the government strangles what’s left of real, independent reporting just out of frame.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Spike in Strikes
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, twodozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involvingboat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
Reforms Unraveled
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they’re not too busy perforating innocents? Let’s use images from Pokémon and Halo! Want to celebrate the destruction of American health thanks to RFK Jr. being in charge of it? Time to whip together a Stardew Valleymeme!
It’s gross, of course. Wrapping these pop culture images around fascism, particularly where real deaths have been a result, is nauseating.
But if you want to make this absolutely as disgusting as possible, you need only to use video game footage to gloat about the body count America is racking up in its war/non-war with Iran.
On March 4, the official White House Twitter account posted a roughly one-minute-long video featuring numerous clips of real military strikes against different Iranian locations and targets. At the very start of the video is a clip from 2023’s Modern Warfare III that shows a player activating an MGB killstreak. This is a hidden killstreak for players who get 30 kills without dying. Once called, the bomb ends the match. The official video was posted with the caption: “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue.”
This is disgusting. Using video game footage to gloat about the Iranian body count is simply sick. Set aside what you think about this war. Set aside whether you think this administration has any fucking clue what it is doing and what will come next once it’s done dropping its bombs. Set aside the open question of what our goals actually are here, whether we’re going to see American troops on the ground in Iran, or whether this will end up as another American quagmire in the Middle East. None of that is the point here.
This isn’t a fucking game. It’s war, no matter how hard the president and the Republicans in Congress want to pretend otherwise so that they don’t have to do their damned jobs. War is a very serious matter, a sentence that never should need to be written in the first place. Eschewing that level of seriousness by treating this like it’s some kind of a video game and we’re all just trying to earn trophies and badges for our kill counts is fucking sick.
IRAN: At least 1,230 people killed, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed in a missile strike on a primary school in Minab in the country’s south on the war’s first day, according to the non-profit humanitarian group Iranian Red Crescent Society. It was unclear if the overall death toll included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military casualties.
Here’s an image of the mass graves Iran says it dug in order to put all of those children to their final rest.
I wonder, are those girls included in the body count to get the White House its Xbox achievement?
War is not a game. Treating it like a video game shows that these are deeply unserious people that are not only running our government, but currently prosecuting a war that they don’t want to call a war. The naked cruelty of it all, rather than treating the enemy and, more importantly, the American people with respect, is horrifying.
That they’re doing it in our name, all the more so.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, Senior Resident Fellow for Global and Democratic Governance at the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council. Together, they discuss:
Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery.
AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers any of this happened. Many of the attack vectors were based on simple things like telecom administrators failing to change default passwords on sensitive hardware entry points.
“The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November to repeal a ruling that requires telecom providers to secure their networks, acting on a request from the biggest lobby groups representing Internet providers.”
In a folksy Halloween blog post, Carr tries to pretend this somehow improves cybersecurity. According to Carr, ISPs pinky swore that everything is fine now, and frames obvious regulatory capture as the agency being more “agile”:
“Following extensive FCC engagement with carriers, the item announces the substantial steps that providers have taken to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses. In doing so, we will also reverse an eleventh hour CALEA declaratory ruling reached by the prior FCC—a decision that both exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats. So, we’re correcting course.”
Let me be clear about something: the Biden rules were the absolute baseline for oversight of telecom, basically requiring that ISPs do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to securing their networks, while being transparent with the public about when there’s been a major hack. This stuff was the bare minimum, and the U.S. is too corrupt to even do that.
This is part of Carr’s effort to destroy whatever was left of flimsy U.S. corporate oversight of regional telecom monopolies so he can ensure he has a cushy post-government job at a telecom-funded think tank or lobbying org. To that end, he’s been taking a hatchet to the very shaky FCC oversight standards that already helped result in the worst hack in U.S. telecom history.
It’s yet another example of how Trump policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack. In many ways it’s worse, given that at least with Russia, Iran, and China, you’re spared the kind of phony piety and sanctimony coming from inside your own house.
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move to bring a VPN operator to heel:
Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.
The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels.
The issue here is that the Greek authorities chose to prosecute Windscribe’s founder, Yegor Sak, rather than making an official request to the company for information about the alleged breach of the Greek system by a Windscribe user. That approach not only ignored established procedures for investigating such cases, it put a great deal of pressure on Sak — doubtless intentionally — in an attempt to force him to hand over information. Fortunately, the charges against Sak were dismissed last month, as the Greek court “did not find sufficient evidence to implicate Sak or Windscribe in any wrongdoing” according to Hackread.
If Greece had made VPN owners personally responsible for everything their users did online it would have set a terrible precedent, even if it would not have been legally binding elsewhere. In the face of such risks, some VPNs would doubtless have shut down, while others would have been forced to monitor closely what their users were up to. The Greek case was particularly important, because it involved a VPN provider that does not log user activity, and was therefore incapable of providing any information about the alleged abuse, even if ordered to do so.
It’s great news that the charges against Sak were dropped, albeit after a two-year legal battle, probably thanks in part to Windscribe’s no-logging policy. But the fear has to be that more governments will bring in laws that compel VPN services to keep logs in order to allow their users to be tracked and later identified. This is already the case in countries with repressive Internet laws, for example Russia, China, Iran, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, as that article on Comparitech notes, even in countries that nominally protect privacy, like the US, UK, Canada and Australia, there are laws that could be used to force VPN services to log users or build in backdoors. It’s another reason why VPNs, useful as they are, should not be regarded as cast-iron protection against surreptitious surveillance by governments and others.
