The "Invasion" Lie, The Intelligence Purge and The Threat to Habeas Corpus

Edited by Sam Thielman

TULSI GABBARD, the latest opportunist to serve as Director of National Intelligence, fired the two senior leaders of the National Intelligence Council last week. Their fireable offense was to preside over an intelligence analysis refuting a lie favored by the Trump administration, which holds the United States to be under invasion by the Venezuelan government using the previously obscure gang Tren de Aragua. Predictably, Gabbard's office claimed that firing acting National Intelligence Council Chairman Mike Collins and his deputy Maria Langan-Rieckoff was a strike against "the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community," rather than, say, Gabbard unambiguously weaponizing and politicizing intelligence. If you read this piece of mine from 2020, you'll be familiar with Gabbard's gambit. 

The National Intelligence Council analysis in question, dated April 7, is available here, and I encountered it via SpyTalk, so shout out to them. (SpyTalk EIC Jeff Stein solicited my first freelance piece of national-security journalism, way back in 2002, so I hold him in high regard.) The Times reported last week that the April 7 assessment was itself a do-over, after Gabbard deputy and National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent reportedly told Collins to "rethink" an earlier version that came to the same conclusion. 

"While Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA [Tren de Aragua] to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA, and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States," the analysis found. The basis for that assessment, it continues, is that "Venezuelan law enforcement actions demonstrating the regime treats TDA as a threat; an uneasy mix of cooperation and confrontation rather than top-down directives characterizing the regime's ties to other armed groups; and the decentralized makeup of TDA that would make such a relationship logistically challenging." They might have added that it's fucking rich to accuse the Venezuelans of destabilizing the United States when the United States has been involved in two failed coups against Venezuela in less than 20 years. 

My track record in journalism should demonstrate that I am not here to glaze the intelligence agencies. Hearing the likes of Jim Clapper manipulate the phrase "speaking truth to power," as if the "intelligence community" isn't power itself, causes my eye to twitch. But that shouldn't obscure the underlying issue here. The April 7 intelligence analysis is a substantial impediment to a claim critical for Trump to perform renditions and deportations using a 227-year-old law intended for use during wartime. That is, for the Trump administration to avail itself of the authorities of the 1798 Alien Removal Act, which circumvent due-process guarantees, it has to show that the U.S. is under a real and not rhetorical invasion. "Invoking [the Act] in peacetime to bypass conventional immigration law would be a staggering abuse," writes Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice with understatement.

Over the past two months, the courts have dealt Trump's mass-deportation agenda setback after setback, particularly concerning Trump's invocation of the Alien Removal Act. While we shouldn't overstate these setbacks since ICE continues its raids, the Trump administration's most recent legal frustration came on Friday, when the Supreme Court continued a pause on using the act for migrant removals so an appeals court can clarify "whether the president's move is legal," per CNN, among other central questions. CNN also noted that during the Trump administration's initial March submission to the Supreme Court asking to overturn lower-court bans against using the Act to deport/render people, it cited "sensitive national-security-related operations." 

It is unsurprising that the administration would cite "national security" grounds to argue that the courts need to defer to the executive. That was the frequent assertion made by the Bush administration at the dawn of the War on Terror, continued by the Obama administration when it came time to assassinate a U.S. citizen it never charged with a crime. While those efforts didn't succeed in destroying habeas corpus—that is, in making detentions unreviewable—they succeeded more than they failed, as readers of REIGN OF TERROR know. Once again, Trump is opening a jar that the War on Terror loosened up for him. The Supreme Court will likely end up deciding the scope of the applicability of the Alien Removal Act, and the track record of the court makes me doubt it has a Rasul v. Bush or a Boumediene v. Bush in it. (Not that the federal courts after those rulings freed Guantanamo detainees, but I digress.) As Sam and I were working on this piece, the Court permitted Trump to remove Temporary Protected Status for up to 350,000 people who migrated to the U.S. from Venezuela. 

The judicial friction prompted White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, on May 9, to threaten the suspension of habeas corpus in a statement to reporters. Soon after, Steve Bannon made the same threat, phrased as prediction since he doesn't wield formal power, in an interview with the Financial Times. Their statements were aimed at the federal judges and Supreme Court justices considering mass-deportation cases. Since the judicial branch will want to avoid the bright-line Constitutional abandonment that suspending habeas corpus represents, Miller and Bannon are telling the courts that if they want to keep Trump from crossing a Rubicon, they need to accept the abandonment of due process for mass deportation. Seeing how quickly mass deportation, even outside the Alien Removal Act, became a weapon against political dissent, Miller and Bannon are running a heat check on the judges, to see who will go along with the bullshit distinction of gutting due process in the name of saving habeas corpus. 

The firings should remove all doubt, should any remain, about why Gabbard is in her job. It’s reminiscent of Trump getting rid of a troublesome inspector general in retaliation for his role in Trump's first impeachment and firing one of Gabbard's predecessors for insufficient loyalty. The director of national intelligence is purging inconvenient intelligence analysts not for being part of a "Deep State" but for not being a suborned part of a Deep State. It will never stop being ridiculous for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to see itself as excluded from a Deep State, just as it was for Mike Flynn, a former JSOC intelligence chief and a director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to posture like he was fighting one. The only thing distinguishing an intelligence official from a Deep State operative in MAGA's eyes is deference to its agenda. In much the same way that the CIA recently bent its knee on its COVID-19 analysis, we can expect still more do-overs of the Tren de Aragua "invasion" intelligence until Gabbard delivers Trump's desired result.

Seeding the bed for such fabrications is Secretary of State/acting national security adviser/acting USAID administrator/acting national archivist Marco Rubio to denounce the April 7 assessment and cling to an alternate and desired conclusion arrived at by the Kash Patel-purged FBI. "Yeah, that’s their assessment.  They’re wrong," Rubio told CBS News on Sunday, clinging instead to an alternate and desired conclusion arrived at by the Kash Patel-purged FBI. 

It was impossible for me not to hear George W. Bush dismissing a subsequently-vindicated 2004 intelligence analysis that Iraq was descending into civil war as "just guessing." Bush said that ahead of his own purge of the CIA after he blamed it for the Iraq war. Before and after the Iraq invasion, the right encouraged Bush to bring intelligence analysis to heel so it would no longer be an impediment to his prerogatives. "The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have stubbornly refused to see the big picture of Islamic militancy," one Weekly Standard article intoned in 2002 as a reason for disregarding their analysis, so I don't want to hear Bill Kristol say a word objecting to the harvest he helped sow. More than 20 years later, Trump is the culmination of that impulse, with only the stakes and the scale changing. 

THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA IS ACCELERATING. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu pledged in a video that Israel will "take control of all the Gaza Strip," and portrayed the news that he will allow an insufficient amount of food into a starving Gaza, the first since March 2, as a means to enable such control. "Our best friends in the world—senators I know as strong supporters of Israel—have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge, Netanyahu said Monday. "Without international backing, we won't be able to complete the mission of victory."

Read my friend Jeremy Scahill on this for Drop Site News. Jeremy also notes fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that the Israel Defense Forces will force Palestinians into southern Gaza (again) "and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump's plan. This is a change of the course of history—nothing less." For all the hype about Trump's recent distance from Netanyahu, it looks as hollow as Biden's: rhetorical disavowals that distract from the U.S. facilitating the genocide. That's especially true in light of Jeremy's Friday scoop that U.S. negotiator Steve Witkoff lied to Hamas that the release of Edan Alexander would lead to the U.S. forcing an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. 

Operation Gideon's Chariots is underway. The scenes of slaughter in Gaza are overwhelming. Once again, the U.S. is facilitating an ethnic cleansing. And if NBC is correct, the administration is internally discussing forcing up to a million Palestinians into Libya, something the network notes that the administration denies and Hamas hasn't heard about. 

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, my beloved friend Sue Werner's excellent band War on Women opened for one of my teenage favorites, the legendary Subhumans, on, of all things, a boat. Several old and new friends of mine weren't about to miss an opportunity to support our friend while partying on a wonderful sunset cruise along the East River, out into New York Harbor for a majestic view of the Statue of Liberty, and back to a pier near Dimes Square. War on Women were typically ferocious, and I had never seen Subhumans before, despite once having been able to recite most of their 17-minute "From The Cradle To The Grave" opus. They were great and I sang along to "British Disease" and "Religious Wars," a song whose bridge, the singer of Catharsis once observed to me, invented goth-punk. 

Not long before War on Women went on, another old and dear friend, Julie Tibbott, snapped this picture of some of us on the boat shooting the shit. Left to right, that's Leslie (right? It was nice to meet you, sorry if that's not you), Sue, Bill, Margot, me and Gina. It was a party, so we weren't really paying attention to the Mexican Navy sailboat Cuauhtémoc that you can see above Sue's head.   

It was dark, I was not wearing my glasses and I was very far from sober when the Cuauhtémoc stunningly collided with the Brooklyn Bridge, snapped its masts, and left two people dead and an estimated 20 wounded. It took my friend Lindsey Adler to call attention to what looked like an unreasonable volume of Coast Guard activity over by DUMBO. Quickly we started seeing helicopters overhead. Word rapidly circulated on deck that something had hit the Brooklyn Bridge. We were too far away from the bridge for me to be able to make out a giant sailboat moored there with snapped masts, but it wasn't long before the breaking news started appearing on our phones, crazy as it is that I had to rely on media for something that if I had had my glasses with me I could have seen for myself. One early headline we saw on the boat screamed MASS CASUALTY INCIDENT.  The Subhumans quickly reported from the stage that they needed to cut their set short because the boat was ordered to return to the pier. The river needed to be clear for search and rescue. I looked out at the river in the dark and couldn't see much, so my brain interpreted the water as being full of dead people. I had to wait hours for subsequent reports that reassured me it wasn't. 

I spent the rest of the evening, much of yesterday and frankly right now in some variety of fight-or-flight. I'm irritable and I have an inarticulable sense, stored in my back and shoulders, that the next disaster is imminent. The circumstances are obviously much different, but a ship colliding with the Brooklyn Bridge triggered all the New York PTSD stored within me. Sue reminded me that this was the second mass casualty event we had seen one another through. It took me a moment to remember that it was the third—not only 9/11, but the 2003 blackout as well. I couldn't be more grateful for her. 

Hug your loved ones today and every day. May the memories of those who died on the Cuauhtémoc be a blessing. May there be accountability and justice for how this horror occurred. 

SAM CHIMING IN BRIEFLY: As is too typical of me, I used a tasteless semi-joke about Kristi Noem making a racist reality show for Trump in the subhed for one of my pieces last week about the despicable ICE raids in DC. (ICE spent yesterday telling everyone that it is not the Gestapo, which sort of begs the question.) I regret to inform you that, like The Onion, I should have picked something less plausible. 

The UK’s Daily Mail broke the news that DHS is indeed considering exactly such a show in partnership with Rob Worsoff, whose main credit is Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker. Tricia McLaughlin, a flack for DHS, lied outrageously about the existence of the show, as is her custom, and then backtracked and admitted that it was real. The show is tentatively titled The American. No network is yet attached. There’s something queasily poetic about reality television creating Trump and then Trump using the government to turn human misery into reality television. I try to think about it sometimes but I just end up staring into the middle distance.