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      A genocidal war criminal will address Congress. As a congressman, I’m outraged | Jamaal Bowman

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      The United States and our federal government love to portray ourselves as leaders in peace, diplomacy and human rights. In the eyes of the world, we want to be seen as collaborators and coalition-builders, working together to solve problems around the world.The reality in the halls of power is very different.On Wednesday, Benjamin Netanyahu will come to the People’s House to give a joint address before members of Congress, one of the highest honors afforded to foreign leaders. The Israeli prime minister was invited in the midst of what the international court of justice has determined to be a plausible genocide by the Israeli government.We are at a pivotal moment in our democracy and our society where we have to ask ourselves: how do we want to be represented on the global stage? What do we stand for as a nation if we are inviting an accused war criminal to address a joint session of Congress as he inflicts collective punishment on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children? Platforming a war criminal should not be our answer.Last month, I had the opportunity to meet with Sara, a 17-year-old girl from Gaza whose home was bombed by Israeli forces. Her two brothers, Ahmad and Mohamed, were killed, and she suffered deep burns across her entire body. She was unable to leave her house to seek medical treatment for a month because Israeli forces surrounded her home. Luckily, she was able to come to the United States to seek treatment but she is still afraid for the safety of the family she left behind.I have also met with families of Israeli hostages who are worried for the safety of their family members as Netanyahu continues to inflict collective punishment. They are terrified that their loved ones will be killed by Israeli military campaigns like others have.I am disgusted that we are allowing the man who is responsible for ripping families apart and killing Israeli and Palestinian civilians to be given a platform before Congress to try and win support and funding for his indiscriminate bombing campaign.Netanyahu’s record of fascist and genocidal behavior is not new. His initial work to prop up Hamas is responsible for widespread destabilization in Palestine. He has presided over the detainment of Palestinians without due process, the illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and the practice of “mowing the lawn”, indiscriminately murdering dozens of Palestinians in horrifying military onslaughts. He has also worked to dismantle the national judiciary so he cannot be held accountable and aligned himself with far-right actors such as Itamar Ben-Gvir who have called for mass displacement of Palestinians.In Israel, thousands of people are protesting against Netanyahu’s handling of the war, which is further putting hostages held in Gaza at risk. They are calling for a ceasefire and negotiations between Israel and Hamas to protect the safety of innocent civilians in Israel and Gaza. On Tuesday, thousands of people will protest outside the Capitol, calling for an immediate and lasting ceasefire and release of the hostages. The majority of American people and people around the world support this.There is a moral outrage in the American conscience that is not being fully expressed in Congress. Netanyahu’s presence and his joint address are directly undermining the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans who want peace. Instead of joining this collective push, most members of Congress are more focused on institutional norms and their neoliberal approach to foreign policy.Our system is broken if our leaders choose to ignore the will of the people. We should all be outraged about the murder of children, whether at home or abroad. We should all be yelling in the halls of Congress until our leaders have no choice but to listen.We need a permanent ceasefire and release of the hostages. We need a world where people understand that criticism of a state or a leader does not make you antisemitic. We need a paradigm shift on how we approach the issue of Israel and Palestine. It’s time to re-evaluate where we stand as a democracy and a society and re-examine our alignment and support for Netanyahu and his genocidal government because it is outrageous. For hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and for our democracy as a whole, the future depends on it.

      Jamaal Bowman is the United States representative for New York’s 16th congressional district since 2021 More

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      American rule of law is vanishing at the tips of Trump-appointed judges’ pens | Moira Donegan

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      Donald Trump stole thousands of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, according to prosecutors, and shoved them in unsecured areas around the tacky Florida golf club where he lives. He kept them in basements, bathrooms and ballrooms; they were often unlocked, accessible to anyone who happened to wander by, as dozens or hundreds of people do, every day, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump refused to return the documents when asked; he also lied about what he had.On at least one occasion in 2021, he was recorded showing off one of the classified documents to a visitor, apparently for the sake of his own aggrandizement. “It is like highly confidential. Secret,” Trump said to the man, who was not authorized to see the information. “See, as president, I could have declassified it. Now, I can’t, but this is still a secret.”Aileen Cannon, a US district court judge in Florida whom Donald Trump appointed during his last year in office, has done everything in her power to make sure Trump is never held accountable for the theft of the documents. Since the special counsel Jack Smith’s case – widely considered to be the most legally airtight of the several criminal prosecutions against the former president – was formally assigned to Cannon in June 2023, she has often acted as if she was a member of the defense team; denying routine motions from the prosecutors, antagonizing Smith and his team personally, and dragging on the proceedings in endless rounds of briefings and delays, all surely meant to postpone the case until after Trump retakes the White House.On Monday, she dismissed the case entirely, throwing out all the document-related charges against Trump. Her purported reasoning? That special counsels such as Jack Smith are unconstitutional. Smith signaled that he plans to appeal the decision.Cannon’s ruling flies in the face of decades of precedent, going back to the Watergate era, wherein courts, including the US supreme court, have repeatedly reaffirmed the constitutionality of special counsels and their appointments. But although Cannon wears a robe, she is not interested in the law, which is a mere pretext for her bald effort to advance and protect Trump’s interests. She is not a judge any more than the man who works at the mall every December is Santa Claus. She has the trappings and the power, but none of the expertise, none of the obligations and none of the shame.Cannon’s dismissal of the Trump documents case was predictable: the prosecution, widely considered to be doomed, came at the end of months of strategic moves on her part meant to provide Trump maximum leeway to message publicly about the case, and minimum threat to his electoral process. When Trump lied about the FBI raid on his home, saying that it was a plot on his life orchestrated by the Biden administration, Smith, fearing violence and public misperception, asked for a gag order. Both the sensitivity of the case and the egregious danger posed by Trump’s conduct should have made it an easy call; but Cannon denied it, allowing Trump to continue lying about the raid.At one point during preliminary proceedings, Cannon outright refused to let prosecutors see the documents that had been seized from Mar-a-Lago, a move that prompted a reversal and rare rebuke from the appeals court above her, Atlanta’s 11th circuit. That 11th circuit warning seems to have prompted the first instance in which another federal judge urged Cannon to recuse herself from the case. It would not be the last.Cannon’s single-handed nullification of the classified documents case demonstrates the core problem with what has been, until now, the dominant theory of how to hold Trump accountable for his crimes: with the law. Increasingly, it seems prosecutions in the federal courts are a futile exercise when it comes to the former president. And that’s because the courts are packed with Republican partisans, Trump appointees and personal Trump loyalists, and large numbers of other right-leaning judges who aim to use their seats to roll back the social progress of the past century, further Trump’s authoritarian agenda, and shield him permanently from consequence. To the extent that they are controlled by these actors, the federal courts will never provide a check to Trump’s power. They will only augment it.This reality was underscored on 1 July. The supreme court’s last decision of the term, Trump v United States, created, out of thin air, a vast and near-absolute immunity from criminal prosecution that the court’s conservative justices say applies to presidents – or, at least, applies to their favorite former president.That decision stemmed from another of Smith’s prosecutions, in the January 6 case; in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing alone, signaled that he thought that perhaps special counsels such as Smith might not be legal after all. It was less like a real, considered legal position than like a set of instructions for Cannon: throw the documents case out on these grounds. Her argument mirrors Thomas’s; she took her marching orders straight from the top.The 11th circuit is likely to reverse Cannon’s dismissal, and it’s possible that Smith will get a chance to re-file his charges – possibly in Washington, closer to the site of the original illegal conduct, which will have the benefit of permanently removing his case from Cannon’s court. But the case will not be heard before the election, and so it may never be heard at all.Even prosecuting Trump might turn out to offer little more than a delay of the inevitable: the complicity of the courts in Trump’s criminality reveals an institutional rot that even locking him up would not solve. If the courts cannot hold the president accountable – or rather, if they choose to exempt one man from their authority, and instead bend themselves to his will – what, exactly, is the check on the presidency? How can a powerful criminal be held to account? Where does the rule of law apply, and where does it vanish?We have at least one answer: the rule of law vanishes at the tip of a Trump judge’s pen.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Films, fashion, law,d politics: George and Amal Clooney’s growing global reach

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      It took a famous TV doctor to diagnose the patient. After two weeks of turmoil in the US Democratic party over President Biden’s re-election bid, it was ER’s Doug Ross, AKA George Clooney, who wrote up a devastating evaluation of the incumbent president.The 63-year-old actor was not in theatrical mode when he wrote a more-in-sorrow letter published by the New York Times last week that called on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race that the White House reportedly begged him not to submit, coming three weeks after Clooney helped raise $30m for the Biden-Harris ticket at a lavish Hollywood fundraiser.But Clooney’s bedside manner was impeccable: “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice-president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him,” he wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can.”Clooney was speaking for ­himself – and for a large swathe of liberal-leaning Hollywood donors angry at what they see as White House deception over the apparent decline of Biden’s health. Clooney said the man at the fundraiser “was the same man we all witnessed” in his debate performance two weeks later.In the current spirit of panic and recrimination, with a White House press corps turning every Biden appearance into a test of competence, Democrat money bundlers, including co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign and movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, are under suspicion of helping to cover up Biden’s apparent health issues.Clooney’s letter has put the Ocean’s Eleven actor out of political harm’s way. The Democratic party may not be so lucky. Democrats, says James Carville, the Clinton strategist who last week called for a blitz primary to select a new candidate, “are hellbent on a mission to force the American people to do something they don’t want to do – to vote for Joe Biden”.“George has come out, [former house speaker] Nancy Pelosi has come out – I don’t know what else people can do,” Carville told the Observer. “Other than a few people in Congress, everybody thinks this is a terrible idea [for Biden to run]. But you’re up against a guy who doesn’t want to leave, and that’s just where we are.”View image in fullscreenGeorge Clooney is not the only Clooney making waves on a global stage. Last month his wife Amal Clooney was revealed to have played an important role in making the case for arrest warrants to be issued by the international criminal court (ICC) to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and three top Hamas leaders.Biden called the ICC move “outrageous” and said that whatever the ICC prosecutor might imply, “there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”. According to the Washington Post, George Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, counsellor to the US president, to protest about the administration’s willingness to impose sanctions in which his wife could get caught.This week, the Biden-Harris campaign attempted to blame Clooney’s letter on “pre-existing tensions” – hinting at the ICC dust-up. A Hollywood producer familiar with the couple told the Observer that the White House’s explanation for the letter was “bullshit” and the lawyer had been smeared because her work is on human rights irrespective of political division.“George has power in Hollywood. Amal doesn’t, except as George’s wife,” they added. “Her power is in the UK, at the Hague and on the pages of Vogue.”The lawyer has not commented on her husband’s political intervention, which may have come with Barack Obama’s tacit approval. But after 10 years together, George and Amal Clooney are seen as one of the most stable couples in Hollywood.View image in fullscreenThey’d met at the actor’s home in Lake Como, Italy, when a mutual friend brought her by. Clooney’s agent had also got wind of the ­introduction, the actor later revealed. “My agent said: ‘I met this woman who is coming to your house, who you’re going to marry.’ It really worked out that way.”“It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” Amal said. “I always hoped there could be love that was overwhelming and didn’t require any weighing or decision-making.”A safari in Kenya to see giraffes sealed the deal. In 2014 he proposed, they married in Venice and now have twins.The political instinct which had surfaced in Clooney films including Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and The Ides of March (2011), soon took flight. By 2016 the couple were meeting with then-German chancellor Angela Merkel to talk refugee policy; that year they were at a UN refugee summit and soon after established the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which focuses on legal rights for those targeted by oppressive governments, tracking the money of human rights abusers and those profiting from war crimes.“We’re both inspired by the young people out there challenging injustice in their communities, a new generation that won’t accept the status quo,” the actor said in an awards acceptance speech two years ago.But Clooney’s intervention comes with potential costs. The Bidens, like the Clintons and Obamas, may see themselves as benefiting from rubbing shoulders with celebrities, but the intersection of entertainment and politics, and the money and ideologies that underpin it, is repulsive to many outside political-entertainment enclaves. In an echo of Trump, Biden now says the rising chorus against him is coming from members of “the elites”, despite the bad timing of first lady Dr Jill Biden appearing on the cover of the August US Vogue.The tradition of celebrity-political endorsements goes back to Frank Sinatra, who organised his friends, the Rat Pack, to campaign for John F Kennedy. Two decades later, disagreements over Ronald Reagan forced celebrities to choose where they belonged.“That’s where we are still,” explains veteran Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “Celebrities see themselves as an important part of the Democratic fundraising and thought-based operation, which a lot of Americans would not agree with.”View image in fullscreenSheinkopf says that the fight over Biden’s future is as much about the future of the Democratic party as it is about Biden’s health – and Clooney’s intervention will make Maga Republicans fight harder for candidate Trump.“Democrats are the party of the elites despite the fact that they see themselves as the party of the non-elites,” he says. Regardless of who is writing the cheques – Hollywood celebrities or a rightwing Texas industrialist – “what all elites want is a party that does what they want because they think it’s right”.“But that’s not who Joe Biden is. He represents the old pro-union, almost colour-blind left, but that’s not who the operators behind the scenes are,” he adds.Peter Bart, previous editor of the Hollywood trade bible Variety, wrote in a Deadline column that he had “great respect for Clooney’s decision” but it was also one that “will cost him”.He recalled other Hollywood stars who had mixed politics with entertainment, including Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston and John Wayne. “Apart from potential career damage, Clooney must confront donors who have spent millions at his ­urging to support a ticket he now renounces,” Bart, 91, warned.He recalled a conversation he’d had with Ronald Reagan about Nixon. “I want people to like me, even voters who vote against me,” Reagan told him. “Nixon doesn’t seem to care, but I’m still an actor.”Still, Clooney’s intervention has set him up for criticism. The progressive left and African-American voters, both voting blocs Biden is courting to firm up his support, slammed the actor for taking a position afforded him by being famous, white and male.Others have implied that perspectives are different from the window seat of a Gulfstream jet flying between homes in Los Angeles, England, France and Italy. (Besides being a successful actor, known for pranking friends, Clooney and partner Rande Gerber, husband of Cindy Crawford, split up to $1bn from the sale of their tequila brand Casamigos.)Clooney has been criticised, too, from the other side. Trump weighed in, saying Clooney “turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are”, and some have questioned why Clooney, and Hollywood more broadly, waited until after the debate to disclose what they had witnessed at the fundraiser.Still, the New York Times letter establishes the Kentucky-born actor as a modern-day Warren Beatty, the actor who made his political beliefs part of his public image. Beatty never ran for office and quipped it would be “more like running for crucifixion”, nor has Clooney, allowing both to ride over the humdrum day-to-day of retail politics.“George’s op-ed was provocative, well done, but voters don’t want this anyway: 73% of the voting public say they want something different,” says Carville. “They’re not asking for anything difficult – just a different nominee. We’re in a crisis.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump plans to block hearings in January 6 case before 2024 election

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      Donald Trump is expected to launch a new legal battle to suppress any damaging evidence from his 2020 election-subversion case from becoming public before the 2024 election, preparing to shut down the potency of any “mini-trials” where high-profile officials could testify against him.The plans come after the US supreme court last week in its ruling that broadly conferred immunity on former presidents opened the door for the US district judge Tanya Chutkan to hold evidentiary hearings – potentially with witnesses – to determine what acts in the indictment can survive.In the coming months, Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue that the judge can decide whether the conduct is immune based on legal arguments alone, negating the need for witnesses or multiple evidentiary hearings, the people said.If prosecutors with the special counsel Jack Smith press for witnesses such as former vice-president Mike Pence or White House officials to testify, Trump’s lawyers are expected to launch a flurry of executive privilege and other measures to block their appearances, the people said.The plans, which have not been previously reported, are aimed at having the triple effect of burying damaging testimony, making it harder for prosecutors to overcome the presumptive immunity for official acts, and injecting new delay into the case through protracted legal fights.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, including by succeeding in having the supreme court from taking the immunity appeal in the 2020 election subversion case in Washington, which was frozen while the court considered the matter.The delay strategy thus far has been aimed at pushing the cases until after the November election, in the hope that Trump would be re-elected and then appoint as attorney general a loyalist who would drop the charges.But now, even if Trump loses, his lawyers have coalesced on a legal strategy that could take months to resolve depending on how prosecutors choose to approach evidentiary hearings, adding to additional months of anticipated appeals over what Chutkan determines are official acts.A Trump spokesperson declined to comment on the legal strategy but claimed in a statement: “The entire January 6th case has always been just a desperate, un-constitutional attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election. The only thing imploding faster than the Biden campaign is Deranged Jack Smith’s partisan hoaxes.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s lawyers are not expected to make any moves until the start of August, the people said, when the case is finally returned to the jurisdiction of Chutkan after the conclusion of the supreme court’s 25-day waiting period and a further week for the judgement to formally be sent down.Once Chutkan regains control of the case, lawyers for Trump and for the special counsel have suggested privately that they think she will quickly rule on a number of motions that were briefed before the case was frozen when Trump filed his immunity appeal with the supreme court.That could include Trump’s pending motion to compel more discovery materials from prosecutors. If Chutkan grants the motion, Trump’s lawyers would insist on time to review the new materials before they started sorting through what acts in the indictment were immune, the people said.In the supreme court’s ruling on immunity, the justices laid out three categories for protection: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue the maximalist position that they considered all of the charged conduct was Trump acting in his official capacity as president and therefore presumptively immune – and incumbent on prosecutors to prove otherwise, the people said.And Trump’s lawyers are expected to suggest that even though the supreme court contemplated evidentiary hearings to sort through the conduct, they are not necessary, and any disputes can be resolved purely on legal arguments, the people said.In doing so, Trump will try to foreclose witness testimony that could be politically damaging because it would cause evidence about his efforts to subvert the 2020 election that has polled poorly to be suppressed, and legally damaging because it could cause Chutkan to rule against Trump.Trump’s lawyers have privately suggested they expect at least some evidentiary hearings to take place, but they are also intent on challenging testimony from people like former vice president Mike Pence and other high-profile White House officials.For instance, if prosecutors try to call Pence or his chief of staff Marc Short to testify about meetings where Trump discussed stopping the January 6 certification, Trump would try to block that testimony by asserting executive privilege, and having Pence assert the speech or debate clause protection.Trump’s lawyers would argue to Chutkan that any privilege rulings during the investigation that forced them to testify to the grand jury were not binding and the factual record needed to be decided afresh.Meanwhile, witnesses such as former Trump lawyer John Eastman or former Trump campaign official Mike Roman would almost certainly be precluded from testifying because they have valid fifth amendment concerns of self-incrimination, as they have been separately charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Fulton county, Georgia. 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      Making US public schools display the Ten Commandments isn’t harmless or neutral | Judith Levine

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      I was 10 in 1962, when the supreme court ruled, in Engel v Vitale, that the officially sanctioned recitation of prayer in public schools violated the constitution’s first amendment, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion.Before that, my school day started with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an appeal to God. We rose and pushed our chairs under our desks. Then we stood erect, gazed at the flag sticking out at an angle above the blackboard, and placed our right hands over our hearts. After the pledge, we bowed our heads and said a prayer composed by the New York state board of regents, which held authority over the schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.”As far as I could tell, none of this presented a problem for my classmates, almost every one of them Italian, Greek, or Irish Catholic. Many kids clasped their hands during the prayer.But as the only Jew in the class and the daughter of militantly atheist socialists to boot, saying these words every day was no simple exercise.To my parents, both the pledge and the prayer constituted authoritarian brainwashing. They had reason to suspect oaths of allegiance. Under the anticommunist regime of Senator Joe McCarthy, my father, a high school teacher, was required to sign a loyalty oath disavowing membership in the Communist party. He refused, and, like other government employees on the left, resigned rather than be fired.Although the Pledge of Allegiance contained no such explicit ideology, in 1954 Congress added the words “under God” to the pledge, a rebuke to godless communism. My parents weren’t thrilled by this conflation of patriotism and theism. But even if the US deserved fealty – and my mom and dad were not convinced it did – they objected to children being trained to give it by rote.It was the prayer that really riled them, though. Its authors called it “non-denominational”, but that did not distract the supreme court, or my parents, from the law’s intent: “to further religious beliefs”, said the justices – a clear breach of the separation of church and state. “In this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government,” they wrote.I’d been attending civil rights and Ban the Bomb demonstrations since infancy. I was an unswerving non-believer as far back as I could remember. I was proud to be different, because nonconformity meant rejecting lies and standing up for what was right.Still, a kid wants to fit in. It was hard enough being Jewish. Hurtful to endure casual antisemitism (“I hate Jews,” an erstwhile friend announced one day, out of the blue). Uncomfortable to be left alone with the teacher and the one Protestant girl on Wednesday afternoons, when the Catholic kids were excused for “catechism”.It was dicey being an atheist. In third grade, I was consumed by terror after my three best friends convinced me that if I didn’t start believing in God I would end up in hell, which they described in ghastly detail. Anti-communism also threatened my family’s security – I kept that part of me a secret.Mom and Dad assured me that the law allowed me to remain silent or leave the room during the prayer, and they’d support my doing so even if it were illegal. I wanted to. But didn’t they understand that either act would only call attention to my apostasy?I was destined to betray something or someone – America, God, the truth, my family. Or myself. But what elementary school child knows who that is? What child should be compelled to figure it out?Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, recently signed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”It was a nod to the “Judeo” in the “Judeo-Christian values” the Christian right is forever invoking – never mind that some people are neither Jews nor Christians, but Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or none of the above. The Republican state representative Dodie Horton insisted that the law “doesn’t preach a certain religion”, but merely “shows what a moral code we all should live by is”.These statements recall New York’s statement on moral and spiritual training in the schools, in which the “non-denominational” prayer was published three-quarters of a century ago. “We believe that this statement will be subscribed to by all men and women of good will,” the officials wrote, “and we call upon all of them to aid in giving life to our program.”Civil libertarians are challenging the Louisiana law. Its supporters are keen for the challenge, betting that the justices who have begun removing bricks from the constitutional wall of church-state separation will demolish the whole thing this time. Republican politicians in Texas have already indicated they plan to follow Louisiana’s lead.Government-mandated religion is patently unconstitutional. It reproduces the religious coercion that Europeans came to this continent to escape. It is no boon to children’s spiritual or civic education. Rather, it is harmful to children – or some children, as it was to me. And legally and morally, even one is too many.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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      The Alito flag scandal and the supreme court’s ethics problem – podcast

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      Reports surfaced a few weeks ago that the supreme court justice Samuel Alito had flown an upside-down US flag outside his home days after insurrectionists flew similar flags when they stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Alito has blamed his wife, saying he wanted her to take down the flag down after a dispute with neighbours.
      Democrats want Alito to recuse himself from any supreme court case involving 6 January, but he has refused to do so. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Amanda Marcotte of Salon about whether this latest scandal is proof that the supreme court is incapable of being unbiased

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Spying, hacking and intimidation: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC exposed

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      When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so.Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents.View image in fullscreenBensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened.Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila.Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet.The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it.Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.”Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.View image in fullscreenThe allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people.But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest.It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”.One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.”View image in fullscreenA hand-delivered threatFor Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states.Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague.Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number.View image in fullscreenSources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home.The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan.Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries.In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome.Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities.View image in fullscreenMultiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled.Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC.Hacked emails and monitored callsFive sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance.Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices.“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to.According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel.In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.”Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers.View image in fullscreenSuch documents often contained sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz.Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC.According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office.One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials.Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations.“It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.”Secret meetings with the ICCLegitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office.Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority.According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu.The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker.“In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.”View image in fullscreenA person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said.For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories.They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account.This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings.Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases.“If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained.Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories.View image in fullscreenIt was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation.Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”.Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally.Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation.Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier.In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite.View image in fullscreenSources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”.After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating.A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments.Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials.Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber.They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.View image in fullscreenWhen she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said.This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member.According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear.However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation.Trump’s campaign against the ICCIn March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC.One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure.View image in fullscreenDays before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials.Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together.At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”.As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”.The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House.View image in fullscreenBut at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”.Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor.On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time.“Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.”Khan announces arrest warrantsWhen Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”.As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes.Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward.In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”.The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid.By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed.In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time.“I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.”View image in fullscreenThe comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said.Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant.Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said.It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”.Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”.It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”.He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.”View image in fullscreenThe ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.”Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians.Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law.“I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.” More

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      Another provocative flag flown at Samuel Alito residence, report says

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      Another type of provocative flag that was flown during the breach of the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021 was reportedly flown outside a summer residence of US supreme court justice Samuel Alito – following a similar, prior incident outside his main residence.Last summer, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which originates from the Revolutionary war and has in recent years become a symbol of far-right Christian extremism, was flown outside Alito’s summer home in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.According to photographs obtained by the outlet and interviews with multiple neighbors and passersby, the flag was flown last July and September. The newspaper reported that the flag was visible in a Google Street View image from late August. It remains unclear whether the flag was flown consistently throughout last summer.The New York Times report comes just days after it reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside Alito’s Virginia home just days after the January 6 Capitol riots.The Appeal to Heaven flag, also commonly known as the Pine Tree flag, was spotted among other controversial flags waved in Washington on 6 January 2021 when rioters and insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, encouraged by Trump, then the president, over the false belief that the 2020 election had been won by him and not the actual victor, Joe Biden.The Capitol attack was aimed at stopping the official certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which was delayed by the violence but finally happened in the early hours of the following morning.The Pine Tree flag was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the Revolutionary war. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.The first report of the Stars and Stripes being flown upside-down outside an Alito residence provoked outrage about the further politicization of the supreme court, but Alito simply said his wife had done it and it was displayed only briefly.The Guardian contacted the supreme court for comment on the latest report but did not receive an immediate response. More